The Presidents Club: Inside the World's Most Exclusive Fraternity

by Nancy Gibbs

  By midsummer, Eisenhower was telling his friends that Reagan was not anti-Semitic—whatever they may have heard. “To scotch such a rumor,” he wrote to one New York socialite in July, “is difficult because a candidate cannot, unless specifically questioned, speak out to proclaim ‘I am not a thief; I’m not a liar; I’m not anti-Semitic; I’m not an assassin; I’m not a perjurer.’ I hope that Reagan will be questioned on the matter—and if he is, I know his answer. He is a decent American and I do hope he is elected.”

  The issue reached a climax in early August when a young state controller named Alan Cranston chased Reagan down at the Sacramento airport in an effort to personally hand him a twenty-eight-page report alleging anti-Semitism in his campaign because of his connections to the Birch Society. A Reagan aide intercepted Cranston and his document as Reagan was boarding a plane to Los Angeles. Reagan never got to rehearse Ike’s lines, but he didn’t need to. Instead, Reagan waved Cranston off with a trademark cock of his head. “You’ve made your grandstand play,” he said. “It’s no secret I deplore racism of any kind.”

  But if the Brown forces weren’t above raising the Birch Society as an issue in Reagan’s campaign, neither was Nixon. That fall, Nixon flew to California once more to campaign for Republican lieutenant governor candidate Robert Finch. Pat Buchanan, then a thirty-year-old aide traveling with Nixon, recalls seeing a former Republican congressman and state party stalwart named Patrick Hillings talking to reporters after one campaign stop. When Buchanan wandered over to listen in, he heard Hillings telling local reporters that Reagan needed to fully repudiate the Birch Society.

  Such a suggestion, Buchanan knew, only served to make the apparent connection between Reagan and the Birch Society even stronger. Stunned by this unhelpful remark, Buchanan pulled Hillings aside afterward and asked, “What the hell are you doing?”

  Replied Hillings: “The old man told me to do it.”

  Nixon, who had campaigned strategically for Republican congressional candidates all across the country, watched the 1966 results come in with about forty supporters at a suite at the Drake Hotel in New York. It turned into a huge Republican night, with big gains in the Midwest and West. The party gained forty-seven seats in Congress—including a young congressman from Houston named Bush—and elected a new generation of governors. Nixon roamed the suite all night long, noting, “It’s a sweep, it’s a sweep.”

  But it was as much the moment of the Reagan arrival as of Nixon’s revival. In California, the former actor who was easy to underestimate won in a stunning landslide, earning 3.7 million votes to Brown’s 2.7 million—capturing a million more votes than Nixon had earned four years earlier. The comparison with 1962 was haunting: where Nixon had won just twenty of California’s fifty-eight counties, Reagan captured all but three just four years later. Nixon didn’t have to worry about getting through to Los Angeles on this night; this time, Reagan phoned Nixon, who took the call alone in one of the bedrooms at the Drake suite.

  When he emerged, he said to aides, “He’s all right, Ron is—it’s a sweep in California, too.” Then the whole Nixon party went out for spaghetti.

  Within days, Reagan was being mentioned in the New York Times as the conservative favorite for the 1968 nomination. Two weeks later, Reagan quietly launched his own campaign to win the White House.

  Shadowboxing

  What unfolded over the next two years between Nixon and Reagan was the closest they ever came to direct competition, but that didn’t make it any less of a fight. It began within days of Reagan’s victory.

  November 28, 1966

  Dear Ronnie:

  Warren Weaver’s story in the New York Sunday Times magazine section even went so far as to concede your skill in fielding questions. This concession of the Times is a major breakthrough! Pat joins me in sending our very best wishes to Nancy and you for Christmas and the New Year.

  Sincerely

  Dick

  Immediately after the 1966 election, the 1968 Republican primary began. Reagan and Nixon both allowed other Republicans to step out in front: George Romney of Michigan, Nelson Rockefeller of New York, and, though he was a Democrat on paper, George Wallace of Alabama, who was becoming a hero to many of the nation’s conservatives.

  Despite Nixon’s triumph as a surrogate and statesman in 1966, some on Reagan’s team regarded him as a loser, a washed-up has-been; the party would never nominate someone with so many scars a second time.

  And so Team Reagan quietly launched its own campaign.

  According to Lou Cannon’s definitive account in Governor Reagan, Reagan met at his Pacific Palisades home with a handful of top advisors to discuss a possible presidential bid only nine days after his election as governor. Reagan aides were given assignments to fan out around the country and measure interest among key party players. Not everyone who was contacted was intrigued. But Tom Reed, Reagan’s political advisor, met a few days later with F. Clifton White, a key architect of Goldwater’s 1964 nomination, at the Apawamis Club in Rye, New York. White urged Reed to make no moves until Reagan had put some points on the board as governor. Reed personally briefed Reagan on the conversation a few days later in San Francisco.

  Reagan’s first campaign for president was a strange and muddled affair. In a conversation with syndicated columnist Robert Novak, White described the Reagan bid, in fact, as a clandestine operation: Reagan could not run for president so soon after his gubernatorial election; instead, “a few emissaries under cover would try prying delegates from Nixon even though Reagan was not a candidate.” Reagan was at times no more than ambivalent about a White House run; some of his aides were more enthusiastic than he was. Stuart Spencer recalled that even as the furtive campaign was unfolding, he kept a back channel going with Nixon’s camp to make sure relations did not turn irrevocably sour.

  The secret candidate himself was almost fatalistic about his prospects, taking an active role at some stages while turning passive at others. He had a habit of repeating a phrase to his aides that seemed to take the guesswork out of the gamble: “The office seeks the man,” he would say, “the office seeks the man.” What exactly did this mean? It translated best into a conviction that if the times demanded it, voters would somehow rise up and call you to service. What you did about it in the meantime, under this unusual theory, mattered only to a point. It was surely a comfort to Reagan, who believed deeply that God had a plan for him, that there was only so much he could do to alter it. But it is also clear that over the next two years, Reagan took a variety of steps to prolong his role in the unfolding 1968 Republican nomination drama even when many people both inside and outside his circle were urging him to quit.

  Meanwhile, there is no doubt that Nixon came to view Reagan as an obstacle to the prize. Nixon had seen Reagan roll up massive majorities in California over Brown; he knew how smooth and appealing the former film star was on camera and he knew that the rising urban unrest and unhappiness with the Vietnam War was making the Republican Party a more Western, suburban, and conservative coalition than it had been in 1960. Unlike Rockefeller or Romney, Reagan could appeal to Southern and Western conservatives who were playing a growing role in a party long dominated by its more moderate Midwestern and Eastern factions. “Ronald Reagan . . . set the hearts of many Southern Republicans aflutter,” Nixon wrote later. “He spoke their conservative language particularly and with great passion. Until I had the nomination, therefore, I had to pay careful attention to the dangers of a sudden resurgence on the right. Equally dangerous would be a serious intraparty split that would deliver the Reaganites to Wallace’s camp.”

  In a private January 1967 strategy session with his advisors at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, Nixon sized up his rivals, giving Romney even money to win, himself two-to-one odds, and pegging Reagan’s chances one in four. But Reagan was enough of a concern that Nixon discussed with his aides—and then abandoned—the idea of promising Reagan the 1972 nomination in exchange for staying out of the 1968 race.
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br />   Over the course of 1967 and 1968, Nixon and Reagan squared off in an increasingly public fight for the nomination while, in private, each went to unusual lengths to pretend that the whole thing was a series of perfectly logical misunderstandings.

  Each man played his supposedly innocent role all the way to the convention in Miami Beach.

  February 24, 1967

  Dear Ron:

  Through my private intelligence, I have learned that you will be the speaker at the Gridiron dinner on March 1. The purpose of this note is to wish you well and tell you how sorry I am that I will be in Europe on that date on the first leg of my around-the-world tour.

  The Gridiron speech, as you know, is quite a test for the average political figure. My guess is, however, that this white tie audience will present no significant problem for you. After the battle of Berkeley, everything else should seem easy!

  Pat joins me in sending our best wishes to Nancy and you.

  Sincerely,

  Dick

  Here, in just a few lines, can be found all of Nixon’s complex feelings about Reagan and his rise. Seldom has a politician been less qualified to give a rival advice on charming a crowd than was Nixon with Reagan. The wording is friendly and generous enough but the tone makes clear that Nixon still thought of Reagan as a lucky novice who should be somewhat grateful for the advice and compliments of a seasoned vet. Nixon seemed to believe he could keep Reagan in a box, making a point of strutting about his upcoming overseas swing and his own mysterious network of spies. Left unstated but just as likely, Nixon may have been envious that it was Reagan who was tapped by the capital’s political press corps to be its toastmaster at Washington’s toniest white-tie dinner that spring. “Nixon did not have a high regard for most people and Reagan was no exception there,” recalled John Sears, who worked for Nixon in 1968 and later for Reagan. “Nixon disliked people who he thought were just fluff, who he thought were nothing special underneath a good package. That was part of his idea about the Kennedys and, in Nixon’s mind, Reagan fit that too.”

  As 1967 unfolded, Reagan’s political ambition became a very public story. In late April 1967, Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty, who had backed Reagan in 1966, said that the governor was “running for President too soon.” In early May, some fifteen million Americans watched as Reagan appeared on a nationally televised CBS broadcast in which he and Bobby Kennedy debated via satellite two dozen students in London about world affairs, chiefly Vietnam. The foreign students were officious, well prepared, and hostile, but Reagan handled them with a cool detachment that Kennedy visibly lacked. Afterward, critics agreed that Reagan, a relative newcomer to politics, easily outperformed the more accomplished senator from New York. Reagan left Kennedy “blinking,” said Newsweek. Afterward, Kennedy asked, “Who the fuck got me into this?”

  It was a boffo performance that did not go unnoticed in Nixon’s camp, which was just then setting up its headquarters a block from the White House, at 1726 Pennsylvania Avenue.

  May 31, 1967

  Dear Ronnie,

  I was still in Latin America when the program was carried but from all sides I have heard nothing but the highest praise for your handling of the joint television appearance with Bobby Kennedy.

  When Newsweek gives you rave notices, it must have been tops!

  I am planning to come to the Bohemian Grove for the weekend of July 22 and 23. In the event that you are in Sacramento at that time, I would very much enjoy the opportunity to visit with you. I think you might find some of the information I have gathered on my world, fact-finding journey of considerable interest.

  With best personal regards, sincerely,

  Dick

  Reagan agreed to meet, but stuck to his campaign schedule anyway, focusing on the very Republicans who had never held Nixon in high regard. In mid-June, Reagan stole the show at the Young Republican Convention in Omaha, where his speech was interrupted twenty times and climaxed with a five-minute demonstration in the city’s sports arena that was punctuated with chants, “We want Reagan! We want Reagan.” In late June, Reagan easily won the buzz-war at the summer meeting of the National Governors Association, held at Wyoming’s Jackson Lake. He even met privately with eleven Western Republican governors, sweeping into the session, one observer said, like a white knight on a charger, trying to capture the party’s right flank. “Reagan’s rapidly replacing Dick Nixon in one wing of the party,” New Mexico governor David Cargo told reporters that weekend. Still coy, Reagan refused to say he was a candidate—or rule out a draft if it came to that. “If the Republican party comes beating at my door, I wouldn’t say ‘Get lost, fellows.’ But that isn’t going to happen.”

  One account of the Teton meetings sent Reagan—and surely Nixon too—around the bend. “Reagan’s ascendancy poses the threat of a conservative split,” Time reported. “Reagan, in fact, said of Nixon to one Republican governor, ‘This guy’s a loser. Any guy who can lose to Pat Brown can’t win the presidency.’”

  There it was: the whole rationale for Reagan’s supposedly secret candidacy suddenly out in the open. And if Time was right, Reagan himself had put it there. And so a few days after the issue appeared, Reagan fired off an angry letter to Time’s editors to cover his tracks. “TIME owes it to its readers to name the anonymous Governor whom I allegedly told that ‘Dick Nixon is a loser.’ It will be especially interesting, since I have never said it or thought it. I am sorry that at a time when Republican leaders are working hard for party unity, TIME would stoop to quoting nameless sources in an effort to destroy that unity.”

  Reagan then wrote Nixon a sort of half apology and included a copy of his letter to Time’s editors.

  July 12, 1967

  Dear Dick,

  I thought you might be interested in seeing the attached letter.

  Best regards,

  Ron

  Nixon wrote back six days later:

  July 18, 1967

  Dear Ron,

  Your letter to TIME was right on target. It probably helps to let them know their errors will not go unchallenged.

  Best regards,

  Dick

  Time, for its part, dismissed Reagan’s request for a clarification. “Time’s source is not at all ‘nameless,’” the editors replied, “but we are bound to honor his request that he not be identified—a request with which Governor Reagan, as a political figure, can surely sympathize.”

  Five days later, the long-awaited Nixon-Reagan meeting unfolded in the one place where their conversations would go unrecorded, but not unnoticed: at the all-male power broker confab known as the Bohemian Grove sixty-five miles north of San Francisco. There, amid the towering redwoods spread out over 2,700 acres, the nation’s moguls, financiers, politicians, and cabinet officers had been gathering for decades to talk business and politics and put on musical skits. It was something of a clubhouse. In 1967, Nixon was set to be the Grove’s keynote speaker in the sprawling natural amphitheater and he planned to dedicate his speech to Herbert Hoover, who had introduced Nixon to Ike at the Grove in 1950.

  Sometime during the weekend, Nixon cornered Reagan to pin him down about his plans for 1968. Sitting together with California senator George Murphy on a bench in the “Lost Angels” neighborhood of the Grove, Nixon officially informed Reagan of what was already obvious: that he planned to seek the presidency in 1968. Echoing many of their previous conversations, Nixon promised to run not against any fellow Republicans but instead against LBJ.

  And what were Reagan’s plans, exactly? According to Nixon, Reagan said he was “surprised, flattered and somewhat concerned about all the presidential speculation surrounding him.” Reagan told Nixon that he “did not want to be a favorite son” but he would permit his name to be placed in nomination in order to keep California’s large slate of delegates unified. In what would turn out to be a promise he could not keep, Reagan also told Nixon he would not be a candidate in the primaries. Reagan historian James Mann has pointed out that each man was able in
this conversation to “advance his own political interests while cloaking them in the guise of what was best for the party.”

  Yet their truce barely made it through the night. The next day, a Nixon aide was quoted in a syndicated column that suggested how Nixon really felt about Reagan’s campaign. The column, a particularly arcane Evans and Novak workup of New York state Republican machinations, suggested that “the rise of Gov. Ronald Reagan” had led the Nixon camp to take some steps to isolate Reagan as the candidate of the fringe ultraconservatives. “Let Ronnie have the kooks,” the Nixon aide remarked.

  Now it was Nixon’s turn to apologize. On August 4, he sent Reagan a long, two-page, single-spaced letter of explanation.

  August 4, 1967

  Dear Ron,

  When I returned from the Coast last week, I came across this recent column by Evans and Novak and I wanted to send it along as a sample of what can be expected from those who are trying to create divisions between us. It is ironic that the same small Eastern coterie that divided the party in 1964 is now trying to divide those who sought to unite it in 1964 by supporting the ticket.

  As you are aware from the experience with Time Magazine that you related to me at Lost Angels, it is extremely difficult to stop this kind of activity.

  . . . Writing a letter asking the columnists to straighten out the facts is going to accomplish nothing. And, as you found in trying to get TIME to retract the erroneous quote it had attributed to you, a letter to the editor often results in re-publication of the original inaccuracy or falsehood. . . .