Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  He saw how the financial squeeze affected these people, hardworking people who needed to make every dollar count—people like his father, Jack—and he spoke directly to them. “I was seeing the same people that I grew up with in Dixon, Illinois,” Ronald Reagan recalled. “I realized I was living in a tinsel factory. And this exposure brought me back.” He had advice, meaningful advice, that he wanted, needed, to share. At stake, he maintained, was their very financial security, their seemingly uphill ability to make ends meet. The greatest impediment to that was the “ever-expanding federal government,” a glutton that devoured resources and trampled on individual liberties.

  To develop and support most of these positions, Ronald Reagan studied a virtual library of material that a consortium of GE’s top executives funneled to its employees—corporate bulletins, books, and magazines specifically tailored to educate its workers and middle management while promoting the company’s long-range point of view. An underlying free-market philosophy permeated the propaganda. There was a decided prejudice against ballooning government expenditures and deficit spending. Free enterprise needed to function unencumbered by intrusive federal programs and oppressive taxes. Once he might have disagreed with this view, but now it made perfect sense to Ronnie. He more than fell in line behind the corporate program; he believed it.

  GE was determined not to take a partisan political stand, yet it needed to address what it deemed “external challenges.” That meant supporting candidates in state, congressional, and presidential elections who were sympathetic to the company’s interests; achieving an advantageous balance of power in negotiations with the unions; subduing the company’s ideological competitors; and “spreading its influence beyond industry and finance.” To those ends, it was crucial, as GE saw it, to reeducate its workers and their neighbors—to engage and indoctrinate them at the grassroots level the way the unions did it, so that the workforce would, in effect, influence the broader community by spreading GE’s view of the country, as well as promoting its products. It emphasized “the importance of recognizing each GE employee as a member of the community, with interests broader than the narrow boundaries of his or her job.” The secret weapon would be the community-relations outreach. In Ronald Reagan GE had found its mouthpiece, someone who was “out there, beating the bushes for private enterprise.”

  The program worked like a charm. For one thing, General Electric Theater vaulted to the top of the prime-time ratings chart, with its genial host a nationally recognized figure. His visibility on the show eclipsed his middling movie-star image, making him “one of the most recognized men in the country.” Each time an announcement of Ronald Reagan’s forthcoming visit to a GE plant appeared in a local paper, requests for speeches poured in. This gave GE’s management the luxury to pick and choose which venues would best serve its purposes. Often, GE scheduled a speech at the weekly luncheon of a civic organization, then later the same night at a function—perhaps a reception or a banquet—for another business or community group. “His speech was always the same,” recalled one of the GE chaperones; “he had it polished to perfection.”

  Ronald Reagan’s talking topics—chosen expressly by him, without censorship by GE—were nevertheless in sync with its wishes and hit his audience in exactly the places consistent with the company’s objectives. When he segued from the jokey, let’s-get-acquainted portion of the program into weightier realms, the meat of his speech, he’d remove any barriers between him and his audience to demonstrate how their interests were the same. If Hollywood was paralyzed by antitrust restrictions and government interference, then any government interference—of free enterprise or worship or what we see on TV or read in books—was antithetical to the American way of life. While actors were subjected to excessive tax rates, the average citizen’s pockets were being picked. “Thirty-four percent of your phone bill is taxed, and twenty-seven percent of gas and oil use, and more than a fourth of the automobile you drive is in direct and indirect taxes.” He was plagued by the same outrageous medical bills as everyone else and warned against what he saw as the socialization of medicine. And the outrageous cost of putting food on the table—no wonder when so much of farming was regulated and controlled by the federal government. “Freedom,” he liked to remind his audience, “is never more than one generation from extinction.”

  Ronald Reagan struck the right notes with these listeners, who were muddling through the awkward transition from a wartime economy to the emerging modern world. The changes were coming so fast that they were difficult to absorb. Life in general was increasingly complex, more demanding, less rewarding. The traditional American values of the good ol’ days—the values that were predominant in the Hollywood movies of the 1930s, the white picket fences and Andy Hardy innocence—seemed lost in the balance. “There appears to be a lessening of certain moral standards and certain principles of honesty and honor in our country,” he lamented during an address to a business group, “even a lessening of patriotism.” There was something in Ronald Reagan’s voice and in his face that signaled to his audience that he understood.

  Earl Dunckel, who watched every speech from the sidelines, marveled at the way Ronnie read the disposition of those audiences, how he shifted his remarks in midflight based on how they responded. The man’s antennae, he thought, were “absolutely uncanny” and attuned to perceiving the slightest changes in the crowd’s mood. In time, the Hollywood anecdotes stirred less of a reaction compared with the comments dealing with government regulation and the erosion of personal freedoms. People were dissatisfied with the way things were going in the country. They felt maligned and they wanted more bang for their buck. The working-class community was moving away from FDR’s New Deal progressive policies to a more conservative outlook. They were moving from left to right, and so was Ronald Reagan.

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  His disillusionment with the Democratic Party wasn’t an overnight phenomenon. It had begun soon after World War II ended, almost in sync with his diminishing movie-star status. Ronald Reagan refused to believe that an actor’s popularity—his popularity—could slip so precipitously. Instead, he blamed it on the government’s ham-fisted intrusion—antitrust restrictions that, in his view, were responsible for bringing down the studio system. Once studios felt the pinch, they lost the resources to offer him good stories and better parts. And, of course, elements of the press—“the kind that are addicted to yellow journalism, certain kinds of gossip columnists”—perpetrated “an invasion of our personal and private lives.” The situation gnawed at him. It reflected the larger picture.

  Even though Ronnie’s fortunes dwindled, he somehow had more income taxes to pay. Every time he turned around, the government had its greedy hands in his pocket. This soured him toward the system, a system that he decided was becoming more intrusive. His feeling about it was disquieting, that “a slow invisible tide of socialism was engulfing America, held back only by a few brave businessmen.” He was still on the warpath about the mounting communist threat, and about big government, but now a specific menace, crippling entitlements, grew in his mind. All those wasteful baby-fat programs! Even Social Security, an FDR centerpiece, rankled; in a speech delivered to insurance executives, he floated the idea of making it voluntary.

  Ronald Reagan was balancing a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence. By day, he was the loyal New Deal Democrat, espousing strong unions, fair pricing, and adequate low-cost housing. It was as much a part of his makeup as his Midwestern charm. But come nightfall, when the sun retreated and the like-minded audiences rolled in, a crusading conservative emerged from the shadows.

  Plenty of neighborly advice helped to influence his conversion. Since his marriage to Nancy and move to the Palisades, the Reagans had developed a new circle of Hollywood friends who were fiercely conservative Republicans. Robert Taylor, perhaps Ronnie’s closest friend and a rabid anticommunist, had risen up the ranks in the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for t
he Preservation of American Ideals, as had Robert Arthur, the producer, a frequent Saturday-night companion. Both men and their wives spent long evenings around the dinner table, where hearty helpings of politics were served with every course. Along with conservative proselytizers like George Murphy, Dick Powell, Edgar Bergen, and the irrepressible Neil Reagan, the diehard Republicans laid it on thick. Their arguments were convincing to a man whose faith in progressive New Deal policies was shaken.

  Dana Andrews, who later followed in Ronnie’s footsteps as the president of SAG, laid the change at the feet of Reagan’s current employer. “It was the GE managers of those factories who changed his politics,” Andrews asserted. “They groomed him—and they did a good job of it.” Earl Dunckel, a self-styled “arch-conservative,” made no bones about his own contribution. “I was drumbeating at him all the time,” Dunckel recalled. “Whenever he tried to defend New Dealism, or what was passing for it at the time, we would have some rather spirited arguments.” According to Dunckel, he had no trouble wearing Ronnie down. He struck at a particularly vulnerable Achilles’ heel when they hashed over the union strikes at the movie studios in 1947. Dunckel seized on “the degree to which [Ronnie] was disillusioned” by the seeming communist involvement and went to work exploiting the doubt it had caused.

  Ronald Reagan had supported Harry Truman in 1948 and made speeches on behalf of Hubert Humphrey, the Minneapolis mayor running for the Senate seat in Minnesota occupied by Joe Ball, a conservative who had actually crossed party lines to endorse Franklin D. Roosevelt. Then, in 1952, Ronnie did the same by voting for the Republican presidential candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower. He had never cast a vote for a Republican before.

  It was not without some serious hand-wringing. Ronnie thought some of the issues that the Democratic challenger, Adlai Stevenson, had campaigned on were “intelligent, honest and smacked of greatness.” And he considered Ike’s running mate the bogeyman. In a letter to Sam Harrod II, the son of Ronnie’s old Eureka College benefactor, he warned that Richard Nixon was “a hand-picked errand boy with a pleasing façade and naught but emptiness behind. . . . He is less than honest and he is an ambitious opportunist completely undeserving of the high honor accorded him.”

  His disdain for Nixon came from experience. They had crossed paths on two occasions, and Ronnie never forgave Nixon’s duplicitous shenanigans, especially in 1950, when Ronnie campaigned on behalf of Helen Gahagan Douglas, the wife of his acting pal Melvyn Douglas, who was running against Nixon for the open Senate seat in California. Ronnie admired Helen Douglas’s accomplishments—organizing relief efforts for migrant workers during the Depression, establishing family farms in California’s Central Valley as a hedge against giant agricultural interests, sounding early warnings to women of Hitler’s impending rise, making impassioned pleas for peace in Congress after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Helen Douglas was a good woman who exhibited boundless energy and ingenuity to promote good causes. Nixon’s only strategy against her was to go negative. He chose to smear her as a communist, which she was not, calling her “Pink right down to her underwear,” as though she were an emissary from the Kremlin. “Don’t Vote the Red Ticket, Vote the Red, White and Blue Ticket.” He relied on a mixed bag of dirty tricks to win the election. The behavior reflected his role in the House Un-American Activities Committee putsch, when he joined the gallery of smug Red-hunters pointing accusatory fingers at Hollywood liberals. Ronnie wasn’t taken in by Richard Milhous Nixon.

  Not at first, anyway.

  There was still much to admire about the new president Eisenhower, but GE kept Ronald Reagan too busy speaking to immerse himself in national politics. The intensity of his schedule picked up pace. Eight to sixteen weeks a year were spent on the road. A journalist figured that with the first few circuits under his belt that Ronnie had visited 135 GE plants in twenty-five states and had shaken hands with more than 200,000 of the company’s employees. “We drove him to the utmost limits,” explained Edward Langley, a GE press officer who accompanied him on several of the later tours. “We saturated him in Middle America.”

  The hosting duties at General Electric Theater took up no time at all. “I had television work down to an average of about one day a week,” Ronnie said. That freed up stretches for the pursuit of more lucrative movies. The prospects were slim for a featured actor approaching fifty. The most he got offered were scraps thrown from studio cast-offs. Tennessee’s Partner, a western he made in 1955 with John Payne and Rhonda Fleming, was the kind of ragged Saturday-afternoon matinee that played to raucous teenage boys, and 1957’s Hellcats of the Navy, a low-budget “jingoistic potboiler” in which he co-starred with Nancy, died at the box office, and essentially spelled doom for his movie career. The drop-off in work befuddled Ronald Reagan. He saw himself in the mold of John Wayne, making wide-screen action epics, unable to grasp that his star had faded.

  The important roles disappeared altogether. After Hellcats of the Navy, another movie offer wouldn’t come Ronald Reagan’s way until 1964. And by then, he was on to his next act.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  AN “APPRENTICESHIP FOR PUBLIC LIFE”

  “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.”

  —JOHN, Viscount Morley of Blackburn

  More and more, wherever Ronald Reagan spoke, his remarks dug deep into the anxieties of the heartland. A litany of grievances just poured out of him: the wrongheaded goal of government-paid medicine, excessive Social Security contributions (“Social Security is coming to the end of the road”), an unnecessary $2.5 billion program to alleviate allegedly crowded schools, the myth of underpaid teachers (“The truth is, not one shred of evidence has been presented that federal aid of any kind is required”), the “farm mess” (he was opposed to government subsidies), the progressive tax (“We have received this progressive tax direct from Karl Marx, who designed it as the prime essential of a socialist state”), the national debt, and his favorite whipping boy, “encroaching controls,” all those entitlement programs that “equalize the earnings of our people.” As he pounded the lecterns in those smoke-filled banquet halls to punctuate each injustice, a rhythm built steadily, the timbre of his eloquent voice rose and swelled, jacking up the temperature of the crowds. “He had them in the palm of his hand all night,” recalled Paul Wassmansdorf, a GE advertising manager. “Those people just loved him,” observed William Frye, who produced many of the General Electric Theater segments. “He was unbelievable. He sounded as though he were running for something.”

  The prospect had certainly crossed his mind. From as far back as Illinois, the impulse to stand out and govern was in Ronald Reagan’s DNA. In high school he’d been elected president of the student body, and at Eureka to the influential college senate. The SAG presidency bumped up the wattage exponentially, not only in the amplitude of power but also with the range of its authority, a range that affected economics, legislation—people’s lives. Many of those people had benefited from his leadership, and a few of them suggested that he consider a larger stage.

  As early as 1940, with the world on the brink of war, Dick Powell had tried persuading Ronald Reagan to run for Congress on the Republican ticket. The likelihood of that happening, at the time, was absurdly low. His flag was firmly planted in Democratic soil, and switching parties was unthinkable. It was a nonstarter in 1950 when someone put his name up as a candidate for mayor of Hollywood, an honorary position. That left a cheesy, tinsel aftertaste. Better offers were floated from time to time. Local Democrats had asked him to run for Congress in 1952. Not to be outdone, that same year, Holmes Tuttle, an influential Republican contributor and prominent L.A. businessman, proposed that Reagan seek a Senate seat. Ronnie was flattered—but not even tempted. The urge to act remained too strong; he believed that he still had a full slate of movies ahead of him. “I did not want to leave the entertainment world to go into politics,” he said.

  But signals persi
sted. Every time he ran into Bob Cummings, his former Warner Bros. co-star said, “Someday I’m going to vote for this fellow for president.” And while it was nothing more than playful banter and Ronnie persisted in laughing it off, the sentiment never failed to resonate. Over drinks one night at Trader Vic’s, Robert Stack told him, “You know, you really should think about doing something for this country one day.” He loved having Jack Benny address him as “governor,” or answering to “Mr. President” at guild meetings.

  But nothing satisfied quite as much as the approbation showered on him at the speeches he made for General Electric. These were the kind of people who made America what it was, applauding issues he cared so passionately, perhaps even obsessively, about. They listened carefully to him, these kindred spirits, people whose circumstances were difficult and whose destinies were linked by the dictates of big government. What he said really touched these people. They felt his determination not only to understand their lives, but to help change them by changing legislation. And they, too, pressed Ronald Reagan to seek office. After every speech, there would be a cluster of admirers lying in wait by the door, urging him to run for . . . something, a position where he could put his talents to use in solving the country’s ills. He insisted, unconvincingly to some, that he wasn’t interested. Even fifty years later, he swore, “Never in my wildest dreams did I even consider seeking public office.” But the drumbeat continued.