The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

by Rick Perlstein

  That same summer, 1962, Loyd Wright ran in a three-way Republican senatorial nomination contest, becoming known as the “John Birch Society” candidate; Reagan served as his campaign chair. Also that summer, according to Reagan, he got a call asking him to limit his talks to commercial pitches for GE products—no politics. Shortly thereafter, he got twenty-four hours’ notice that General Electric Theater was canceled. An anthology show hosted by Jack Webb, G.E. True, began running in its old Sunday night slot that fall, lasting only for one season. But ratings were never Ronald Reagan’s problem. Ideology was—or at least the opening episode of G.E. True suggested it was: as if in absolution, the story General Electric now presented to the nation was not one of anti-Communist freedom fighters in Hungary nor heroic FBI spies infilitrating the Communist conpsiracy, but a lionization of the left-wing icon Clarence Darrow.

  Later, to his daughter Maureen, Reagan told a heroic story about what had happened: a friend had informed him of rumors that the federal government had threatened to cancel its contracts with GE unless he was fired; he checked out the rumor with his boss, who told him that it was true but that the company would not be blackmailed. “ ‘Wait a minute,’ dad said back without stopping to think about it,” Maureen Reagan wrote in her memoir. “ ‘There are an awful lot of people whose paychecks depend on those contracts. I appreciate your standing up for me, I really do, but I can’t abide that.’ ” He said he offered to quit. However, at the time, he told other stories. He announced that the AFL-CIO “had tagged me as a strident voice of right wing extremism, and under the accepted liberal practice of the end justifying the means, proceeded to issue bulletins long on name-calling and short on truth.” He hinted at Communist involvement. He blamed Bobby Kennedy. “Government contracts,” he told his teenage son Michael at the dinner table. “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 the attack on me. . . . Because I’m speaking out against the Kennedy Administration and the road they’re trying to lead us down.”

  His wife chimed in: “Of course Bobby Kennedy’s behind it. It’s obvious.”

  HOWEVER IT HAPPENED, HE NOW had lost a $125,000 salary, and bookings scheduled years into the future. Another professional humiliation. He picked up the occasional commercial, odd jobs like hosting the Rose Bowl Parade, episodes on TV series like Wagon Train. Then once more politics saved him.

  That fall, he chaired Democrats for Nixon on behalf of Nixon’s run for California governor. His anger at his martyrdom fueled him, and vaulted him into conservative movement superstardom—until he was as busy as before. In Long Island, in 1963, Young Americans for Freedom honored him in a rally that drew thirteen thousand people. That summer he began working on his first book. In 1964 he took on working toward Barry Goldwater’s presidential nomination practically as a full-time job. The reviews, it turned out, were more spectacular than any he had received in his life: “I think it would have been better if Ronald Reagan had just talked, and Goldwater had just sat there and nodded,” one conservative said at the Republican convention that summer in San Francisco. That fall, he picked up host duties for another anthology show, replacing a wizened coot known to the world only as the “Old Ranger.” Death Valley Days hacked out cheap half-hour Westerns. Syndicated, often running late at night, it was sponsored not by one of America’s most majestic corporate citizens but by a brand of soap, Borax.

  That meant the image lingering in citizens’ minds when he began his political career was of Reagan in Western garb reciting silly sloganeering nonsense about “20-Mule Team Borax”—that, and the image of a sadistic cad smacking around a girl. For he finally landed a meaty roll, his first in decades, in the nifty existentialist crime caper The Killers, the very first movie in history produced for broadcast on TV. But it turned out to be far too violent to show on TV. It played in theaters instead, where, for the first and last time in his acting career, he played not a rescuer but a bad guy—one whom another bad guy laid flat with a punch. He regretted taking that role for the rest of his life.

  And then, on October 27, 1964, with dazzling quickness, the rest of his life began. Barry Goldwater’s rich California backers prevailed upon the Goldwater campaign to put on TV the speech Reagan had been giving for years, repurposed for the Republican nominee, to raise money for the flagging presidential campaign. “You and I,” he said, “have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children, this the last best hope on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.” David Broder called it “the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic Convention with the ‘Cross of Gold’ speech.”

  He was now a conservative superstar. Two years later, he was governor of the nation’s largest and richest state. And by 1975, after eight years in office, he was ready to meet his next rendezvous with destiny—ministering to a wounded nation’s soul.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  * * *

  Governing

  WHEN REAGAN GAVE HIS SPEECH for Goldwater the donations it brought in erased the deficit of the Goldwater campaign. People started asking their conservative friends, Why wasn’t this guy the candidate? And almost before the broadcast was over, Reagan’s rich businessmen friends—his “kitchen cabinet”—began putting together an organization to slate him for the 1966 governor’s race. He spent six months in 1965 giving speeches around the state, testing the waters; finding them warm, he entered in January with an extraordinary, unprecedented TV show, complete with theme music that sounded like Leave It to Beaver and a title graphic (RONALD REAGAN AND A NEED FOR ACTION! over a map of the state). Just as he once did for General Electric, he warmly invited viewers into his home—smiling, be-suited, with one of his trademark pocket silks, again not looking all that different from his first screen appearance leaning jauntily against the camera in a tweed three-piece suit, holding a fedora, in that 1937 trailer for Love Is on the Air.

  He began, amiably, telling stories from his six-month tour: “I’ve been on a California street 8,000 feet above sea level, and one below sea level. I’ve thrown a snowball and watched water-skiers, all in the same day. And I haven’t begun to cover the state. Actually I think you could spend a lifetime just seeing and getting to know California. . . .” He picked up a ketchup bottle from a table beside him, like in a TV commercial, with a professional’s skill so as to obscure the brand logo, the camera pulling back to show a roaring fire behind him and a leather easy chair to his right: “A ketchup bottle is a pretty commonplace item. But when the secretary of labor and our own state government finished their experiments in reform among farm workers and canceled out the Bracero program, there were twenty-eight million fewer of these manufactured in one plant in Oakland. . . .”

  How unlikely was it when this movie-star-cum-pitchman won the nomination that spring against a well-liked pillar of the Republican establishment? So unlikely that a Washington Star columnist reported an “air of furtive jubilation at Lassie for Governor headquarters,” and Esquire said, “The Republican Party isn’t bankrupt, or isn’t that bankrupt that it has to turn to Liberace for leadership.” How unlikely was it that he could survive a general election campaign? Richard Nixon had some thoughts about that. He sent a young aide to take some notes to Reagan for his political coming-out before the National Press Club in Washington. Reagan ignored the advice, and virtually charmed his audience out of their doubts—and after Reagan won the general election, on a platform of singeing student protesters and foregrounding the menace to law and order represented by liberal social programs, Nixon ended up borrowing the themes for his own 1968 campaign. Nixon’s presumed student was actually the master.

  When Reagan became governor in 1967, the shock for his skeptics was simply this: that the antigovernment supposed incompetent actually governed. “Amazingly enough,” Newsweek reported upon co
mpletion of his first hundred days, the “host of Death Valley Days has managed to close one of the widest credibility gaps any politician ever faced.” And after he left office in 1975, the postmortems from the guardians of elite discourse were much the same. Elizabeth Drew wrote in the New Yorker that “he was a reasonably competent governor of California and that his administration was more progressive than his political rhetoric suggested”; Richard Reeves observed that he had proved himself “passive, moderate, and moderately effective” at providing “big government as usual.”

  They were not wrong. As governor, Reagan consistently proposed just the sort of conservative policies he had campaigned on—most controversially, immediately upon his ascension, a 10 percent across-the-board cut in the budgets of every state department. And when passage of radical notions like this proved impractical (indiscriminate 10 percent cuts turned out to be a novice’s fantasy, given that much of the state budget was hemmed in by federal and state statutes he had no power to change), he changed course, moved on, learned, and adjusted, gladly dropping right-wing orthodoxy when more pragmatic solutions presented themselves. He felt out the status of institutional and popular power for and against his preferred nostrums, playing things by ear. Democrats controlled both houses of the legislature, and in negotiations he took his adversaries seriously, respectfully, and tried to get the best deal he could. He wanted to succeed, to chalk up accomplishments. Indeed, he frustrated conservative purists to such a degree that in 1971 some of them even launched a recall movement, calling him a “discredit to the American spirit, to the West, and to our California heritage.”

  But Elizabeth Drew and Richard Reeves were not entirely right. Their assessments did not nearly convey the whole story. He was, yes, pragmatic like any successful politician. But the way he did it was different. When he made compromises, he always insisted that they were only tactical and technical—and always, he would say afterward, the fault of someone else: Democrats, generally; liberals, specifically. His rhetorical habit of parsing the world into black-and-white persisted when he became a governing executive. It some ways, it even deepened.

  For instance, he had affected horror at a demand from the state legislature in 1971 to make tax collection more efficient by withholding payments automatically from paychecks: “Taxes should hurt,” he said, insisting, “My feet are in concrete.” He proved able to loosen his feet from that concrete, giving in—then, when the 1972 tax bill he signed brought an unexpected revenue windfall, the $851 million state budgetary surplus it produced became his marquee boast, even though it came largely from reforms in the collection of revenue that he had so adamantly opposed. And the increased money flowing into state coffers also became Exhibit A in proving government was a devouring Gila monster. Indeed, it was the foundational argument for his Proposition 1 tax limitation initiative.

  These claims were contradictory. Reagan was opportunistic that way—and rhetorically successful in his opportunism. He proved gifted at jumbling budgetary statistics. “Five years ago our state budget was second in size to the federal government,” he said in 1971. (Why shouldn’t it be? California was the largest state.) “Today, we are fourth—behind the federal government, New York State, and New York City. Five years ago, there were 102,456 full-time Civil Service employees on the state payroll. When we ended the fiscal year in June there were 101,399, or 1,066 fewer than when we started.” It all made his accomplishments sound very . . . Reaganite. What it obscured, though, was that he inherited a $4.6 billion state budget in 1967, and left behind one of $10.2 billion in 1975. And that the average individual Californian’s tax burden when he took office was $426, but when he left it was almost double that, $728. But here was the gift: he could claim that this only proved his point—that Sacramento and Washington, whose top-down dictates to states could always be offered as excuses, were intractable puzzle palaces, defying the people’s will at ever turn.

  When worse came to worst—as when he signed the nation’s most liberal abortion law—he might claim an offending passage had been slipped in at the last minute. Excuses were always readily on offer—excuses that ended up making his rhetorical position stronger instead of weaker. Because liberals were furtive and diabolical in ways unsullied innocents could not comprehend.

  He framed economy measures, where he achieved them, not just as cost savings, but as shimmering moral advances—for instance his success paring the budget of the state’s mental health system. It was, his budget aides suggested, one area where a 10 percent reduction could easily be realized—given that the number of mental patients was already plummeting due to new medical advances like tranquilizing drugs. First in 1967, and then again in 1972, thousands of positions were eliminated from the state’s Department of Mental Hygiene. He called that in a 1972 speech a “new approach to the treatment of the mentally ill that has reduced the number of patients sentenced to a hopeless life in our asylums from 16,500 to 7,000”; and who could object to that? Harried, baffled psychiatrists, it turned out, one of whom later recollected how “Reagan with one bold, brilliant stroke abolished mental illness in California,” and hospital staffs were required to turn away the most broken people imaginable: “Back to violent alcoholic families. Back to angry spouses . . . to rag-filled grocery carts . . . to sleeping in moldering cars. Back to the community of cocaine-crazed friends and pitiless dealers awaiting them outside the hospital gates.” The apparent earlier, salutary decline in mental patients requiring hospitalization, it turned out, had been a mirage—because the ones who were left were the ones unresponsive to the new procedures, and had always required by far the most care. The hospitals themselves had always been understaffed in the first place. The reductions were a plain and simple nightmare. And yet Reagan proved able to blithely deny a problem existed. When a visiting expert from Sweden called a ward in Sonoma County the worst he had seen in several countries, the governor accused the staff there of having “rigged” the poor conditions to sabotage his planned cutbacks. “We lead the nation in the quality of our mental patient care,” he simply said, “and we will keep that lead.”

  To claim a mere mixed success was never enough. Take, for example, the time he set his mind for his second term to reform California’s welfare system, which he called “a cancer that is destroying those it should succor and threatening society itself.” And it was true the welfare system in California was broken, from whatever ideological position one viewed it. Leftists could point out that benefits had not been raised since 1957—$172 for a family of three when the minimum subsistence income in San Francisco was $271. Conservatives could point out that the number of recipients had exploded from 357,00 in 1963 to 1,566,000 in 1970—an unquestionably unsustainable rate of increase.

  But when the process of reforming the system began, the debate soon broke down in a tangle of mutual public recrimination between Reagan and liberals who distrusted his claimed desire to “adequately provide for the truly needy.” The impasse was magnanimously broken by his rival, assembly speaker Bob Moretti, who offered to begin negotiations anew even though he held a controlling majority in the legislature. The two sides sat down for two weeks of intense talks, which began each day at 9 A.M. and lasted some nights until after dark. The resulting bill Reagan signed was a genuine compromise product—and, according to an independent analysis published six years later, a genuine success.

  The resulting statistics thereafter became a staple of his campaign rhetoric: “When I came into office, California was the welfare capital of the nation. Sixteen percent of all those receiving welfare in the country were in California. The caseload was increasing 40,000 a month. We turned that increase into an 8,000 a month decrease. We returned to the taxpayers $2 billion and we increased grants to the truly needy.”

  But that this was the product of joint proposals of both Republicans and Democrats—and that the slowed increase in welfare cases was also the fortuitous result of demographic accident (most eligible recipients were already on the rolls by 197
1)—was missing from such storytelling. By his account, Democrats had figured merely as wreckers and irritants, moved off the dime only by the fury of an outraged California electorate.

  He piled on fantastical claims. One part of the new welfare law, included at his firm insistence, was a pilot program requiring recipients in some counties to work. It failed, most people on welfare lacking the job skills to make them useful to employers, despite the governor’s claim that there existed a massive pool of employable lollygaggers. In 1974, the work program’s peak year, it was able to enroll only 4,760 out of 182,735 welfare recipients, despite massive investment in staff time and effort from the governor’s office. All told, only 0.2 percent of welfare recipients ever received jobs through the program; most were for tasks like raking leaves. And though the program was supposed to decrease the number of people applying for relief, applications for welfare turned out to be greater in counties with the program than those without. In fact, according to a study ordered by Reagan’s successor, Governor Brown (a study Reagan cited as authoritative when it came to the parts that suited him politically), the Community Work Experience Program “failed to meet any of its employment objects.”