by Anne Edwards
Both his own party and Nixon had underestimated Kennedy. He knew just how to run with issues and there was no contest between his personal charisma and his opponent’s once they had engaged in their famous television debates. The younger man’s vigor, his sophistication, his physical presence were at their best advantage against Nixon’s saturnine face and use of standard homilies.
Although he called himself a Democrat for Nixon, Reagan chose this campaign to align himself finally with the Republican party. Reagan’s all-involving activities during the first half of 1960—the SAG and his duties for G.E.—kept him from active campaigning, and his public support would have made it appear as though General Electric were endorsing Nixon.
The steadily impassioned Kennedy, with long-legged Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson as his running mate, won the election with the help of the Kennedy organization—hundreds of “effective, intelligent, loyal lieutenants”—but it had not been a landslide. Despite all his shortcomings, Nixon had come closer to winning than the Democrats wanted to believe.†
* * *
As late as 1961, Reagan was still publicly flailing the issue of Communist infiltration of Hollywood, although McCarthy’s downfall and death had happened years before. Under Kennedy, Washington was now a Camelot where nothing ugly ever happened. True, the American Legion published a list of films to be boycotted because some member of the cast or crew had once supported a supposedly Communist front organization. And a reprehensible blacklist did still exist. Few new names had been added since 1957. Hollywood had a new enemy to combat—television—and fighting a “Red invasion” seemed less threatening, at least to the pocketbook.
Yet the speech Reagan was giving across the country under the auspices of General Electric in 1961 was rabidly anti-Communist. He declared that “the Communist party has ordered once again the infiltration of the picture business as well as the theatre and television. They are crawling out from under the rocks, and memories being as short as they are, there are plenty of well-meaning but misguided people willing to give them a hand.… Most people agree that the ideological struggle with Russia is the number one problem in the world… and yet, many men in high places in government and many who mold opinion in the press and on the air waves, subscribe to a theory that we are at peace… the inescapable truth is that we are at war, and we are losing that war simply because we don’t or won’t realize we are in it.
“… Only in that phase of the war which causes our greatest fear are we ahead—the use of armed force. Thanks to the dedicated patriotism and realistic thinking of our men in uniform we would win a shooting war. But, this isn’t a decisive factor in the Communist Campaign. They never really intended to conquer us by force unless we yielded to a massive peace campaign and disarmed. Then, the Russians would resort to armed conflict if it could shortcut their time table with no great risk to themselves.
“… The Communists are supremely confident of victory. They believe that you and I, under the constant pressure of the cold war, will give up, one by one, our democratic customs and traditions. We’ll adopt emergency ‘temporary’ totalitarian measures, until one day we’ll awaken to find we have grown so much like the enemy that we no longer have any cause for conflict.
“There can only be one end to the war we are in. It won’t go away if we simply try to out-wait it. Wars end in victory or defeat. One of the foremost authorities on Communism in the world today [name not given] has said we have ten years. Not ten years to make up our minds, but ten years to win or lose—by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free.”
He ended with patriotic fervor:
“In this land, occurred the only true revolution in man’s history. All other revolutions simply exchanged one set of rulers for another. Here for the first time the Founding Fathers—that little band of men so advanced beyond their time that the world has never seen their like since—evolved a government based on the idea that you and I have the God given right and ability within ourselves to determine our own destiny. Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction—we didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in the United States when men were free.”
When he gave this speech to the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce on March 30, Loyal Davis was in the audience. After hearing it, Reagan’s father-in-law urged him to try his hand at politics. Reagan still resisted. Some said he didn’t like the proposed billing—junior senator from California; others felt it was a matter of money—a senator’s salary at that time being about one fifth of Reagan’s income with General Electric.
That obstacle would soon be removed. In spring 1962, at the end of its eighth season, General Electric decided to discontinue General Electric Theater because of the high ratings of Bonanza on a competing network in the same time slot. Reagan was now unemployed.
* Old Westerns proliferated on television because Monogram and Republic, two of the smaller studios and specialists in the cowboy genre, had released their product.
* Later, an agreement was made for reuse of films made after that date (1959) with specific percentages.
† Reagan was referring to an offer from G.E. to produce several episodes of the General Electric Theater.
‡ George Chandler was elected to replace Reagan.
* Both claimed victory.
† Kennedy campaigned for Congress in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1946 with that slogan.
* McCarthy had dated Kennedy’s sister Patricia, and Robert Kennedy had been on his staff. John Kennedy had met McCarthy during World War II in the South Pacific and was the only Democratic senator not to vote for the resolution to condemn McCarthy; and in 1952 he contributed three thousand dollars to McCarthy’s campaign. Because of his support and friendship to McCarthy, Eleanor Roosevelt had refused to back Kennedy’s vice-presidential attempt in 1956, even after he personally appealed to her.
† The Republican party had doubts that Nixon had lost. Some of Nixon’s supporters wanted him to challenge the results. Nixon refused. “Our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis—and I damn well will not be party to creating one,” he is quoted as having said.
24
THE TOURS INSTILLED IN REAGAN A FEELING OF great wisdom. Tragedy had not often touched his life. The end of his first marriage had been a serious setback. Nelle’s recent death on July 25, 1962, had struck him a hard blow, and even with the tender presence of Nancy, it took him several months to recover his usual high spirits. His difficult childhood and youth had prepared him to take tough times in stride. But now they appeared to be over. His years with G.E. had provided a cushion for his future, and through a deal he made shortly after his SAG board resignation he owned a 25 percent interest in the last films he had made for G.E.
One of the first moves that John F. Kennedy made after becoming president of the United States was to name his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general. Robert Kennedy turned his immediate attention to the job of routing out antitrust violations, and MCA received the full thrust of his energy. What the attorney general hoped to prove was “that MCA’s unique position, achieved through the ‘blanket’ waiver of being the only orga nization controlling both a talent agency (MCA Artists, Ltd.) and a television film production company (Revue) is leading inevitably to (a) monopolization of ‘Name’ talent, and (b) monopolization of television film production. We also hope to prove that the grant of this ‘blanket’ waiver was effectuated by a conspiracy between MCA and SAG____”
Reagan was subpoenaed to testify in a private session before the grand jury three months into the investigation, on February 5, 1962. The grand jury was looking for a possible payoff by MCA to Reagan for his aid in securing the SAG grant for the lucrative MCA-SAG waiver. Reagan testified for nearly two hours without a break and acquitted himself well. A month later, the Justice Departme
nt ordered an audit of both Nancy’s (because she had also been on the SAG board) and Reagan’s Internal Revenue tax returns for the years 1952-62. (However, the year 1951, a key year if Reagan was repaying a debt to MCA rather than accepting a bribe, was never investigated.) It was shortly thereafter that G.E. canceled General Electric Theater.
What with Nelle’s death, Reagan spent a stressful summer while the inquiry continued and the IRS audits were being made. Then, on September 18, 1962 (the date that ended MCA’s blanket waiver with the SAG), MCA signed a court-ordered consent decree to divest itself of all its interest as a talent agency. (By this time, Revue Productions earned about ten times the yearly volume of the agency.) The attorney general withdrew his bloodhounds and sent them barking at the heels of organized crime.
Earlier in the year, Reagan had at last registered as a Republican. Loyal Davis, Holmes Tuttle and Justin Dart convinced him to run against the more liberal Republican, Senator Thomas Kuchel, in the upcoming primary. Reagan refused. “The whole notion of entering politics was alien to my thinking,” he insisted. He wanted to get back to “his kind of work,” but he was not being flooded with offers. He no longer had MCA to represent him. He had, in fact, returned to Bill Meiklejohn who, after all these years, was running his own agency again.
Neil had become a top executive with the advertising firm of McCann, Erickson, and had successfully handled many of their television accounts. The firm represented the United States Borax Company, who sponsored a television show called Death Valley Days. “The old boy… (at that time we called him ‘the Old Ranger’) who was the host on the show, he got to the place where he was so old that it took more time for us to shoot the forty-fivesecond opening and forty-five-second close than it did to shoot the half-hour show. Put three words together and he couldn’t remember the middle word, or maybe the last,” Neil recalled. “U.S. Borax agreed that we were going to have to replace him. Well, the question now becomes—who?
“Dutch had just finished the G.E. Theater contract and wasn’t doing anything… so I suggested to the client, ‘What about Reagan?’ He said, ‘Oh, if you can get him, you’re damned right.’ Dutch said, ‘No way, I don’t want to replace [the Old Ranger].’ I got the brilliant idea. Why not go to his agent, Bill Meiklejohn, who was not doing so good and between us we set things up.”
Neil was in the habit of eating his lunch each day at the Hollywood Brown Derby and had the same booth up front for himself on a more-or-less permanent reservation. “One day in walks Dutch and stops at my table. ‘If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have to be here this noon, dressed up with a tie on,’ [he said]. I says, ‘What do you mean, because of me?’ He says, ‘I’m having lunch with Bill Meiklejohn.’ I said, Well, I hope he’s got something for you.’“ Reagan then went to join Meiklejohn at his table. “After lunch, Bill Meiklejohn comes over. ‘Go ahead and write the contract up and send it over to him. He’ll sign it.’ He did.”
Death Valley, California, is supposedly the hottest place in the world, hotter than the Sahara or the Gobi. That’s in the summer, of course. The rest of the year, the temperatures can hit ninety even after the sun goes down, but an occasional wind blows in over the hills swirling the sand into dunes. No one can estimate how many poor souls perished there during the mid-nineteenth century, but the heat hadn’t deterred the wagons from passing through in their westward search for gold. In its half-hour segments, Death Valley Days retold the legends of this land (adding quite a few new ones in the process). These were the kind of stories Reagan loved to read and see. “It worked out all right,” Neil was convinced. “He was happy. There was a little method in my madness that transcended the Death Valley Days thing. It kept him in the public eye for what I figured might be helpful.”
Neil, along with Tuttle and the others, was in there coaxing him to try his hand at politics, but he continued to resist the idea. Nevertheless, he became more active in the campaigns of other Californians running for office on the Republican ticket. In the summer of 1962, he served as a featured speaker at a fund-raising affair for John Rousselot, an avowed John Birch Society member then running for Congress. Reagan, when questioned about his endorsement of a member of such an extremist group, said he did so “automatically, because he was a Republican.” And then he actively campaigned for the extremist candidate Loyd Wright (the same man who had represented Wyman in Reagan’s divorce suit) against Thomas Kuchel.
Nancy had been cast in the role of her dreams, wife of a prominent man, but she did not guess the details of the final screenplay yet. Dr. Davis and all of Reagan’s old friends kept telling her what a great future her husband would have in politics. She confided to one of her friends, “Ron can’t be pushed; he can be coaxed.” When Joan Didion interviewed her about this time, she wrote, “Nancy Reagan has an interested smile, the smile of someone who grew up in comfort and went to Smith College and has a father who is a distinguished neuro-surgeon and a husband who is the definition of Nice Guy, the smile of a woman who seems to be playing out some middle-class American woman’s daydream, circa 1948. The set for this daydream is perfectly dressed, every detail correct.… There on the coffee table in the living room lie precisely the right magazines… Town and Country, Vogue, Time, Life, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Art News. There are two dogs named Lady and Fuzzy and two children named Patti and Ronnie.…”
At forty-three, Nancy’s youthfully spare size-six figure and her air of immaculate chic were still intact. Her short red-brown hair with its gold highlights was lacquered to remain in place even in a high wind. She still favored the color red (new red rugs had been added in the house). She liked music you could dance and sing to—Gershwin, Cole Porter—and the singing of Frank Sinatra. She read current novels, and kept up with magazine articles of topical interest. And she truly loved her husband. “I gauge everything by the birth of my children or when I was married,” she told her mother’s friend Eleanor Harris. “I said, ‘Nancy, people just don’t believe it when you look at Ronnie that way—as though you’re saying, “He’s my hero.” You know what she said to me? She said, ‘But he is my hero.’“
When asked why Reagan had changed parties, Nancy bridled, “Remember when Churchill left the liberal party to join the Conservatives? He said, ‘Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.’ Ronnie feels that way about becoming a Republican.”
As President Kennedy’s term progressed, so did his esteem in the eyes of the nation—and the world. The Kennedys—John, Jackie, John-John and Caroline, Robert and Ethel and their great tribe, Rose and Joe—were the closest the United States had come to having a royal family. By November 1963, just a few months after the president’s forty-sixth birthday, they seemed to be riding an even greater crest of popularity. Nonetheless, Kennedy had made plans to visit first Florida and then Texas to court votes for the upcoming 1964 election. He had lost Florida in 1960, and Texas, though Lyndon Johnson’s home state, was in danger of going over to the affluent, extreme Right. His reception had been overwhelming all along the way, and when he arrived in Dallas on Friday, November 22, 1963, he had every reason to believe that Camelot would last longer than “one brief shining moment.”
No one understood Kennedy’s senseless assassination. The Western world and the new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, inherited none of his laurel wreaths and all of his unsolved and unfinished problems, not the least of them being the Vietnam War.
In August 1964, American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin were attacked by the North Vietnamese and a presidential campaign was in full swing. Johnson stood on a peace platform against Loyal Davis’s friend Barry Goldwater, who proposed the use of nuclear weapons, if necessary, to win the war. Ultraconser-vative Republicans had become united in their support of Gold-water. He was a man “who spoke their language, denouncing Federal matching grants to the states as ‘a mixture of blackmail and bribery.’“ He accused the U.N. Secretariat of brimming with
Red spies (“Get the U.S. out of the U.N. and the U.N. out of the U.S.” was one of his campaign chants). He also stated that if elected he would try to remove the Federal government’s hand in education, agriculture, urban renewal and social security. He was in favor of an equal income-tax rate for rich and poor.
America’s faith in itself was badly shaken with Kennedy’s murder. During the three years that he had served, the people had come to believe as he had that the fulfillment of their historic ambitions was within their sight. His murder immobilized the liberals who weren’t sure they could trust the new president. People thought of the tough, often vulgar Texan as a power-driven man, and Johnson had less than a year to win the country’s confidence.
The Republican party had suffered its own bitter disappointments and setbacks. The conservatives felt betrayed by Eisenhower’s administration and still were reeling from Nixon’s defeat. They wanted power so badly they could taste it, and in their search for a man who they felt could not only stand up to Lyndon Baines Johnson but had the charisma to replace him in the White House, they came up with Senator Barry Morris Goldwater.
The senator was charming, energetic and witty. By press standards, “A damned hard man to dislike.” A big man (6 feet, 185 pounds), he could stand toe to toe with Johnson and look him straight in the eye. The Arizona sun and his love of the outdoors had given his handsome blond looks a salubrious glow. He laughed easily and liked to kid himself. At one Republican fund-raising dinner, he quipped, “Many predict that I might make our finest Civil War President.” His father was Jewish, his mother Episcopalian, and he and his brother and sister had been brought up in their mother’s faith. On the death of his father in 1929, he left his studies at the University of Arizona to enter the family business, a successful string of Arizona department stores headquartered in Phoenix. He became friendly with Justin Dart, who had been sent to Phoenix by Charles Walgreen, his father-in-law.* Goldwater married a friend of Ruth Walgreen Dart’s, Margaret Prescott Johnson, whose father was one of the founders of Borg-Warner Corp., giving him an early connection to big business. A tremendous ambition drove him, and on two occasions (two years apart—1937 and 1939) he suffered nervous collapses that required lengthy “rest” periods. “His nerves broke completely,” Mrs. Goldwater admitted.
