Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  To the operatives working the angles, this was a big mistake. “He was running against Reagan instead of on his own [merits],” says Tom Reed, who monitored each of the candidates’ stump speeches. “And once Brown decided not to run as the guy who had created the university system and built the great roads and great water plan, and was just a guy campaigning against extremism, I knew he was done.”

  The challenge for Ronald Reagan was winning over disaffected liberal voters. California was traditionally a solid Democratic state. But the Spencer-Roberts office discovered a new phenomenon that later became known as the Reagan Democrats. The state was full of transplants from Texas and Oklahoma whose granddaddies had migrated to California in search of gold and oil and would turn over in their graves if a scion of theirs didn’t vote Democratic. “Our research showed us that in anywhere from one to two election cycles they would get up in the morning and say, ‘This isn’t the Democratic Party I know,’” says Stu Spencer, “for any number of philosophical reasons.” On issues like campus protest, racial unrest, spending, and taxes, Ronald Reagan’s message was grabbing them. “We could see it developing in South Gate, Torrance, and some portions of Orange County, where there were deep pockets of blue-collar laborers. And we knew Pat Brown was going to have a hell of a time with them.”

  Bill Roberts also identified a segment of potential converts in the rapidly expanding Mexican-American community, where he calculated a solid 25 percent were unhappy with Pat Brown’s policies and lack of meaningful Latino appointments. “Our battle cry was ‘Ya Basta?’” Roberts recalled—Had enough? They slapped it on bumper stickers and plastered telephone poles along with windows of bodegas. Slowly but surely, a coalition was being built.

  Another advantage was party unity. A codicil to the Eleventh Commandment stipulated that whoever lost the Republican primary would support the candidate, no strings attached. Whether that would come off as planned was anybody’s guess, considering the barrage of toxic rhetoric that had been traded during the contest. But Holmes Tuttle and the Kitchen Cabinet had intervened on primary election night to salve wounds. “The minute it became obvious that Reagan was going to win, they went to the Christopher people, threw their arms around them, and asked them to join in the campaign,” recalled William French Smith, who headed a new endeavor, the Campaign Executive Committee, composed almost equally of Christopher and Reagan staff.

  The unity played effectively against the opposition. According to Bill Smith, “The Democrats did everything wrong after the primary.” For one thing, they had campaigned exclusively against George Christopher, certain in their wisdom that he would emerge the victor. Then, finding Reagan in their crosshairs, they began firing potshots that landed wide of the mark.

  The “right-wing extremist” label wasn’t sticking. Nor was the charge about their opponent’s lack of experience. But neither of those indictments compared with the blunder of using a bizarre TV ad to demonize Ronald Reagan. It was entitled Man vs. Actor and began innocently enough, with Pat Brown speaking to an integrated classroom and discussing the success of former Democratic governors. Then, incautiously, he leaped off a cliff. “I’m running against an actor,” he tells a young black female student, “and you know who shot Lincoln, don’tcha?” It was dumbfounding and tasteless, a complete misfire. Ronald Reagan, reflecting on it later, said, “I couldn’t believe the stupidity of it.” He was embarrassed for Pat Brown, as well as for his Hollywood brethren. Even the committed Democrats among them deserted the candidate after that remark.

  Though nowhere near as disastrous, the Reagan campaign had its own advertising woes. Its thirty- and sixty-second television spots were frumpy, hackneyed, distressing to watch. The extras in the ads were superimposed from stock footage of a 1940s theater crowd. In the background of one scene, a 1938 Oldsmobile cruised by. It conveyed the message that “Ronald Reagan is your grandfather’s candidate, not a man for the sixties,” in the words of a senior staff member. Tom Reed delivered a more critical judgment. “It was amateur hour,” he says. “We looked at the ads and said, ‘This is a disaster.’” Responsibility fell to McCann-Erickson, the advertising agency that produced them. Unfortunately, McCann’s executive in charge of the account was its vice president, Neil Reagan.

  In a closed-door meeting, the Executive Committee determined that the ads were counterproductive and unusable. Someone had to tell Ronald Reagan. “I drew the short straw,” Stu Spencer recalls. “I went to Ron and said, ‘We’ve got to make a change.’ He looked up at me and said, ‘I only have one brother.’ End of conversation.”

  In the end, they were forced to go around the Reagan brothers’ backs. “We couldn’t show that crap, so we bootlegged, we went outside,” Spencer explains. They produced their own spots, splicing together clips from revival-type rallies featuring the candidate at his dynamic best, cutting in wildly cheering crowds made up of blacks, Asians, and young enthusiasts. They were a revelation compared with the McCann spots, which were still running as well.

  Moon blew his stack. He raised hell with the Kitchen Cabinet and drew Nancy Reagan into the fray. The north and south factions began whining, pointing fingers at each other; a power struggle between them ensued, threatening to undo all the months of unity and steady progress. A last-minute appearance by Bobby Kennedy endorsing Pat Brown didn’t help. But, oddly, none of the static mattered. Ronald Reagan insulated himself from it. He kept his focus on the message. He insisted to reporters that he was “running scared,” but remained confident, “both inwardly and outwardly.” His popularity continued to increase on the stump, where his theme of commonsense government by citizens resonated, a fact confirmed by the polls. The margins in the south had always been sizable; now new indicators showed him edging ahead in the north. The campaign’s managers had been confident for months. According to Stu Spencer, “We figured by the spring of 1966, the son-of-a-bitch was going to beat Pat Brown.”

  They just never figured by how much. On November 8, 1966, when the votes were tallied, the word “landslide” could be heard throughout the giddy election-night celebrations. Ronald Reagan had beaten Pat Brown by close to a million votes—3,742,913 to 2,749,174. He’d won fifty-five of the state’s fifty-eight counties, carrying traditionally Democratic working-class and suburban precincts, along with strong pockets of Mexican-American communities.

  In the Biltmore Bowl, the same room where thirty years earlier a gangly Ronald Reagan had come to plead his case for an acting audition, he appeared briefly to thank the throng of supporters who unfurled an enormous “Reagan for President” banner. He was fifty-five years old and had finally landed the biggest role of his career, as a leading man in an A-list part: Governor of California.

  PART 3

  GOVERNOR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “PRAIRIE FIRE”

  “We must, I think, take Reaganism seriously. It will be with us for a long time under one guise or another.”

  —JAMES Q. WILSON, 1967

  Ronald Reagan felt at home in the north—in San Francisco, which was a vital, sophisticated city. But Sacramento was another world altogether.

  Situated in the lush, flat valley halfway between Lake Tahoe and San Francisco—the mountains and the bay—Sacramento lacked its own strong, distinct character. Chinese immigrants who settled there to build the railroads called it “Yee Fow,” Second City, and that more or less summed up its ongoing identity crisis. It played a poky second fiddle to San Francisco’s offbeat allegro pulse and “existed as a cowtown” to those snobs farther south. Sacramentans hated the endless comparisons. In fact, there was ample homegrown pride. “It was a very sleepy little town,” says Ken Hall, who served for a time in the governor’s cabinet. “Wonderful people, very community oriented.” C. K. McClatchy, the local newspaper baron who presided over the Bee, christened it “Superior California”—more agricultural, more water sufficient, a more prosperous middle class. Its well-planned grid
of tree-shaded streets provided a lovely symmetry to the ever-expanding urban sprawl, and the city was as handsome and stately as the rivers that framed it. And beyond those rivers, before the first of the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, lay a broad swath of the fertile Central Valley, whose fields and orchards fed the nation. The state capitol was another great badge of honor, but because the legislature was a part-time institution, the legislators put in their minimal three-day workweeks, even leaving their suitcases packed to enable a speedy getaway.

  News of Ronald Reagan’s election as governor threw the city into a tailspin. “We were in shock,” says Burnett Miller, Sacramento’s one-time mayor. “He wasn’t considered a serious politician, and we took pride in the legislators who did vital work here.” Though there had been discontent with Pat Brown at the end, he’d been an open, approachable figure in town, “an affable down-to-earth guy” to whom Sacramento County had delivered a plurality in the election. He’d done a lot in his eight-year term to revitalize the city. “Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, provoked a lot of negative feelings,” says local historian Dr. Steven Avella. The populace was largely Democratic and progressive, the unions strong and inevitably wary. “There was a lot of consternation, people were dazed and confused.”

  There was confusion in the new governor’s camp as well. No sooner had Ronald Reagan taken the oath of office than he realized the burden he’d taken on. “Here we are—now what do we do?” he asked a young volunteer who’d accompanied him to Sacramento. Reality hit hard: he now represented the welfare of nearly twenty million Californians, and without a clue as to how to go about governing them. “I guess I thought more about winning the election than the job to follow,” Reagan admitted later. “Those first days were very dreary, very dark. . . . It just seemed like every day that I came into the office, almost immediately there was someone standing in front of my desk saying, ‘We’ve got a problem.’”

  Pat Brown had been right about one thing: no one involved in the new administration had any experience or knew what to do. “We were not only amateurs,” Lyn Nofziger quipped, “we were novice amateurs.” Governor Reagan had chosen as his chief of staff a young lawyer from Los Angeles named Philip Battaglia who, when it came to state matters, was as green as he was. Bill Roberts and Stu Spencer, who proposed staff assignments, “specifically wanted people who were ordinary citizens, with no prior experience,” and Phil Battaglia fit the bill.

  A short, slight, pious Catholic with olive skin and piercing dark eyes, he was considered “the fair-haired boy” of the Kitchen Cabinet—though he had little hair and less of a reputation for fairness. The appeal was his credentials, which jibed with their financial interests. A partner at Flint and McKay, perhaps the most prestigious white-shoe law firm in Los Angeles, Battaglia moonlighted as president of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, where he distinguished himself as an intractable business wonk. As Southern California chairman of the Reagan for Governor campaign, he built an operation amassing influence and power. “He was a charming, personable guy who was very well organized and got things done,” recalls Richard Quinn, whom everyone called Sandy. “On the other hand, he could be as tough and cruel as a situation required.” His intensity rubbed some people the wrong way. From the outset, he alienated Tom Reed, his campaign counterpart in the north of the state, who saw himself as the governor’s éminence grise. “There was constant jockeying for position,” Quinn says. Reed, from day one, had his eye fixed on Reagan’s running for the presidency and saw Battaglia as an obstacle in the path.

  Phil Battaglia opened the office for business on Monday morning, January 9, 1967, after a four-day lavish inaugural celebration, while the Reagans acclimated themselves to their new surroundings. In late December they’d moved the family into the governor’s mansion at Sixteenth Street and H Street, a rambling old 1870s gingerbread Victorian located in the center of town. Gomez and Morticia Addams would have felt right at home in it. Ronald Reagan took one look at the place and declared it “the most dreary, dismal place in the world.” The house, with its high-ceilinged rooms and narrow halls, had been owned by Albert Gallatin, a hardware merchant who had deeded it to the city at the turn of the twentieth century. Governor George Pardee moved in in 1905, and little upkeep had been done since then. Nancy Reagan decried it as “a wooden firetrap” and “a tinderbox,” which weren’t exaggerations. The beams were riddled with dry rot. A series of ropes that could be hung out the windows on the second floor substituted for fire escapes. The hot water didn’t work. And the location—on Highway 160 at the corner of Sixteenth Street, the main drag from San Francisco that led to Lake Tahoe and Reno—was a traffic nightmare. “It backs up on the American Legion Hall,” Nancy Reagan explained, “where I swear there are vile orgies every night.” Trucks pulling out of the gas station across the street ground gears in a cacophonous fugue that played around the clock. “Those damn trucks!” Reagan complained to staff. “I think they shift gears every time I begin falling asleep.” As far as Nancy was concerned, the place was uninhabitable. The morning after her husband was sworn in, she called his aides and put her foot down: find another place for them to live.

  Governor Reagan had more pressing problems. On November 28, 1966, just days after winning the election, Phil Battaglia, along with a small team of aides that included Caspar Weinberger, had attended a meeting at the capitol with Hale Champion, the state’s outgoing director of finance. “Gentlemen,” Champion said, “I want to introduce you to Roy Ball and Ed Beach;* they know everything that is going on here. I also want you to know that the state is broke. I’m going on a boat trip to San Diego. In fact, I’m leaving right now. The very best of luck to you.” And without another word, he walked out the door.

  Worse than broke—actually in serious debt. With all the new programs that Pat Brown had pushed through, few had questioned what money would pay for them. He’d balanced the budget through the current fiscal year by borrowing from future revenues. It was a scheme Charles Ponzi would have admired. A cursory examination of the state’s books revealed that next year’s spending would exceed income by $250 million, with a shortfall that might run as high as $700 million. Ronald Reagan would have to initiate a tax increase to cover the deficit. It was the worst piece of news an incoming governor could hear.

  “I didn’t realize it would be this bad,” the new governor admitted at a press conference in early January at which he announced the state was in a dire financial crisis.

  It was actually worse. The Medi-Cal program that assisted the needy was running on empty, and swelling welfare benefits were draining the fund’s reserves. Even education, the biggest portion of the state’s budget, was unable to meet the demands of a ballooning school-aged population. Hints that Californians might be charged tuition at state colleges and universities for the first time in history touched off strong protests that spread across campuses. The state was hemorrhaging cash.

  “Here I was, the big conservative who talked of cutting the cost of government, cutting taxes, faced with the realization that there was no way out except to raise taxes,” Reagan concluded. His new, young, untested administration, desperate, put out feelers for outside guidance. At the annual Republican governors’ conference in Colorado Springs, the California delegation—Reagan, Battaglia, Reed, and Nofziger—huddled with Ohio governor James A. Rhodes, who laid out a formula that had rescued his state from insolvency. It was elementary, Rhodes told them: cut appropriations across the board by 10 percent, eliminate as many state workers as possible, and assemble a task force of businessmen to slash government expenses.

  It sounded like a workable plan. No one stopped to consider that Ohio’s problems might be different from California’s. When Governor Reagan faced the television cameras on January 16, he was confident the Ohio template suited his purposes. “Any major business can tighten its belt by ten percent and still maintain the quality and quantity of its operation,” he explained. “So can government . . .
including the university and college systems.” The way he saw it there was no alternative. “Our state has been looted and drained,” he said, laying blame squarely on the Pat Brown era.

  The bloodletting began almost immediately. Early that March, a caucus called the Businessman’s Task Force recommended the elimination of 3,700 jobs in the mental health sector. “We can close hospitals and bring people home to their communities,” the governor said. It looked good on paper, but it was poorly thought out. “The whole system came unglued,” says Ken Hall, “and it blew up in our faces right away.” The newspapers had a field day. In Napa, Auburn, San Bernardino, across the state, editorials lambasted the new administration. “What are you going to do with all these people?” “Governor, you have no facilities for them.” “Their families don’t want them back.” To make matters worse, there had been no communication with the legislators who represented those areas, most of whom were Republicans. And Ronald Reagan was forced to admit, “The roof fell in on the whole thing.”

  Undeterred, the task force kept bulldozing through each department of the state government. Most government maintenance was postponed; any construction requiring new money was halted; updating the fleet of aging state-owned vehicles got deep-sixed; career state employees were laid off. The ax fell on one program after another.