But with the rise of the Cold War, the struggle against Communism captured Reagan’s imagination. There was a clear good guy (the free West), a clear villain (the Soviets), and dramatically high stakes (the future of American freedom or even the survival of mankind). Talking about the global struggle, Reagan could employ the kind of urgent drama he preferred: “You have an opportunity to decide now whether you will strike a match,” he told an audience in the early fifties, “and whether you will help push back the darkness over the stadium of humanity.”
In addition, the fight against Communism offered an essential element for Reagan’s worldview: a conspiracy plot. Stories of sinister plans hatched by powerful, hidden interests had long appealed to him. They became vital to the marriage of his taste for vivid drama and his notion of the Communist threat. Mr. Norm, who believed fervently that most people were good, decent, hardworking, and kind, could not entertain the possibility that evil ideas could win over the masses. In a good world, evil couldn’t ever gain advantage fair and square; it had to resort to dark magic or dirty tricks. The foreign treachery of a Moscow cabal played a central part in Reagan’s vision of the Communist menace. In America, he wrote in 1951, “the so-called Communist Party is nothing less than a Russian-American Bund owing allegiance to Russia and supporting Russia in its plan to conquer the world. The very Constitution behind which these cynical agents hide becomes a weapon to be used against them. They are traitors practicing treason.”
It was strong stuff, driven by motives that were personal as well as political. Reagan had been active in liberal causes in Hollywood in the late 1930s and ’40s, a period when it was not easy to keep track of just who was a Communist and who was not. Two groups of which he had been a member—the American Veterans Committee (AVC) and Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP, “pronounced,” said Reagan, “like the cough of a dying man”)—came under Communist control. Reagan resigned from each group when he learned of its Communist affiliation, and no evidence exists that he ever knowingly supported Communist causes. Still, he could be fairly described as a leftist political activist and labor leader with known Communist associations. In Hollywood, in the McCarthy era, reputations were ruined for far less.
So he had strong personal interest in proclaiming himself a fierce and ardent Cold Warrior, a hard-line anticommunist. And in the process, he began his shift to the political right. Reagan’s ideological conversion would not happen overnight. He voted for Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 but was no fan of Ike’s vice president. “Pray as I am praying,” he wrote after the election, “for the health and long life of Eisenhower because the thought of Nixon in the White House is almost as bad as that of ‘Uncle Joe.’ ” (“Uncle Joe” being Stalin—no holding back the drama there.) “Nixon is a hand picked errand boy with a pleasing façade and naught but emptiness behind. He has been subsidized by a small clique of oil and real estate pirates, he is less than honest and he is an ambitious opportunist completely undeserving of the high honor paid him.”
But as the decade wore on, Reagan found the left a more and more alien space. The Cold War liberals’ case against Communism was aggressive, but it was also nuanced. The totalitarian state that abolished free markets posed a mortal threat to liberty, they argued. But they also believed in the New Deal consensus government: a government that provided a safety net from the market’s excesses, a government that could use planning and fiscal policy to preserve and grow the economy, a government that had the power to actively transform the lives of its citizens. “Containment,” the government’s consensus approach toward international Communism, was, by necessity, complicated and qualified as well. The doctrine held that the expansion of Communism must be met with a willingness to show force around the globe. But it also held that, thanks to the catastrophic potential of nuclear weaponry, force should be avoided at all costs, and conflicts with the Soviets should be carefully and strategically chosen.
Only in the newly radicalized hard right could Reagan find the unqualified moral clarity and dramatic urgency he preferred. By the early 1950s, conservatives had been out of power for nearly a generation. Their worldview was undiluted by the compromise and contradictions that inevitably come with the responsibility of governing. A group of young conservative thinkers—the most prominent of whom was William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of the conservative magazine National Review—saw themselves as leading a new, more radical movement. They had little use for classical conservatism’s respect for and preservation of existing institutions. Rather, they viewed themselves as an oppressed minority, standing outside the New Deal consensus with no choice but to condemn it in the strongest possible terms. National Review, Buckley wrote in 1955, “stands athwart history, yelling stop.” The magazine performed “a predominantly monitoring task,” observed the writer Garry Wills, who served as a staffer at the magazine in its early days. “It came to accuse.”
These movement conservatives accused the governing establishment of creating a leviathan welfare state that threatened liberty. They accused Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower of launching the federal government on a path that would inevitably end in tyranny. They accused the nation’s elite of corrupting that government and of conspiring to obscure its excesses. And they accused the nation’s leaders of a dangerous naïveté in foreign policy that would lead inevitably to capitulation and defeat. There could be no compromise, they screamed, in matters of life and death. “The forces of international Communism are … the greatest single threat” to liberty, their statement read. “The United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with, this menace.”
Here was the vivid moral clarity Reagan yearned for. The circumstances of his personal life helped his ideological conversion along as well. From the GE executives who paid his bills, he received a steady diet of pro-business cant. From Nancy’s parents and their wealthy friends in conservative Arizona, he heard a mounting cry of indignation at the consensus mush coming out of the Eisenhower administration. Movement conservatism was critical of the East, which Reagan found foreign and unappealing. It lionized the traditional Midwestern values Reagan had long sought to embody, and it romanticized the rugged individualism of the West, where Reagan had proudly made his home. It preached of excessive taxation’s threat to liberty, a message that resonated with a high-earning actor who worried about his future earnings. Even the movement’s withering critique of those who urged “coexistence” with the Soviet Union—appeasers, the movement had it, who wished for peace and would get war—may have had unique personal appeal. Lew Ayres, the actor with whom Reagan’s first wife, Jane Wyman, was rumored to have had an affair, was an avowed pacifist who had been sent to a conscientious objectors’ camp during World War II.
But one thing more than any other made the conservative movement a natural home for Reagan: the proud place it gave to a speaker who, like him, could stir dramatic passions. The conservative pantheon of stars was almost exclusively populated by operatic, even hysterical, personalities. First and foremost was Buckley, who lived for experience that revealed vitality—a daring sailing voyage through dark and stormy seas, a motorcycle ride through the streets of Manhattan—and for moments that hinted at the everlasting—a Bach concerto played on his Bösendorfer piano, the miracle of the Eucharist in the Latin mass. In the taut conformity of consensus, Buckley understood, a political thinker could distinguish himself merely by being interesting. “For we offer,” he wrote in the debut issue of his magazine, “a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D.s in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town.”
The movement had other hot tickets, too. Conservatives cheered Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, whose br
ief and memorable service as the leading authority on the Communist conspiracy sprang not from any expertise on the topic but from a search for a campaign issue that would get him maximum attention. The spirit McCarthy showed in his infamous Wheeling address—I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five … members of the Communist Party—was untempered and unattenuated by experience, unburdened by concern for fairness or truth. As such, it made a great show. Phyllis Schlafly, a grassroots activist from the Midwest, captured the movement’s attention by describing the country’s situation as extremely perilous. The name of her radio show revealed the entire movement’s style: America, Wake Up!
Then there was Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator who, in the latter half of the fifties, filled the void in the movement’s political leadership left by the death of Senator Robert Taft. Goldwater’s press coverage from the period stressed his rebellious roots. As a child, writes biographer Rick Perlstein, Goldwater “rubbed shoulders with boys of all classes and races, was a basement tinkerer and a hellion who fired a miniature cannon at the steeple of the Methodist Church.” He became a national figure in the fifties by gleefully hurling cannonballs at Eisenhower, the sitting president from his own party. The spending by Ike’s government harkened “the siren song of socialism” he declared on the Senate floor. Conscience of a Conservative, the slim volume he released in 1960 (actually written by Young Americans for Freedom cofounder L. Brent Bozell), transformed the gray mire of consensus politics into vivid dichotomies:
I do not undertake to promote welfare for I propose to extend freedom.
My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.…
Either the Communists … will force us, ultimately, to surrender or accept war under the most disadvantageous circumstances. Or we will summon the will and the means for taking the initiative, and wage a war of attrition against them.… For Americans who cherish their lives, but their freedom more, the choice cannot be difficult.
“To many young readers,” Perlstein observes, “the argument had almost a Gandhian appeal.… Freedom was indivisible. It was worth dying for.”
By the time 1960, and the choice between Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy, came around, it was clear to Reagan: he had become a Republican.
He showed little public hesitation over inverting his allegiances. Now it was Nixon’s opponent, not Nixon himself, drawing comparison to famous Communists. “Shouldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s ‘bold new imaginative program’ with its proper age?” Reagan wrote to Nixon, offering his services in the 1960 campaign. “Under the tousled boyish hair cut it is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago.” Nixon liked this kind of talk. “Use him as a speaker whenever possible,” Nixon urged his staff. “He used to be a liberal!” (The former liberal, as it happened, was eager to make things official with the Republican Party, but the Nixon camp, believing he could do them more good as a registered Democrat, told him to sit tight.)
Party member or not, Reagan worked tirelessly for Nixon and the Republicans, making speeches whenever his schedule allowed. He liked these political appearances so much he didn’t stop them after the election in November, remaining on the Republican speakers’ circuit for the early Kennedy years. Now his sinister-sounding proper nouns were attached to the president: Kennedy and aides like Professor Arthur Schlesinger were putting programs in place that would inevitably make freedom-loving Americans slaves of the state.
And he learned quickly what an ambitious conservative had to do to advance in the movement. His passion, first and always, was the global threat of Communism, but he backed conservative crusades against statism at home as well. In a 1961 speech, he spoke of the evils of a favorite New Deal consensus cause: a medical-care bill for the elderly. He urged his listeners to block the program, injecting his message with all the drama he could summon: “If you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”
Real conservatives, he discovered, had a long list of people they mistrusted. The kind of conservatives who formed Young Americans for Freedom chapters on college campuses, the kind who were organizing for a Goldwater presidential campaign in 1964—they loathed and mistrusted not just the John F. Kennedys and Adlai Stevensons of the world, but the Dwight Eisenhowers, Nelson Rockefellers, and Richard Nixons, too. These establishment Republicans were hardly better than the Democrats. As proponents of consensus politics, they were naïve appeasers themselves.
Reagan was never quite as enthusiastic about attacking establishment figures as were his movement compatriots. Usually, before he went after a Democrat or wobbly Republican, he took time to note that they were well intentioned but woefully naïve. But he did what he had to do to get along in a movement that valued purity. When Nixon asked for Reagan’s endorsement in the 1962 California gubernatorial primary, the actor coolly volunteered that he thought he’d be more help in a general election campaign. Unlike many California conservatives, Reagan did not join the extremist John Birch Society, a hard-line right-wing group whose leadership preached fantastic conspiracy theories, suggesting that Eisenhower was a double agent working on the Kremlin’s behalf. But he did campaign for a Bircher candidate, John Rousselot, in the congressional election of 1962.
Before long, he was acquainted with all the movement’s leading lights. He struck up a warm relationship with Goldwater, a social acquaintance of Nancy’s parents, who had retired to Arizona. Buckley first encountered Reagan as his opening act at a 1960 speech before a group of California doctors. When the loudspeakers wouldn’t turn on, Buckley watched as Reagan “cat-walked above the traffic” to the window of the locked control room “and smashed it open with his elbow.” Buckley was taken with the handsome actor’s heroics: “Turning on the juice,” he would note approvingly, “the show must go on.”
To the movement’s leaders, Reagan’s conversion was a boon. Here was a handsome and familiar face who had been in the clutches of the liberal behemoth—only to see the light and live to tell the tale. He told it in a friendly but thrilling fashion, with a seemingly endless supply of facts and figures that made the conservative case sound as indisputable and sensible as they all knew it to be. Who cared if in Hollywood he was a has-been. In the movement, he was a shining star. Right-wing audiences loved him. When he appeared onstage with Goldwater, people wondered: Why didn’t Reagan just run for office himself?
Why indeed.
Until the end of his life, Reagan swore that he never imagined a life in politics, not even in the early 1960s. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, this version of events has largely prevailed in histories of Reagan’s life. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. Both Reagan’s admirers and critics share a common interest in a history in which Ronald Reagan’s political career just happens.
Some facts are indisputable. Sometime before he announced his candidacy for California’s governorship in 1966, the idea entered Reagan’s head that he could have a career in electoral politics. Some Reagan admirers on the right are inclined to push that date as late as possible. Years spent planning an entry into politics does not fit with his image as a flawless conservative hero—Reagan, after all, was the man who said “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” It is inconvenient for that man to have spent years planning a career in government. They prefer to remember Reagan as a modern-day George Washington, leaving behind his beloved farm and field to heed duty’s call, or as the perennial cowboy hero, coming down from the mountains to save California and then the world.
On the left, Reagan’s political career is often treated as an accident that he stumbled into. It is difficult for his liberal critics to accept that a B-movie actor, a man who costarred with a chimp, could rise to lead a coalition that would in time roll back a generation’s worth of liberal progress. Reagan couldn’t have plotted his own ascent. He must have been a pawn for wealthy, well
-connected interests, rich men who wrote a script for him and, when the moment was right, told their puppet with his pretty face to look into the camera and smile.
And then, most formidably, there is the narrative put forth by Reagan himself. Again and again, Reagan maintained that a career in politics was something he’d never imagined and never planned. In his postpresidential autobiography, he told of a group of conservative California businessmen coming to his home in early 1965 to speak with him about running for governor of California. “I almost laughed them out of the house,” Reagan wrote. He tried to convince them they had the wrong guy. “ ‘I’m an actor, not a politician,’ I said several times, ‘I’m in show business.’ ”
Reagan wrote these words after he had left the White House. He knew his disciples on the right—already out proclaiming him the twentieth century’s greatest president—and understood the distaste with which they viewed professional politicians. “I’d never given a thought to running for office,” he wrote firmly. “I had no interest in it whatsoever.” He recalled the advice of one of his conservative touchstones, Nancy’s father, Loyal Davis: “He said I would be crazy to run for office; he said there was no way a man could go into politics without sacrificing his honesty and honor.”
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