by H. W. Brands
The failure in Indochina was symptomatic of a larger misreading of the world, Reagan thought. He remained a loyal enough Republican not to attack the policies of Republican administrations directly, but he began to question the philosophical underpinnings of détente. Nixon’s opening to Moscow had permitted a grain sale that sent millions of tons of American wheat and corn to Russia at below-market prices. Critics called it the “Great Grain Robbery,” but their ranks didn’t include the midwestern farmers who were delighted at the boost the sale gave to prices for the rest of their crops. Gerald Ford extended the deal in 1975, following a new shortfall in the Soviet harvest.
The extension prompted Reagan to express doubts about détente. “The Russians want to buy American wheat and American farmers want to sell their wheat,” he told his radio audience. The transaction sounded reasonable on its face. “If we believe in a free market, shouldn’t our farmers be allowed to sell their produce anywhere in the world for the best price they can get?” But there were other considerations, starting with the nature of the country doing the buying. “If we believe the Soviet Union is hostile to the free world—and we must or we wouldn’t be maintaining a nuclear defense and continuing in NATO—then are we not adding to our own danger by helping the troubled Soviet economy?” Beyond this was the moral issue. “Are we not helping a Godless tyranny maintain its hold on millions of helpless people? Wouldn’t those helpless victims have a better chance of becoming free if their slave masters’ regime collapsed economically? One thing is certain, the threat of hunger to the Russian people is due to the Soviet obsession with military power.”
It was also due to the fundamental wrongheadedness of socialist economics. “Nothing proves the failure of Marxism more than the Soviet Union’s inability to produce weapons for its military ambitions and at the same time provide for their people’s everyday needs,” Reagan said. Amer ica required but 2 percent of its workforce to feed the American people and much of the world besides. “A full one-third of Russia’s workers are in agriculture and still they’d starve without our wheat. And the failure is not Russian; it is communist, for every other country that has collectivized its agriculture has gone downhill in farm production.”
Whether because he was sincerely ambivalent or because he didn’t want to come down too hard on a Republican administration, Reagan judged the grain question a close call. “The wheat deal is beneficial to us economically. Right now in our time of economic dislocation and imbalance of trade maybe it benefits us enough to outweigh the strategic factor. In other words it strengthens us more than we’d be benefitted by weakening them.” But the morality of the sale still troubled him. “The moral question in the long run won’t go away. The Soviet Union is an aggressor and a threat to world peace. It can remain so only by denying its people freedom and the basic commodities that make life worth living, which we take for granted.” Morality in the long run aligned with strategy. “The Russians have told us over and over again their goal is to impose their incompetent and ridiculous system on the world. We invest in armaments to hold them off, but what do we envision as the eventual outcome? Either that they will see the fallacy of their way and give up their goal, or their system will collapse—or (and we don’t let ourselves think of this) we’ll have to use our weapons one day.”
Reagan’s dilemma prompted him to float a solution that hadn’t occurred to many others in this context and that sounded odd coming from a conservative, because it entailed a major government intrusion into the private market. “Maybe there is an answer,” he concluded. “We simply do what’s morally right. Stop doing business with them. Let their system collapse. But in the meantime buy our farmers’ wheat ourselves and have it on hand to feed the Russian people when they finally become free.”
REAGAN’S VIEW OF détente was that of an outsider. He wasn’t privy to the confidential discussions of foreign policy that took place within the Ford administration. In another area of policy, however, the curtain parted a little. Watergate inspired the media to dig deeper into the affairs of government, and what they found included evidence that the Central Intelligence Agency had exceeded the terms of its charter. Reports indicated that the CIA, which was supposed to confine its activities to foreign countries, had engaged in domestic operations, including the tapping of telephones, the opening of mail, and the infiltration of dissident political groups. Gerald Ford felt obliged to respond to the reports; he did so by appointing a commission to investigate them and other matters relating to the CIA. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller headed the commission, and various individuals of standing and distinction formed the membership. Reagan, newly released from the California governorship, took a seat on the Rockefeller Commission.
But he did so only intermittently. He informed Rockefeller at the outset that existing commitments would prevent his attending all the meetings, and he found little in the meetings to make him want to break those commitments. (He ultimately attended fewer than half of the twenty-six meetings.) The commission’s makeup revealed the Ford administration’s lack of interest in a searching analysis of CIA activities during the Cold War. The members included no outspoken critics of the CIA; most, like Reagan, sympathized with the difficulties confronting American intelligence officers in identifying and combating threats to American national security. The commission concentrated on domestic activities by the CIA, which, while forbidden by the CIA’s charter, often fell within the realm of what Reagan and the others considered reasonable precautions.
Ford got what he wanted from the Rockefeller Commission. Its report, which Reagan signed, chided the CIA for “some activities that should be criticized and not be permitted to happen again,” and it recommended closer oversight of the agency’s operations. But it stopped far short of the kind of overhaul CIA critics were demanding.
The critics were happier with another committee, organized by congressional Democrats and headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. The Church Committee dug deep and uncovered much that Reagan, among other conservatives, thought should have stayed secret. The committee documented the CIA’s role in the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953 and the Guatemalan government in 1954, in the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, and in the attempted assassination of various foreign leaders in the early 1960s.
Reagan was more upset with the Church Committee than with the CIA. “In any bureaucracy of about 16,000 people,” he told his radio listeners, “there are going to be individuals who make mistakes and do things they shouldn’t do.” But the intelligence agency as a whole had honorably and effectively defended America against mortal threats. And it must be allowed to continue to do so. “We are being spied upon beyond anything that the American people can possibly conceive, not internally, not by our own people, but by potential enemies.”
25
CONSERVATIVES IN MODERN America face a chronic problem in running for office. Often believing government to be the enemy, they have to explain to themselves and others why they want to join that enemy. Some seem to agonize; others exhibit only mild compunction. But eventually most arrive at the lesser-evil theory: that if they don’t run and get elected, liberals will, to the further detriment of the national interest.
Gerald Ford wasn’t a liberal, but Reagan decided he wasn’t conservative enough to remain in the White House. That’s what he told himself, at any rate. And had he been younger, that might have been the whole truth. But Reagan was already very old by American political practice. Only William Henry Harrison had been older at election than Reagan would be in November 1976, and Harrison died a month after inauguration. Reagan assumed he couldn’t wait until Ford stepped aside; if he would achieve the presidency, it was 1976 or never.
So he ran. It was a desperate move rather than a smart one. The odds were against him, and the hazards were large. Presidents, even unelected presidents like Ford, have power. They command the attention of the national media without having to strain or pay for the coverage. They can make appointments that please all
ies and constituents. They can arrange appropriations that secure the loyalty of influential members of their party. As a result they typically control the machinery of the party, which writes rules for primaries and conventions. They can rely on the patriotic reflex of most Americans when the national interest is threatened and, if adept, can convert that reflex into political support.
For Reagan to defeat Ford would require him to overcome these incumbent advantages. For Reagan merely to challenge Ford risked splitting the party. Rarely had a sitting president faced a challenge from within his party, and in nearly every case that party had lost the presidency. If Reagan challenged Ford, and if the Republicans lost, Reagan would be blamed.
But he went ahead nonetheless. He tacitly approved the formation of an exploratory committee in the summer of 1975. Paul Laxalt, a Republican senator from Nevada who shared Reagan’s brand of western conservatism as well as his relaxed personal style, headed the group. John Sears, who had helped elect Nixon in 1968 and now wanted to do the same for Reagan, provided ideas and energy. Reagan himself stood off. Until he formally announced his candidacy, he could keep his radio show, his newspaper column, and his paid speaking engagements. Once he became a formal candidate, those revenue streams would stop.
The exploratory committee discovered intense interest in a Reagan candidacy. Conservatives in the Republican Party had distrusted Nixon, and many delighted in his downfall. Watergate accomplished something the conservatives had been vainly attempting for more than a decade: to discredit moderation in the party. Conservatives remained a minority among Republicans, and until Nixon self-destructed, they seemed to be losing ground rather than gaining it. Watergate came as a gift, something they couldn’t have foreseen, and they itched to take advantage.
Reagan was their man. His rhetoric remained as conservative as ever, and now that he was out of office, he could put aside the pragmatism that awkwardly undercut his words. He stumped California and the country during the early autumn of 1975 recycling the speech that had launched his political career in 1964. It was as satisfyingly unspecific as ever, and it allowed him to blame America’s ills on the federal government without detailing which parts of government he would shrink or eliminate.
Yet he still refused to commit formally to the race. Michael Deaver wondered what sign he was looking for, until it appeared. “We were on a plane,” Deaver said of a November 1975 commuter flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Reagan’s ambition by now had long since defeated his aerophobia. Deaver continued: “Everybody had the same class on there. The only thing they would do for us is that the security people would put us on in the first two seats as you got on the plane. So we’d get on first. Reagan would sit by the window. I’d sit on the aisle. Then, 126 people would get on, and everybody would either say hello or stop and say something to him. There had been hundreds of thousands of people who had said practically the same words. But this one woman stopped and said to him, ‘You have to run.’ ”
For some reason this woman’s words hit home. The rest of the passengers boarded, the crew did its preflight check, and the plane began taxiing down the runway. Reagan turned to Deaver. “You know, she’s right,” he said.
Deaver wasn’t sure which passenger Reagan was referring to. “What are you talking about?” he asked.
“That woman who said I have to run. I have to run.”
Deaver agreed, but he didn’t know why Reagan suddenly did. “You do?” he said.
“Yes, I just don’t think Jerry can do it,” Reagan said. “And if I don’t do it, I’m going to be the player who’s always been on the bench who never got into the game.”
On November 20 he got into the game. At the National Press Club in Washington he declared that he was challenging Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976. “Our nation’s capital has become the seat of a buddy system that functions for its own benefits, increasingly insensitive to the needs of the American worker who supports it with his taxes,” he said. “Today it is difficult to find leaders who are independent of the forces that have brought us our problems: the Congress, the bureaucracy, the lobbyists, big business, and big labor.” The inclusion of big business in Reagan’s rogues’ gallery raised eyebrows among those who remembered him as a longtime front man for one of America’s biggest businesses, General Electric. He would soon abandon this aspect of his critique, finding in government ample targets for indignation. He called for swift and stringent cuts in federal spending. “We have no choice,” he said. “This government must get back as quickly as possible to a balanced budget.” Responding to questions whether his unmoderated embrace of conservatism risked a repeat of the Republicans’ debacle with Goldwater in 1964, he asserted that Goldwater had simply been ahead of his time. “The only thing wrong in 1964 was that the voters of this country were still in something of a New Deal syndrome. They still believed that federal help was free and that federal programs did solve problems. Now the change has come, and the people no longer have to be convinced that the federal government is too big, too costly and hasn’t really solved any problems.”
He denied, against the evidence, that his candidacy was directed against Gerald Ford, and he wrapped himself in the Republican Eleventh Commandment. Lyn Nofziger, his press secretary, said the former gover nor had spoken by phone with the president and that each had expressed a wish to avoid splitting the party. Reagan’s aides characterized a conversation between the candidate and Ford’s vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, as “very cordial.”
John Sears, Nofziger, and others on Reagan’s staff had arranged for the announcement of his candidacy to take place in Washington, rather than California, to mesh more neatly with the news cycles of the major television networks and to allow Reagan time to jet to Florida for another appearance that afternoon. In Miami he addressed a crowd that seemed uniformly delighted that he was taking on the establishment. One young man, however, was out of place, as became apparent when he pointed a pistol in Reagan’s direction. Security personnel instantly wrestled the man to the ground, discovering in the process that the weapon was a toy. Reagan brushed off the incident; the news media mentioned it in passing.
But Nancy Reagan, at her husband’s side, was badly upset. “I was trembling, and Ronnie had to calm me down,” she recalled.
26
MICHAEL REAGAN WANTED to be part of his father’s campaign. Reagan’s elder son had spent much of his life wanting to be a larger part of his father’s life, but circumstances and the personalities of those involved worked against it. His mother and his stepmother never got along. “For thirty-five years I feel as if I have been in the middle of a battle between Mom and Nancy,” Michael wrote later. Jane Wyman didn’t like her son growing close to Nancy, not least because Nancy obviously made Reagan happier than she ever had. Nancy, for her part, didn’t appreciate being reminded that her husband had loved someone before he had met her. She knew that the split between Jane and Reagan hadn’t been his idea; if matters had been left to him, he and Jane would still have been married.
The tension between Nancy and Jane affected Maureen Reagan, too. But she had been older than Michael when her parents divorced and older when she acquired a stepmother. More tellingly, perhaps, she didn’t face the questions adopted children often face: about why their birth parents gave them up, about whether they are really part of their adoptive families. By his own testimony Michael required constant reassurance that he was loved. And he often didn’t get it. Jane was too busy with her film career, and Reagan with the Screen Actors Guild and then politics. Michael bounced from one boarding school to the next, wondering why neither of his parents seemed to want him. He craved affection that his father couldn’t demonstrate. “He can give his heart to the country, but he just finds it difficult to hug his own children,” Michael wrote.
Much later Michael revealed that he had been plagued with guilt since being sexually molested by a camp counselor at the age of seven. When his father entered politics, Michael feared that rep
orters or Reagan’s opponents would uncover what he considered his shameful secret. His dread increased with each victory his father won. And simply being the son of a famous man, and a famous woman, was burden enough. He concluded that people pretended to like him to get close to his father or mother.
Reagan’s distraction hardly helped matters. Michael attended a boarding academy in Arizona for his last two years of high school; as graduation day approached, he understood that he would not be allowed to participate in commencement exercises on account of previous misbehavior. But a member of the faculty suggested that if he could prevail on his father to speak at commencement, his indiscretion would be overlooked. Reagan might or might not have understood the linkage, but he was happy to do anything that would help Michael get his diploma.
Reagan arrived on graduation day and greeted the graduates. “As the others passed in front of him one by one,” Michael recalled, “I heard Dad introduce himself and then ask for the graduate’s name. My grin was as wide as a cavern when I came before him.
“ ‘My name is Ronald Reagan,’ Dad said. ‘What’s yours?’ ”
Michael was badly hurt but not wholly surprised. “I took off my mortar board. ‘Remember me?’ I said. ‘I’m your son Mike.’
“ ‘Oh,’ said Dad. ‘I didn’t recognize you.’ ”