An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  Not long after that, I went to Modesto, an agricultural town in the lush San Joaquin Valley where local people had put on a successful campaign to raise money for a new medical center and had invited me to speak at the dedication banquet. We were still at the height of the campus rioting and the administration was doing other things that hadn’t made me popular, including an effort to reform California’s welfare system, and our security people told me they didn’t think it was a good time for me to leave Sacramento. But I’d given my word I’d go, and insisted we do so.

  When we got to Modesto, there were four different groups of placard-waving people demonstrating outside the building against me. While I was inside giving my speech, I learned later, a citizen reported to the police that a suspicious-acting man had been repeatedly circling the building and stopping every so often to ask people which door I was going to use after the banquet.

  This alarmed the police and sheriff’s deputies, who couldn’t find the man, and a real dragnet was put into action. Finally, someone spotted the man in a car slowly circling the block again and again; the next time he came around, the police pulled him over, yanked him out of the car, and bent him face down over the hood of his car as they frisked him.

  He realized pretty quickly what was going on: “No, no, no,” he said, “you fellows have it all wrong. I just want to see the son of a bitch.”

  In a country ruled by laws, it seemed to me that nothing was more important than removing politics from the process of choosing judges. During previous administrations in California, governors had often handed out judgeships to friends and cronies like prizes at a company picnic. Not only had this produced a lot of inferior judges, it had placed a number of partisans on the bench who believed that putting on the black robes of a judge gave them a license to rewrite the laws. I wanted judges who would interpret the Constitution, not rewrite it. So I sent out an order setting up a new system to take politics out of the selection of judges: Whenever there was an opening for a judge around the state, we asked lawyers in the community, through their local Bar Association, to appoint a committee to consider eligible candidates and recommend the best available man or woman for the judgeship; at the same time, we asked a citizens’ group in the same community to give us their recommendations on the best candidate; third, we asked all the judges sitting in the district to give us their recommendations. Each of the three groups acted independently, unaware of the others’ recommendations. Then, all the recommendations were sent to me and assembled in the form of a scoresheet with a point system ranking the top candidate; without exception, I chose the person at the top of the rating. Politics or party membership played no part in the selection.

  The system reminded me a little of how All-American football teams are chosen. Although none of the groups knew the others’ recommendations, many times the three groups recommended the same candidate. As a result, we got the cream of the crop.

  One day in 1968, Cap Weinberger, the state finance director, came to my office to tell me he had been going over the books and that he expected the state to have a budget surplus of more than $100 million the following fiscal year. The surplus was a result of the tax increase I’d signed to close the Brown administration deficit and some of our initial cost-cutting efforts.

  Cap said no legislators knew about the projected surplus yet and he asked me if I had any ideas on how I wanted to spend it—whether, for example, I wanted to proceed with projects or programs we’d had to curtail because of the deficit crisis.

  “I think you ought to decide now,” Cap said, “before the legislature hears about the money and starts thinking of its own ways of spending it.”

  “I already know what we should do with the money,” I said. “Let’s give it back to the people, give them a tax rebate.”

  “It’s never been done,” Cap said.

  “You’ve never had an actor up here before, either,” I said.

  The legislature had to approve any refund of money to taxpayers, and if there was one thing I’d learned about government, it was that if there was any loose money lying around, the people in government would find a way to spend it. The worst sin in the bureaucracy was to give money back because it meant the bureaucracy’s budget could be reduced the following year. If at the end of the fiscal year they hadn’t spent all the money in their budget, there would be a rush to buy new office furniture, take a trip at the taxpayers’ expense, or spend the money on something else, just to assure their budget wouldn’t be smaller in the future. The idea of returning money to taxpayers once it had been collected from them had never come up before.

  I knew what would happen if word leaked out about a surplus. Some legislators just wouldn’t countenance the notion of giving money back to the people. To them, taxpayers were meant to be fleeced, not fattened.

  Before legislators could learn about the extra money, I decided to go on the air and tell Californians about the surplus and suggest that it be returned to them. Since the surplus was expected to equal about ten percent of the revenue normally collected through the state income tax, I suggested the best way to deal with it was for Californians, when they computed their income tax the following year, to send a check for only ninety percent of what they owed.

  When the legislators heard that, they went wild. But it was too late; the people knew about the surplus. They wanted it back—and they got it back.

  By the spring of 1968, I was really starting to enjoy my new job. The ulcer was gone (no evidence of it ever returned) and I was making some progress on the things I wanted to accomplish. Nancy and I weren’t ready for another round of pressure to run for office, but that’s what we got. It had started shortly after we came to Sacramento: I’d give a speech and afterward there’d be a cluster of people who’d be waiting to talk to me and they would urge me to run for president. I’d always said I wasn’t interested.

  Then early in 1968, several leaders of the state Republican party came to see me and said they wanted me to run for the Republican presidential nomination on the California primary ballot the following June as a favorite-son candidate. If I did, he said the party could avert a repeat of the kind of bloody battle between moderates and conservatives that split the party so badly in 1964.

  I agreed with them that there were still lots of hard feelings left over from the Goldwater-Rockefeller primary fight and that a heated primary race between the three major candidates in 1968—Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, and George Romney—would probably reopen the wounds. But running for president was the last thing on my mind. I’d been governor for less than two years and I said it would look ridiculous if I ran for president.

  But they countered: “A favorite-son candidate is not the same thing as a real candidate. If you enter the primary as a favorite son, the major candidates won’t enter the race, so we’ll avoid a disastrous primary fight; as governor, you’ll win the primary, but that only means you’ll head the delegation to the convention.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll do that, I’ll enter my name as a favorite son, but that’s all, and only on one condition: that our delegation be representative of all sides in this split, not just one group.” They promised to balance the delegation—and they did.

  After the word leaked out of my agreement to run as a favorite son in the primary, I began getting calls from Republicans around the country asking me if it was true that my name was going to be placed in nomination as a candidate.

  I’d say, “Well, yes, because that goes with being a favorite son, but I’m not running for president.” Then, they’d say, “That’s all we wanted to know; we’re going to consider you a real candidate and campaign on that basis.”

  Then I replied: “I’ll have to repudiate you if you do that—I’m not a real candidate.”

  “We know that,” they’d say, “but we’re going to do it anyway.”

  As I traveled around the country on the speech circuit that spring, preaching Republicanism and the Eleventh Commandment, I ran i
nto some of these people, repeated what I’d told them on the phone, and declined to let them place my name on state primary ballots. But that still didn’t stop it. A lot of top Republicans in California kept telling me I was foolish not to launch an all-out bid for the nomination, but I said I didn’t want to run for the presidency and I meant it.

  By the time the convention opened in Miami Beach in early August, George Romney had lost his initial momentum and the race had boiled down to a battle between Rockefeller and Nixon, who was completing his great political comeback after the defeats of 1960 and 1962. When I arrived at the convention, I was surprised to learn quite a few delegates had pledged their support to me, but I continued to tell them I wasn’t a candidate and didn’t want it. But they’d just go away and say I was a candidate.

  Former Senator William F. Knowland came to me one day when all of this was going on and said he wanted to let me know that the California delegation were planning to issue a unanimous statement declaring that, in their minds, I should be considered a bonafide candidate for the nomination.

  “Damn it, Bill,” I said, “you know it’s not true. I’m going to have to repudiate them if they do that.” He said, “We know that, Ron, but there’s so much sentiment for you we think you’ll end up as a laughing-stock if somebody doesn’t say we are taking you as a serious candidate.”

  Well, when the balloting took place, I got a sizable number of votes behind Nixon and Rockefeller, but Nixon had the clear majority and so I ran up to the front of the hall and jumped on the platform and asked the chairman for permission to address the convention.

  At first, I was turned down because of a procedural rule, but after a minute they agreed to waive the rule and let me speak and I made a motion that the delegates nominate Richard Nixon by acclamation and they did so with a tremendous roar.

  Afterward, Rockefeller told me, “You didn’t get as many votes as we counted on; we thought you’d stop Nixon for us.” I guess he thought I’d take enough votes away from Nixon to give him the nomination on a split.

  The next day, Nancy and I left on a restful trip through the Florida Keys aboard a friend’s yacht—only the two of us and the crew.

  That first night, we slept fourteen hours, and we felt the greatest sense of relief either of us had ever known.

  Because I consented to be a favorite-son candidate that year, some people have suggested that I was bitten by the presidential “bug” back in 1968. But it wasn’t true. When Nixon was nominated, I was the most relieved person in the world. I knew I wasn’t ready to be president.

  We spent almost three days on the yacht and we didn’t pay any more attention to the convention. We were relaxed and very happy when we got back to California. I knew there was still lots of work to be done in Sacramento.

  28

  DURING THE PEAK OF UNREST on our college campuses, student leaders from the nine campuses of the University of California asked to see me in Sacramento. I was delighted to see them. During those days, if I’d visited one of their campuses, I’d have started a riot. When I’d been campaigning, I was cheered by students because I was running against an incumbent who was part of the establishment. Now, I was the establishment.

  When the delegation arrived in the capitol, some were barefoot and several were wearing torn T-shirts; when I entered the room, they sat silently where they were, some sprawled out on the floor. No one stood up. Then their spokesman began:

  “Governor, we want to talk to you, but I think you should realize that it’s impossible for you to understand us. . . . It’s sad, but it’s impossible for the members of your generation to understand your own children. . . .

  “You weren’t raised in a time of instant communications or satellites and computers solving problems in seconds that previously took hours or days or even weeks to solve. You didn’t live in an age of space travel and journeys to the moon, of jet travel or high speed electronics. . . .”

  While he paused to take a breath, I said:

  “You’re absolutely right. We didn’t have those things when we were your age. We invented them. . . .”

  As a seventeen-year-old college freshman, I’d known something about student protests firsthand. But what occurred on California’s campuses during the late 1960s didn’t bear any resemblance to our placid protest at Eureka College against an administration plan that would have denied dozens of upperclassmen their chance for a college degree.

  When it began, perhaps students at the University of California had grounds for grievances against the institution they had entered: Full of dreams and full of ambition, they had been herded into gigantic classes and handed over to a faculty they seldom saw, one that spent most of its time on “research,” and turned over its responsibility to teach to inexperienced teaching assistants not much older than the students themselves. The students were given little attention as individuals.

  I understood their sense of alienation, but whatever the source of this alienation, it was expropriated by articulate agitators—many of whom had never been inside a college classroom—who then turned it into an ugly force that could not be tolerated.

  A great educational institution became paralyzed. In later years, some participants in those revolutionary days have tried to look back on them as heroic and noble.

  Whatever it might have been at the beginning, the upheaval that shook so many of our campuses when I was governor wasn’t a gallant or idealistic rebellion to right some wrongs: It was violent anarchy; the campuses were literally set afire by rioting mobs in the name of “free speech.”

  During one eleven-month period, there were eight bombings and attempted bombings at the Berkeley campus of the university alone; during those eleven months, the police confiscated more than two hundred rifles, pistols, and shotguns and nearly a thousand sticks of dynamite and dozens of Molotov cocktails.

  There were undoubtedly well-meaning students caught up in the demonstrations who thought they were doing the right thing. They had a right to express their grievances. As Americans, the Constitution guarantees them the right of free expression. But there was nothing noble about those who under the anonymity of a mob injured others, burned, destroyed, and acted like storm troopers on the streets of Berkeley and other college towns.

  The vast majority of students at the university only wanted an education. But for months they were robbed of it by the rampaging of a minority; meanwhile, many moderate voices on the faculty were silenced by the intimidation of left-wing professors whose vision of freedom of speech was limited to speech about things they agreed with.

  As I’ve said, I campaigned for the governorship by saying the campus rioters should “Obey the rules or get out,” and that was the policy I applied when I became governor.

  The state had a responsibility to establish rules of behavior for the students to whom it gave an education, and, as governor, it was my job to enforce them.

  One day during the spring of 1969, more than two thousand rioters charged down a street in Berkeley toward a line of policemen and literally trampled them underfoot, sending forty-seven to the hospital. The president of the university called me from the chancellor’s office at the Berkeley campus and said he was with the mayor and police chief of the city. They had agreed unanimously, he said, that they could no longer guarantee the safety of citizens in Berkeley and wanted me to send in the National Guard to quell the rioting.

  These were stormy times, but I’ll never forget one very quiet moment during that period. One day, I arrived at the University of California campus in San Diego for a meeting of the Board of Regents and there was a huge crowd of demonstrators waiting outside.

  The security people told me to remain in the car so that they could drive around to a rear entrance of the building away from the demonstrators. Well, I didn’t want to do that. I told them I’d walk through the front door of the university administration building as I was supposed to.

  It was a long walk, about 150 yards, to the building. On one side was a
knoll and on the other side a smaller rise; both areas were packed with demonstrators all the way from the street to the front door of the building, and I had to take that long walk between them by myself.

  The protesters had decided to hold a silent demonstration, with not a sound, and everyone just standing and glaring at me as I made the walk; the silence had an effect and pretty soon it began to seem like a very long walk and I was feeling a little uncomfortable. I had almost reached the building when one girl left the crowd and started descending from the knoll, headed right for me, and I thought, Lord, what have they got planned now? As I approached her, she was waiting for me and she held out her hand and I took it. Then her voice broke the stark silence and said: “I just want to tell you, I like everything you’re doing as governor.”

  I’ll never forget the sound of her voice rising out of the silent crowd. I was going on into the building, she was going to be left outside with her peers in a crowd with whom she had had the courage to disagree.

  In subsequent years, sometimes when I had a decision to make and the easy way out was to go along with the crowd, I have thought about this young woman’s demonstration of courage. And I have always felt terrible that afterward I didn’t try to learn her name so that I could tell her how much it had meant to me that day.

  Once the National Guardsmen restored order on the campuses, no more policemen or other people were attacked by rioters and peace began to be restored to our universities.

  Once the campuses were quieter, I could turn back to our efforts to cut costs and try to make government efficient. The teams of business people that I appointed right after the election had conducted in-depth studies of sixty-four state agencies and confirmed what I had suspected: Many were run in such an old-fashioned and inefficient fashion that they wouldn’t survive in the real world outside government for more than a few weeks.