After they finished and were standing outside the state office, he said he questioned the young men about their applications and learned that two or three of them had not answered a few of the questions on the application forms; so he took them back inside so that they could fill in the blanks.
When they returned to the office, the clerks said they couldn’t find the applications.
Since they’d only been gone a few minutes, the man walked over to a wastebasket on a hunch and discovered all of the young men’s job applications had been tossed away. When I got back to Sacramento, I made sure that our bureaucrats didn’t do that again.
At a meeting in East Los Angeles, several mothers told me that their kids weren’t doing well in school, in part because their teachers were ignoring the fact that their native language was Spanish.
One mother told me that because her son had had difficulty in school, his teacher had sent him to a special class for retarded children; luckily, another teacher realized his only problem was difficulty with English, and he was transferred out of the class and eventually graduated from high school with the highest honors. This mother told me she knew of other children who had not been as fortunate as her son. I suggested to the group of mothers that they volunteer to take turns visiting their children’s classes to monitor whether their children were having a language problem. They looked at each other, then back at me, and said they’d be delighted to do that, but couldn’t because only people with teachers’ certificates could participate in classroom functions.
I thought it was ridiculous that a parent couldn’t assist in school and arranged for the rule to be changed. Later on, as an outgrowth of this, California became a national pioneer in a program that enlisted the help of parents in the early education of their children. Although our efforts to “squeeze, cut, and trim” reduced the state’s rate of spending substantially, we had had only six months to close the deficit before the new fiscal year, and I realized this wasn’t going to be long enough to deal with the fiscal mess left by the Brown administration.
We hired a team of independent auditors who documented for the people how bad the mess was, and then I went on television and said I had no choice but to ask for a tax increase.
It was not an enjoyable speech to make. I’d campaigned on a promise to keep the lid on taxes, now I was asking for an increase. But I swallowed hard and said that as soon as I could, I’d make sure we gave the people some of their money back to them.
Over the next eight years, we did just that four times, but that’s getting ahead of my story.
26
ONE REPORTER WROTE A STORY describing my first year in Sacramento headlined “The Political Education of Ronald Reagan.” I suppose this description of my introduction to political life wasn’t far off the mark, although the reporter might have added this was a period of “education” for Nancy, too.
For much of that first year or so, nothing went according to my plan: We kept uncovering problems nobody had told me about before; there was continuing violence on our campuses; Democratic legislators rejected my proposals right and left; moderates and conservatives in my own party couldn’t get along; and I made lots of mistakes because of inexperience.
As I remarked during one speech, “Out in California we have a form of on-the-job training: When I got to Sacramento, I felt like an Egyptian tank driver reading a set of Russian instructions. . . .”
Yes, I was learning that it was one thing to preach a sermon about reducing the size of government, another to put it into action when you’re fighting a hostile legislature determined to expand it.
In Hollywood, Nancy and I had become used to having critics take shots at us and reading things about ourselves in the papers that weren’t true. But what we found in Sacramento made our Hollywood experience seem mild by comparison.
After a while, when I’d get home from the capitol, I’d know exactly where Nancy was—in the bathtub.
I’d smell bath salts at the front door and hear her voice echoing down the hallway from the bathroom.
Her way of dealing with attacks on me was to get in a hot bath and hold an imaginary conversation with whoever had taken after me that day—she’d just talk to the wall and get it off her chest.
I wish I had been able to find as easy a way to deal with attacks on her. In some ways Nancy and I are like one human being: When one of us has a problem, it automatically becomes a problem for the other; an attack on one of us is an attack on both of us. When one suffers, so does the other.
Over the years, I’ve often felt guilty that so much flak meant for me was aimed at her. When somebody would say something untruthful or nasty about Nancy and I’d get upset about it, people would tell me, “Oh, that’s just politics.”
Well, I never agreed with that or got used to it. There is no justification for a political opponent or someone in the press to go after a man’s wife just because he is in politics.
During those first few months in Sacramento, Nancy began to realize that being the wife of a man in public life could bring with it the unwanted role of serving as a target of potshots meant for him; but it wasn’t easy for her, and it never would be. I know it never became any easier for me.
We hadn’t been in Sacramento for more than a few months when I came home one day and told Nancy: “I spent thirteen years at Warner Brothers and they couldn’t give me an ulcer, but I think I’m getting one now.”
I’d felt a sharp pain down in my stomach that wouldn’t go away. When I told Nancy’s father and brother, who was also a doctor, about it, they agreed it sounded like an ulcer, then my regular physician confirmed the diagnosis.
I’m not sure when I started to get the ulcer; it’s possible it started when I first came under that pressure to run for governor, when I couldn’t get people to take no for an answer. Whatever its origins, my battles with the legislature, the continuing upheaval on our campuses, and the other problems we ran into during that first year or so contributed a lot to that pain down in my stomach.
I was ashamed for having an ulcer. I’d always regarded an ulcer as evidence of weakness, and now I had one.
I didn’t want anybody to know about it and so I kept it a secret from everyone except the family. I certainly didn’t want the press saying the Democrats had given me an ulcer. I watched my diet, avoided the inevitable fried chicken, took a daily dose of Maalox, and prayed the ulcer would go away. But as we continued to open drawers and find more problems, the ache in my stomach got worse.
A little over a year later, however, I reached for my bottle of Maalox one morning and something inside me said, “You don’t need this anymore.” So I put down the bottle and didn’t take my medicine that morning. An hour or two later, I had an appointment with a man from Southern California who had a problem he wanted to discuss with the governor. As he was leaving my office, he turned around and said, “Governor, you might like to know that I’m part of a group of people who meet every day and pray for you.”
I was taken aback by what he said, but thanked him and said I also put a lot of stock in the power of prayer. Later the same day, another person, this time a man from Northern California, came to see me about a different matter, and as he was leaving, a similar thing happened: He turned around and told me that he met with a group of people who prayed daily for me.
Not long after that, I went to the doctor for my regular checkup. He poked my stomach and did the usual battery of tests. When he was finished, he looked up at me and said it seemed I didn’t have an ulcer anymore.
When more test results came in, he said there was no evidence that I had ever had an ulcer. The power of prayer? I don’t know, but I’d prayed daily for relief and I can’t forget that impulse I had to stop taking my medicine, and then hearing about those prayers other people were saying for me.
Besides our privacy and the ranch, another thing I had to give up after my decision to run for governor was my aversion to flying. Prior to the election, I was still committed
to give a few speeches out of the state including a pair in Texas—in El Paso and Fort Worth. I asked the staff to book me on the train from Los Angeles to El Paso and then arrange for a bedroom on a night train from El Paso to Fort Worth that I’d taken previously. They got back to me and said the night train now had only day coaches, no berths. I decided I didn’t want to sit up all night in a coach and then remembered what I’d always told myself: The day would come when something would happen that would make me realize it was time to fly.
The time had come, I decided. I asked the staff to get me a ticket on the train to El Paso and the morning plane from El Paso to Fort Worth. There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. They had never heard me say that before. But I assured them I really meant what I said and they made the arrangements. I picked up my tickets and was driving home when I stopped at a signal on Sunset Boulevard and bought an afternoon paper from a newsboy. As I waited for the light to change, I placed the paper down on the seat beside me and studied the front page: There was a story about an airliner that the day before had lost a wheel on takeoff in El Paso and had had to circle the airport at Fort Worth while it emptied its fuel and emergency crews spread foam on the runway, before making a belly landing. It was the same flight for which I had just picked up a ticket. When I read the story, I remember looking up and saying aloud: “Make up your mind.” But I took the plane and got to Fort Worth safely and from then on, there would be lots of airplanes in my life.
Around the same time that my ulcer disappeared, things had started to turn up for me in Sacramento. Our spending cutbacks and the tax increase had begun to put the state’s financial house in order; I was learning a little more about how to deal with a hostile legislature; I was learning how valuable the line-item veto, the governor’s authority to veto individual items in a budget proposal, can be when you’re dealing with an unfriendly legislature; and I was learning probably the most important political lesson of my years in Sacramento: the value of taking my case to the people.
Although the Democrats controlled the legislature, it occurred to me that I had an opportunity to go over their heads. Franklin D. Roosevelt gave me the idea with his Fireside Chats, which made an indelible mark on me during the Depression.
By going on television or radio and telling the people what was going on in Sacramento and what we were trying to do about it, I thought I might be able to get public opinion on my side.
It worked better than I ever dreamed it would.
• • •
During eight years of travels for General Electric and during the campaign for governor, I’d gotten a good idea of what was on the minds of people. They wanted their government to be fair, not waste their money, and intrude as little as possible in their lives. A lot of people in Sacramento had different ideas of what government should be and I told the people that.
I discovered that if you could make the public understand what was going on, they’d do the rest: They’d write letters or call their assemblymen and senators and apply pressure on them. The legislators knew that sooner or later they’d have to face voters again, and as I suspected, there was a limit to how far they’d go in opposing what the folks back home wanted.
During the first year or two in Sacramento, I kept my distance from legislators. Nancy and I had never done much partying in Hollywood—our idea of an exciting evening was to spend it at home with the children—and when we got to Sacramento, we hadn’t plunged into the social world there either, causing some of the legislators to regard us as snobs.
There were still some hard feelings toward me left over from the campaign, when I’d gone out of my way to say I thought the professional politicians in Sacramento and I were natural enemies: My loyalty was to the people, not the political establishment, and I had said so fairly pointedly. Although that sentiment never changed, I realized after a while that to accomplish what I wanted to do swimming upstream against a current of opposition legislators, I’d have to do some negotiating with them. And that meant I’d make a truce of sorts with the opposition, meet with them socially, invite them over for a drink, get to know them. I began doing that. And the more time I spent in government, the more I realized that legislators and congressmen were often less responsible for the growth of government and taxes than the “permanent government”—the people in the bureaucracies who were forever trying to enlarge their power and budgets and prolong programs after their need had expired. As I’d learned back in Dixon, the first rule of the bureaucracy is, protect the bureaucracy.
I began to socialize with the legislators, and in more on-the-job training, I also discovered the value of picking up a telephone and calling a legislator to tell him or her why I thought he or she should vote for something I wanted.
Although I may have been a former actor, I knew something about negotiating. As president of the Screen Actors Guild, I’d matched wits with some of the shrewdest negotiators on the planet—people like Jack Warner, Y. Frank Freeman, the president of Paramount, MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, and the heads of the other studios.
When I began entering into the give and take of legislative bargaining in Sacramento, a lot of the most radical conservatives who had supported me during the election didn’t like it. “Compromise” was a dirty word to them and they wouldn’t face the fact that we couldn’t get all of what we wanted today. They wanted all or nothing and they wanted it all at once. If you don’t get it all, some said, don’t take anything.
I’d learned while negotiating union contracts that you seldom got everything you asked for. And I agreed with FDR, who said in 1933: “I have no expectations of making a hit every time I come to bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average.”
If you got seventy-five or eighty percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later, and that’s what I told these radical conservatives who never got used to it.
Although the first year or so in Sacramento was hard going for us at times, Nancy and I had learned a lot.
For years, I’d been giving speeches about the problems in government. Now, after being dragged kicking and screaming into public office at a time when the state was facing a real emergency and I was uncovering problems I hadn’t even known existed before, I’d been given a chance to do something about them.
As cumbersome as they were, I was at the controls. It was exciting. Suddenly, instead of just trying to rouse people to act, the problems were mine to deal with and it was a lot more fun than just talking about them.
As we finished dinner, Nancy and I agreed my new job made everything we’d ever done before seem as dull as dishwater.
27
NANCY AND I LEARNED IN SACRAMENTO that one of the inevitable consequences of holding a prominent public office is a degree of personal risk. Death threats and security people become part of your life.
In 1968, after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on election night in Los Angeles, Secret Service details were sent from Washington to guard the governors of several states because of reports that foreign agents were plotting to kill other American officials. Shortly after the agents arrived in Sacramento, I had to make a trip to Los Angeles. While I was there, I was curious to see our old ranch near Lake Malibu again. I’d always enjoyed target shooting and while we were there in the wilderness, several of the agents and I decided to do some practice shooting. We set some tin cans up on a log and began firing away. While we were reloading, I mentioned an article I’d recently seen describing techniques for shooting from the hip and one of the agents said, “Oh yeah, we have to do that.”
When it was my turn, I went into a low crouch, raised my gun, and shot from the hip.
I’ve always been a right hander but sometimes I think I was intended to be a southpaw because there are some things I just do automatically with my left hand—like shooting a gun.
Well, in any event, that afternoon I shot from the hip with my left hand, following the method described in the article, and missed the can
by a mile. Then one of the Secret Service agents stepped up and pulled his gun from a holster and started shooting from the hip. But he didn’t crouch: He just stood completely erect and hit the can with almost every shot.
I said, “Good shooting—but you know, you didn’t go into a crouch.”
“No, we lose our rating if we crouch,” he said.
I said, “What are you talking about—is the article wrong?—It says you’re supposed to go into a crouch.”
Then the head of the Secret Service detail stepped in and came to the agent’s rescue: “Governor, if we are ever shooting at someone, we’re between him and his target and we don’t crouch.”
I looked at these guys, perfect strangers, who had taken a job where, if anyone was shooting at me, they were going to stand up straight between him and me and make themselves a target. I was amazed—and grateful.
During the peak of the rioting on our university campuses, Nancy and I were asleep in bed late one night when I heard a loud noise outside our window that could have only been a gunshot fired very close to the Governor’s Mansion. I jumped out of bed and went into the hall and was met by an agent running toward me who shouted: “Stay away from the windows.”
The guards outside the Governor’s Mansion had discovered two men beneath our window in the act of lighting a Molotov cocktail. When they were spotted, the men had sprinted to a waiting car, although one of the guards got off a shot as they drove away. I don’t know what would have happened if the men had succeeded in throwing the gasoline bomb into the house. Nancy, of course, was very upset by the near miss, but I calmed her down, assuring her the two men were gone.
Within a few minutes, there was a large group of reporters at the Governor’s Mansion. Still in my robe and pajamas, I went out to explain to them what had happened and said one of the security men had gotten off a warning shot; well, about the third time I said that, the guard spoke up and said: “Governor, we don’t fire warning shots. I just missed the bastard.”
An American Life Page 17