Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  The biggest victim of discretionary cuts was the state’s precious university system. Since the end of World War II, successive budgets had lavished money on higher education without so much as a glance at the cost. It was the jewel in the crown, sacrosanct. But now a new reality prevailed. The governor, as the San Francisco Chronicle noted, “took his big stick to the entire University administration.” “We would like to welcome the academic community into the cold world of reality with us,” Ronald Reagan told the UC Regents in the weeks immediately after he took office. He was trimming the university’s operating budget by $13 million and ordering the Regents to kick back some $21 million in federal fees generated by UC researchers. What’s more, free tuition for California students, a long-standing and proud tradition, was most likely coming to an end. He proposed initiating a modest yearly $400 fee. The way UC students reacted, it might have been $40,000. On impact, all hell broke loose. Students at Berkeley planned a mass march on the Regents to protest even a nickel’s worth of a levy, while a UC–Santa Barbara faction 2,500 strong descended on the state capitol in a noisy but civil confrontation with the governor.

  “He was having horrific fights with the University of California leadership,” Stu Spencer recalls. The Regents had enjoyed a lifetime of autonomy and were unwilling to kowtow to the disciplines of a budget, much less a governor they viewed as a meddler. “But he was determined to make them toe the line.”

  The skirmish cost UC president Clark Kerr his job. Protesters on the Berkeley campus were rounded up and prosecuted. The FBI and CIA mounted a covert campaign “to harass students, faculty and members of the Board of Regents.” Throughout the honeymoon phase of the Reagan administration, the university fracas dominated the news. “It was a real mess,” Spencer allowed in retrospect.

  Tony Beilenson, the Los Angeles assemblyman, watched from the sidelines, bewildered by the governor’s unfocused initiatives. “It seemed that every place he put his foot, it sunk deeper into political quicksand,” he says. “There was no forward progress being made, no momentum. He kept changing his mind and had difficult dealings with his own Republican base. To many in the legislature, he seemed distracted.”

  Distracted put it mildly. Ronald Reagan was being pulled inside out.

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  Nine days after the election, Tom Reed called the new governor and said, “I want to come talk to you about the prairie fire.” It was an expression Reagan had used often while campaigning in the state: “If we win this election, it will start a prairie fire across the country.” The way he saw it, a conservative win in California was symbolic; it would resurrect the philosophy that got decimated by the Goldwater debacle of 1964. Now Reed nursed greater ambitions.

  The day before meeting with the governor, Reed arrived at the Spencer-Roberts office to give the political strategists a heads-up. The prairie fire was spreading and too hot to contain. “I want you to start laying groundwork for a campaign for the presidency,” he told them. As Reed remembers it, “Their jaws dropped.”

  “Kid,” Stu Spencer sputtered, “what are you talking about?”

  Reed was adamant that the only way to effectively hobble Lyndon Johnson’s reelection bid in 1968 was to run Ronald Reagan against him. No one else measured up against LBJ—not George Romney, the current front-runner, or Nelson Rockefeller or Richard Nixon, all potential candidates. “Ron has the talent, firepower, and momentum to take it all the way,” Reed argued. And preparations for it had to start immediately, he insisted. Spencer considered the prospect less than hopeless. “The guy hadn’t been in office two weeks,” he said. “He wasn’t ready for 1968, much less the immediate job of being governor.”

  Nevertheless, machinery was set in motion to start collecting delegates for a ’68 presidential bid. Reagan knew it was premature, but he was willing to let Reed put out feelers. There were power brokers who needed to be brought on board if a serious run was going to be launched. At a meeting in Pacific Palisades with the Reagans, Phil Battaglia, and Lyn Nofziger, Reed outlined his wish list—Texas Republican chairman Peter O’Donnell, who had orchestrated the election of John Tower, the first Republican senator in the state since the Civil War; Clifford White, a virtuoso delegate collector who’d masterminded the Goldwater nomination; and National Review publisher Bill Rusher. It would be better, they decided, to bypass the Kitchen Cabinet. “Those guys talk too much,” Reed said. Many of them were already committed to Rockefeller and Nixon and would raise hell if Reagan intervened.

  The whole plan seemed far-fetched. The governor ran it by his new legal affairs secretary, Edwin Meese, a short, firepluggish, thirty-five-year-old assistant district attorney from Alameda County who would go on to work for Ronald Reagan for much of his career. “I was opposed to it,” Meese recalls fifty years later. “I felt the governor needed to pay attention to California. He had essentially just been elected, and I got the impression he was not emotionally committed to [a presidential run].”

  That might have been the case, but obligations for it began mounting. Reagan agreed to do some barnstorming throughout the spring of 1967—to Nebraska, for a featured speech at the Young Republicans national convention; on to Montana, where a contingent of western governors met; and afterward in Wyoming, addressing a full slate of Republican governors. At each event, seeds for the presidency were laid, though ambivalently. Stu Spencer had come around on the question of running, but he found these efforts “half-assed” and counterproductive. “This is not being done right,” he complained to Ronald Reagan. “You’ve got to be courting people, be more definite in your goals.” Did he really intend to run for president? Spencer wanted an answer.

  “The office seeks the man,” Reagan responded. It was the kind of artful dodge he often turned to when push came to shove.

  “That’s bullshit!” Spencer countered. “If you want it, you’ve got to go get it.” It infuriated him that a comer like Ronald Reagan was wasting a perfectly good opportunity.

  He wasn’t the only one. Word of these probes eventually leaked out to members of the Kitchen Cabinet, who were exasperated and extremely upset. After all they had contributed to the governorship, they resented being left out in the cold. On July 7, 1967, Holmes Tuttle and Taft Schreiber turned up at Reagan’s home in Los Angeles and, according to Tom Reed, who ushered them in, threw a major tantrum. “They went wild,” Reed recalls. Not only had they underwritten Ron’s entire campaign while he was organizing a presidential run behind their backs, they’d bought him and Nancy a posh house in Sacramento to circumvent the dreaded Governor’s Mansion. They were really frosted. “Ron, what are you doing?” they demanded.

  “The office seeks the man,” he recited.

  The man, they insisted, needed to get his act together. If things continued going downhill in California, there would be no legacy to build a future on, much less a stepping-stone to the presidency. According to Ken Hall, “Those first months were replete with error after error after error. And the mistakes were really gratuitous.” Reagan’s relationship with the state legislators, for instance, was practically nonexistent. He shunned any social interaction with them, and usually left the office by five p.m. each night, avoiding the after-hours period when much of the constructive glad-handing occurred. As far as Bob Monagan, the Republican leader of the Assembly, was concerned, “He wasn’t interested in the legislature at all.” Without its cooperation, it would be next to impossible to move the Reagan agenda forward.

  Others acknowledged the same impasse. George Steffes, a young deputy secretary, blamed the standoff on Lyn Nofziger. “He convinced Reagan that he didn’t need the legislature,” Steffes says. “Lyn told him, ‘We can go directly to the people if they don’t do what we want.’ And Phil Battaglia agreed. They thought all they needed for success was Ronald Reagan. It was a huge mistake.”

  An even larger one than they realized. Before 1967, California had a part-time legislatu
re. The first year of its term lasted only through June; the second year was even shorter and dedicated solely to the budget; the legislature took July and August off. As a result of the abbreviated sessions, the legislators didn’t bring their families to Sacramento. It was a lonely, isolating existence; they had nothing to do during those nights in the city, which meant they went out to eat and drink. Together. Democrats and Republicans. Because of the socializing and the fact that assemblymen were permitted to run for the nomination in both parties—and often got elected by both Democrats and Republicans—the legislature was proudly bipartisan. “There were several Republican leaders in the Assembly who felt alienated by the governor and simply went their own way to work with Democrats on successful issues,” recalls Tony Beilenson, who had a soft spot for many of his Republican counterparts. Harnessing the legislature was key to governing the state. It behooved Ronald Reagan to cultivate a working relationship with them.

  Turning the tide, however, was not a mission easily accomplished. Phil Battaglia, embracing his new power as executive secretary—Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff—had effectively isolated the governor from most spontaneous encounters, including any with lawmakers in the capitol. “Every piece of legislation had to come through Phil,” says Paul Haerle, the administration’s assistant appointments secretary. There wasn’t an area of state government he didn’t hold sway over. Battaglia personally filled important staff positions and made key judicial appointments independent of his boss. He issued official press releases attributed to Ronald Reagan and held court with local reporters, while forbidding others on his staff to speak with the press corps. “He operated as if he were the de facto governor,” Haerle says.

  Battaglia also began laying down roots in Washington, D.C., assuming a Reagan move there sometime in the future. He used his growing influence to sow friendships among congressmen and lobbyists, forging alliances that benefited his own ambitions. Throughout the early summer of 1967, Battaglia and his deputy, Sandy Quinn, shuttled on a state-owned jet between Sacramento and Washington so often that his absence from the governor’s office sparked open resentment among the staff. It fell to Bill Clark, the cabinet secretary, to manage the state’s business that languished as a result, further raising hackles and provoking chatter. “I tried to run everything by [Battaglia], whenever I could find him,” Clark explained, but it was becoming increasingly difficult.

  Clark worked hard to bring the governor up to speed on policy and raise his image with legislators. “I started setting up lunches based on issues and bringing in legislators on an issue-by-issue basis,” Clark recalled. “He seemed to enjoy the give-and-take with them and began experiencing some real success, where none of us thought it possible.” Clark’s most important contribution was the mini-memo, a system tailored to simplify and summarize issues before the Assembly. Each memo was a single page broken into four brief sections: 1) the issue itself; 2) any relevant facts; 3) a brief discussion—pro and con; and 4) recommendations. The last thing Ronald Reagan wanted was to anguish over reams of policy. Issues, he felt, “should be played by ear.” He preferred getting the facts in a nutshell, then making a gut decision. That way, he could dispense with numerous issues at a clip. Refinancing the state Medicaid deficit—kill it. Property tax relief—go for it. Welfare reform—ditto. Funding for the Coronado Bridge—let’s table it. At cabinet meetings around the jumbo rectangular conference table, through a bilious cloud of cigarette smoke discharged by his hyperactive aides, the governor listened intently to discussion, even occasionally joining in himself. “Finally,” he recalled, “when I’ve really heard enough that I know what my decision is, I’d interrupt and say, ‘Well, here’s what we’re going to do,’ boom, and tell them.”

  He liked it that way—cut-and-dried.

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  One bill that couldn’t be as easily dealt with was the Therapeutic Abortion Act, which came before the legislature in April 1967. Before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, individual states had their own abortion laws, most of which prohibited the practice other than to save the life of a mother. “The word ‘abortion’ didn’t even appear in newspapers,” says Tony Beilenson, who first introduced the bill in 1963 and again in 1965. “It was called ‘an illegal surgical procedure.’ It wasn’t a public issue; nobody talked about it.” Beilenson was appalled by the epidemic of back-alley abortions performed by quacks, which criminalized women and often resulted in their mutilation and death. The law was “archaic, barbarous and hypocritical,” he felt, and he vowed to “restore a degree of freedom of choice and of conscience to many thousands of women.” As Beilenson proposed it, the bill would extend the right to an abortion to victims of rape and incest, and in situations where there was risk a child would be born with grave physical or mental defects. Only Colorado and North Carolina had enacted similar laws; California, he felt, needed to move with the times.

  Hearings around the state indicated that public opinion was changing. Field polls revealed that upward of 70 percent of Californians, including 67 percent who were Catholic, favored modernizing the abortion laws. So did the Episcopal Church, the American Baptist Convention, and the Lutheran Church. The State Board of Health, the California Medical Association, and the Junior Chamber of Commerce were also on board, as well as most of the major state newspapers. The only serious opposition was the Catholic Church, which was dead set against any alteration to the law. Priests instructed their flocks from the pulpit to write their legislators demanding they vote against the bill. As an illustration, George Danielson, a state assemblyman on the Judiciary Committee, got three thousand letters—much of it hate mail—from his Catholic constituents, all obviously turned out by churches. On the other side, women’s groups rallied to demand change. These ground forces facing off and politicizing the issue offered a preview of the nationwide controversy to come in the aftermath of Roe.

  The governor’s top aides and members of the Kitchen Cabinet were divided along religious lines. The Catholics—Phil Battaglia and Bill Clark—urged Ronald Reagan to oppose the bill, while Lyn Nofziger, a non-Catholic, lobbied for its support.

  The governor was unable to reach a decision. “I had never given much thought to abortion prior to [this],” he admitted. Although he was a man of deep convictions, the issue rattled his moral certainty. “I suppose I did more soul-searching on that than anything I’d ever faced,” he said. At a press conference on May 9, 1967, he told reporters, “This is not in my mind a clear cut issue,” refusing to reveal any personal feelings. “He was really torn,” Ed Meese recalls. “Basically, he was opposed to the idea of abortion, yet at the same time he realized it was a medical necessity if a woman’s mental state or her health was affected.” For weeks he continued to grapple with the issue. He felt that life began at conception, which both colored and clouded his judgment. Nancy Reagan suggested that her husband take it up with her father who could at least provide some medical perspective. Dr. Davis supported relaxing the abortion laws, but while Reagan respected, even revered, his father-in-law’s opinions, this one failed to sway him one way or the other.

  Early on in the process, Ronald Reagan indicated he would sign the bill if it was passed by the legislature and reached his office, but he was in no way bound by such a commitment. In fact, he let it be known that he’d be grateful if the bill got bottled up in committee. And the lobbying activity began to weigh heavily. The Spencer-Roberts organization’s newest client was Francis Cardinal McIntyre, the archbishop of Los Angeles and a canny political actor. On his orders, priests were dispatched to Sacramento to bring pressure on legislators, and the governor himself was even called to account. Stu Spencer was to recall vividly a meeting he arranged in which His Eminence loomed menacingly over Ronald Reagan. “Young man,” McIntyre intoned in a voice reserved for sermons, “are you thinking of running for the presidency? You realize I’ve got a lot of friends around the country.”

  Reagan was being badger
ed from all sides. Most of the arm-twisting was fairly benign, but not in every case. One young woman, the head of the local antiabortion movement, convinced him that “very rarely has rape ever been followed by pregnancy,” that it was just an excuse for women to solicit abortions. She recited facts and figures to support her argument—how in the event of a rape, standard medical treatment ensured that “no pregnancy takes place.” It was utter nonsense, yet it was enough for the governor to seek changes to the bill. Rape, he insisted, needed to be removed as a blanket condition to sanction abortion. And while they were at it, he wanted the clause on fetal deformity deleted. “I cannot justify morally,” he announced, “taking of the unborn life simply on the supposition that it is going to be less than a perfect human being.”

  Grudgingly, Tony Beilenson amended the bill to satisfy these objections before it passed through the legislature with enough votes to override a possible veto—49 to 30, a rough mix of Democrats and Republicans—on June 14, 1967. Ronald Reagan signed it just as grudgingly. A lingering sense of guilt persisted. “It just finally came to my mind,” he said, “that an abortion was the taking of a human life.” He told Lou Cannon in a 1968 interview that “he never would have signed the bill if he had been more experienced as a governor.” And twenty years later, as he was leaving the presidency, he mentioned it as his one chief regret “in all the years he was governor of California and president of the United States.”

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  Other decisions followed, victories he could stitch together into a larger legislative framework. New judicial appointments were made based on merit by a professional commission, eliminating the practice of political cronyism. He authorized conjugal visits in California prisons. And—perhaps his greatest success—a hard-fought tax “reform” bill (in fact a tax raise) was passed in July, giving him an extra billion dollars toward reducing the budget deficit.