An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  Giving of their time month after month, sometimes to the detriment of their own businesses, members of our task forces (who dubbed themselves “Reagan’s Raiders” and had cuff links made with a replica of my head on them) helped implement thousands of recommendations to upgrade the efficiency of the state departments.

  They saved taxpayers hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of dollars, often simply by incorporating into the state government the most basic modern business practices found in any forward-looking business.

  This project, incidentally, taught me something about the psychology of audiences.

  As we started to make some headway in trimming costs, I began telling the public about the savings we were making and I learned it can be difficult for many people to envision a hundred million dollars or even one million for that matter.

  I’d mention an example of something we’d done that saved several million dollars and would get a glassy stare and polite applause.

  But during one speech to a group of business and professional people in San Francisco, I happened to mention that we’d been able to save about $200,000 by sending motorists their annual automobile registration renewal notices several weeks earlier than in the past; postal rates were going up and so we rushed to do our mailing before the increase went into effect. Well, after I said that, the audience came to their feet with a roar of approval. Two hundred thousand dollars they could visualize. Two hundred million, they couldn’t.

  After discovering that state hiring policies sometimes unintentionally discriminated against minorities, I devoted a lot of time to bringing more blacks and Hispanics into important jobs in the state government. Nevertheless, a myth persisted that I was insensitive to minorities. Once I got a call from several black leaders from the San Francisco Bay Area who said they wanted to talk to me about my “treatment of blacks.”

  When they arrived in my office, it was clear what was on their minds; there was a look of hostility on their faces and it was evident they were just itching to attack me as a racist. And so, I said:

  “Look, are you aware that I’ve appointed more blacks to executive and policy-making positions in the state government than all the previous governors of California put together?”

  One said, “Yes, but why aren’t you out there telling people about it? How come you haven’t bragged about it?”

  Well, I was amazed by the question. “In appointing these people, I just was doing what I thought was right,” I said. “I think it would have been cheap politics if I’d gone out and started singing a song about it. Besides, they were the best people for the job; I didn’t appoint them just because they were blacks. . . .”

  With that, the whole atmosphere of the meeting changed. They said they thought I had been quiet about it because I was fearful of angering my more conservative white supporters.

  When we left the room, we left literally with our arms around each other.

  As I found myself enjoying my job more, Nancy, as always, gave me a lot of support, but not in the way some of my critics have claimed over the years. She’s been subjected to a bum rap.

  I know she’s been accused of being a kind of “shadow governor” or “shadow president” with some sort of undue influence over me. Well, that’s another myth that has no foundation in reality. It’s true that I’ll sometimes use her as a sounding board, but Nancy has never tried to intervene on matters of policy or affect the important decisions I’ve had to make. As in any good marriage, I value her opinion and we talk over everything, but she’d be the first to tell you I can be a stubborn fellow when I don’t agree with her.

  One of the things that has been most helpful to me is Nancy’s instinct about people. As I’ve mentioned, I tend to trust people until they give me reason not to, while she usually focuses a more skeptical eye on people, especially those in a position to harm me. She’s a very good judge of people and it’s helped me a lot over the years.

  In any top position, you risk becoming isolated: People tell you what you want to hear and are reluctant to tell you about somebody who might not be pulling his weight or doing something hurtful to your administration. Not many people close to you are willing to say: You’re wrong. Nancy has always been there to point out when the emperor—including me—wasn’t wearing any clothes. Sometimes people who’ve been reluctant to tell me about a problem have felt they could go to her and she might pass it on to me; then, alerted, I’d do some digging on my own.

  By the end of 1969, I realized I was going to need more time than I had left in my first term to accomplish my goals as governor, and I’d had enough experience—and enjoyment—at it to know I didn’t want to stop. I’d tasted briefly what it was like to be governor with a Republican legislature: As a result of some special elections, we had a bare majority in the legislature for one year and passed some forty anticrime measures that until then had been buried in committee. I knew that if I could win a second term, the odds were high I’d be stuck again with a Democratic legislature, but I didn’t want to quit before I’d accomplished my most important goal, reforming California’s bloated welfare program.

  I have never questioned the need to take care of people who, through no fault of their own, can’t provide for themselves. The rest of us have to do that. But I am against open-ended welfare programs that invite generation after generation of potentially productive people to remain on the dole; they deprive the able-bodied of the incentive to work and require productive people to support others who are physically and mentally able to work while prolonging an endless cycle of dependency that robs men and women of their dignity. I wanted to see if we couldn’t rescue some of those people from what FDR had called the “narcotic” of welfare.

  And so in 1970 I decided to run for a second term—but only one more term. My opponent was Speaker of the Assembly Jesse Unruh, the tax-and-spend liberal who from the beginning had opposed our reforms tooth and nail. On election day, I was reelected by a margin of fifty-three percent to forty-five percent. I think the people had made it clear that they wanted the reforms to continue.

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  IF CALIFORNIA WERE A NATION, it would have been the seventh-ranking economic power in the world. As governor, I discovered a large industrial state like California has many of the same problems and challenges of any industrialized nation: the challenge of keeping our economy strong and modern and our citizens fully employed; the challenge of expanding opportunity for all people; the challenge of helping businesses compete and prosper without over-regulating them; the challenge of helping those who cannot help themselves; the challenge of assuring that every man, woman, and child can go to sleep safe at night and wake up the next day guaranteed the freedom to better their lives.

  Even international relations were important to a state like California. We had more imports and exports coming across our borders than any other state—more than many nations—and foreign markets were vital to our prosperity. Fortunately, I had a chance to get a little experience in dealing with foreign leaders that would help me when I got a different job a few years later.

  On four occasions when I was governor, President Nixon sent us abroad to represent him on goodwill missions; I carried a personal message from him to foreign leaders but always managed to do a little salesmanship on behalf of California and its business opportunities.

  Nancy and I met the heads of state of eighteen countries in Europe and Asia during four overseas trips and had person-to-person experiences we’ll never forget.

  In Manila, President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, put us up at Malacañang Palace.

  In Australia, I happened to mention during a luncheon speech that Nancy enjoyed working on the Foster Grandparents Program in which older adults volunteer to help retarded or troubled children through bonds of love and support. People in the audience asked Nancy about it and before we’d left the country, they were already establishing a Foster Grandparents Program in Australia.

  In Japan, I became the first for
eign official other than a head of state to be formally presented to Emperor Hirohito. As our plane approached Tokyo and the city spread out beneath us, I couldn’t help but think of the huge model of Tokyo that we’d made secretly during the war.

  President Nixon invited Nancy and me to take our children with us on the trips. A government plane similar to Air Force One was made available and Secret Service and government aides went along and took care of everything for us. We never carried much money on those trips. The security people didn’t want us going out on the streets shopping or walking up to the front desk of our hotel to pay the bill. They took care of everything and sent us the bills when we got home.

  One evening in Paris, our schedule was clear so Nancy and I decided to take Ron to dinner at Maxim’s; about midway through the meal, the restaurant’s strolling violinist headed our way.

  I knew he’d expect a tip and I reached into my pocket to look for a dollar bill, the appropriate tip in those days for a strolling violinist; well, all I found was a $5 bill, a dime, and a penny—it was all the money I’d taken with me from home.

  Since $5 was too large a tip I asked Nancy for a dollar; she said she didn’t have any cash with her; so then I asked Ron, who was only a kid then, and he said, “Dad, are you kidding?”

  I said: “Okay, keep your head down, don’t look up, keep on eating and maybe he won’t come to our table.”

  Well, we kept our heads down, but he kept moving in our direction and when he was just a few inches from our table, he began playing, “California, Here I Come.”

  I reached into my pocket and got the $5 bill and handed it to him.

  Well, I was now down to a dime and a penny. A couple of days later, we were in Ireland in the company of a young Irish guide when we passed a tombstone close to where, according to legend, St. Patrick had erected the first cross in Ireland. The tombstone was inscribed, “Remember me as you pass by, for as you are so once was I, but as I am you too will be, so be content to follow me.” The sentiment had proven too much for another Irishman who’d scratched on the stone beneath the inscription, “To follow you I am content, I wish I knew which way you went.”

  The guide showed us a wishing well and suggested we might want to toss in a coin. I reached in my pocket, gave Nancy the dime, and I flipped the penny into the well.

  After I got home, I liked to tell people what it was like to travel through Denmark, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, England, and Ireland on $5.11.

  As my second term began, my most important priority was welfare reform. Because of lax eligibility standards, the number of people in California receiving welfare checks had almost quadrupled between 1960 and 1970 to more than two million. With about ten percent of the population, the state had more than sixteen percent of the nation’s total welfare recipients; it had become a magnet for able-bodied people from around the country who preferred a handout to a job. During my first term, I appointed a special task force on welfare that concluded that even if we were able to pay off the deficit and solve the financial mess the state had fallen into during the Brown years, welfare expenditures were growing so fast that the state would be bankrupt again soon unless something was done to control the open-ended spending.

  The task force tried to reduce waste and fraud and improve efficiency of the welfare program through administrative reform but encountered a brick wall: The last thing that many of the people who supervised the welfare program wanted was to reduce their caseload because it might have threatened their jobs. As always, the first goal of the bureaucracy was to protect the bureaucracy. The study panel concluded that the state needed a top-to-bottom rewriting of its welfare regulations.

  The eligibility standards were so lenient they were an invitation to steal. Through computer cross-checking, we discovered thousands of people who were receiving welfare checks at the same time they were gainfully employed, and many people were getting aid who didn’t need it. One couple, for example, earned more than one hundred thousand dollars a year between them but had a household helper for their handicapped child, paid for by the taxpayers.

  Welfare was taking away the very thing that people needed most—the initiative to provide for themselves. At the same time it was undermining the family: Teenagers from the inner cities, who for various reasons decided they didn’t want to live at home anymore, discovered that by getting pregnant—they didn’t even have to wait for their baby to be born—they got a welfare check that allowed them to rent their own apartment, and they discovered they could increase their monthly welfare check any time they chose simply by getting pregnant again.

  Meanwhile, the father of the child might have a good job and want to live with his family. But he was told his family was better off financially if he walked out on them; if he stayed, they wouldn’t get a welfare check.

  Not only was the welfare program a tax-financed incentive for immorality that was destroying the family, it was responsible for an endless and malignant cycle of despair in which generation after generation went on the dole and never had any incentive to leave it.

  Some of my most conservative supporters tried to pressure me to wage an all-or-nothing battle to virtually eliminate the welfare program; but I believed we should not take aid from the people who really needed and deserved it, the truly impoverished elderly, blind, and disabled. I just wanted to stop the abuses, take people off the welfare rolls who didn’t belong there, and try to end the open-ended cycle that had made a monthly welfare check a way of life for too many people.

  The Democrats in the legislature agreed with us that welfare costs were headed for the stratosphere but claimed the solution was a huge tax increase—in other words, to keep pouring more money into a bucket that was full of holes.

  I’d been in Sacramento long enough by now to know that in order to get genuine welfare reform past the bureaucracy and legislature, we’d have to go to the people, and this time we really put on the pressure.

  I went back out, speaking about welfare reform and to urge people to demand that their legislators clean up the mess. We organized committees in all fifty-eight counties of the state to apply pressure on the legislature. Boy, did it work.

  One day the liberal Democrat who succeeded Jesse Unruh, Speaker of the Assembly Bob Moretti, came into my office holding his hands in the air as if I had a gun on him and said, “Stop those cards and letters!”

  “Sit down,” I said. “Look, we’re all partners in this. Let’s put aside our personal feelings and jointly go to work and see what we can get done.”

  Over the next week or so, he and I, along with members of our staffs, met almost around the clock to put together a package of welfare reform that cut expenditures by hundreds of millions of dollars a year while raising benefits and providing cost-of-living increases for the truly needy in the state.

  By tightening eligibility standards and eliminating loopholes, we turned a monthly increase in the welfare caseload of forty thousand to a monthly decrease of eight thousand. California was no longer the welfare capital of the country.

  We obtained authority from the federal government, which set a lot of the rules regarding welfare, to let us try an experiment in which able-bodied welfare recipients were given a job. We contacted every level of government throughout the state and asked if there were things they would be doing if they had the money and manpower to do it. We got all kinds of affirmative replies—none of them boondoggles. Washington gave us permission to go ahead with the experiment only after President Nixon intervened on our behalf. We took the able-bodied welfare recipients, assigned them to these jobs in return for their welfare grants, and as they learned some job skills, they were moving into jobs in the private sector.

  During the 1973—1974 recession, this program got seventy-six thousand people off the welfare rolls and put them into productive jobs. Later, a lot of them wrote and thanked me for the program, saying for the first time in their adult lives they had felt a sense of self-respect because they were doing something i
n return for their monthly check; the remarks reminded me of the smiles I’d seen on the faces of the men my father helped find jobs during the Depression.

  During my second term, I was able to announce a fourth rebate of state taxes to the people—the biggest surplus yet. I’ll always remember what happened after I’d announced we wanted to do that. The Democratic leader of the state senate burst into my office and said, “Giving that money back to the people is an unnecessary expenditure of public funds.”

  In all, largely through property-tax relief, we returned more than $5 billion in taxes to the taxpayers—the people to whom it belonged in the first place.

  It’s not easy for me to boast, but during the eight years, I think we made the state government less costly, smaller, and more businesslike; we were able to upgrade the quality of people attracted to government and cut the government’s growth to a rate at or below the level of California’s population growth; we made the bureaucracy more responsive to the public; and we began to return some of the power and taxing authority usurped by the state from local communities back to where they belonged, at the local level.

  During the eight years, I used my line-item veto authority 943 times and was never overridden by the legislature. If a bill had something beneficial in it but legislators had voted too much money for it, I could sign the bill but cut spending to a reasonable level, allowing me to set priorities and enabling the state to live within its means. The power of the line-item veto is held by forty-three governors. How I would miss it later in Washington. Presidents don’t have a line-item veto.

  Although many of my supporters wanted me to run for a third term in 1974, I’d accomplished most of what I’d set out to do and I’d sworn from the beginning that I was going to stop at two terms.

  Nancy and I left Sacramento in early 1975. The previous eight years had changed both of us—and we had found a new love.