Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  Things intensified. On April 14 the New York Times splashed a sensational story on page 1: an officer stationed in Germany, General Edwin Walker, was indoctrinating his troops with Birch literature. Then the Times thundered against him on the editorial page. On April 17 Walker was removed from his post.

  Then, on the eighteenth, the John Birch Society was knocked off the nation’s front pages. A force of 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs for an assault on Fidel Castro’s government. Cuba’s meager air force, which was supposed to have been wiped out in air strikes that President Kennedy scaled back at the last minute so he could plausibly deny American involvement, strafed the force’s landing boats, and 1,000 survivors made a quick surrender. Kennedy’s advisers saw him weep. The news came just six days after another crushing Cold War humiliation: the world’s first space flight, by a Russian, Yuri Gagarin. And for a time, the right-wing scare seemed hardly worth the candle.

  7

  STORIES OF ORANGE COUNTY

  There was one place in the United States where there was no sudden alarm at a failed invasion of Cuba; there, alarm was a constant. Long before the Bay of Pigs, the signs graced Orange County, California, windows: “THEY’RE NOT JUST 90 MILES AWAY. THEY’RE HERE.” On April 18, 1961, at any rate, Orange County was paying more attention to the struggle against “their” attempts to subvert a local school board.

  Joel Dvorman, a New York native and liberal Democrat, had been elected as a trustee of the Magnolia School District board the previous summer. That he was also the membership secretary of the Orange County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, and had once belonged to American Youth for Democracy, was unknown or ignored at the time. In June of 1960 Dvorman invited an organizer of the protests at the San Francisco HUAC hearings to his home to speak at a meeting.

  James Wallace, a production supervisor at a local aerospace firm who lived near Dvorman, got word of the meeting an hour before it started. A new report from the California state legislature’s own local version of HUAC had just noted that the ACLU’s southern California division “devoted an unusually large part of its time and energies to the protection and defense of Communist Party members.” Wallace decided to drop in to check out what his neighbor was up to. He reported what he saw in a letter to the Santa Ana Register: Joel Dvorman was entertaining traitors. “I wonder what we would have done in 1942 if Mr. Dvorman had a German-American Bund meeting at his home,” he wrote. At a subsequent school board meeting, Dvorman was asked if he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. A committee was hastily gotten up to fight a “threat to our heritage, to expose it and to combat it with every weapon at our command.” The weapon of choice, a recall petition, warned that Dvorman might “subtly impose his beliefs upon students through selection of textbooks, establishment of curriculum, selection of teachers.”

  James Wallace soon formed Anaheim’s first chapter of the John Birch Society. (Robert Welch, he said, “awakened us out of our selfish apathy and indifference to what is happening in America.”) Soon there were five chapters in Anaheim, and thirty-eight in Orange County. In January of 1961 Orange County State College and Fullerton Evening Junior College announced a series of lectures, “Understanding the Goals and Techniques of World Communism.” The course was promptly oversubscribed, as was Santa Ana College political science instructor John G. Schmitz’s course “Communist Aggression.” In March a coalition of civic leaders hosted a rally by the barnstorming Australian minister Fred C. Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade (whose unique contribution to right-wing discourse was to draw on his background in disease pathology and to contend that the Communist Party held sway over the people of Russia via “the techniques of animal husbandry”). The publicity for Schwarz’s event warned of “communist plans for a flag of the USSR flying over every American city by 1973.” Principals were urged to suspend school; seven thousand children were obligingly trooped off to attend the all-day affair. Soon the ninety thousand parents of the Garden Grove School District were sent flyers assuring them that their children recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, in schools where “any type of propaganda in conflict with county, state, and national laws is prohibited.”

  And on April 18, 1961, residents of Orange County’s six-thousand-pupil Magnolia School District recalled Joel Dvorman and two other liberals at the polls by a ratio of 3 to I. Even during the McCarthy years a public official had never been recalled from office for membership in the American Civil Liberties Union. But even during the McCarthy era there had never been a place quite like Orange County was in the 1960s.

  Orange County had caught anticommunism fever. On any given weekend, interested citizens of Anaheim, Santa Ana, Fullerton, Costa Mesa, and half a dozen other Los Angeles-area suburbs could drop in on one, two, or five different showings of films like Operation Abolition or Communism on the Map, a geopolitical melodrama in which blood- or pink-colored ink leached over country after country, sparing only Spain, Switzerland, and the United States (which was covered by a big question mark). On any given night they could find a study group assiduously poring over the organizational structure of what J. Edgar Hoover called the “state within a state”—the American Communist Party.

  Orange County’s VFW halls and school auditoriums were Meccas for traveling lecturers like former double agent Herb Philbrick (whose claim to fame was announced in the title of his book, I Led Three Lives); Korean War POW John Noble (I Was a Slave in Russia); and World War I fighting ace Eddie Rickenbacker (The Socialistic Sixteenth—A National Cancer). Another perennial was W. Cleon Skousen, who was so right-wing he had been fired as Salt Lake City police chief by Mayor J. Bracken Lee, the tax resister working to dissolve the federal government, for running his department “like a Gestapo.” Another favorite was Ronald Reagan. It was glamorous having a movie star talk to your Republican precinct club. And he preached anticommunist hellfire as well as anyone else on the circuit.

  Reagan’s showbiz fortunes had declined considerably since his peak after the war when he commanded a salary just below that of Errol Flynn. In 1954 he took a job as an MC in Vegas, an experience he likened to “going over Niagara Falls in a tub.” Partly it was the rise of television; partly it was fashion (he was no T-shirt-wearing method actor); partly it was that he spent so much time with politics. As a liberal who worshiped FDR, Reagan became president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947 just as a jurisdictional struggle with deceitful, violent craft unionists whom Reagan suspected of being Communists gave him very good reason to fear for the safety of himself and his family. It was a formative experience. In his mind, Communism became an everyday threat, looming just around the corner.

  He was still a liberal. But his remarriage in 1952 to the daughter of a conservative, politically connected Chicago surgeon (whose Phoenix vacation home the couple visited each Easter) and his work negotiating with studio chiefs were beginning to change that. That year he worked for Democrats for Eisenhower. The entrepreneur, not the union, the government, or the crusader for social justice, moved ever closer to the center of his moral imagination. In 1955 he became a charter subscriber to National Review.

  TV and politics had doomed him; now they saved him. In 1954 General Electric was looking for an attractive, smart, straight-arrow actor who could think like a salesman to take a demanding double job as actor-host of TV’s weekly General Electric Theater and as a motivational speaker for G.E.’s hundreds of thousands of employees in 125 separate facilities across the country, making everything from light bulbs to locomotives. The fact that General Electric Theater was produced by Reagan’s talent agency, MCA—an agency that SAG president Reagan had helped to receive a blanket waiver of a union rule that talent agencies could not produce television programs—helped his chances. But it had to be said that Reagan was a natural for the job.

  G.E. was an unusual company. It had always considered communicating a precisely calibrated corporate image as much a part of the company’s busi
ness as making the products it sold—as much inside their 125 plants as outside them. The image G.E. hoped to convey was of a company that was an indispensable cog in America’s well-being. In the 1930s and 1940s, when G.E.’s top brass was liberal (one executive chartered Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration), that meant that the company backed the New Deal vision of a strong welfare state and a vigorously enforced Wagner Act (G.E. was among the few big manufacturing companies to avoid labor strife in the 1930s by simply offering the CIO a national contract). But when a 1946 strike shuttered every electrical plant in the country, that vision began changing. New management came in and hired a man named Lemuel Boulware to a new post: vice president for employee and community relations. Boulware was a marketing expert. The key to successful labor relations, he believed, was to “achieve ultimately the same success in job marketing that we had accomplished in product marketing.” A crucial part of the task was explaining how free enterprise created a virtuous circle harmoniously joining labor, management, customer, and community. In this scheme, Bouwarism (as labor leaders, with a shudder, pronounced it), unions were but irritants, as was the welfare state. The United States, he would lament in the many addresses in which he spread his gospel to business leaders, “is well down the road to a collectivist revolution.”

  Reagan was an integral component in the Boulwarite system. The actor, crackling charm, would walk the floor of the yawning thirty-acre plants—squinting a little because he couldn’t wear his contact lenses for the smoke and dust—shaking hands and chatting up the workers. Then he would speak to an assembly. “Today,” he would say, “there is an increasing number who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without automatically coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they would seek the answer to all the problems of human need through government.” Lem Boulware couldn’t have said it better.

  On Reagan’s first tour, his handler was approached because a convention speaker had canceled at the last minute, leaving several thousand teachers waiting in the town armory. “Let’s give it a try,” Ronnie said gamely. He performed famously. After that, nearly every factory stop was followed up by a freelance appearance before some civic or business group or another.

  Reagan stepped up his outside political work after resigning from his SAG responsibilities in 1960. He still hadn’t bothered to change his party registration. But he was aghast enough at John F. Kennedy’s convention acceptance speech to be moved to write Richard Nixon a letter. “Shouldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s bold new imaginative program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish hair cut it is still old Karl Marx.” Nixon, delighted, appended a note to his staff: “Use him as speaker wherever possible. He used to be liberal.” In 1960 Reagan ended up running Democrats for Nixon in California. And after Nixon’s loss, Reagan’s disillusionment took him in the same direction as it did so many of his southern Californian neighbors—to the right. When he wasn’t on the road for G.E. or on the set, he spread the gospel in front of any audience that invited him. His family hardly saw him. “The inescapable truth is that we are at war,” he would say, “and we are losing that war simply because we don’t or won’t realize we are in it. We have ten years. Not ten years to make up our mind, but ten years to win or lose—by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free.”

  In Orange County that kind of talk was making Reagan a hero. He was like them—a Midwestern transplant, from small-town Illinois. He almost belonged more to them than he did to Hollywood.

  It was first said in the nineteenth century that California was “America, only more so.” Orange County was California, only more so. It had been the commandment to Americans after World War II to go forth and multiply. Orange County listened, and exploded. The government said to fight Communism. Orange County listened, and went berserk.

  California had always been a territory of booms and busts. Orange County’s boom came during World War 11. Opening up to the Pacific, possessed of a mild climate, southern California was the perfect place for defense installations. As in Phoenix, the aircraft manufacturers followed. Unions were weak. Venture capital was abundant. And when the jet and missile age arrived in the 1950s, it turned out that southern California had a competitive advantage: unlike more established companies back East, which preferred safe construction contracts, the tinkerers in California welcomed long-term research and development deals. New York State lost 34 percent of its share of the Defense Department’s procurement between 1950 and 1956; by 1965 California would have almost a quarter of the Defense Department’s prime contracts and 41 percent of NASA’s. Aerospace accounted for a staggering 10 percent of all personal income in the state of California and perhaps a quarter of its economic growth. And Orange County, the formerly rural area south of Los Angeles—whose municipalities were so eager to play host to the War Department that the town of Santa Ana leased the U.S. government a 412-acre former berry ranch for a dollar a year—did best of all. Orange County’s population, 100,000 in 1940, approached a million by 1960. Washington had called forth a new suburban civilization in southern California. Orange County was its hub.

  Real estate speculators turned ranches into subdivisions virtually overnight—an entire municipality, Irvine, from a single orange grove. Men who got a taste of the Sunshine State as Pacific Theater veterans flocked back after the war to settle there with their families; all you had to do was visit a real estate office at the edge of some former citrus grove, point to a site on a tract map, and lay down a $200 down payment (less if you were a veteran), and you’d bought yourself a house. But with mortgage debt a constant, silent presence, the new homesteaders were not keen on squandering their precious salaries, their only assets, on high taxes to help out the other guy. In 1959 Orange County congressman James Utt reintroduced an effort to add a “Liberty Amendment” to the Constitution—which would repeal all federal income, estate, and gift taxes and ban all government enterprises that competed with the private sector. Utt likened the federal government to a “child molester who offers candy before his evil act.”

  Orange County had always been a Republican stronghold. As in the rest of southern California suburbia, much of the county’s population hailed from Taft’s Midwest (every year a massive “Iowa Day” celebration was held in L.A.’s Griffith Park). The first time a Democratic President carried the county was 1932, the last 1936. That was two times too many for Raymond Cyrus Hoiles, publisher of the Santa Ana Register, who said the world would have been better off if Franklin D. Roosevelt had never learned to read or write. Hoiles’s editorials railed against the government stake in what he called “tax-supported schools, roads, and parks”—and called for an end to child labor and pure food and drug laws. As for the area’s racial attitudes, in 1954 a Korean-American Olympic Gold Medal winner was able to purchase a home in Garden Grove only after an outcry in the international media, and the Magnolia District’s first black teacher was forced to quit after a year when she couldn’t find housing. Orange County tended to draw people who found such politics amiable. Once there, they often moved further to the right.

  New postwar migrants, unmoored from the familiar Main Streets of their youth, burst the churches of conservative preachers like “Fighting Bob” Wells at the seams. Many were fundamentalists and Evangelicals of a new kind: they mixed politics with religion, a diversion much more associated with liberal clergymen. (“Preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners,” as the young pastor of the Lynchburg, Tennessee, Thomas Road Baptist Church, Jerry Falwell, put it.) When fundamentalists and Evangelicals were political they weren’t necessarily conservative: the Southern Baptist Convention endorsed Brown v. Board of Education, and the Reverend Billy Graham called Martin Luther King’s Montgomery bus boycott “an example of Christian love.” But Joe McCarthy’s 1953 charge that prominent Methodist bishop G. Bromley Oxnam was a Communist—and the ensuing claim of McCarthyites that perhaps 5 percent of Protestant clergy
men followed the Soviet line—boosted the right-wing radio “parachurches” of Billy James Hargis, Carl McIntire, and Edgar C. Bundy; a 1960 Federal Communication Commission ruling that encouraged networks to sell air time to religious broadcasters as a public service—and Evangelical terror of the possibility of a Catholic U.S. President—helped even more. Orange County church vestibule tables were thick with publications the radio hosts produced, like The United Nations, A Smoke-Screen for Communist Aggression and Disarmament, An Invitation to Communist Takeover.

  Disarmament may or may not have been an invitation to Communist takeover. It certainly was a threat to the southern California economy. A 1961 issue of Orange County Industrial News admitted that its growth projections presumed “that there will be no agreements on disarmament or on limitation of nuclear weapons”—although their dependency on government contracts didn’t increase their love for Washington any more than it did the nineteenth-century Arizona merchants who had been put in business by the Indian Wars. “Show me one, just one, from Southern California who helps make policy at Washington!” the mayor of Los Angeles seethed in a speech to Orange County service clubs as the crowd whistled him on. It was a curious relationship. The trade journal Missiles and Rockets expected Kennedy to penalize California contractors because the state went for Nixon. In fact, it was to Kennedy that they owed their continued good fortune. Eisenhower worried that high military budgets would superheat the economy toward recession; Kennedy’s Keynesian economic advisers proposed a virtuous circle: grand designs abroad put money into workers’ pockets, vouchsafing economic growth at home. Southern Californians might not be working in Washington, but their money certainly was. North American Aviation, where James Wallace started his career, paid its D.C. lobbyist $14,000 a month, an executive’s salary, just for part-time work.