An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

30

  ITS NAME WAS RANCHO DEL CIELO, although it was called Tip Top Ranch the first day we saw it.

  After I became governor and taxes forced us to sell our ranch near Lake Malibu, Nancy and I purchased a large piece of land in an isolated rural area north of San Diego, planning to make it our ranch-hideaway once I left office. Although there was no utility service on the property when we bought it, we were assured water and electrical service would be extended there shortly. But as the time approached for us to leave Sacramento, there was still no utility service and we were told none was likely to be provided very soon.

  When one of our friends, Bill Wilson, heard about our problem, he said he had heard rumors that a cattle ranch not far from a lemon ranch he owned north of Santa Barbara might be coming on the market and he offered to find out if we could visit it. We’d been at his ranch many times as guests and loved the area, but didn’t know what we were getting ourselves in for.

  Bill and his wife, Betty, and Nancy and I got in Bill’s car and we started driving up a narrow, winding road into the Santa Ynez mountains, a range of granite peaks that rise above the Pacific Ocean a few miles north of Santa Barbara.

  The road seemed to go on forever and as we got higher and higher up the mountain, Betty started saying, “Bill, there can’t be anything up here that they’d want, why don’t you turn around?” But Bill didn’t answer and kept on driving.

  Although I kept quiet, I was beginning to have the same doubts as Betty: The road was so steep and the area was so primitive I thought, well, maybe somebody’s got a house up here they call a ranch, but it sure looks like goat country to me. Where would you ride a horse?

  After seven miles of twists and turns, the road straightened out briefly and we were surrounded by a stand of oak trees; then we turned off the road, went through a gate, and started down another narrow road.

  Pretty soon, we were passing through another lovely grove of trees and suddenly we emerged on a huge green meadow with rugged hills stretching far beyond it. Across the meadow I saw a tiny house.

  I took one look at the view and was ready to buy, even before we reached the house, but Bill kept saying, “Shut up. If you’re gonna buy it, don’t tell the owner you like it.”

  The owner was a cattleman named Ray Cornelius. He put us on horses and we took a ride over the place. Well, after that, I was really sold.

  The previous Christmas Eve, Ray and his wife had lost their daughter (who by coincidence had been a classmate of Patti’s) in an automobile accident; until then, they’d kept the ranch mostly for her to ride on. Now they no longer wanted it, but they were hesitant to sell the ranch because, they told us, they were afraid it would be taken over by someone who wouldn’t love it as much or have as much feeling for it as they did.

  Nancy and I said we’d bestow all the love in the world on the ranch, and pretty soon, we sold our land near San Diego and with that money bought Tip Top Ranch.

  The ranch, which covered 688 acres, was named Tip Top after a mountain peak that marked a dividing point for rainfall in the Santa Ynez range: Rain that fell on one side flowed toward the Pacific Ocean, rain that fell on the other side drained into the Santa Ynez Valley and then found its way to the ocean.

  Nancy and I chose another name, Rancho del Cielo, “Ranch in the Sky,” for that’s what it was.

  The tiny plastered adobe house on the ranch had been built in 1872 and it needed lots of work. On two sides, the previous owners had erected a makeshift screened porch with an ugly corrugated aluminum roof and walls made of green plastic siding. It wasn’t very pretty, nor was most of the house itself, which hadn’t really been lived in full-time for years and was used mostly by overnighting cattlemen.

  We tore out the porch, leaving only the concrete floor, and with the help of a contractor, built a big L-shaped room with a fireplace and big windows all around. The house now had about fifteen hundred square feet, not a big house by some standards, but our new addition and the windows, which opened up wonderful views across the meadow, did wonders in giving it a greater sense of spaciousness.

  With the help of Barney Barnett, a retired California highway patrolman who’d been our driver and friend in Los Angeles, and another friend, Dennis LeBlanc, we replaced well-weathered asbestos shingles on the roof with a new roof of simulated Spanish tiles on the main house as well as the new addition, giving it all the look of a nineteenth-century Mexican adobe.

  Our bedroom was only nine feet by fourteen feet and before long, Nancy was feeling a little claustrophobic, so Barney and I knocked out a wall and expanded it. (My experience remodeling houses as a fourteen-year-old in Dixon never came in handier.) But we didn’t stop there. We got the contractor who had rebuilt the porch to turn the bedroom into an even larger room.

  From the first day we saw it, Rancho del Cielo cast a spell over us.

  No place before or since has ever given Nancy and me the joy and serenity it does.

  Rancho del Cielo can make you feel as if you are on a cloud looking down at the world. From the house we look across the meadow at a peak crowned with oak trees and beyond it, mountains that stretch toward the horizon. From some points on the ranch, you can watch boats cruising across the Santa Barbara Channel, then turn your head and see the Santa Ynez Valley unfold like a huge wilderness amphitheater before your eyes.

  When we want to take a horseback ride, we have a choice of at least half a dozen trails, and every time we take a ride, we see something different, discover something new about the ranch.

  When I was still in the acting business, I’d bred my horse, Baby, with a dapple gray thoroughbred stallion and she produced a dapple gray mare I named Nancy D because I was courting someone by that name. After Baby got up in years, I trained Nancy D and she became a wonderful hunter and jumper; later on, I bred Baby once more and got a beautiful black colt I named Little Man because he was very large.

  I lost Nancy D when she was sixteen with an extreme case of gastroenteritis and then I switched to Little Man, the son of Baby.

  A friend of ours, a surgeon who also likes to ride, once told me that when he had a really difficult operation ahead of him, he always got up early in the morning and went for a ride and when he was finished, he felt ready for the operation.

  Riding has the same kind of effect on me.

  Since the day we bought the ranch, if Nancy or I wanted to think something out, there’s been no better place to do it than Rancho del Cielo.

  As I’ve said, there’s something about the wild scenery and serenity at the ranch and having a horse between my knees that makes it easier to sort out a problem. I think people who haven’t tried it might be surprised at how easily your thoughts can come together when you’re on the back of a horse riding with nothing else to do but think about a decision that’s ahead of you.

  During those first months after we left Sacramento, I spent a lot of time on Little Man riding around the ranch thinking about the future.

  My health was excellent and even though I was nearly sixty-five, I didn’t feel old and I never gave a thought to retiring. I was getting more requests than ever to speak. Nancy was busy with her Foster Grandparents Program; I had a newspaper column and regular radio spot that gave me a chance to continue speaking out about things that concerned me. We had our home in Pacific Palisades; we could see the children often; we were looking forward to fixing up the ranch and spending more time there.

  I think we would have been content to spend the rest of our lives that way.

  Yet, hardly a day passed when someone didn’t call and ask me to make a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. These weren’t only calls from people in California, but from people all over the country—people I’d met over the years on the speech circuit.

  Eight years earlier, I’d been dragged kicking and screaming into politics. But now my opinion about holding public office was different.

  I didn’t automatically turn a deaf ear to the appeals I was receiving. I had chan
ged, probably, I think, because when I’d been governor I’d felt the excitement and satisfaction that comes from being able to bring about change, not just talk about it.

  It had been thrilling and fun and I was proud of what we had accomplished. Yet, the longer I had been governor, the more I realized the biggest problems we had regarding big government had to be solved in Washington, which was gradually but inexorably taking power from the states.

  It reminded me of something that James Madison said in 1788: “Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”

  His friend and neighbor, Thomas Jefferson, thought much the same way. “What has destroyed liberty and the rights of men in every government that has ever existed under the sun?” he asked, and then gave an answer: “The generalizing and concentrating of all cares and powers into one body.”

  As governor, I’d experienced how the federal bureaucracy had its hand in everything and was “concentrating all cares and power into one body.” Washington would establish a new program that the states were supposed to administer, then set so many rules and regulations that the state wasn’t really administering it—you were just following orders from Washington. Most of these programs could not only be operated more effectively but more economically under our own laws.

  The federal government hadn’t created the states; the states had created the federal government. Washington, ignoring principles of the Constitution, was trying to turn the states into nothing more than administrative districts of the federal government. And the path to federal control had, to a large extent, become federal aid. From our schools to our farms, Washington bureaucrats were trying to dictate to Americans what they could or could not do, and were portraying bureaucratic control as the price Americans must pay for federal aid administered from Washington. The money came with strings that reached all the way back to the Potomac.

  Usually with the best of intentions, Congress passed a new program, appropriated the money for it, then assigned bureaucrats in Washington to disperse the money; almost always, the bureaucrats responded by telling states, cities, counties, and schools how to spend this money.

  In Madison’s words, Washington was usurping power from the states by the “gradual and silent encroachment of those in power.”

  In ever greater amounts, federal handouts started cascading to states and communities, often for programs they had no need or desire for, but they took the money because it was there; it seemed to be “free.”

  Over time, they became so dependent on the money that, like junkies, they found it all but impossible to break the habit, and only after they were well addicted to it did they learn how pervasive the federal regulations were that came with the money.

  As all this was going on, the federal government was taking an ever-increasing share of the nation’s total tax revenues and making it more difficult for states and local governments to raise money on their own; as a result, they had to turn even more to the federal government for financial aid and became the captives of a relentless Washington and its multitude of bureaucracies. In return for federal grants, state and local governments surrendered control of their destiny to a faceless bureaucracy in Washington that claimed to know better how to solve the problems of a city or town than the people who lived there. And if local officials or their congressmen ever tried to end a program they didn’t like or they thought was unproductive and wasteful, they discovered that the beneficiaries of the program and the bureaucrats who administered it had formed such a tight alliance that it was all but impossible for elected officials to kill it. Once started, a federal program benefiting any group or special interest is virtually impossible to end and the costs go on forever.

  We had strayed a great distance from our founding fathers’ vision of America: They regarded the central government’s responsibility as that of providing national security, protecting our democratic freedoms, and limiting the government’s intrusion into our lives—in sum, the protection of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They never envisioned vast agencies in Washington telling our farmers what to plant, our teachers what to teach, our industries what to build. The Constitution they wrote established sovereign states, not administrative districts of the federal government. They believed in keeping government as close as possible to the people; if parents didn’t like the way their schools were being run, they could throw out the Board of Education at the next election; but what could they do about the elite bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Education who sent ultimatums into their children’s classrooms regarding curriculum and textbooks?

  Of course, I had been disturbed by the expansion of the federal government and its encroachment on our freedoms for a long time, but the problems increased dramatically during the years I was governor with the start of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and “War on Poverty.”

  Those years were a watershed in the evolution of our central government that I think many historians have not yet paid sufficient attention to.

  Between 1965 and 1980, the federal budget jumped to roughly five times what it had been while the federal deficit grew to fifty-three times as much and the amount of money doled out under various federal “entitlement” programs quadrupled to almost $300 billion a year; along the way, a lot of the decision-making authority traditionally exercised at the grass-roots level of America was transported to Washington.

  Yet, as you look back on that myriad of new federal programs, it’s hard to find any that did much good for the poor or the nation as a whole.

  A lot of the money just got lost in the administrative process. Hundreds of billions were spent on poverty programs, and the plight of the poor grew more painful. They had spent billions on programs that made people worse off.

  The waste in dollars and cents was small compared with the waste of human potential. It was squandered by the narcotic of giveaway programs that sapped the human spirit, diminished the incentive of people to work, destroyed families, and produced an increase in female and child poverty, deteriorating schools, and disintegrating neighborhoods.

  The liberals had had their turn at bat in the 1960s and they had struck out.

  As I rode Little Man around Rancho del Cielo during the spring of 1975, I thought a lot about the lost vision of our founding fathers and the importance of recapturing it and the voices from around the country who were pressing me to run for president. And I remembered something I’d said many years before: A candidate doesn’t make the decision whether to run for president; the people make it for him.

  31

  ALTHOUGH I’D ONCE BROADCAST a University of Michigan football game in which he played, I knew Gerald Ford only slightly before he succeeded Richard Nixon in the White House. He offered me a choice of virtually any position I wanted in his cabinet, but I wanted to complete my second term as governor and said I’d prefer to remain in Sacramento.

  After he became president, a number of Republican leaders around the country began urging me to challenge Ford for the party nomination in 1976. Running for the presidency wasn’t something I had planned on. But, as I’ve said, I had always believed a candidate doesn’t make the decision whether to run for president, the people make it, the people let you know whether you should run for office. And so, I agreed to go after the nomination, but pledged to follow the Eleventh Commandment and I did.

  Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada, whom I’d gotten to know and like while we were governors of neighboring states, agreed to serve as general chairman of the campaign. The team of political professionals led by Stu Spencer and Bill Roberts, who had helped oversee my campaigns for governor, had already agreed to work for Ford, so to manage the campaign, my supporters brought in John Sears, a well-respected Washington lawyer who had worked in the White House during the Nixon years.

  For the primary campaign, we decided on a simple and
straight-forward strategy: Our attacks would be aimed solely at the Democrats and big government, not Gerald Ford.

  Our main theme was that I wasn’t part of the Washington establishment—I was an outsider—and therefore I offered voters a clear-cut alternative to the Democrats.

  The first time I ran for governor, I had had to overcome the argument that I was an actor without any experience in government. My eight years as governor had taken care of that. Now, in a presidential race, I knew we’d have to confront a different stereotype: the bias many Northeasterners held against Californians—the one that says since California is a land of fruit and nuts, it’s a great place if you’re an orange.

  My theme on the campaign stump was familiar to anyone who had heard me speak over the years: It was time to scale back the size of the federal government, reduce taxes and government intrusion in our lives, balance the budget, and return to the people the freedoms usurped from them by the bureaucrats.

  As we set off on the campaign trail, I attempted to tell Americans what we had accomplished in California to reduce waste and welfare abuse, and I proposed returning to states and communities direct control over a variety of federal programs such as welfare, aid-to-education, and housing, along with the taxing power to pay for them.

  Our first battleground in the campaign was the New Hampshire primary in late February. I should have spent the weekend before the primary barnstorming New Hampshire, but instead John Sears arranged for us to leave the state and fly to Peoria, where I campaigned for the Illinois primary. Only afterward did friends in New Hampshire tell me that by leaving the state on the eve of the election, I’d sent a message to the voters of New Hampshire that I was taking them for granted, that New Hampshire wasn’t important to me.

  I lost the primary by fewer than 1,500 votes out of 108,000. We lost Florida, then the primary in Illinois, my home state. After three big losses so early in the campaign, the press began writing off my campaign, along with my political future. But once I’d entered the race, I wanted to see it through.