Early Reagan

by Anne Edwards

  As a lieutenant colonel during the war, Goldwater ferried planes across the North Atlantic (he had been a pilot most of his adult life) and saw action in the Mediterranean and China-Burma-India theaters. After the war, he became a major general in the air force reserves and was one of the only senators qualified to fly an air force jet. He had started his political career in Phoenix, when he was elected to the city council in 1949. Three years later, aided by an Eisenhower majority, he helped to break the Democratic grip on Arizona by being elected to the Senate.

  Reagan had met Goldwater just at the time of this great victory. He could not help but admire and identify with the man. Goldwater was a great outdoorsman, an expert pilot, a confident speaker and a power in his own state. During the next twelve years, Reagan often came to Phoenix and saw Goldwater socially. A lot of the same good-humored political arguments he had once had with Hal Gross and Dick Powell he now had with Goldwater and Davis. By 1956, Reagan’s friendship with Goldwater was close enough for the Reagans to christen their son with the middle name “Prescott,” one of Mrs. Goldwater’s family’s names.

  Goldwater had heard Reagan’s 1962 speech to the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce (given elsewhere as well), and he called on Reagan to help his campaign in California. Reagan agreed, but said it would have to wait until his current work was done. He had the Death Valley Days season to complete, as well as an NBC-TV picture, The Killers (produced by Universal and Revue Productions), based on the Ernest Hemingway short story. The story had already been made into a film in 1946 by Universal and had starred Burt Lancaster (his first movie role) as the man marked for death and resigned to die. Reagan had believed that with Hellcats of the Navy his film career was over. But when Bill Meiklejohn suggested he play Browning in The Killers, he could not refuse.

  This remake was to be a part of Project 120, Revue Productions’ series of films for television that would eventually be released to theaters (a new concept in 1964). Reagan was not cast in the Burt Lancaster role (played by John Cassavetes), but as a powerful, violent underworld figure, a type of role—a heavy—that he had never assayed before, and Don Siegel, with whom he had worked on Night Unto Night, was to direct. The decision to take the role had taken courage. The character went against the image his public had of him and, although the part was a challenge, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be seen as a thug and a murderer. Yet, he accepted the film, which was to star Cassavetes, Lee Marvin, Clu Gulager and Angie Dickinson, and received fifth billing for his supporting part.

  The new screenplay lacked the plausibility of the original and had confusing plot shifts. Nonetheless, Don Siegel supplied it with a fast, hard pace and a mood that was reminiscent of some of the early Bogart and Cagney films. In the end it did not work, because Siegel superimposed the realistic violence of a 1964 crime movie upon the background of an earlier period. The use of Technicolor further defeated the somber tone he sought to maintain.

  A Ronald Reagan slapping around (hard) a beautiful, vulnerable Angie Dickinson, a good-guy Reagan as a crook and murderer, even if he is killed for his crimes in the end of the film, was inconceivable to filmgoers. The film’s gratuitous violence barred it from television, the medium for which it had been planned. All in all, The Killers was an unfitting finale to Reagan’s movie career. And yet he gave one of his better acting performances. Siegel had somehow managed to dent his nice-guy armor. Onscreen he is not Ronald Reagan, he is Browning, albeit a crime lord with more charm than most.

  His work in The Killers took only a few weeks. Goldwater had asked for his support, but Reagan was working on another project, his life story (to be titled Where’s the Rest of Me?), with Richard C. Hubler. It was not to be a typical movie-star autobiography. It contained very little gossip and revealed almost nothing about his mature private life. What he deemed important was for the world to see him in the light he saw himself—as much more than a movie actor—as a man of serious intellect capable of withstanding tremendous pressure, a former labor negotiator who won major victories for his membership, and a man of good values and a strong belief in Mom, family and God, an unbigoted smalltown middle-American boy who had never tried to hide from his roots.

  While Hubler was doing the final writing on the book, Reagan decided the time was right for him to make himself more visible in the world of politics. He spoke locally at some Goldwater rallies, and he involved Neil in the senator’s campaign.

  “I got a call from Ronald one day saying, ‘Senator Goldwater is going to call you. He’s been getting all kinds of complaints on some TV spots that have been made by the agency that is handling him and I told him he should call you,’“ Neil recalled. “[The next day] Barry called me… I said, ‘Well what is your problem?’ And he says, ‘Well, I’d like to have somebody bring my problem over and show it to you. I’m getting all kinds of criticisms on my TV commercials [that he did not communicate well].’ I said, ‘Well, Senator, first of all, let me say this. You’ve got an advertising agency, and this really is not Kosher for me to get involved here.’ But, I said, ‘As long as you’re a good friend of my brother’s… I’ll look at the commercial… and I’ll tell you what I think is wrong with it.’

  “Well, he didn’t come over. He sent somebody over with the commercial.… Here sits Barry in the middle of the davenport between two women. The spot opens with the camera on Barry Goldwater and an announcer’s voice-over telling you that Barry Goldwater’s going to be interviewed by these two women… you don’t do a spot with three people on the davenport, because every time that Barry has to now answer this woman over here, he now turns this way, and you’ve got a great shot of his ear.

  “So I told him… ‘If the other spots are like this, you’re throwing money away.’“ Despite the fact that Neil felt it would not be ethical to take Goldwater as a client when he had a contract with another company, he suggested he call the New York office of McCann, Erikson and discuss the situation with them. They said, “We’ll take the account.”

  “I traveled with the senator for sixty-five days on his seven-twenty-seven [used for the campaign],” Neil continued, “… We had to go into Washington every Sunday and Monday, which was all right because then we could do spots on Monday at the CBS Studio in Washington, D.C. [One Monday] a call came through that Reagan was going to do a speech on CBS but that one of the [Republican] sponsors… felt that there were some things in the speech that were counter to points in the Goldwater campaign.… Goldwater took the call and then handed me the phone—why he handed me the phone I don’t know but I listened to the story again—and then I… turned around to Barry and said [this was the day of the night Reagan’s speech was to be broadcast coast to coast], ‘Well there’s one way you can find out whether or not there’s anything in this speech that you do not approve of or that’s counter to what you have been saying in your campaign… we’ll get them to feed just the voice portion of the TV show and you can listen to it.’ Barry said, ‘OK’—I made the arrangements with the network. They fed it through on a spare loop. He listened to it in the control booth and after it was all through, to use an old Barry Goldwater expression, he said, ‘What the hell is wrong with that?’“

  The speech was released over national television the night of October 27, just one week before the election. Called “A Time for Choosing,” it incorporated many of the same themes Reagan had used in his G.E. “Encroaching Control” speech three years earlier and added (or borrowed) some fancy poetic phrases which gave it more grandeur. “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny,” he said (without due credit to FDR for the phrase). “We can preserve for our children this last, best hope of man on earth, or we can sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.” He introduced all his former views on health, housing, farming, industry, commerce, education and government spending.

  “If we fail,” he ended, “at least let our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

  One p
ress team called it, “The most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic Convention with his ‘Cross of Gold’ speech.” Had Goldwater been given the video to watch and not just the sound track of this speech, he might have had more reservations about Reagan presenting it. For Reagan was an actor who had played this same role in hundreds of previous performances. He knew how to use each nuance to make a point, to hold the camera, to make those beyond the camera believe he was speaking directly to them. Very few political personalities could compete. His old imitations of FDR had not gone to waste, nor his close study of Kennedy during the Kennedy-Nixon debates.

  Neil says that the speech brought one million dollars of campaign funds. The problem was that Goldwater’s followers had lost heart for their candidate with Reagan’s appearance. What they wanted was a candidate with Goldwater’s views and Reagan’s charisma. With Reagan, they would have had both.

  Barry Goldwater’s attempt for the presidency failed. The nation chose Lyndon Baines Johnson. The day after the November 4, 1964, election, a group of conservatives in Owosso, Michigan, Thomas Dewey’s birthplace, formed “Republicans for Ronald Reagan.”

  A movie star had retired from his career, and a political star had been born.

  * Barry Goldwater recalls, “The first time I saw Justin Dart he was jerking sodas trying to learn the drugstore business.”

  25

  IN THE TARANTELLA OF POLITICS, SOME MEN HAVE the talent to lead, some to follow. Others, knowing they cannot lead and unsatisfied with being followers, become the men who make the music and, upon occasion, pull the strings that make a political star dance. Reagan had many friends who saw in him a man who had the natural ability to attract followers. This quality does not always suggest that such a person is also a leader. That is a gamble political backers take.

  Charles E. Cook had been a self-made man. He had been born in Enid, Oklahoma, and brought up in El Paso, Texas, where he had been a bank clerk. At the age of twenty he went to California, and within six years had advanced from bank clerk to bank founder. He had also struck up a friendship with Holmes Tuttle, the used-car dealer. Both men were Republicans active in their party. Both men hankered after power. And both men recognized that they did not have the talent to lead. Of the two, perhaps Holmes Tuttle was the driving force. It had been Tuttle’s idea to get Reagan into politics, “not the smoke-filled back room type of thing.” Having met him through Justin Dart in the 1940s, Cook has said that Reagan was never interested in state or local politics, or the idea of having to answer to constituents. After Reagan’s nationwide television address at the end of the Goldwater campaign, Cook and his brother Howard (his business partner) went into action. Within a matter of six weeks, they and five others got up a pot of thirty-six thousand dollars and asked Reagan to run for governor (of California) in 1966. From that moment, Reagan had his eye on the presidency.

  He knew very little about California’s problems, especially those indigenous to the northern part of the state. He had never held office on a local or state level. He was, however, willing to learn. Cook has claimed that even as early as 1964, shortly after Goldwater’s crushing defeat, Reagan was thinking about announcing himself as a 1968 presidential candidate. Cook and Tut-tle worked to convince him his chances would be increased if he had high visibility as governor of California before going for “the big one.”

  Though still silent on his future, Reagan wasted no time in looking like a candidate. On November 10, less than one week after the 1964 election, he appeared as the major speaker at a meeting of the Los Angeles County Young Republicans:

  “We don’t intend to turn the Republican Party over to the traitors in the battle just ended [a jab at Kuchel, who had refused to endorse Goldwater]. We will have no more of those candidates Who are pledged to the same goals of our opposition and who seek bur support… turning the Party over to the so-called moderates wouldn’t make any sense at all.”

  By 1964, Reagan’s old friend Justin Dart was a powerful figure in California politics. Like Reagan, he thought of himself as a “big-issues guy… interested in the national economy and our defense ability, not all these crappy little issues like equal rights or abortion or the Moral Majority or whatever.” Dart’s language Was “habitually littered with profanities ranging from the old fashioned to the coarse,” but he had a commanding self-image. When Dart spoke, he expected people to listen—and Reagan did, for he much admired this masculine, shrewd, unsentimental wheeler-dealer, who was at his best “maneuvering behind closed doors.”

  Through the years, Dart had become one of the party’s most aggressive fund-raisers. He both knew the men and women with money and how to get them to make large contributions. His reputation as a king-maker began when he raised so much money for Eisenhower in 1956 that he and the president became personal friends. Reagan was fortunate to have him on his team.

  “I don’t think he’s the most brilliant man I ever met,” Dart declared, “but I always knew Ron was a real leader—he’s got credibility. He can get on his feet and influence people.”

  The group around Reagan now included Cook, Cy Rubel, Tuttle, Dart and the men he brought in—oil man Henry Sal-vatori,* steel magnate Earle Jorgensen, businessman Jack Wrather and Diners Club millionaire Alfred Bloomingdale, whose wife Betsy became Nancy’s best friend. Nancy never had a coterie of women friends, but she and Betsy got on well.

  Nancy was encouraging Reagan. She knew what it would mean to be a candidate’s wife and the idea appealed to her. In 1965 the big question was, Will Reagan run for governor in 1966? Sheilah Graham found Nancy “tense and cautious” during this time, “not the pleasant girl I had known during her brief career in minor pictures at M.G.M.… A friend of mine bumped into Nancy at the Saks Fifth Avenue store on Wilshire Boulevard [Beverly Hills] and called to tell me, ‘He’s running, she was nice to me.’“

  Graham was at the Reagans’ [in the course of an interview in 1964] when “a telephone call came for him. Ronnie excused himself. He was smiling when he returned. A very silly thing just happened. A group of Republicans asked me if I’d be interested in running for Governor.’ I thought it was too silly to bother to write about. ‘… It’s a wild notion isn’t it?’ he grinned and was off and running about how the newly elected Democrats were ‘leading us to ruin with too much power concentrated in Washington.’“

  Neil remembered that “… he held out a long time after the suggestion was made to him that he run for governor. The group that got together [including] Cy Rubel, who was at that time chairman of the board of the Union Oil Company, and Holmes Tuttle… Ronald trusted Holmes… they saw fit to include me in their group during the long sessions up at the house [San Onofre], which used to start at eight o’clock in the evening and wind up at three or four the next morning, talking to him about running for governor. He was very noncommittal.… [They asked me to join them] because I was his brother [and thought I might influence Reagan].… I kept a very low profile for the meetings, but every once in a while he would call me or I’d call him, and then we’d get to talking about that. And then I’d say, ‘Well, you really ought to give it serious consideration.’“

  If Reagan ran, his opponent would be the incumbent governor (Edmund G.) Pat Brown, a party Democrat with a somewhat lackluster personality. “I have no style and I know it,” Brown once confided to a friend. “I’d give anything to have it, but it’s just not there.” What Brown lacked in personality he made up for in sidewalk politicking—mixing it up with voters, kissing babies, shaking hands. He had also been a good governor, could rely on potent Washington Democrats coming to California to speak on his behalf, and could theoretically count on the registration ratio in the state, where Democrats outnumbered Republicans three to two. The campaign would not be easy. The odds were not in Reagan’s favor, and Northern California was not entranced with the idea of an actor for governor. And also before Reagan could get a whack at Pat Brown, he would have to win in
the Republican primary against George Christopher, former mayor of San Francisco and a moderate.

  By December 1965, Reagan had decided to announce his candidacy, but no public statement was made. He had no previous political experience and “The Friends of Ronald Reagan” (as the group now called themselves) wanted to be sure he would have the best public-relations staff possible. Neil thought the campaign would be handled by his company, McCann, Erickson.

  “Ronald called me one day and said, I want you to have lunch today. Meet me at the [Cave des Roys]… a private club [then on La Cienega and Beverly Boulevard]…. So I met him at eleven-thirty, and he comes over and gets in my car and says, ‘The people we’re going to have lunch with won’t be here until twelve. I want to talk to you.’ And I said, ‘OK.’ And he said, ‘Now, this is an outfit called Spencer-Roberts.’ ‘Who is Spencer-Roberts?’ I don’t know,’ he said, ‘somebody suggested that we might talk to them about handling the campaign. They’ve handled other campaigns.’ I said, ‘Well, I thought that I made it plain that this would go through McCann, Erickson.’ ‘Well, why?’ ‘So I can keep an eye on it.’“

  By the time of this conversation, Stuart Spencer and Bill Roberts were already hired. The final arrangements were that Spencer and Roberts would take care of the purely political areas—speeches, campaigning, press arrangements; and McCann, Erickson would handle all the media advertising.