Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  The first order of business was introducing Ronald Reagan, the citizen politician, to people across the state—party leaders and voters alike. It meant a tour of every city, town, and rural community where he could address small groups, meet with local businessmen, pick up newspaper coverage, and leave, having made an impression that he was serious about the challenges of running the state. Money wasn’t an issue. Ample funds flowed from the Friends of Reagan to keep him out on the hustings for as long as necessary. But the tour was slow getting off the ground. Reagan had never gotten over his fear of planes. “So he would take a train everywhere, or drive,” Nofziger recalled. From the outset, they put in long miles on the road, traveling up, down, and across the state. California was just too big; it covered such a huge, sprawling amount of territory, and train travel limited them to towns directly on the lines. Eventually, the Kitchen Cabinet, the nickname given to the Reagan backers, intervened. If Ron intended to run for governor, they said, he’d have to fly. So they hired puddle jumpers at first. Then once he got his nerve back, they upgraded to the Turkey, a big, old lumbering DC-3, lent to the campaign by a San Joaquin Valley turkey rancher who used it to haul his flock to market. When it hit the runway at the end of a flight, everyone on board threw their heads back and gobbled.

  At first, very few who came out to hear Ronald Reagan were for him. They knew his face, his movies, but they didn’t know him. Most people in the places he visited knew his Republican opponent, George Christopher. He was well liked and respected, especially in the north where the party leaders were horrified by the prospect of anyone running against him. Even though Christopher was an old face on the scene and had twice been defeated in statewide campaigns, as a two-term mayor of San Francisco they’d all done business with him. They’d rubbed shoulders with him at the Union Club, stoked his coffers with contributions. So when Ronald Reagan turned up in their districts asking for support, they tended to disappear. They weren’t about to transfer their hard-earned allegiance to an interloper, particularly not to a Hollywood interloper.

  Sometimes, during visits in the north, his dilettantism was all too evident. At an outdoor event in Clear Lake, an agro-resort community north of Napa County, someone in the crowd asked him, “What are you going to do about the Eel River?” After a moment, Reagan responded, “Where’s the Eel River?” Another voice shouted out, “You’re standing on it!”

  He was a hard sell in the north—and elsewhere. George Christopher, the northern favorite son who appealed to moderate Republicans in many Southern California enclaves, hammered away at what he claimed was Reagan’s “complete and utter lack of qualifications.” His objective was to force Ron on the defensive and, if possible, to tease out his reputed temper. And for a while, it worked. Lyn Nofziger noticed that “it irritated Reagan” when Christopher attacked his inexperience. He resented “the feeling—that this guy didn’t know very much,” and occasionally he’d lash out at his critics.

  A dogfight among Republican challengers was the last thing party leaders wanted. The 1964 election had riven its ranks, with Goldwater “fire-breathers” on one side and Rockefeller moderates, sneered at as “liberals,” on the other. The upshot triggered a bloodbath among down-ballot candidates, ceding most of the state to Democratic control. Now here it was all over again, with Christopher representing the moderates and Reagan the conservatives. A lack of unity threatened to sink their chances in 1966 as well. To stem the divide, Gaylord Parkinson, the California GOP chairman, handed down the so-called Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.” It was actually conceived by deputies of the Reagan campaign who felt it would rein in Christopher from attacking their horse. Each of the candidates even signed a statement agreeing to abide by it.

  “I will have no word of criticism for any Republican,” Ronald Reagan stated during an interview soon afterward. The Eleventh Commandment prevailed.

  Except when it didn’t. The first real challenge to it came on March 7, 1966, when the candidates appeared together at the National Negro Republican Assembly in Santa Monica. It was a peculiar event. Few members had remained loyal to the party after its 1964 presidential platform had rejected the Civil Rights bill. Still, a smattering of black stalwarts clung to the outfit in the hope they could work from the inside to influence the party. It stood to reason that the issue would be raised that afternoon. Almost immediately, a black businessman named Ben Peery stood and put the question to Ronald Reagan. “How are Negro Republicans going to encourage other Negroes to vote for you after your statement that you would not have voted for the Civil Rights bill?” he asked.

  It wasn’t a gotcha question. Reagan had encountered it before and had a standard response that, up to now, had always sufficed. He would have voted for the bill, he said, if it weren’t “a bad piece of legislation.” Bad meaning keyed to a particular race as opposed to all races. Christopher pounced. He began needling Reagan, questioning his ethics. “Contrary to my opponent,” he allowed, “I would have voted for the bill if I had been in Congress.” In his rebuttal Christopher insinuated that those who opposed the bill were out of touch with, and had lost respect for, the black community.

  Ronald Reagan was visibly smoldering. This was the last straw; his temper boiled over. He jumped up, interrupting his opponent. “I want to make a point of personal privilege,” he said. “I resent the implication there is any bigotry in my nature. Don’t anyone ever imply that I lack integrity. I will not stand silent and let anyone imply that—in this or any other group.”

  With that, he wadded up a piece of paper he was clutching, flipped it into the stunned audience, and stomped off the stage. “I’ll get that son of a bitch,” he hissed, elbowing his way through the crowd toward the exit. Lyn Nofziger and Stu Spencer tried shushing him as best they could as the press closed in. Carl Greenberg, a Los Angeles Times reporter, grabbed Spencer by the sleeve and said, “Did I hear ‘motherfucker’?” It was all they could do to hustle Reagan into the car.

  It was an unmitigated public relations disaster. Afterward, Nofziger headed straight to the Reagans’ house, where Ron and Nancy were assessing the damage. “You’ve got to go back,” Nofziger insisted. It was the only way to rescue the situation. The black caucus was holding a reception later that evening, at which time amends could be made. There was no argument from Ronald Reagan. Go back he did, explaining contritely that his anger wasn’t directed at the delegates. He felt any insinuation about bigotry was unjust. “Frankly, I got mad,” he explained. “There are just some things you can’t take as a man.”

  That was enough to mollify the group. Anger at being defined by others was something they understood and respected. But the next morning the newspapers had a field day with the incident. It made headlines in all the major dailies, with a blistering cartoon on the editorial page of the L.A. Times. In a spoof of Reagan’s recently released memoir, Where’s the Rest of Me?, it depicted a caricature of him standing headless, with a caption that said, “I’m looking for the rest of me . . .”

  It wasn’t his last brush with the press—not even that week. On March 12, he addressed a lumber industry trade group, the Western Wood Products Association, at its annual meeting in San Francisco. Playing to their prejudice against tree huggers, he quipped, “If you’ve looked at a hundred thousand acres or so of trees—you know, a tree is a tree. How many more do you need to look at?” It got a good laugh and sustained applause from the crowd. Later, at the group’s reception, someone approached him about the state’s “over-attention” to Redwood National Park. “Look,” Ronald Reagan responded, “it only needs to be a half mile on either side of the freeway. That’s all the people look at.” It sounded funny at the time, and as Tom Reed, who’d accompanied him, noted, “If it’s a good line, he loves to recite it. Often.” But it didn’t sound funny in the papers the next morning.

  Strategists suspected these incidents were killing his chances of attracting crossover
voters, and that might very well have been the case. But they were resonating with Republicans. Even so, Stu Spencer panicked when Reagan announced his intention of taking more questions from his audience at events. “If I’m asking them for their vote, they’ve got a right to find out anything they want to know,” he argued, a good point, though not reassuring. “They were scared to death that he would really foul up,” Lyn Nofziger recalled. “He didn’t really know a heck of a lot about state government.”

  As it turned out, he didn’t have to. Conservative voters were more interested in issues that affected them personally. They felt the cost of providing for their families was becoming unbearable. Runaway taxes were strangling them. There was rising discontent over frivolous cost overruns on new roads and schools. Welfare, in their eyes, was out of control. Civil unrest scared the hell out of them. The hippies had no respect for their middle-class values. These were the issues Ronald Reagan began campaigning on, and his frustration reflected the voters’ frustration. He called for a “moral crusade” to close what he called the “decency gap,” phrases that struck a chord with people who felt alienated by shifts in the culture.

  In Fresno, at the end of a speech, he digressed from the prepared text, launching a broadside on campus unrest that got an especially big reaction from the crowd. He fingered the “small minority of beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates” responsible for protests—he called them “shameful things”—at the University of California. “And if that means kicking them out, kick ’em out!” he declared. Afterward, in the car out of town, Stu Spencer confronted him about going off-message. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Campus unrest isn’t even a blip in our polling data.” Reagan looked at him and winked. “It will be,” he said, “when I get through.”

  Tom Reed concentrated on moving Reagan around the upper part of the state to challenge the standard voting patterns. “The general doctrine was that Christopher was going to carry San Francisco and the north, Reagan would carry the south, and the rest was a toss-up,” he recalled. “So I began fixating on carrying northern California.”

  His efforts paid off. By late spring, the national press was reporting that straw polls showed a sizable lead for Ronald Reagan in the Republican primary, “especially,” the San Francisco Chronicle noted, “in northern California.” This was an entirely unexpected development. And it had far-reaching consequences. Pat Brown, the Democratic incumbent, was rooting for a Reagan victory, handing him a challenger he thought was eminently beatable. Let him sweep the north in the primary, Brown thought. It would give him a nice false sense of security. The north was a Democratic stronghold. Reagan’s support there would evaporate in the general election.

  Brown should have paid more attention to the massing storm clouds. The times, as the poet wrote, were indeed a-changin’ among the California electorate. A migration was under way from the left to the right. Early in 1966, polls had shown George Christopher out front by seventeen points. As the race tightened, his lead was down to two points, with Pat Brown ten points behind both Republican candidates. And by Memorial Day, the tide had turned. The New York Times offered a prediction that “Ronald Reagan has an excellent chance to be the governor of the most populous state in the union.”

  With the election just eight days off and feeling the heat on his neck, Christopher all but abandoned the Eleventh Commandment. He flew to Eureka College in Illinois to stage a last-ditch broadcast on former Reagan turf, citing evidence that his opponent had once belonged to both Americans for Democratic Action and United World Federalists, allegedly Communist front organizations. “Did he jointly sponsor protest on U.S. atomic policies with the chairman of the Communist Party in Los Angeles?” he posited.

  He did, of course, but it didn’t make a bit of difference. The accusations fell on deaf ears. Voters weren’t interested in Cold War rhetoric. Ronald Reagan had hijacked the conversation with a revolving loop of populist issues, taking swipes at outrageous taxes, migrants who abused the state welfare program “to loaf”—to loaf—and an old standby: the encroachment of rights. So what if he rejected the Fair Housing Act? He defended his position by turning the issue away from discrimination. “I have never believed that majority rule has the right to impose on an individual as to what he does with his property,” he said. Observers who surveyed his audience saw people nodding their heads in collective agreement.

  North, south, and everywhere in between, the people were with him. And on June 7, 1966, when the results of the primary election were tallied, the people had spoken. Ronald Reagan had 1,385,550 votes to 663,199 for George Christopher. It was as decisive a victory as the campaign could have hoped for, but still left many scratching their heads. No less an authority than the New York Times noted: California Republicans, “against all counsels of common sense, insisted upon nominating actor Ronald Reagan for governor.” And it wasn’t even close.

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  If the legions of doubters and naysayers had learned one thing, it was not to underestimate Ronald Reagan. So many had made that mistake along the way only to recognize that his glossy surface camouflaged a gift for plain speech that stirred deep emotions. And while the primary seemed to have made this abundantly clear, Pat Brown missed the lesson. He dismissed his opponent as a Goldwater clone who lacked any experience in the political arena. His press secretary, Jack Burby, set the tone early on when he scrawled “‘Bring him on’ is our motto” across a memo to his boss.

  Bring him on. The charge became a rallying cry for a motivated Democratic delegation and a candidate who prided himself as the People’s Governor.

  It was hard to take a cudgel to a man like Edmund “Pat” Brown. Even his adversaries in the legislature felt kindly toward him. “A sweet, nice, all-around lovely guy whose heart was in the right place” was how Anthony Beilenson, a longtime state assemblyman, described him. And Stu Spencer, who sought to vanquish him, considered the governor “not only a good man, but an outright joy when a few beers were involved.” Brown was an old-time Irish pol who never forgot a name and insisted everyone he met forgo formalities and call him Pat. A burly, gregarious, roly-poly man with a wardrobe full of identical baggy suits, he’d built a strong state Democratic machine serviced by unshakable union support, and yet his administration operated on the bedrock of bipartisanship. “There was no ideological divide in Sacramento,” says Kirk West, a Republican legislative aide who became the state’s deputy finance director. No one considered it far off base when he described his politics as being “reasonable, rational and realistic.”

  Brown’s first two terms as governor might have given him the illusion that the fulfillment of initiatives required nothing more than a wave of his wand. He was a dynamo when it came to enacting legislation. In swift succession he oversaw two fair-housing bills and had a fair-employment practice put into place. The construction of great water projects were begun, with a $1.75 billion bond issue to finance them. New prisons and mental facilities were established. He increased benefits for the unemployed, the blind, and the elderly, and was instrumental in building the mazy state freeway system. Even more impressive was his expansion of the state’s higher-education structure into a gold standard for the rest of the country, adding three new university campuses and six state colleges. In all, he superintended a period of growth in California that inspired admiration from coast to coast.

  “We respected him a great deal,” said Stu Spencer, “but he’d had his day.”

  In fact, many thought the state suffered from “Brown fatigue.” Feuding had broken out among his inner circle, stymieing the momentum that had propelled his two terms. And his string of advancements had come at a cost—the state was deeply in debt. To contain the likelihood of a tax increase, he instituted a system called “accrual accounting,” which enabled him to spend fifteen months’ worth of revenues for the twelve-month budget period—in effect borrowing three months’ income from the follow
ing year. Voodoo economics.

  In an ordinary election against a routine Republican challenger, Brown might have been targeted as vulnerable, but against Ronald Reagan, an actor without a whiff of experience—the prospect was unthinkable. Bob Monagan, the Republican minority leader of the State Assembly, took one look at the matchup and declared, “Well, we’ll probably have Pat Brown again.” Politically, Brown still functioned as a force of nature. He’d beaten strong contenders in previous statewide races—William Knowland, a U.S. senator considered a “political giant,” whom he’d defeated by a million votes in 1958; and, four years later, former vice president Richard M. Nixon, whose thrashing by Brown prompted the concession-speech outburst: “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” Tom Reed, chairman of the northern Reagan for Governor campaign, thought that “Brown was going to be a very difficult candidate.”

  Pat Brown went right at Ronald Reagan, portraying him as a dangerous extremist, a “front man” who “collaborated directly with a score of top leaders of the super-secret John Birch Society.” He also accused Reagan of being a “radical rightest who condemns Social Security and other advances as Communist-inspired.” Reagan and his supporters had heard it all before. They’d rejected a platform initiative at the state Republican convention that said, “We should condemn the John Birch Society; they have no place in the Republican Party.” Instead, long before the campaign was launched, they’d worked out a response to elbow aside the controversy: “I’m not going to condemn them or repudiate them. Anyone who chooses to support me has bought my philosophy—I’m not buying theirs.” It became a mantra that Ronald Reagan evoked time and again. As to the charge that he lacked experience, Bill Roberts recalled that it was dealt with by Reagan admitting he wasn’t a politician at all—“he was a citizen politician.” Audiences bought into that the moment they heard it. “Nowhere in the state constitution does it say to be Governor you have to be a professional politician, and I’m not,” he insisted every time he addressed another crowd. Roberts scanned the faces of people who attended those events and imagined them thinking, “Yes, by God, this is the way the country was started, with citizens assuming a responsibility in government.” The strategy was so successful, in fact, that it forced Pat Brown into the position of defending professional politicians, which only fed the public’s skepticism.