by Bob Spitz
The California presidential primary was still up for grabs. Ronald Reagan was being positioned as the state’s favorite-son candidate, but in customary form he had refrained from throwing his hat in the ring—or anywhere else, for that matter. Tom Reed, who had been flogging the Reagan cause, was beyond frustrated with the governor’s ambivalence. Reagan kept chanting the same tired mantra: “The office seeks the man.” He was still on the fence.
Richard Nixon wasn’t. But even in July 1967, Richard Nixon seemed like a long shot. Since his defeats by John F. Kennedy in 1960 and by Pat Brown in the 1962 gubernatorial election, he’d been languishing in political purgatory, unable to shake the loser image. What’s more, a survey of potential candidates for 1968 gave Michigan governor George Romney front-runner status, even if by the slimmest of margins. Nelson Rockefeller also lurked in the shadows. Neither Republican moderate was a shoo-in in California, where conservatism was engaging the party, and Nixon smelled an opportunity. Intently, stealthily, he was threading his way toward the primary, “working every state committee meeting since 1966,” according to a Nixon adviser. But Ronald Reagan was blocking his path. If Reagan stepped up and made a credible play for the nomination, he could clearly spell trouble for Nixon. Was Reagan in or out? Nixon sought an answer.
Ronald Reagan had nothing concrete to offer. He was still trying to read the tea leaves, trying to determine whether he had a fighting chance of success. Tom Reed and Lyn Nofziger had turned up the heat. Both die-hard conservatives, they pummeled the governor with flattery to convince him he was the key to victory in 1968. Not only were they fearful of Lyndon Johnson’s reelection, they dreaded the Republican nomination falling to Romney or Rockefeller. “Romney was wooden,” according to Reed. “And the folks in Iowa were never going to trust Rockefeller.” Other contenders, by his estimation, were Pennsylvania governor William Scranton—“charming, but a lightweight”—and James Rhodes from Ohio, “a heavyweight, but close to being a Mafia don.” Nobody, aside from Reagan, really “had it.”
Richard Nixon was a horse of a different color. He was smart, crafty—and a statesman. As his lakeside speech the following morning would reveal, Nixon’s grasp of foreign policy was “close to genius.” And when it came to political strategizing, he made Machiavelli look like Ashley Wilkes.
He let Ronald Reagan monopolize conversation through a light lunch on the deck of Lost Angels. He laughed at Reagan’s jokes, encouraged his Hollywood stories. But afterward, over orange juice laced with vodka, Nixon leaned in to lay out his cards. He wanted to make it official: he had every intention of seeking the Republican nomination, and he wanted Reagan’s endorsement. George Murphy, their host, had already promised to back him. Reagan’s stamp of approval would practically clinch things for Nixon.
Murphy might have been the veteran hoofer, but Ronald Reagan proceeded to tap dance. “Gee, fellas . . .” he hedged. A Nixon endorsement? How could he, with his own plans up in the air. As to whether he was in or out, he was somewhere . . . in between. He’d accepted a full schedule of speaking engagements over the next few months. Perhaps they would help him make up his mind. That was as far as he would go at present.
In the meantime, Nixon’s lakeside speech put a new sheen on his image. He spoke eloquently and convincingly about Asia’s booming economies as a counterweight to the spread of communism; the Soviet Union’s strategic parity with the United States; the importance of expanding bilateral agreements with China and Russia as a way of testing peace. His careful analyses made good sense to the two hundred men seated around that lake whose fortunes depended on an enlightened worldview. “Nixon had a way of converting an entrenched skeptic into a believer,” recalls an ex-skeptic who listened to the speech.
One attendee, at least, remained unconvinced: Ronald Reagan.
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Ronald Reagan didn’t share Nixon’s views on Vietnam—a war in which American forces had lost their ten thousandth airplane by January 1968—and he said as much, every chance he got. He believed the United States had a vested interest in stopping the spread of communism in Southeast Asia and favored a fish-or-cut-bait strategy. Either we should make every effort to win the war or we should withdraw, he insisted. “I’d step up the war and get it over with.” Later, he shot down Muhammad Ali’s attempt to obtain a boxing license in California, saying, “Forget it. That draft-dodger will never fight in my state.”* Nixon refused to commit himself on the war one way or the other. He seemed content enough with the country’s present Vietnam policy. Reagan also advocated eliminating the peacetime draft in favor of a professional Army. His approach, on the surface, was more pugnacious than Nixon’s, and thus took a toll on Reagan as the months wore on. It was clear that Reagan’s ideas resonated with the very conservative segment of the population, but the rest of the country preferred a less strident candidate.
The first indication of the electorate’s preference was revealed on March 11, 1968, as the results of the New Hampshire primary were tallied. Romney and Rockefeller had failed to catch fire, while Nixon racked up a decisive 79 percent of the Republican vote. Democrat Eugene McCarthy, an antiwar poet-senator from Wisconsin who had the temerity to challenge the incumbent president from his own party, nearly defeated LBJ with a head-spinning showing. Reagan, whose name didn’t appear on the ballot, received 362 write-in votes. The strong Democratic antiwar sentiment threw the entire campaign out of joint. Lyndon Johnson became instantly vulnerable. Four days later, Robert Kennedy entered the race.
Ronald Reagan despised Bobby Kennedy, and it would be fair to say the feeling was mutual. Animosity lingered from Kennedy’s McClellan Committee investigation into the relationship between MCA and the Screen Actors Guild. Two weeks after the grand jury testimony, he had subpoenaed Reagan’s tax returns and had them audited, just before General Electric canceled GE Theater. Ronald Reagan read the coincidence as: Kennedy got me fired. Their most recent confrontation, on May 15, 1967, was a heated debate about the Vietnam War on “Town Meeting of the World,” a CBS-TV broadcast, in which Reagan reportedly “destroyed” his opponent. With Kennedy now jumping into the fray, it gave Reagan some extra incentive. “It’s almost as if a big light went on: here is the chance to settle up with that son of a bitch once and for all,” Tom Reed says. “It energized him by two megatons.”
If that wasn’t incentive enough, Reagan got a truckload of it on March 31, two weeks after the New Hampshire primary. That evening, Lyndon Johnson preempted network TV shows to announce that he would not be seeking reelection as President of the United States. It stunned leaders in both parties and sent all potential candidates scrambling to reassess their chances.
“I thought ours were just about nil,” says Reed. “Ron kept insisting he wasn’t a candidate, but he encouraged us to explore the opportunity.” Reed designed a brief tour to help the governor test the waters. It had kicked off on September 28, 1967, in Eureka, Illinois, where Reagan dedicated a library and addressed his alma mater. But the visit had a larger agenda. It was essentially an opportunity to meet Everett Dirksen, the Senate minority leader who hailed from Eureka, and to elicit a token of his support. “Dirksen was very diplomatic,” Reed recalls. “He was primed for Ron to bring up the election, but Reagan never did.” Instead, he entertained the senator with recaps of legendary Eureka football games. Finally, Dirksen blurted out, “Are you in this thing?” To which Reagan replied, “Well, I think the office seeks the man.”
The next day Reagan flew to Columbia, South Carolina. Following a raucous rally at the airport, where he reminded the crowd, “I am not a candidate,” Ronald Reagan addressed a packed house at a Republican fund-raising event organized specifically to stoke Strom Thurmond’s campaign chest. Thurmond held a fistful of important cards. Four years earlier, he’d switched political parties, from Democrat to Republican, and delivered South Carolina—Southern working-class Democrats—for Barry Goldwater. In fact, many experts
saw Thurmond’s conversion as the catalyst that turned the Deep South from blue to red. After the dinner portion of the evening, Thurmond and his sidekick Harry Dent escorted the governor, along with Tom Reed and Lyn Nofziger, to an anteroom of the banquet hall, where they got down to brass tacks. “Strom wanted to know if Ron was going to run,” Reed recalls, “and Reagan kept dancing around the question. Nofziger and I were grinding our teeth.” Finally, Thurmond asked him flat-out: “Do you intend to be a candidate?”
“Well, the office seeks the man.”
Thurmond simply shook his head. “Young man,” he said, “you’ll be president someday—but not this year.”
Reed and Nofziger were beginning to agree.
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Through the spring of 1968, Ronald Reagan kept on the move, burnishing his star. More than half his time was devoted to appearances outside California—whistle-stops in Iowa, Kansas, Texas, Ohio, Illinois, New Mexico, and Arizona, where crowds were reminded that he wasn’t running for office. The former actor insisted he was merely “crusading on behalf of Republican unity.” As the New York Times observed, “He reserved his best acting talents for his current impersonation of a non-candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination.”
For all intents and purposes, Reagan had “pulled the ‘off’ switch,” as one supporter judged it. In the meantime, Reed and Nofziger kept the non-candidate busy speaking to any group or civic association that attracted Republican voters and helped broaden his appeal, with the occasional detour to Washington. On April 4, a small Reagan contingent flew there for a series of meetings with Republican leaders in the House of Representatives and a private audience with J. Edgar Hoover. As they deplaned at Dulles Airport, Lyn Nofziger and Ed Gillenwaters, the governor’s liaison in D.C., delivered the grim news that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot in Memphis. “He’s dead,” Gillenwaters announced.
Reagan was shocked and concerned. He knew what this meant for the country and especially for California, which had experienced its share of civil unrest. By noon the next day, rioting was starting to accelerate in Los Angeles and in black communities along the coast. Hoover informed him that the FBI was monitoring the situation and warned that Washington was set to blow. Against the advice of his handlers, Reagan decided not to cut the visit short. Instead, he delivered a speech at the Women’s National Press Club and then attended an untimely meeting with black community leaders that was intended to soften his image as a hard-liner. Not surprisingly, he found his hosts in an embittered state. “The city’s going up,” a local police officer advised the Reagan entourage soon after they’d arrived. “You’d better get out of here.”
On his way back to the Madison Hotel, waves of rioters could be seen streaming along the Mall. Stores were being looted. Sounds of gunfire echoed in the vicinity. Traffic had choked to a halt, trapping the governor’s limousine in a knot of abandoned cars. “There’s no sense sitting here, let’s just walk,” Reagan suggested. “It’s only six blocks to the hotel.” His security detail insisted he don a pair of dark sunglasses as a disguise. The ruse was predictably lame. Only half a block from the car, he was accosted by a black man in the process of liberating a television set from an appliance store. “Governor Reagan!” the man shouted, his face lighting up. Putting his booty down carefully on the sidewalk, he stretched out a hand. “Can I have your autograph?” The men accompanying Reagan swallowed grins as the governor scrawled his name across a stolen box, but the situation was no laughing matter. Fires had broken out in surrounding neighborhoods as convoys of National Guard units descended, attempting to restore order.
California fared better. When the governor returned home the following day, the streets were relatively unperturbed. Still, the tragedy of Dr. King’s murder served to underscore the woeful state of the country’s race relations that dogged Ronald Reagan throughout the remainder of his term. The man who was raised to be color-blind, who took his black college teammates home rather than subjecting them to discrimination, who proposed scholarships and loans to aid poor minority children, was confronting issues that tested his principles. For all his past open-mindedness, his views were now at odds with those of most black Americans. He denounced militant black leaders and viewed laws promoting fair housing, welfare, and civil rights as benefiting blacks disproportionately, and it put his relationship with black constituents on edge.
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Their support, of course, had little effect on Reagan’s prospects in the ensuing primaries—even though he hadn’t officially declared. Voter turnout in the black communities was infinitesimal when it came to Republicans. In Wisconsin, a nearly all-white electorate gave him 11 percent of the primary vote, and he got twice that in Nebraska, both landslide victories for Richard Nixon. Massachusetts handed its contest to Nelson Rockefeller. A long-shot strategy for a Reagan nomination at the 1968 Republican convention emerged directly from these results. “Conservatives believed that if Nixon did not win on the first ballot, Rockefeller would put up a real fight on the second or third,” says Ed Meese. By keeping himself out of the hostilities, Reagan could lie low as Nixon and Rockefeller pummeled each other. “If Nixon faltered and Ronald Reagan put himself into contention, he would be the successor for sure.”
Other scenarios were being floated. Spiro Agnew, who had just been elected governor of Maryland, showed up in Sacramento to broker a deal. If Reagan was amenable, Agnew could arrange for him to be Rockefeller’s running mate. Or they could switch up the billing, it didn’t matter. “I want a Rockefeller-Reagan ticket either way,” he said, “either Rockefeller-Reagan or Reagan-Rockefeller.” The response to Agnew’s offer drew an immediate thumbs-down. Ronald Reagan had no interest in the number-two spot—he’d already rejected a Nixon-Reagan combo when Dwight Eisenhower proposed it—and as for Rockefeller, their political philosophies stood miles apart.
In the meantime, Nixon continued to rack up impressive wins in the primaries. Even in California, on June 5, where Reagan ran unopposed as the favorite-son candidate, over 50 percent of Republicans failed to cast ballots for him. All eyes were on the Democratic contest, in which Robert Kennedy scored a decisive win over Eugene McCarthy. The jubilation was short-lived. That same night, on his way to celebrate with supporters in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Kennedy was shot while passing through the kitchen. His death two days later shocked the nation and threw the election into disarray.
Ronald Reagan was visibly shaken. “It is a great tragedy,” he wrote to his daughter Patti, “just as it was a great tragedy for his brother.” Reagan admitted having an intimation about Bobby Kennedy’s assassination: “Our friend in Washington [a euphemism for astrologer Jeane Dixon] told me that she foresaw a tragedy for him before the election.” The actual murder, however, hit him hard. “I’ve been here in the office all day, and feeling almost sick most of the time,” he reported to his daughter. “I saw him the day after Bobby was shot, and he was rattled, depressed,” Tom Reed recalls. The violence horrified him. “You could see his attitude change overnight. He’d continue stumping with an eye on the nomination, but the fire was gone.”
Barry Goldwater urged him to get behind Nixon, as did his benefactors, the Kitchen Cabinet, who had already sunk $366,000 into the Reagan effort; if he continued to hedge about his candidacy, they’d turn the spigots off, refusing to raise any more money in support. They were embarrassed by Reagan’s lack of commitment. Hoping to clear the air, William French Smith called a meeting at Reagan’s Pacific Palisades home on June 9, but it devolved into a shouting match between Henry Salvatori, Taft Schreiber, and Justin Dart, the top contributors. Things were coming apart at the seams. As Tom Reed later wrote, “The Reagan machinery, still in place, was a headless juggernaut.”
And out of steam. As Lou Cannon observed, Ronald Reagan had “raised bundles of money for the Republican Party and won many a conservative cheer, bu
t he had barely dented Nixon’s delegate count.” On August 5, 1968, as the Republican convention convened in Miami Beach amid antiwar demonstrations thronging the streets, Reagan clung to his favorite-son status, even allowed his name to be put into contention, but much too late to have an impact. The delegate votes were out of his reach. Nixon closed the deal on the first ballot, and it fell to Ronald Reagan, at two in the morning on August 8, to mount the podium and move for a unanimous vote in support of Nixon.
As he descended the platform, a delegate from South Carolina echoed Strom Thurmond’s prophecy: “Not this year, Ron, but sometime.”
Sometime. The presidency had become more than just a pipe dream. The support for Reagan throughout the state delegations had been palpable, even among Nixon stalwarts. “He had their hearts,” says Stu Spencer, “if not their votes.” Had a floor fight developed, there was reason to believe he could have stolen the nomination on the third or fourth ballots. He’d raised his profile more than a few notches. But now, like that, it had come to an end.
The governor couldn’t wait to get out of the spotlight. Six hours later, as dawn broke over the South Beach shoreline, he and Nancy boarded a cabin cruiser and sailed out into the Keys, as far as they could get from the political tidewaters. That night, he slept fourteen hours—and the next night, too. “It was the greatest relief I’ve ever known,” he recalled. There was a lot to think about. One thing for sure, he “wasn’t ready to be president.”
Not in 1968. But . . . sometime.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE CONSERVATION GOVERNOR
