Landslide

by Jonathan Darman

  So they focused their initial energy on removing the odor of extremism. Traveling the state that spring and summer of 1965, Reagan began preaching against “hyphenated Republicans”—those who regarded themselves as conservative-Republican or liberal-Republican or moderate-Republican voters. They should all just be Republicans, he said. The line had a sort of genius to it. It was a message of unity, meant to appeal to moderates. But it had unconscious echoes of Teddy Roosevelt’s early-twentieth-century worries about unassimilated “hyphenated Americans.” To California conservatives, who’d gone to war rather than accept “unity” with moderates in the past, Reagan’s preaching sounded like just the thing: he wanted a party that was more pure!

  What they didn’t notice, for the most part, was the moderation creeping into his words. “I’m sure that we all recognize that as the state grows,” he told one group, “we must have growth in government also and in government services. But there should be some proportionality.” Asked what caused the Watts riots, Reagan was careful with his words. “I think you have to preface anything you say about Watts with the recognition that ninety-nine percent of the people there are fine, responsible citizens and had no part in the trouble,” he said. “We’re talking about a one percent minority.”

  He was even wary of being called a conservative. When a reporter asked if the term applied to him, Reagan dodged: “You’d have me going counter to the talks I’ve been giving to Republican groups. I have been saying to all Republicans who’ll listen that the descriptive adjectives and the hyphens have no place in our party. I actually believe they were first foisted off on us by … opponents, and that we should give them back and from now on just be Republicans.”

  It was easy for Reagan to say this sort of thing, because he actually believed it. After thirty years as a Democrat he had converted and was proud to wear the label of the Republican Party. He was Mr. Norm, convinced, always, that he shared the values of the good and decent majority. He knew he was a Republican; therefore, by definition, the majority of Republicans must see the world the way he saw it. What was the point of squabbling when there were evil conspiracies to stop? Better for him to play the role of unifier, healer of the party’s wounds. That was a hero’s role, one he knew he could play.

  And as he played that role, he would accept no carping from the right. “I have no intention of compromising my beliefs,” he wrote testily to a rare conservative critic, “but I do know this. If we are to have the constitutional government we all desire, then we of the so-called conservative philosophy must recognize we have to convert those people of a more liberal view. We don’t win elections by destroying them or making them disappear.”

  Mainstream Republicans were pleasantly surprised by this kind of talk. Never mind that the policies Reagan advocated differed little from Goldwater’s. To candidate Reagan, Social Security was necessary but horribly construed. Medicare was an atrocity that should be dismantled. The Civil Rights Act was well intentioned but unconstitutional. The problem with Johnson’s policy in Vietnam was a lack of resolve to win, come what might. And the federal government was an encroaching behemoth, steadily enslaving the people it was supposed to protect.

  Never mind all of that. Reagan didn’t sound like Goldwater when he talked, and he didn’t look like him, either. He sounded, and looked, like a winner.

  And that was what he desperately wanted to be. If all he wanted to do was make speeches, raise his profile, and cement his status as a darling of the hard right, he could have looked to New York City. There, in the summer of 1965, William F. Buckley, Jr., had announced his intention to run for mayor in the November elections on a conservative party line. It was, self-evidently, a fruitless task. But winning was not the point for Buckley. “Do you really want to be mayor?” a reporter asked the National Review editor as he announced his campaign. “I’ve never considered it,” Buckley replied. Elsewhere, he admitted that for a conservative candidate to win in New York City would take “a miracle.” But, the devout Catholic added, “I happen to believe in miracles.” Buckley’s platform, The New York Times noted, included “a ban on mid-day truck deliveries; the sale of narcotics to adult addicts who submit to a doctor’s care; the abolition of rent controls; a constitutional amendment, if necessary, to permit school prayers; separate schools for laggard students and city clean-up work for those on relief.” He would entertain, he would provoke, he would draw attention to movement principles. He would hopefully win some converts. And then he would go home. It was, in a sense, a mannerist, erudite updating of the Goldwater effort: winning was not the point of his campaign. His campaign was the point of his campaign.

  Once, Reagan, too, had sought nothing more than to win converts to the true faith. No longer. His break with the hard-line conservatives had its awkward moments. When a reporter asked him if he was a candidate in the Goldwater mode, he grew uncomfortable. “I don’t think it’s very pertinent,” he said. “This is the present and the future now, and the problems of California.” It was awkward with his friend Goldwater, too. “I have received some kick-back,” he wrote to Barry during the campaign, “and in checking it out, discovered some of my remarks were quoted by the press as indicating you might be unwelcome in California. This, of course, I’m sure you know is untrue, but just for the record, I tried to keep my answer to the question regarding your possible participating in line with your own remarks on this subject, namely that the forthcoming primary was a California affair between California Republicans and their candidates, and that you had expressed yourself as believing it would be improper for anyone from another state to intervene.” This was a weak excuse for keeping the Republican Party’s most recent presidential nominee out of the state, and Reagan knew it. “Nancy sends her best. Please give Peggy a kiss from both of us, and I hope we’ll be seeing you soon.”

  Movement conservatives could see what Reagan was doing. They knew that by distancing himself from the movement’s touchstones, he was conceding the moderates’ point about conservatism being toxic. But for the most part, they didn’t complain about his abandonment of movement principles. They had heard him speak and they knew he was one of them. And they wanted a winner, too. Writing in the movement journal Human Events, the conservative pamphleteer Lee Edwards mentioned the long list of moderates that Reagan’s consultants had represented. “Spencer Roberts does not handle any Democrats, but quite obviously does service a wide variety of Republicans. However, all Republicans are agreed that the firm is first in political management in California.”

  Reagan’s early adjustment to the candidate’s life was not flawless. He struggled with the gripping and grinning that fill any politician’s days. From a speaker’s rostrum, he could form an instant connection with his audiences, but when he walked into a roomful of strangers, he was sometimes shy and tended to keep to himself. He prided himself on appearing always decent and respectful. He was repulsed by the politician’s “Hey there! I’d appreciate your vote!” Plus, he was Ronald Reagan, the star—he wanted people to come to him.

  Eventually he learned to introduce himself, reverting to his standard routine of friendly comments and silly jokes. His preference was always to keep things as light as possible. Supporters who tried to engage him on substance were disappointed. “I think he should have been briefed on the people he was talking to,” one potential donor wrote to Bill Roberts. “Admittedly, we were a rather unimportant group, but the magnitude of his impression would have been much greater had he had even the slightest idea who we were and why we were there.”

  It was clear, too, that he had little passion for the parochial issues that are the bread and butter of any governor’s race. “If he can zero in on California as he has done [on] the national and international problems,” one supporter tactfully observed to Stuart Spencer, “we should have a winner.” His benefactors were less circumspect. At a meeting at his house in late November, the donor Henry Salvatori expressed concern that Reagan’s candidacy lacked sufficient substance. W.
S. McBirnie, a right-wing radio host, was present at the meeting. “I think Henry tried to say that he had no criticism of you,” he told Reagan afterward, “but he was waiting for a definite program which would stamp you as electable.”

  Reagan tried to do the work required. Spencer and Roberts hired BASICO, a team of behavioral scientists, to help Reagan flesh out his positions on local issues. BASICO developed a file system for candidate Reagan with index cards containing digestible bits of information on a variety of issues. With his photographic memory, he crammed facts and figures to develop positions on water policy and early childhood education. But his heart wasn’t in it. “Damn,” he exclaimed to BASICO co-founder Stanley Plog, “wouldn’t this be fun if we were running for the presidency.”

  So, to solve the problem, they started to act as if they were. They nationalized the governor’s race. After the November 1965 meeting at Reagan’s home, McBirnie proposed “a positive direction” for Reagan’s campaign. “Almost every successful candidate of any historic importance in modern times has offered a positive program, packaged in some kind of slogan or neat description: New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, Great Society, New Order, etc. Why not try: ‘The Creative Society.’ ”

  Stu Spencer saw the opportunity right away. “The Great Society,” he later explained, “which was Lyndon Johnson’s, was going on at the time. Everybody liked it conceptually, but it didn’t work out. We were taking advantage of the society aspect, not the great.”

  They would offer an alternative to the Johnsonian vision, on Johnson’s own terms. The goals were the same: a better country, a fuller, more meaningful life. So was the basic assumption: that a magnificent future was possible, that soon Americans could master their own fate. The difference was in the means of doing it. “You could base it upon the firm belief that there exists within this state the resources,” McBirnie advised, “to solve any problem—without the growth of bureaucracy. But to release this tremendous latent, creative power, more citizens must be led by the ‘Creative Society’ type of government to organize in volunteer associations to deal directly with these problems.”

  And so Reagan was unleashed to do what he loved—to tell a story about the threat facing the country under its current president, and the way that he would stop it. As 1965 came to a close, the voters who, a year earlier, had thrilled to Johnson’s message in the aftermath of his landslide election—“These are the most hopeful times in all the years since Christ was born in Bethlehem”—were rapidly giving up faith in the president’s promises. Offering his alternative vision, Reagan told the voters of California they didn’t need to give up their hope, they just had to look for it to be delivered in another form. “We must show the voters,” he told an audience, “that major issues cross party lines. Almost half of them have grown up under a planned society leaning toward a socialist system. We must match dreams of utopia with the hard facts of actuality, and show them that a free economy is far more attractive than the deadly dullness of a planned society.”

  ONE MAJOR PROBLEM remained for Reagan as he sought to prove that he could be a serious candidate. It was the most basic: What was a B-movie actor doing trying to run the country’s largest state? In many press accounts from 1965 and early 1966, the idea that Reagan could fancy himself a candidate for high office played as a bad joke. “The idea of an actor named Ronald Reagan becoming the next governor of America’s largest state evokes a political vision approximately as radiant as a nomination of Rock Hudson to be the next Secretary of State,” Emmet John Hughes wrote in Newsweek. The Saturday Evening Post quoted an anonymous Reagan rival: “Sure he’s drawing the crowds … so would Jayne Mansfield.”

  In Sacramento, Pat Brown acted as though he barely knew who Ronald Reagan was. He’d seen the actor only once onscreen, he said. “It was on the late show,” Brown recalled. “He played a sheriff.… He was a very attractive sheriff. He was shot in the end, though.” (Watching Brown’s remarks, Reagan pointed at the screen: “In the back. I was shot in the back.”)

  Reagan’s “actor problem” came with two dangerous prongs. First, it invited the notion of Reagan as an intellectual lightweight. A bad day on the campaign trail inevitably ended with this conclusion. “Ronald Reagan,” wrote one critic in January 1965, “who recently announced he was seeking the Republican nomination for governor of California, proved he might be able to portray a politician, as an actor, but also that every actor needs a good script—which he did not have when he faced several newsmen Sunday on … ‘Meet the Press.’ ”

  The second, more dangerous concern was that Reagan was acting out the part of politician too well. “He is assiduously playing the role of a political figure up and down the State of California,” The Fresno Bee worried in the summer of 1965. The paper compared Reagan’s performance as a politician to Raymond Massey playing a doctor on television. “What happens when an actor simulates a role so well he is called upon to perform it off stage in real life? Then you have Raymond Massey actually attempting an appendectomy or Ronald Reagan actually making crucial decisions of government. Frightening thoughts.”

  Attacking the “actor problem” became a central focus of the campaign. Humor was a first line of defense. The candidate had any number of canned jokes at the ready. He would tell crowds that his son Ron Jr. thought his father, the Death Valley Days star, should “just go up to Sacramento, stand in the street and call out to the governor, ‘Pat, one of us has to be out of town by sundown.’ ” Or he’d try to beat those who questioned his qualifications to the punch: “I’ve never played a governor.” Or he’d joke that the concerns about his background signaled progress: “Only a generation ago, people in my profession couldn’t be buried in a churchyard.”

  After a life spent trying to get onto Hollywood’s A list, he suddenly found himself scrambling to get off. In campaign materials, he was listed not as an actor but as “an actor-rancher.” A campaign résumé made the most of his non-Hollywood professional life. It was thin gruel. Entries included “Operates horse breeding and cattle ranch” and “Member Board of Directors International Holding Company & Coast Life Insurance Company.” His Midwestern radio career merited two separate entries. These billowed with extraneous nouns in a manner familiar to job applicants in their early twenties: “Radio sports announcer and editor—Central Broadcasting Company” and “Broadcast Chicago Cubs & White Sox home games, Big Ten and Notre Dame Football.” At GE Theater, he had been not just host or actor but “Production Supervisor.” Meanwhile, a single entry in the middle—“Motion Pictures, Warner Bros., Universal and free-lance. Appeared in 50 featured pictures”—encapsulated his entire movie career.

  As a last defense, the campaign actually made the case for actors. For help in the cause, they enlisted no less a figure than John Wayne, who put on his cowboy costume to cut a Reagan ad. “So what’s this empty nonsense about Ronald Reagan being just an actor?” asked Wayne, standing in front of a desert backdrop. “I’ve watched Ronald work his entire adult life preparing for public service.” Reagan was no lightweight, the ad suggested. Anyone arguing otherwise would have to talk to the Duke.

  Still, the actor attacks stung Reagan. It had been more than twenty years since the brief moment he’d been a hot-ticket movie star. In several of those years, he’d struggled to make a living as an actor at all. But to listen to his critics, he’d been a matinee idol all along. “I’ll probably be the only fellow who will get an Oscar posthumously,” he joked, only half concealing his bitterness. He would grow testy at the suggestion he was just looking for another stage. “There are no jobs in politics,” he wrote to one critical newspaper editor, “that offer comparable rewards to those obtainable in show business.”

  But that was the biggest problem Reagan faced when fighting the actor charge. The rewards of the job—the job itself—were similar to being a Hollywood star. Certainly there was plenty of Hollywood staging. In January 1966, when he finally made his campaign official, he announced it in a highly produced televi
sion special taped in the same studio as Death Valley Days. Hours before the telecast, the campaign held a premiere for two hundred reporters in the Pacific Ballroom of the Statler Hilton in Los Angeles. “Roll it,” Bill Roberts ordered, and the broadcast began to play on a movie screen. In the program, Reagan appeared on a set made to look like a comfortable upper-middle-class living room, complete with books, framed pictures, and a roaring fire. He moved effortlessly around the set as he spoke.

  California also leads in some things that unfortunately give us no sense of pride. The only thing that’s gone up more than spending is crime. Our city streets are jungle paths after dark.

  As he spoke, he tilted his head down, strolling slowly but purposefully toward the other end of the room, as though this carefully coded racial imagery had just now popped into his head.

  And the greatest reward of a campaign was the same as the greatest reward of the movie business: he got to be the star. Often, a powerful man who starts a second career in politics chafes when the professionals try to handle him. He is accustomed to being the boss in all areas of his life. Indeed, he has been the boss for such a long time that he has come to think of it as his natural state. But a candidate has so many places to go, so many performances to give, he must hand over large areas of his life to other people. He struggles with one of politics’ most basic truths: to win, you must surrender control—first to the handlers, then to events, and eventually to the voters.

  For Reagan, this was nothing new. He didn’t expect to be the one deciding which donors to woo or which cities to speak in any more than he’d expected to write a script or set up a shot or handle negotiations for his next contract. A movie actor learns early on that he cannot take care of everything. Too much worry, too many sleepless nights, too many stressful details—it will all show up on his face, the face he needs to be perfect for the camera, and the world. He didn’t want or need control. He just needed to be the star. And in a campaign—where his name appeared on every piece of paper, where his photo could be seen on thousands of brochures and flyers—he was the biggest star around.