Here it is important to recall, however, that Reagan was never inclined to admit he’d plotted much of anything at any point in his life. His was the natural way of the movie star: make it all look effortless. In Hollywood, Edmund Morris notes, the real stars were the ones who don’t have to audition. Reagan understood the rules of the game early. Shortly after arriving in Hollywood, he wrote a guest column for a newspaper back in Iowa describing his adventures in the film colony. In it, he excises his ardent efforts to get noticed. Instead, his career is something that happens to him: “I was introduced to Max Arnow, Warner Bros. casting director, invited to make a screen test and suddenly woke up with a movie contract in my fist.” And that was how he wanted people to think of his political career, too: that he was invited to run for office and suddenly woke up clutching the keys to the governor’s mansion.
Yet Reagan’s version of events, wherein he was shocked by the suggestion that he run for office in 1965, doesn’t square with the historical record. He had been approached to run for governor of California in the year 1962 (the year, coincidentally or not, that he finally changed his party registration to Republican). The talk of Reagan the candidate was serious enough to reach his adult daughter, Maureen. “Run,” Maureen, already a partisan Republican, urged her father, “you can win back California.”
“Mermie,” her father wrote to her in reply, “I really appreciate your support, but if we’re going to talk about what could be, well, I could be President—ha, ha!—but of course, that’s not going to happen, is it?”
His other children also remember talk of political campaigns in the Reagan house, at points earlier than in the official narratives. It was obvious to his daughter Patti, who was on the brink of adolescence in the early 1960s, that her father’s acting after GE was “a day job, not a passion. Politics was his passion, and it was becoming stronger all the time.” His son Michael recalls eavesdropping on a rare argument between Ronnie and Nancy at Christmas 1963 in which Nancy was pressuring her husband to start a gubernatorial campaign: “She said her stepfather was willing to raise $200,000 in campaign money if Dad agreed to run. Personally, I don’t think Dad ever had really strong ambitions to be a politician, but Mommy—his name for Nancy—prodded him.”
Reagan’s version of events—the version in which his political career just happened—is also complicated by the heights to which he aspired. Stuart Spencer, the California political operative, first met Reagan in 1965. Within months, he was convinced that Reagan had his eye on the presidency. And indeed, in two years’ time, Reagan would hatch plans for a presidential campaign. The desire to run for president, and the conviction that the presidency can be won, is not born overnight. It is nurtured by mind-altering ego and ambition over years and years. In Reagan’s case, it was most likely born in the dark days of the Depression, listening to Roosevelt’s wonderful voice on the radio. Here was a man whose office afforded him the grandest stage of all.
That was what Reagan saw in the blurry haze of his political crowds in the first half of 1964: a chance to be the hero once more. It would be impossible for any man to stand on those stages and not think, What if they were all cheering, and voting, for me? There is little doubt he would have found that possibility alluring. For Reagan, politics gave him the opportunity that Hollywood couldn’t: to spend his middle age as a star.
WANTING A CAREER in politics was one thing. Abandoning his acting career to pursue it was quite another. To do that, Reagan would have had to look at the opportunities of the modern conservative movement in a coldly practical light.
Pragmatism is not a virtue people usually ascribe to Reagan. The Reagan of popular memory is the one the country came to know as president, the one who preferred to keep things pleasant and let other people sweat the small stuff. It is certainly true that Reagan was drawn to fantasies, that he often clung to an oversimplified view of the world, that he relied on the people around him to understand the difference between the world as he wanted it to be and the world that really was. Even so, there was one thing about which Reagan was usually quite realistic: himself. When it came to his own self-interest, Reagan the dreamy idealist was a deeply practical man.
It had always been that way. Working as a lifeguard those sweltering summer days in Illinois, the teenage Reagan would resist the temptation to drop into the water to cool off, knowing that wet trunks would chafe his skin over the course of his long shift. Upon graduation from Eureka, he set out for a career in show business, but he gave himself an ultimatum: if after five years of trying he wasn’t making five thousand dollars a year, he would have to find another career. (He beat his goal.)
Even in his picture-perfect romances, pragmatism reigned. As Cannon notes, in the studio propaganda about his marriage to Jane Wyman, a rare sour note appears when Wyman dishes on their plans to lavishly furnish a new house they are building in the Hollywood Hills. “Depends on conditions and prices and war and things,” Reagan interjects. “We don’t intend to get out on a limb.” So, too, in the early days of his marriage to Nancy, when his Hollywood career was at a standstill, Reagan was conscious of his financial limitations. “It was a year and a half,” said Nancy, “before we could afford to furnish our living room.” His uncommon ambition required him to be ruthlessly realistic about his own interests. And when his ambition conflicted with his need for self-preservation, self-preservation usually won out.
Now, too, as politics beckoned, Reagan would have to look squarely at the circumstances of his life. His two children from his second marriage—Patti and Ron Jr.—were attending expensive private schools. His two children from his first marriage—Maureen and Michael—were both having a rough time in their transition to adulthood. He and Nancy were now running in a social circle—wealthy Republican businessmen and their wives—that could make even top tax bracket earners feel destitute. “Money was a big issue in my family,” wrote Patti, “a live wire that always seemed to be sizzling.” However drawn Reagan was to politics, it was against his nature to let it endanger the security of his family.
By 1964, Reagan had come to understand that self-preservation in politics was no simple task. He had learned that lesson bitterly in his final years at GE. At first, the company’s management applauded Reagan’s burgeoning interest in politics; they liked his pro-business talk. But as Reagan’s tone grew harsher and his politics grew more extreme, he sensed discomfort coming from his corporate overlord. GE did business with the current government, after all, and Reagan’s movement talk didn’t mesh well with the Kennedy moment.
Reagan felt isolated within GE. He imagined powerful new enemies gunning for him. In a postpresidential memoir he would claim, preposterously, that during the Kennedy years, in any city he spoke in, “there’d be a cabinet member or other high official from the … administration who’d be giving a speech on the same day. In the television business, we used to call that ‘counter programming,’ an effort to knock out the competition with a rival show. I don’t have any proof they planned it that way, but I don’t think it was coincidental.”
Democrats, he believed, were pushing his GE bosses to muzzle him. Like Johnson, he suspected one powerful Democrat in particular of machinations against him. His daughter Patti would later recall her parents’ fear that the Kennedy administration was pressuring GE to silence him through threats to the company’s contracts:
“Government contracts, my father said one night at dinner. This is exactly what I’ve been out there speaking about. We’re on our way to a controlled society. The government is trying to control everything. And Robert Kennedy is behind this attack on me.”
“He is?” I piped up. “Why would he want you fired?”
“Because I’m speaking out against the Kennedy administration and the road they’re trying to lead us down.”
“Of course Bobby Kennedy’s behind it,” my mother said. “It’s obvious.”
And so when, in 1962, GE decided not to renew Reagan’s television show, he suspected his po
litics had something to do with it. GE had grown tired of Reagan’s political persona. Management also asked that in his appearances as a GE spokesman he refrain from making political statements. This was a deal breaker for Reagan. “There’s no way that I could go out now to an audience that is expecting the type of thing I’ve been doing for the last eight years and suddenly stand up and start selling them electric toasters.” He and GE parted ways.
In time, the split with GE would become part of the Reagan legend—how he’d refused to compromise his principles for personal gain. But in early 1964, the split looked like something else altogether. However principled, it was a setback, a failure. And crucially, it was a repeat of the lesson he had learned during the worst days of his movie star career, when audiences had ditched his “Mr. Norm” type for the broody, moody, sensitive male stars. He would long remember the studio bosses who had controlled his career then, how they had failed to see how the preferences of the moviegoing public had changed after World War II. “They thought I was the hottest thing around,” he would say, “and didn’t realize that the sixteen-year-olds didn’t know who I was.” In politics, as in Hollywood, it was all the same. Events happened. People’s tastes changed. A star could regret the public’s mood, but if he wanted to eat, he would respect it.
And so a pragmatic Reagan, considering a life in politics, had to look beyond just the roars of approval he found from his conservative crowds. He had to think about what conservatism meant to the people he’d always cared about the most—the everyday, “normal” people in the American mainstream. Entering politics offered any number of risks. To take the leap, Reagan needed an opening, a moment when his worldview aligned with the public mood.
Could he gain confidence from Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign? Before Kennedy’s death, conservatives, having infiltrated the party leadership in key areas of the country, liked their chances of winning the nomination in 1964 and were looking forward to challenging the New Frontier in dramatic style. Kennedy—as aware as anyone of the vast distance between the beliefs of Goldwater’s movement diehards and majority opinion in the country—liked the idea of a race against Goldwater, too. At his last political meeting in November 1963, Kennedy had discussed potential Republican opponents in the election. “Give me Barry,” said the president; “I won’t even have to leave the Oval Office.”
At first, it looked as if Goldwater’s chances at the nomination had died with Kennedy. The press had stopped holding conservatives directly responsible for Kennedy’s death when it was revealed that Lee Harvey Oswald’s political views, such as they were, tended toward Marxism. But still, reporters speculated for months about whether extremist politics of the Goldwater variety had contributed to a climate of hate in which minds like Oswald’s had flourished. (Johnson gave a nod to this line of reasoning in his January 1964 State of the Union address, saying, “In these last seven sorrowful weeks, we have learned anew that nothing is so enduring as faith, and nothing is so degrading as hate.”) In the month after the assassination, Goldwater’s standing in national polls dropped by double digits. In a mid-December column assessing the GOP’s 1964 prospects, Scotty Reston did not even mention the Arizona senator’s name.
Goldwater, who loathed the preening and posing required of presidential candidates, had been dreading a White House run in the months before Kennedy’s death. After the assassination, he wanted to drop out of the race, but his advisers implored him not to give up. They eventually persuaded him the only way you could persuade Barry to do anything—by asserting that it was simply unmanly to drop out of the race at such a late date.
So he stayed in, to the delight of a scornful national press. To political journalists, Goldwater’s winter primary efforts were fun to watch, not as a campaign but as a series of comic calamities: Barry stepping on the drama of his January announcement by telling an off-color joke about his own daughter; Barry recovering from a bone spur injury, sliding around the New Hampshire ice on crutches, snarling at any voter who happened into his path; Barry, confused and belligerent in an interview on Meet the Press, asserting (incorrectly) that Kennedy had never sent federal troops to the South to enforce the law; Barry reiterating his most controversial established positions, that Social Security should be abolished and the Tennessee Valley Authority privatized, and floating new ones that were even more incendiary, that field commanders should be granted the ability to launch nuclear weapons without presidential approval. “There is no mathematical way of recording the pathetic fate of the Arizona senator’s candidacy,” wrote the former Eisenhower aide Emmet John Hughes in February, “simply because most of his followers are still unsure of the direction in which they will desert.”
That was the urgent question for the Republican establishment: Who was their alternative to Goldwater? Barry’s only announced rival was Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican governor of New York. Blessed with his family’s resources, Rockefeller bought himself a superb national organization in advance of a 1964 run. But in 1962 he’d doused himself in scandal, leaving his first wife for the married Margaretta “Happy” Murphy. The Kennedy assassination revived his chances, but he had a long way to go to win over traditionalists in his party and overcome a snippy press corps. Newsweek’s thinly veiled taunting was typical: “Nelson and Happy Rockefeller couldn’t have been happier. The new year would bring a new heir—in June, the governor and his wife disclosed after the newspapers broke the news—and, on the strength of his weekend reception in New Hampshire, Rocky’s political fortunes were showing signs of life too.”
Party leaders scrounged for another alternative but had little luck. Thanks to an independent write-in campaign, the New Hampshire primary went to the patrician Massachusetts politician Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Lodge indicated his lack of enthusiasm for a presidential run when, shortly after New Hampshire, he announced his intention to stay on as Johnson’s ambassador to South Vietnam. Michigan’s moderate governor George Romney considered jumping in. The press swooned over a potential run by Pennsylvania governor William Scranton, whose good looks and ample fortune earned him a reputation as the Republican John F. Kennedy.
In the White House, Johnson worried most about the man whom Kennedy had barely beaten in 1960. As 1964 dawned, Richard Nixon was working as a New York lawyer, swearing he was out of politics but acting like an aspiring politician. When the party’s financial backers gathered for a meeting that included presentations by Goldwater, Rockefeller, Romney, and Scranton, Nixon appeared by closed circuit television. He was opportunistically ambiguous. “I say with confidence tonight,” the noncandidate told the crowd listening to him, “that one of those whom you will hear on this program will be the next president of the United States.”
Johnson couldn’t quite believe he would be lucky enough to have Goldwater as an opponent. And when Rockefeller upset the Arizonan in the Oregon primary in May, creating momentum that would carry him into the decisive California primary, much of Washington assumed that the Goldwater moment had come to an end.
But they hadn’t seen what Reagan saw. They hadn’t seen the devotion Goldwater inspired in young conservatives like the ones in that San Diego ballroom. The ones who’d been talking up a Goldwater presidency since before Nixon lost in 1960. The ones who were enthusiastic volunteers in the national Draft Goldwater Committee. Under the leadership of a brilliant organizer, F. Clifton “Clif” White, Draft Goldwater had set out to secure commitments from seven hundred Republican delegates before the party’s nominating convention in July 1964 (655 votes would secure the nomination). It was an ambitious target, and it was dependent on strong support from new converts to the Republican Party in the segregationist South. The young Goldwaterites were convinced they could achieve it. They had to achieve it. The future of the party, of the country, of civilization itself was at stake.
And more important, the wise people in Washington hadn’t seen the California that Reagan knew. They hadn’t seen places like Orange County. In those Southern
California suburbs, middle-class white refugees from the Midwest had embraced Goldwater’s style of conservatism as a modern religion. There, voters needed no convincing that the Communist threat to civilization was real and that conspirators lay within their midst. There, the John Birch Society was no fringe group; it had thousands of county residents on its newsletter subscription list. There, Phyllis Schlafly’s manifesto “A Choice, Not an Echo” was passed around like a secret Bible speaking the one true faith in a world of heretics. There, in February 1964, Goldwater supporters set out to collect thirteen thousand signatures to get their candidate on the state’s primary ballot. By the end of their first day, they already had close to three times that many. And there, the weekend before the California primary, when Reagan appeared at a rally for Goldwater, the crowd that turned out was twenty-eight thousand strong. You didn’t have to look closely at the faces in that crowd to know one thing: Barry Goldwater was going to be the Republican Party’s nominee in 1964.
SURE ENOUGH, GOLDWATER won the primary. His victory on June 1 would come almost exclusively from the movement diehards in the southern part of the state: Rockefeller would win fifty-four of the state’s fifty-eight counties, but Barry’s vote totals in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Orange counties were large enough to give him the primary victory by a narrow margin. It was the conservatives’ day. A poll of California primary voters found that their top issues were, in order, federal spending, Cuba, and Soviet espionage.
The establishment gulped hard. Anything could happen at a convention, but after California, Goldwater would be hard to beat. Barry’s true believers rejoiced. At last their moment had come.
Reagan cheered Goldwater’s victory, too. For a hardworking Goldwater surrogate like Reagan, it was a happy result. For a conservative true believer like Reagan, the victory was an ideological triumph: finally they had a nominee who would fight for the cause. And for a dramatist like Reagan, it was a delicious story: the man the elites had discounted was getting the last laugh.
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