Reagan’s advisers quickly understood the parallel. Spencer found it easiest to explain the structure of a campaign to Reagan in show business analogies. “I would say, ‘This is like a stage play in New York and then we’ll take it out of town. We’re going to go out of town to Visalia and to all these little burgs up in Northern California and try out your act. If you screw up, only a small number of people will see it, and if it’s good, we can keep it.’ ”
At times, indeed, Reagan’s campaign organization looked like a giant fan club for the movie star candidate and his beautiful wife, Nancy, who was his costar in every respect. In meetings with advisers she would mostly stay quiet on policy. “She’d say something every now and then,” Spencer was to recall, “and he’d look at her and say, ‘Hey, Mommy, that’s my role.’ ” But Reagan’s advisers came to see that Nancy was no shrinking violet. Her instincts on matters of personnel and strategy, it turned out, were superior to her husband’s. “She thinks very well politically,” Spencer observed. “She thinks much more politically than he thinks.”
The campaign built a kind of cult around the Reagans. Campaign materials showed Ronnie and Nancy feeding their horses and posing for pictures with their children, Patti and Ron Jr. Nancy, a campaign brochure noted, was “the daughter of one of the world’s great neurosurgeons” who “shared the stimulating association of the scientific world. As a pretty and popular debutante, she enjoyed the fun of campus life, attending exclusive Girls Latin School and graduating from Smith as a theater arts major.”
Young female supporters were encouraged to be “Reagan Girls,” lithe young hostesses at campaign events. “Reagan Girls represent the young, wholesome, vivacious, natural, all-American girl,” a flyer for the position advised. Their uniforms—“selected by Mrs. Ronald Reagan” and available only in waist sizes under twenty-five inches—were to be kept immaculate at all times. “A clean and neat appearance is a must,” the Reagan Girls were warned. “Giving out of phone numbers and addresses, and making dates are not permitted during appearances.”
Just as he had in his movie career, Reagan allowed his campaign publicists to take liberties with the details of their star’s biography. The résumé that Reagan’s campaign distributed noted that he had been named Father of the Year for the motion picture industry by the National Fathers Day Committee in 1957. Meanwhile, a line in the “Personal History” section noted that he was “Married to Nancy Davis Mar. 4, 1952. Daughter, Patricia, and son, Ronald.” The two children from the Father of the Year’s first marriage were left unmentioned.
Most likely, this was not a clerical error. California Republicans had fresh memories of the Rockefeller-Goldwater drama, with its complicated marital subplots. Reagan’s advisers were loath to draw excessive attention to their candidate’s two marriages. And a complicated personal life only exacerbated the frivolous Hollywood idol problem. So Reagan’s campaign, with the implicit approval of Ronald and Nancy, mostly expunged his first marriage and his first family from the record. It was a brutal excision, even by the standards of 1966. It was particularly hard on Reagan’s elder daughter, Maureen, who was an enthusiastic Republican and who longed to be close to her father’s campaign, and close to her father. Unwilling to blame him for her banishment, she fixed her fury on Spencer-Roberts. After a pitched battle, she was offered a chance to introduce her father to a conservative group of which she was a member. Her feeling of triumph ended when she was handed the introduction the campaign had prepared for her to deliver: “Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy have two children, Patti and Ronnie.”
In the end, it was impossible to fight the actor problem. All of Reagan’s advantages as a candidate were completely tied up in the fact that he had been an actor. In time, Reagan’s campaign found that here, too, they could make a virtue of his defect. As 1966 dawned, it was clear that politicians were failing, in California and the country. Lyndon Johnson was thought to be among the greatest politicians of his generation, and look what that had gotten America. Maybe it was a good thing that Reagan had no experience in the political realm. The problem with California politics, Reagan started to argue, was that it had been hijacked by career politicians like Pat Brown. As he traveled, he began to emphasize the distinction, describing himself as a “citizen-politician.” He was, he said, “an ordinary citizen with a deep-seated belief that much of what troubles us has been brought about by politicians, and it’s high time more ordinary citizens brought the fresh air of common sense thinking to bear on these problems.”
In making the “citizen-politician” case, they were helped by an unlikely source: Reagan’s ongoing Hollywood career. In the first year of his campaign, 1965, when he had still not officially entered the race, he continued to appear as both host of and a player on Death Valley Days. After officially announcing his candidacy in early 1966, he could no longer appear as host in California, but he continued to appear as an actor in pretaped episodes of the program.
The show turned out to be a political plus. Sure, there were awkward moments, like the ads he was contractually obliged to cut for Boraxo, the show’s sponsor. “Here’s Boraxo waterless hand cleaner,” chirped a tan Reagan, wearing a grandfatherly peach cardigan in one of the commercials. “New Boraxo waterless hand cleaner removes the toughest dirt or stains!” But the actual programming on Death Valley Days usually fit the Reagan campaign message perfectly. The program featured weekly teleplays, stories of daring and heroism from the real-life history of the Old West. Often, the heroes were a classic Western type—the decent, soft-spoken man who reluctantly answers the call of duty to stand up for justice in the rough frontier. As a consequence, the characters Reagan played on television seemed to speak roughly the same words as the character he was playing in the campaign.
In one episode he played the nineteenth-century senator George Vest. “I’m a citizen first,” Vest explains early in the episode. “And a candidate after that.”
Here, cut to an ad from Reagan’s campaign, showing the candidate in a crowded banquet hall, addressing the crowd:
I don’t believe that just holding public office is the only way by which you can get experience for public office. If we are to place political experience as the only criteria [sic] for making our decision, we have in Sacramento men with eight years political experience and I think that’s what’s wrong with California.
In another episode, he played the naval hero David Farragut. As the teleplay begins, Reagan’s Farragut, commanding a U.S. Navy ship in San Francisco Bay, has grown disillusioned with the captain’s life. “I’ve made a decision,” Farragut informs his wife. “I’m going to buy as much land in California as we can afford. And when Commodore Mervine gets back from Panama, I’m going to hand in my resignation, effective immediately.”
“David,” replies his worried wife, “the Navy is your heart and soul. To start all over again way out here in the West!”
Farragut is not deterred. “Everyone in the West is starting new.”
Another flash, from Reagan’s telecast announcing his candidacy for governor:
People have been coming to this place and to this way of life for a hundred years.… Even when we’ve been here thirty years, as I have, we still refer to ourselves as being “from” some place. We’re “from” Illinois or Iowa. Kansas, Ohio, New Jersey. But we’re here to stay. And our children are native born Californians. And California’s problems are our problems.
Even as he dreams of retirement, Farragut receives word that San Francisco has been overrun by an unruly vigilante mob that is threatening to destroy civil government in California. He reluctantly puts aside his plans to retire to the land. Coming ashore, he discovers that the city fathers have grown corrupt and weak and are unable and unwilling to maintain order while the mob takes free rein.
Another flash: Candidate Reagan at the San Francisco Cow Palace in 1966, preaching about a favorite campaign issue, the student unrest at the University of California, Berkeley, and the incompetent administration o
f the university:
You have read about the report of the Senate Subcommittee on Un-American Activities—its charges that the campus has become a rallying point for Communists and a center of sexual misconduct.… How could this happen on the campus of a great University? It happened because those responsible abdicated their responsibilities.
With no one else willing to do what is necessary, it falls to Farragut to subdue the bad guys. And he does it, confidently, by threatening force. The unruly crowd disperses. “That’s the way you lose a mob,” he explains to their ringleader. “One man comes to his senses. Then two. Then a dozen. Then a hundred.”
Reagan couldn’t have put it better himself. And that, in the end, was why Reagan’s “actor problem” was really no problem at all. Show business had taught him how to relate to the voters as a politician. And it had taught the voters how to see him as a politician, too.
At first the press missed it. In March 1966, it seemed that Reagan might have torpedoed his campaign when he appeared with his primary opponent, George Christopher, before the National Negro Republican Assembly. Highlighting Reagan’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Christopher tried to paint Reagan as a Goldwater clone. Goldwater’s position on the bill, Christopher said, “did more harm than anything to the Republican Party … Unless we cast out this image, we’re going to suffer defeat.”
At that Reagan shot up. “I resent the implication that there is any bigotry in my nature,” he insisted. “Don’t anyone ever imply I lack integrity!”
He was yelling. He continued:
“I will not stand silent and let anyone imply that—in this or any other group!”
He was walking out the door.
There it was. The unity candidate, the mainstream Republican who had promised to build bridges and work with anyone and everyone in his party, had dutifully gone to meet with a bunch of black Republicans—and had stormed out of the room. He knew right away that he’d made a disastrous, amateurish mistake. Political reporters wondered if he’d killed his chances. In the Los Angeles Times, a cartoon recalled the title of Reagan’s memoir when it depicted Reagan with his head cut off with the caption: “I’m looking for the rest of me.” Pat Brown, watching, was convinced that Christopher would be the tougher opponent in the general election, and most likely the opponent he’d face.
He was wrong. In June 1966, Reagan defeated Christopher in the primary by a far larger than expected margin of 700,000 votes. In the end, the voters just didn’t buy the idea that Ronald Reagan was a hothead extremist. They knew Ronald Reagan, and that wasn’t the Reagan they knew. “We did some studies through the ad agency, Hixson and Jorgenson,” Spencer later said. “He had an approval rating with women in 1965 of 93 percent.… That was purely based on the roles he played in the movies, the nice guy versus the bad guy. He never played the bad guy.”
The conventions of show business were all working in Reagan’s favor. His surprising margin of victory had given him juice. This would be a surprise twist. Adding to the effect, Brown had been through a nasty, divisive Democratic primary against Sam Yorty, the conservative Democratic mayor of Los Angeles. Brown had squeaked by with only 52 percent of the vote.
Suddenly, there was a great national story coming out of California. A Universal Newsreel summed it up:
ANNOUNCER: In California, actor Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Reagan arrive to cast their votes in the state’s primary election. He’s the Republican nominee for governor, it’s his first political contest.
Watch as a pair of sun-dappled Reagans walk hand in hand to their polling place and enter side-by-side curtained voting booths. Moments later, they each pull back their curtain at the same moment and look at each other lovingly, breezily evoking the fun, twin-bed sexuality of the Production Code.
ANNOUNCER: Reagan’s Democratic opponent in November will be Governor Edmund Brown, who’s trying to become California’s first three-term Democratic governor. Experts now rate him as the underdog.
In a parallel scene, the Browns walk into their polling place. Mrs. Brown is holding her handbag, not her husband. Goaded by photographers, the Browns stand outside their voting booth, not knowing what to do. Finally, the governor awkwardly shakes Mrs. Brown’s hand.
ANNOUNCER: November’s showdown election between Reagan and Brown may well forecast an exciting ’68 presidential fight.
PAT BROWN WAS on the phone from California.
“Are you feeling all right?” President Johnson asked.
“I never felt better in my life and had less,” Brown said. “Between you and me.”
This was not what the president wanted to hear. Brown was underconfident, far removed from the governor who had showered praises on Johnson after his landslide election two years before. It was June 1966, a week since the California primary. “President Eisenhower and [Republican Party chair] Ray Bliss have already begun to call liberal Republicans … to put the heat on them,” Joe Califano had informed the president in a memo. “Brown is very nervous about the election, is running scared and thinks he will lose many of the votes that Yorty got in the campaign.” The day before, Johnson had watched on television as Yorty continued to criticize the governor, making it quite clear there would be no happy Democratic unity any time soon. Brown was saying that a race against Reagan would be his toughest as governor.
Now Johnson urged him to buck up.
“You’re selling everybody on the fact that you can’t win!” he said. “And I’m against that kind of stuff coming out of California. I think we gotta get the tail up, get bushy tailed, and high behind, and chin up and let’s go … I think that we’ve just got to quit thinking about the possibility that they could beat us, because they can’t. You’ve got a good administration, you’ve got the best state in the Union, you’re way out in front and the people know it.”
It sounded as though he was trying to convince himself—and as though he was talking about more than just the troubles of Pat Brown. “California is the most populous state in the Union,” the San Diego Union would observe the next day, “and a Republican victory in November would most certainly signal the beginning of the end of the political extravagances of the Great Society.”
Johnson wasn’t about to let Reagan do that to him. “We’ve just got to go after him,” he scolded. “And … put him right where he belongs: with Goldwater around his neck.”
Brown agreed. “I spent all day Sunday reviewing Mr. Reagan’s record. And this fellow is a part of the kook crowd in the United States! He’s to the right of Goldwater!”
“No question about that,” said the president. “He’s got a better television personality and he’s more effective. But he’s more dangerous.”
They were making themselves feel better. But the president and the governor were already several steps behind Reagan and the press. As Johnson and Brown spoke, Reagan was headed back to the East Coast. There he would continue his I’m-Not-Goldwater campaign, jumping toward the middle in the most ostentatious fashion possible. Later that week, he’d head to Gettysburg to receive formally the establishment blessing from Eisenhower. Unlike Goldwater’s wretched and desperate performance with the general late in the 1964 campaign, this visit would produce great pictures. “Here in a brick house on a shaded lawn,” a Washington Post correspondent wrote from Gettysburg, “he humbly paid his respects to Gen. Eisenhower, respectfully listened and eagerly posed for photographs with him.”
Reagan continued the theme the next day in Washington, where he addressed a crowd at the National Press Club that included many leading lights of the Eastern media, coming to scout the new talent. He was eager to show that he was no radical. “I’ve never advocated selling the Post Office or abolishing Social Security,” he said. “Nor do I believe in some conspiracy theory that all who favor increased government planning and control are engaged in a devious plot.”
It worked like a charm. “Right-winger,” the columnist William S. White observed, was “far too strong” a term for Reagan a
fter Gettysburg. “In consequence,” White wrote, “he enters what has become known as ‘the mainstream of Republicanism’ and cannot be symbolically dislodged from it.”
Indeed, the talk in Washington that week was not whether candidate Ronald Reagan was too extreme to win the governor’s race in 1966, but whether Governor Ronald Reagan would be his party’s presidential nominee in 1968. At Gettysburg, Ike had said he saw nothing to prevent such a possibility if the circumstances were right. “Even a Reagan in the clothing of a right-winger,” White wrote, “would have been a strong force at the 1968 Republican National Convention. In such clothing, however, his power would have been largely that of veto. In his present posture of mainstreamism that power could become something else again.”
Richard Nixon, already eyeing 1968 with dogged focus, was nervous about what that something else might be. Once, Reagan had written flowery notes to Nixon offering campaign advice. Now it was Nixon gushing in a lengthy letter to Reagan after the primary. “I was unable to reach you by telephone Tuesday night and Western Union is on strike. Consequently, I must resort to the uncertain delivery schedules of the U.S. mails,” Nixon wrote. Nixon knew that as governor of California, Reagan could control the state’s delegation and, if he wished, scuttle Nixon’s chances at the nomination. In characteristic fashion, he tried to suck up to Reagan by speaking what he thought was Reagan’s language. “As I am sure you know the assault on you will reach massive proportions in the press and on TV as Brown and his cohorts realize that they are going to be thrown off the gravy train after eight pretty lush years. There is an old Mid-Western expression (my roots also are in the Mid-West) which I would urge you to bear in mind as the going gets tougher. ‘Just sit tight in the buggy!’ ”
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