by Nancy Gibbs
Reagan wrote back a week later in his clean, even cursive to thank Nixon for his note. He seemed to be ready to enlist in Nixon’s army. “You were very kind to write me about my talk,” Reagan replied, “and I feel honored that you took the time to read it.” After explaining that he had been crisscrossing the country and giving speeches that he wrote himself, Reagan noted his surprise at the reaction: “Audiences are actually militant in their expression that something must be done. . . . I am convinced there is a ground swell of economic conservatism building up which could reverse the entire tide of present day ‘statism.’ As a matter of fact, we seem to be in one of those rare moments when the American people with that wisdom which is the strength of Democracy are ready to say ‘enough.’”
Nixon answered Reagan quickly, enclosing a report from the Cabinet Committee on Price Stability for his correspondent’s reading pleasure and adding one prophetic observation: “You have the ability of putting complicated technical ideas into words everyone can understand. Those of us who have spent a number of years in Washington too often lack the ability to express ourselves in this way.”
This sort of compliment was worth shopping around. On July 8, an item appeared in Hedda Hopper’s widely read Hollywood gossip column noting that Reagan “had a note from Vice President Nixon congratulating him on [a] speech Ronnie delivered at [the] New York Waldorf,” which Nixon said had shown a “grasp of complex tax issues.” Not standard Hedda Hopper fare perhaps, but the item (almost certainly leaked by Reagan or his friends) did its work. Nixon was helping to launch Reagan’s political career whether he intended it or not.
Soon, the courtship was working in both directions. Reagan wrote to Nixon in September to congratulate the vice president for taking an uncompromising line with communist dictators. Nixon replied overnight, and sent along copies of some of his other recent speeches. In hopes of meeting Nixon in person, Reagan wrote again in December to let the vice president know he’d be anchoring ABC’s coverage of the Rose Bowl Parade on New Year’s Day 1960, in which the Nixons would be featured as grand marshals. Perhaps the two could get together afterward, Reagan suggested. But Nixon begged off.
Reagan’s wooing of Nixon paralleled his own trial separation from the Democratic Party. Reagan had been nudged to the right by his experience as president of the Screen Actors Guild, his friends, and his father-in-law, Chicago physician Loyal Davis, who had retired to Phoenix and become close to Barry Goldwater. After watching the Democrats nominate John F. Kennedy at their convention in July 1960, Reagan decided to coach Nixon in the finer points of political theater, dashing off a letter urging the Republican nominee to dispense with “the traditional demonstrations which follow each nomination. True, they once had their place when their only purpose was to influence the delegates in the convention hall. Now, however, TV has opened a window onto convention deliberations and the ‘demonstration’ is revealed as a synthetic time waster which only serves to belittle us in what should be one of our finer moments.”
After a few disparaging sentences about Kennedy’s boyish appearance, Reagan told Nixon he could pick up millions of votes if he paid more attention to people who don’t vote. This note was a harbinger of Nixon-Reagan battles to come. “I don’t pose as an infallible pundit, but I have a strong feeling that the twenty million non votes in this country just might be conservatives who have cynically concluded the two parties offer no choice between them where fiscal stability is concerned.” Nixon sent Reagan a brief note of thanks in reply.
By now, Reagan felt comfortable enough to advise Nixon on personnel matters, even the most important ones. Nixon was still in the hunt for a running mate at the convention in Chicago that summer when a telegram arrived at the Blackstone Hotel. It read: RESPECTFULLY URGE CONSIDERATION GOLDWATER FOR VICE PRESIDENT. CANNOT SUPPORT TICKET IF IT INCLUDES ROCKEFELLER.
It was signed MR AND MRS RONALD REAGAN.
A scribbled note from a Nixon aide asked the question: “The movie star?” A second scribbled note provided the answer: “Yes.”
It would not be the last time anyone in the Nixon camp mistook Reagan for just an actor.
Over the summer, Nixon’s aides plotted how best to bring Reagan into the fold. Adela Rogers St. Johns, the famed journalist who grew up with Nixon in Whittier and then went on to an illustrious career with the Hearst newspapers, told Nixon aide Stan McCaffrey that a number of Hollywood types could be lured to the Nixon tent, including Walt Disney, James Cagney—and Reagan if “the right man might get him to come along.” Reagan even offered to change parties and publicly endorse Nixon against John F. Kennedy. No, said Nixon, endorse me as a Democrat. It will mean more.
And so, in October 1960, Reagan became the vice chairman of the Southern California Democrats for Nixon. This celebrity conversion, just a few weeks before the election, was cause for announcement. “As a lifelong Democrat, today I feel no Democrat can ignore that the party has been taken over by a faction which seeks to pattern the Democratic Party and its politics after those of the Labor-Socialist government of England,” Reagan said in a statement. “This is no longer the Democratic Party I joined as a young man.” Reagan’s very public pivot prompted a visit from Joe Kennedy himself. “He tried to persuade me to change my mind and support his son,” Reagan recalled, “but I turned him down.”
Nixon lost narrowly to JFK, and two more years would pass until Reagan finally joined the Republican Party. In the interim, Reagan helped Nixon navigate the increasingly hazardous back alleys of California’s Republican politics. It happened this way: after losing the White House, Nixon spent a year living in New York before returning in 1962 to run for California governor. This turned out to be a truly bad idea that even Nixon’s wife, Pat, had opposed. While Nixon had his doubts as well, he also had nothing better to do as he plotted his comeback. But Nixon had no sooner moved his family back home after a decade away when he came under attack from—of all places—the Republican Right. A new generation of archconservatives was gaining influence in California since he had last run for a statewide office, some twelve years before. These Republicans didn’t trust Nixon, they didn’t respect his eight years in Washington at the side of an internationalist like Eisenhower, and they certainly didn’t appreciate the carpetbagger image Nixon had brought with him from New York. And so Nixon turned to Reagan, among others, for advice about how to handle the right-wingers; in turn, Reagan worked behind the scenes to convince many of those who found Nixon too liberal to take another chance on him.
But Reagan’s own credentials as a go-between were suspect, chiefly because he was still a Democrat. Reagan finally fixed that while speaking on Nixon’s behalf at a 1962 Republican fund-raiser near his home in Pacific Palisades. Midway through the speech a woman in the audience stood up and asked Reagan, “Have you registered as a Republican yet?”
“No I haven’t,” Reagan replied, “but I intend to.”
The woman promptly marched forward to Reagan, introduced herself as a local registration official, and placed the proper form in front of him. As the audience cheered, Reagan recalled, “I signed it and became a Republican, then said to the audience, ‘Now where was I?’”
It wasn’t enough to save Nixon. He lost to Pat Brown by almost 300,000 votes in 1962 and vowed at an impromptu Beverly Hilton press conference the next morning to disappear from politics forever. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”
The pundits banged out their Nixon eulogies and buried him. “Barring a miracle,” Time predicted, “his political career ended last week. He was only 49.”
But if Nixon had been sidelined, Reagan had been set free. In March 1962, GE cut him loose as the host of the General Electric Theater on Sunday nights, setting the stage for his second career. It has become an iconic piece of Republican lore that the CBS network couldn’t cope with a program that had an outspoken conservative as a front man. In fact, politics had little or nothing to do with
Reagan getting fired; money did. CBS canceled the show because it was losing market share to a western that appeared at the same time on NBC called Bonanza.
And so he turned his attention to his second career. He was about to become a full-time politician.
A Little Help from Gettysburg
When the city fathers of Phoenix invited Nixon to Arizona in March 1965 for a testimonial dinner honoring Barry Goldwater, they asked Reagan to introduce him. The choice made perfect sense: the undisputed winner of the 1964 election, other than Lyndon Johnson himself, had been Reagan, whose eleventh-hour, nationally televised “A Time for Choosing” speech on Goldwater’s behalf had electrified conservatives and turned Reagan into an overnight sensation.
A few days later, Nixon sent Reagan a note of thanks for his Arizona remarks and included some advice as Reagan launched his own race to be California’s next governor. “Resist the temptation of ‘striking back’ at any of the other potential candidates,” he advised. “I do not know what your political plans eventually will turn out to be,” Nixon added, which was more wishful thinking than fact. “However, as I told you, I am sure that no one can beat Brown if the Republican primary is a bitter bloodletting battle.”
Reagan wrote Nixon back a week later. “I assure you there will be no first blows, or even second, struck by me. Just between us, I wish the other boys would get the idea. But you’ll have my promise—I’ll speak no evil and I’ll act like I hear no evil, but that will test my acting ability.”
Nixon would not be part of Reagan’s first political campaign. Reagan made sure of that when he told the Los Angeles Times in January 1966 that he did not want Nixon at his side. The reasons for this straight-arm were many: the once reliably moderate politics of California—and of Southern California in particular—were turning to the right. The millions of Midwesterners who had poured into the coastal paradise during the 1930s and 1940s for its plentiful jobs, low cost of living, and good schools were waking up to a new purgatory of high taxes, urban riots, campus dissent, and an increasingly unfamiliar social code.
The summer of 1965 had changed everything. Patriotic employees of such San Fernando Valley defense companies as Canoga Electronics, Rocketdyne, Bendix, and Northrop spent the first week of June 1965 proudly glued to their television sets as astronaut Ed White took the nation’s first ever space walk outside a Gemini IV capsule that they all had helped build. Two months later, in August, they tuned in again, this time to watch the black neighborhood of Watts, just an hour away, explode in flames and then devolve into looting and rioting until fifteen thousand troops from the 40th Armored Division moved in and cordoned off the entire area. Watts was as terrifying to white Angelenos as Gemini IV had been thrilling. “Hell in the City of Angels,” the TV commentators declared. A war at home. How could a nation capable of such great achievement in space engender—and then permit—such civil disorder on earth?
Reagan charged straight at that question, promising a new “moral crusade in government” if elected. He capitalized on the hopes and fears both because he was part of the great Midwestern migratory tide himself and because he believed that the government at all levels was becoming too big, too expensive, and too liberal. He drew heavily from Goldwater’s well of cultural issues but he did it with a smile. He barnstormed the state calling for lower taxes, a stronger military response in Vietnam, and a crackdown on everything from crime to drugs to welfare queens to communist infiltration at home to sexual orgies on campuses. “He believed basically what Barry believed,” campaign advisor Stu Spencer recalled. “He said a lot of things that Barry said, but he said them in a soft way, in a more forgiving way.”
And people liked what they heard. Reagan captured 1.4 million votes in his race against George Christopher—a stunning number in a primary. Elite opinion makers on the East Coast were rendered nearly speechless: California Republicans “against all counsels of common sense and prudence,” said a New York Times editorial, “insisted upon nominating actor Ronald Reagan for governor.” Certainly, Nixon needed no coaching on what it would mean if Reagan actually won the governor’s race in November 1966 against Pat Brown. The smooth and handsome actor-turned-pol would immediately become a contender for the Republican nomination for president in 1968—the job Nixon himself was seeking.
A week or so after his big primary victory, Reagan flew east to consolidate his victory. He stopped first in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for a carefully choreographed two-hour session with Eisenhower, who had been watching Reagan for months. “For quite a while I have been reading all I can find about Mr. Reagan,” he wrote to California industrialist Jim Murphy in September 1965. “Mostly I see him in TV scenes that are purely entertainment but he does seem to have a very pleasant and appealing personality. The only thing I know about his politics was that he earnestly supported the Republican ticket in 1964.” After that, in one of the club’s little-known alliances, Eisenhower began sending Reagan advice and ideas directly and through intermediaries. He suggested ways Reagan could lay out a program, shorten his stump speech, and punch up his key phrases. Ike’s advice might have seemed basic, but then neither man had chosen politics as a first profession and they shared the surely strange experience of coming to the game relatively late in life (Reagan at fifty-five, Ike at sixty).
For the summit between the party’s glorious past and its glamorous future, all three networks sent camera crews to Gettysburg; a dozen other reporters made the hour-long trip from Washington to cover Reagan’s arrival at the tiny college where Ike had his office. If Eisenhower favored Nixon, his old vice president, for the 1968 nomination, it was hard to tell that day. “You can bet” Reagan would be a candidate for the White House in 1968 if he beat Brown, Eisenhower said. “It is true that in 1962 I argued that a number of the younger men in the party should make their views known. Our party deserves to have a voice and not sit around and let the nomination go by default.”
Then Reagan moved on to Washington, where he was set to do a star turn at the National Press Club. This event was neither beyond Nixon’s notice—nor beyond his desire to manipulate. Nixon pulled some levers behind the scenes and got California’s senior senator, George Murphy (also a former actor), to coach Reagan about how to handle inevitable questions from reporters about his future plans. Nixon was hoping Reagan would at the very least sidestep any probing about his ambitions in 1968. The tag team was either successful—or Reagan needed no coaching in the first place. For when the questions did come that day, Reagan played the ingenue: “Gosh, it’s taken me all my life to get up the nerve to do what I’m doing. That’s as far as my dreams go.”
In late June it was Nixon’s turn to tour. He flew to California, campaigning not for Reagan but instead for his longtime advisor Robert Finch, who was running for lieutenant governor on the same ticket. Reagan and Nixon met privately for dinner, and afterward Nixon told reporters that he was impressed by the way Reagan had repositioned himself as more of a “centrist.” Of course, by delivering this line he was merely drawing attention to the fact that Reagan had done no such thing. When Nixon ran for governor in 1962, he had repudiated the John Birch Society and its members for their extreme views—and lost ground with some conservative voters as a result. By contrast, four years later, Reagan and campaign advisor Spencer had spent a lot of time thinking about how to manage the Far Right challenge and had decided to neither repudiate nor endorse the society. Instead Reagan countered questions about his connections to the group with the following answer: “Any member of the society who supports me will be buying my philosophy, I won’t be buying theirs.”
It was an artful straddle. But by July, as the general election against Pat Brown approached, the extremist charge had become nettlesome enough for Reagan that Freeman Gosden, half of the Amos ’n’ Andy team of radio fame and a longtime California Republican, sought help from Eisenhower, his Palm Springs golfing partner. Gosden sent Ike a confidential and somewhat cryptic letter in early July 1966, reporting that Reag
an needed a hand getting free of the charge of anti-Semitism, simply because so many Birch Society members were supporting him. “I don’t think [Reagan] can come out and say he is not [anti-Semitic] unless there is a question and answer situation,” Gosden wrote. “You might have some thoughts on this.”
Eisenhower wrote back the same day, proposing a detailed script for a willing reporter and Reagan to follow. This is how Eisenhower imagined the conversation could go:
“Mr. Reagan, I hear that you have disavowed any connection with the John Birch Society, but at the same time I’ve had reports that you are anti-Semitic. Do you have anything to say on this point.”
Ike continued: “His answer could be as emphatic—and as short—as possible. ‘I’ve heard of this malicious accusation. It is not true. Anyone who repeats this rumor is guilty of a deliberate falsehood.’”
Ike noted: “Then, at another point in the conference, he might say something like this: ‘In this campaign, I’ve been presenting to the public some of the things I want to do for California, meaning for all the people of our state. I do not exclude citizens from my concern and I make no distinctions among them on such invalid bases as color or creed.’”
And then Ike closed: “Something conveying this meaning might well be slipped in to every public talk—such as, ‘There are not minority groups so far as I’m concerned. We are all Americans.’”