Landslide

by Jonathan Darman

  I tell you there was one disappointment, though. When I was invited to come to a six-state convention of women Republicans, I didn’t know so many men were going to stick their noses in too. It sounded to me like the kind of a dream that a man could have all his life, and then you had to show up.

  But he doesn’t take it too far. He brings it back to the realm of respectability with a little more of that patronizing gender talk:

  I’ll tell you this, though, seriously, I am very happy to be here and to be talking to you. And the men aren’t going to like me for this, but they know what I say is true. That there is a certain amount of housekeeping connected with the political activity—a party of the nation. And every man knows way down deep in his heart that if it wasn’t for you gals, we’d still be walking around carrying clubs.

  And then he pivots into the meat of his speech:

  And so you are the ones who will do what has to be done, I am sure.

  He had mastered all these tricks so that the words seemed to come effortlessly off his lips. This was the easy part. These little rituals came as naturally to him now as they did to any seasoned pol. And the rest was fairly straightforward, too. It was what he’d been doing since he’d launched his unofficial campaign for the governorship earlier that year, the same thing he’d done all those months ago in San Diego, the same thing he’d been doing, really, since he’d addressed the students and faculty of Eureka College all those years ago. Standing in front of the nice ladies of New England, he felt the energy coming off his audience. And he gave them what they wanted most.

  It wasn’t hard for him to figure out what that was. The audience needed a new hero. All through that fall of 1965, the Errol Flynn of the B movies watched as the feature attraction team in Washington continued to sputter out duds. The plotlines were depressing, the characters’ motivations convoluted, the scripts increasingly irrelevant and absurd. They still had the grand set pieces. They still had the highly produced shots. But growing clamor from offscreen intruded and spoiled the effect:

  SCENE ONE

  EXT. THE ROSE GARDEN. The second week in September, THE PRESIDENT gives brief remarks as he signs legislation creating a new Department of Housing and Urban Development. His administration is promoting the department as a headquarters for key Great Society programs and a sophisticated solution to the complex problems facing the nation’s deteriorating cities.

  THE PRESIDENT: With this legislation, we are—as we must always—going out to meet tomorrow and master its opportunities before its obstacles master us.

  FLASHBACK: The last weekend of summer. THE PRESIDENT celebrates his fifty-seventh birthday at the LBJ Ranch. He admires gifts from his family including a white-leather-bound book of poems written by his younger daughter, Luci.

  LUCI JOHNSON (V/O):

  Admiration flows abundantly

  From this pen of mine

  For the man who’s giving all he’s got

  To try to save mankind.

  OFFSCREEN INT. THE OVAL OFFICE. THE PRESIDENT reads a memo prepared by his staff on recent changes in public opinion.

  People just aren’t going to get excited or go crusading for an antipollution program, for beautifying America, even for bettering its educational standards.

  SCENE TWO

  INT. THE PENTAGON. It is November 2, 1965, a year since THE PRESIDENT’S historic landslide victory over BARRY GOLDWATER. In his large office on the third floor of the Pentagon’s E-Ring, Secretary of Defense ROBERT S. MCNAMARA works at his desk. Early reports show a sharp uptick in casualties from Vietnam. By week’s end, seventy Americans will be dead, the highest combat losses of any week in the war to date. MCNAMARA speaks on the phone to THE PRESIDENT.

  THE PRESIDENT: How’s your battle going out in Vietnam?

  MCNAMARA: Well, uh, pretty well, Mr. President … The problem is that it’s not producing the conditions that will almost surely win for us. It may but it probably won’t. And therefore we’re going to have to propose the problem to you and suggest some alternative solutions to it …

  Cut to EXT. THE PENTAGON.

  Flames erupt within forty feet of MCNAMARA’S office window. NORMAN MORRISON, a Quaker, sets himself on fire, in protest over the killing of innocents in Vietnam.

  It was not a movie in which Reagan would have wanted to star.

  There was another movie coming, with a more enticing script. Reagan was a conservative politician from Southern California, where, a month earlier, the horror of the Watts riots had so vividly punctured the promises of utopia that Johnson and the liberals had made. In the immediate aftermath of the riots, some of Reagan’s fellow conservatives had tried to encourage backlash and tastelessly overdid it. (The managing editor of the conservative magazine American Opinion, visiting Los Angeles, joked about making millions by selling spears in Watts.) Reagan, meanwhile, took the opportunity to reach out immediately to black businessmen in Watts, saying that these upright, respectable citizens, not bureaucrats from the government, were the neighborhood’s best hope of recovery and revival. On his trip to Boston, he posed for pictures with Ed Brooke, the Republican who would soon launch a campaign to be the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction. In the process, he’d instantly established himself as a respectable and authoritative voice—an alternative to the reactionary crazies and an alternative to the tired leadership coming out of Washington. He was beginning to sound like the kind of person these respectable New England Republicans could not just approve of, but follow.

  He knew his partisan Republican audience was rooting for him. A year earlier, after the Goldwater debacle, they had resigned themselves to a fate of losing national elections for some time to come. But now, for the first time in a while, they were beginning to believe they could regain power in Washington. He knew what they wanted from their hero: a stirring attack on the sitting president of the United States. So he gave it to them with his usual assortment of tools.

  He attacked Lyndon Johnson with biting humor:

  Our president is fond of quoting from Isaiah, “Come let us reason together.” Doesn’t that sound cozy? But our President does not drop down a line further to quote “If ye refuse ye shall be devoured by the sword.”

  He attacked Johnson’s record with his familiar cascade of numbers, leaving the impression of irrefutable precision:

  We are told we enjoy unprecedented prosperity, but at the same time the Federal Government reveals that there are 42 Government agencies spending $70 billion a year on public welfare.

  He used the righteous indignation of Mr. Norm, enraged that the architects of the Great Society had called someone like him an extremist in the last presidential campaign:

  We, on the other hand, were presented, for the most part, as radicals who were going to bring about great changes and cataclysmic upheaval. Well, now the wraps are off the Great Society and a multitude of messages have made it plain that we are to have a welfare state with an unprecedented federalization of American life.

  He employed his old habits, using vague language to mask factually dubious claims:

  A serious discussion by supposedly learned men was given to the idea that income should no longer be dependent on the need to work and that we should evolve some system whereby a man is entitled to an annual income just by reason of being born.

  And he attacked with the sweeping, dramatic imagery he most favored, and which he believed the moment required:

  You and I have come to a moment of truth. Does man exist by permission of and for the sake of the group marching toward eternity in a super-ant heap, or does he control his destiny.… This question must be answered by us all, regardless of party.

  He attacked Lyndon Johnson and the entire mythic vision of the American future Johnson had worked so hard to spread. When he’d finished, his audience gave him a standing ovation. In the next day’s Boston Herald he was “the one-time motion picture star who often played the guy who didn’t get the girl” but who “over
whelmed more than 1,400 of them” in his speech. “From sub-debs to septuagenarians,” the Herald wrote, “the female hearts fluttered as he told them what they wanted to hear: that theirs was the historic role of saving the Republic from a government ‘that tends to grow until freedom is lost.’ ”

  IT WAS ALWAYS nice to get a standing ovation, but there were plenty of cheering crowds in California. His trip to Boston was part of a larger East Coast swing, during which he could attract national media attention and talk to wealthy conservative easterners who’d write checks for his gubernatorial campaign. But more important, he had come to places like Boston to prove a point. He wasn’t a conservative fringe candidate who could only play rooms in San Diego or Santa Rosa. He could stand before a group of New Englanders, moderate and conservative alike, and bring them all to their feet. This was his most important message that fall: he didn’t plan on being in B movies forever. Ronald Reagan didn’t want another campaign like Barry Goldwater’s. Ronald Reagan was going to win.

  Reagan could win—it had been the guiding principle of his candidacy since its inception. The first person in need of convincing had been Reagan himself. Two months after Johnson’s 1964 landslide, a group of millionaires convened at the house of Holmes Tuttle, the Los Angeles car dealership mogul, to commiserate over the Goldwater embarrassment. Among Republican donors, this was a rarefied group. And its members had a unique perspective. Across the country, in those first weeks after the Johnson landslide, mainstream Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller and Michigan governor George Romney were taking a hard line against conservatism. To survive, they argued, the party had to rein in its extremist right wing. Tuttle’s group of hard-line conservatives did not share in this view. But they also did not agree with movement activists who thought that the way forward was to demand that the party become more pure. Among Goldwater’s mistakes, Tuttle believed, had been his tendency to double down on extremism in the general election. Instead of the horror show at the Cow Palace, Goldwater should have changed the subject from the divisive primary by adding a moderate like William Scranton to the ticket. For conservatism to triumph, Tuttle and his friends maintained, it had to seek out alliances with the party’s mainstream. They set their sights on the upcoming California governor’s race in 1966 as their best shot to prove their theory.

  They had been at the Coconut Grove fund-raiser that spawned the “Time for Choosing” telecast. They understood that Reagan had superior gifts of communication. “Reagan,” said Cy Rubel, another supporter, “is the man who can enunciate our principles to the people.” Some of “the people” already agreed. Grassroots activists in the party were talking up Reagan as a candidate before Johnson’s hundred days of progressive legislative action had even begun. Maureen Reagan, a plugged-in Republican, urged her father to jump into the governor’s race. “Oh, my God,” Reagan said to Nancy, “they’re closing in all over.”

  He’d been hesitant in those early months. Later he would claim he was shocked when Tuttle and his friends approached him with their plans. “I almost laughed them out of the house,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I’d never given a thought to running for office and I had no interest in it whatsoever.” This, as we have seen, rings false—he would have jumped at a chance to run for office if he’d thought he could do it and still manage to support his family. But his practical concerns were real. A campaign for governor would be a lengthy commitment. The television show he was hosting, Death Valley Days, had proved a reliable source of income. Once he announced his candidacy for governor, he would have to give up the show lest his opponents demand equal time on the public airwaves. Reagan, realistic as always about his own interests, was not going to make the leap unless he believed he had a decent shot at winning.

  In those early months of 1965, it was not at all clear that he did. California’s Republican Party was badly divided after the Goldwater campaign. Conservatives had grabbed hold of much of the party apparatus in the state, but moderate voters remained a major force in the GOP. Thomas Kuchel, the state’s moderate Republican senator, had been making noises about coming home to run for governor. Reagan, who some still saw as a John Birch Society–supporting extremist, would potentially face a long, bloody primary fight that might end in an embarrassing loss.

  Even more daunting was his probable general election opponent, the sitting governor, Pat Brown. In the winter of 1965, there were few liberal politicians in the nation as formidable as Brown—perhaps none besides Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. Brown had already established himself as a national figure when, in 1962, he had run for reelection against no less a figure than Richard Nixon, who’d planned an easy victory in the governor’s race as a launching pad for a second try at the White House. Brown won the election by nearly 300,000 votes. It was this stunning defeat that prompted Nixon’s retreat from politics in the infamous “You don’t have Nixon to kick around any more” rant. At that time, Brown’s future had seemed bright. “Double parking in Sacramento on the way back to Washington,” an aide had quipped. In 1965, even as Brown considered running for an unprecedented third term as governor in 1966, he was at the top of the list of potential successors to Johnson in the White House in the long Democratic era to come.

  For Reagan, then, life as a political candidate still meant risk—the risk of failure or ruin. He was hesitant to jump in. So, with the help of Tuttle’s group, he found a way to run without really running. The wealthy benefactors would form a group, Friends of Ronald Reagan, to supply Reagan with enough funds to acquire the best political assets available. Reagan would spend much of 1965 traveling California, meeting with party officials, and trying to determine whether there was sufficient support within the party for him to run as a serious challenger to the Democrats, not just as a factional favorite of the conservatives. He would effectively be a candidate for governor without ever outright declaring it, a distinction that would allow him to keep receiving checks for Death Valley Days into 1966.

  This solution suited Reagan. It would be a campaign designed for a proud actor: he could suggest himself to the people without having to audition for their support. As he began his travels, he explained that he hoped to meet a cross section of California Republicans to determine who could best run as the party’s unity candidate. The press quickly realized that Reagan himself was a candidate in all but name. What if, one reporter asked him, after meeting that cross section of Californians, he determined that the best candidate was someone other than himself? “Oh gosh, Jack!” Reagan replied. “You’ve asked me one I’ve never even thought about. Maybe I’m naïve, but I just sort of figured that if, when I found out who the cross-section wanted, it wasn’t me, they at the same time, would indicate who it was and I guess that’s the way I go.”

  Clearly, he wanted the choice of the cross section to be no one other than himself. To help things along, Friends of Ronald Reagan enlisted the help of Spencer-Roberts, a highly regarded political consulting firm headed by two young stars, Stuart Spencer and Bill Roberts. The firm had run Nelson Rockefeller’s campaign against Goldwater in the photo-finish 1964 California primary and resided well outside the sphere of alternative reality from which had sprung the calamitous Goldwater candidacy. The firm’s sterling reputation was well known in Southern California—and beyond. While visiting Nancy’s parents in Arizona, Stu Spencer would later say, Reagan had paid a call on Goldwater. “I’m thinking of running. What would you do? Tell me.” Goldwater’s reply, according to Spencer, was simple. “I’d hire those sons of bitches Spencer-Roberts.”

  Spencer-Roberts had also been approached to run a primary campaign for George Christopher, the moderate mayor of San Francisco. Christopher was not a thrilling candidate, but he was a far safer bet than Reagan. Still, the fact that Reagan wanted to work with a bunch of Rockefeller Republicans surprised them: he was more practical than they’d thought. After a two-hour meeting at the Cave du Roy in Beverly Hills, they found that Reagan had charmed them. “We had heard,” one of the partners said, �
�that Reagan was a martinet, a conceited ass, that he would be hard to work with. We found this was totally false. There’s not a phony bone in his body.” It didn’t hurt that Reagan’s backers would cut substantial checks to a firm whose young partners were looking to grow their business. Asked later in the campaign to explain the ideological gap between the Spencer-Roberts partners and their conservative candidate, Bill Roberts shrugged: “We are mercenaries.”

  But the governor’s race was more than a paycheck: Spencer-Roberts wanted to win. And after a few more meetings, they came to believe they could win with Reagan. The more they talked to him about the issues, the more they came to see that he was no rigid ideologue. “He was obsessed with one thing,” Stu Spencer would later explain, “the Communist threat. He has conservative tendencies on other issues but he can be practical.”

  Reagan’s new team knew that their first order of business would be removing the taint of extremism from their candidate. Grassroots activists loved him. Voters in the middle remembered him fondly from television and found him likable. The immediate problem was with the elite. To the establishment, Reagan’s embrace of the hard right during the heyday of the Kennedy-Johnson era still seemed bizarre. National elites thought of him as a failed actor who could give a good speech but who had gone off the Goldwater deep end. Reagan was the “darling of the Goldwaterites and the choice of the John Birch Society,” Evans and Novak wrote in 1965, a man whose primary victory would signal “rightist control of the Republican party in the nation’s most populous state.” Reagan’s advisers knew that if that was how donors and primary voters thought of him, he would be dead in the water.