Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  There was a broader issue. In 1961 the Justice Department launched a probe into price-fixing in the electrical equipment industry. General Electric was a prime target. Corporate management decided prudence lay in avoiding anything that raised the company’s profile needlessly. Reagan’s attacks on big government did just that. His message hadn’t changed since the Eisenhower era, but the country had. John Kennedy’s election signaled a shift in the political tides, which again flowed in a liberal direction. Reagan bucked the tide, creating turbulence GE didn’t need.

  The company offered to keep him on pitching commercial products if he would stop talking politics. He weighed the offer, not knowing what else he would do for a living. But he decided the reduced stage was too small. He rejected the offer. In 1962 the company canceled The General Electric Theater and severed its relationship with Reagan.

  REAGAN’S UNEMPLOYMENT OCCURRED at the direst moment of the Cold War. The North Atlantic Treaty had given rise to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, under which American troops garrisoned West Germany against potential Soviet attack. The creation of NATO prompted Moscow to create a mirror alliance, the Warsaw Pact, equally ready for war. Tension was chronic and occasionally acute, as in 1961, when communist East Germany unexpectedly built a wall around West Berlin, the portion of the old German capital politically attached to democratic West Germany. But the tension never reached the breaking point, and the overarching story of the Cold War’s European theater was that nothing much happened there.

  This left the superpowers to wrangle over the rest of the world. The Korean War ended equivocally, with a 1953 armistice rather than a peace treaty. Concern shifted south as communists in Indochina forced France to abandon its pretensions of empire there and built a communist regime in northern Vietnam that claimed authority over all of Vietnam. The Eisenhower administration rejected the claim and furnished assistance to an anticommunist regime in southern Vietnam. By the early 1960s this regime was calling itself the government of South Vietnam, and the United States accepted the characterization. American arms and soldiers underscored the acceptance and underpinned the government, whose legitimacy was denied by the communists in North Vietnam and undermined by insurgents in the south.

  The Cold War expanded to Africa and Latin America. The European powers were shedding their African colonies with tardy haste; successor regimes struggled to gain footing and then retain it, amid enticements and less positive forms of motivation from Washington, Moscow, and Beijing. The Chinese added a twist to the competition between West and East by declaring the Soviets insufficiently devoted to the ideals of world revolution. The Kremlin often found itself more vexed by Chinese communists than by American capitalists. The African regimes attempted to negotiate the crosscurrents, with varying success. Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the new Congo republic, leaned too far left for Washington’s taste; the Eisenhower administration authorized attempts to assassinate him. Lumumba wound up dead, although at the hands of his Congolese enemies rather than American agents. Congo gravitated into the American orbit, but the Sino-Soviet-American struggle for political and ideological influence in Africa continued.

  The Cold War reached Latin America after Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba in 1959. The Eisenhower administration declared an economic embargo against Castro’s leftist regime and plotted methods for murdering Castro. Nothing came of the plots before Eisenhower left office, but an operation to topple him militarily was set in motion. The operation envisioned the arming of anti-Castro Cuban exiles who, with American help, would land in Cuba and provide a nucleus for anti-Castro groups within the country. John Kennedy approved the invasion, which quickly became a fiasco. Castro had infiltrated the exiles and knew all about the landing; the invasion was crushed. Kennedy was badly embarrassed; Castro was comparably heartened.

  But the Cuban leader wasn’t so heartened that he didn’t seek protection against a second assault. The obvious place to look was Moscow, which spied a chance to rectify a strategic imbalance vis-à-vis the Americans. The state of the Armageddon art was nuclear-tipped missiles, of which the United States had many more than the Soviet Union. Some of the American missiles were based in Turkey, minutes in flight time from the Kremlin. A Soviet deal with Cuba could enable Moscow to put missiles in America’s backyard and give American leaders a sobering taste of what Soviet leaders had been drinking alone until now.

  The deal was struck. The Russians would get missile bases a hundred miles from American shores; Castro would receive protection against another American assault. Secrecy was essential: if Washington discovered the plan before the missiles were activated, it would be more tempted, rather than less, to invade.

  Construction on the missile sites began, but it hadn’t progressed far before the Americans, who had their own informants, as well as reconnaissance satellites and U-2 spy planes, learned of it. Kennedy pondered possible responses: invasion, air strike, blockade, diplomacy. He held off on invading or bombing, noting that the United States wasn’t at war with Cuba and that Soviet military aid to Cuba was perfectly legal under international law. Yet he left open the possibility of invasion or bombing when he issued a public ultimatum to Nikita Khrushchev to halt the construction and remove any missiles from Cuba. Meanwhile, he imposed a blockade on Soviet shipping to Cuba.

  The world held its breath awaiting Khrushchev’s response. For the Soviet leader to accept Kennedy’s demand would be humiliating, but to reject it might be suicidal for the Soviets and homicidal for millions caught in the cross fire of a nuclear war between the superpowers. After what seemed forever but was actually six days, Khrushchev consented to remove the missiles.

  Kennedy’s advocates claimed a decisive victory. A back-channel bargain that pulled the American missiles from Turkey was not made public. Kennedy’s popular approval rating spiked upward. Looking forward to 1964, when he would run for reelection, Kennedy’s advisers were the heartened ones now.

  But Kennedy didn’t survive until 1964. In November 1963 he was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald. No one but Oswald knew why he did it, and he took his reasons to the grave after he was fatally shot while in police custody, on television, by a nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, whose motives were equally opaque. The tragically bizarre sequence of events inspired conspiracy theories that long outlived everyone involved.

  AND THEY GAVE Reagan the opportunity to publicize his conversion to Republicanism. Since World War II the Republicans had experienced their own version of the kind of internecine squabbling that had split world communism. Republican purists contended that the party had lost its way under Dwight Eisenhower, accommodating Social Security and other aspects of the New Deal and endorsing containment with its ever-growing global and governmental footprint. Republican pragmatists countered that Social Security was too entrenched in the expectations of millions of Americans to be uprooted and that containing communism was essential to American security. The pragmatists pointed to Eisenhower as evidence that moderation won elections. The purists rejoined that moderation might win elections but would cost the party its soul and the nation its future.

  Barry Goldwater wasn’t the purest of the pure, but the Arizona senator was the most politically credible of the comparatively pure. Goldwater’s paternal grandfather had fled Russian Poland in the belief that a Jew without wealth had little future under the czars; he wound up in Phoenix, Arizona, where his son built the region’s largest department store. Barry was born in 1909 and was baptized in the Episcopalian Church of his mother; he identified as Christian his whole life without denying his Jewish antecedents. He worked in the family store until World War II, which opened his eyes to public affairs. He entered politics at the city level before audaciously challenging an incumbent Democrat for one of Arizona’s Senate seats in 1952 and then riding Eisenhower’s Republican coattails to victory. His gratitude didn’t extend to Eisenhower’s pragmatism, and after Goldwater called Eisenhower’s domestic policies a “dime store New Deal,” the preside
nt barely spoke to him.

  But Goldwater’s forthrightness endeared him to his constituents, who reelected him in 1958, and to the millions of Americans who purchased and read his political manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative. Goldwater’s conscience accepted the Cold War, for while he lamented the growth of government he made an exception for big defense, which he considered necessary to meet the communist threat. In fact he thought the United States should take a firmer line against the Russians and their proxies, using nuclear weapons if necessary. Goldwater judged that the real America resided in the rugged West; he remarked, “Sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.” He favored equality for blacks and other minorities, but he opposed federal civil rights legislation on the ground that it intruded unconstitutionally on the prerogatives of the states.

  Goldwater supported Nixon in 1960 out of party loyalty rather than conviction; upon Nixon’s defeat he predicted that conservatives would soon reclaim the party. They did, but not without a fight. Nelson Rockefeller inherited Eisenhower’s moderate mantle as well as family millions that made the New York governor a formidable opponent. Goldwater and Rockefeller squared off during the 1964 primary season, with each winning multiple states. Yet when Goldwater narrowly captured delegate-rich California, the nomination seemed his.

  The moderates nonetheless struggled to stop him. The Republican convention, held at San Francisco’s Cow Palace, was the ugliest anyone in the party could remember. The West Coast venue seemed to favor Goldwater, and it inspired western conservatives who heckled and howled when Rockefeller attempted to address the convention. The nastiness grew personal when the conservatives loudly held Rockefeller’s divorce and remarriage against him; the nation had never elected a divorced man president, and the conservatives didn’t intend for it to start. An eleventh-hour movement to block Goldwater foundered when Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania failed to find traction among the delegates; Scranton’s public complaint to Goldwater that “you have too often casually prescribed nuclear war as a solution to a troubled world” merely inflamed the conservatives the more.

  Goldwater fanned the fire himself in his acceptance speech. The nominee assailed the Democrats for failing to stem the communist tide. “I needn’t remind you, but I will,” he said: “It has been during Democratic years that a billion persons were cast into Communist captivity and their fate cynically sealed.” A Republican administration, a Goldwater administration, would halt the communists in their tracks. “I want to make this abundantly clear: I don’t intend to let peace or freedom be torn from our grasp because of lack of strength or lack of will.” He had been labeled an extremist; coming, as it did, from self-proclaimed moderates, the label was one he welcomed. “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

  The conservatives bellowed their approval and stormed out of the convention hall to take on the Democrats and the world. But they soon discovered what the moderates had been saying all along: the conservatives could nominate a candidate but couldn’t elect him. Within weeks opinion polls showed Goldwater trailing Lyndon Johnson badly, and the Republican candidate’s prospects didn’t improve as the election neared. Johnson was no pushover on defense, as his policy in Vietnam was beginning to demonstrate, and Goldwater’s embrace of the extremist tag frightened voters who were still edgy after the Cuban missile crisis. The Johnson side ran a television spot showing a little girl counting daisy petals; an ominous male voice took over the counting and worked it backward to zero, when the mushroom cloud from a nuclear explosion filled the screen. Viewers were urged, by a calmer voice, to vote for Johnson. “The stakes are too high to stay home.”

  17

  AS A RECENT Democrat, Reagan was well positioned to woo other Democrats to the Republican cause. He spoke on Goldwater’s behalf in California, appealing to the same antigovernment sentiments that had won fellow westerner Goldwater the nomination. But there weren’t enough conservative western Democrats to narrow Johnson’s lead materially. The largest pool of restive Democrats was in the South, where conservatives resented Johnson’s championing of civil rights. A hope to reach these distant Democrats was what lay behind the decision of the Goldwater campaign to broadcast Reagan’s “Time for Choosing” speech nationally.

  The speech was a huge success—for Reagan. It might have done more than it did for Goldwater had the Goldwater campaign been better prepared. The campaign appended an appeal for donations to Reagan’s remarks, and viewers responded by contributing $1 million, a large amount at the time. The Goldwater camp wasn’t expecting it and didn’t know what to do with it. Much of the money remained in the campaign’s account when Goldwater received his drubbing—he garnered less than 39 percent of the popular vote and carried just six states—a week later.

  In American political history, no speech ever did more than Reagan’s to launch a national political career. Lincoln’s 1860 Cooper Union address earned the Illinoisan credibility in the East; William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech won him the 1896 Democratic nomination. But both Lincoln and Bryan had been in politics, been members of Congress. Reagan was a tyro. He had never held political office, never even run for office. He had been a member of his new party barely two years. And with one speech he became the most attractive Republican in America.

  No one realized at the time that Reagan had identified beliefs that would carry him to the highest office in the land and survive a quarter century’s hard use essentially unchanged. Reagan supporters would come to call his October 1964 performance “The Speech,” and its twin themes of smaller government at home and stronger defense abroad would provide the template for the most successful political career of the second half of America’s twentieth century.

  What contemporary viewers did realize was that the former actor made a far more compelling political candidate than the actual candidate. And if Goldwater’s performance at the polls dispirited conservatives, Reagan’s speech gave them something to cheer about. They buried him in fan mail of a new sort. “I’ve never had a mail reaction like this in all my years in show business,” he told a reporter. The consensus among his correspondents was that the Republicans should have nominated him. If Reagan had been on the ballot, the party and the conservative position might have fared better. And he should be on the ballot sometime soon, the writers said.

  Conservatives in Michigan formed a Reagan-for-president committee; Republicans in other states began talking similarly. But a more realistic first race was for California governor. The second term of the incumbent, Democrat Pat Brown, would expire in 1966, giving the Republicans what they considered a reasonable shot at replacing him. The handicapping had already begun, and Reagan’s stirring speech propelled him to the front of the small group of perceived hopefuls. “It’s 14 months away from filing time, but already two prominent Republicans are beginning to think seriously about running for governor,” political analyst Richard Bergholz wrote for the Los Angeles Times shortly after the Goldwater debacle. “One is Ronald Reagan, 53, actor and dyed-in-the-wool believer in Sen. Barry Goldwater’s brand of political conservatism.” The other was George Christopher, formerly mayor of San Francisco and a Republican moderate. “Reagan is the hottest—and the newest—prospect,” Bergholz said. “Articulate, handsome, well-identified, the native of the little Illinois community of Tampico came on big toward the end of the recent presidential campaign … The response: tremendous.”

  Bergholz acknowledged the challenges Reagan would face. George Murphy, the actor, had gone into politics and just been elected to the Senate; some voters might think his victory eased Reagan’s way, but Bergholz judged that it could instead inspire a feeling that one actor in politics was enough. Another handicap was Reagan’s background as a Roosevelt Democrat. “Some of his detractors say his career as a Democrat was ‘pretty liberal
,’ to the point where it might prove embarrassing.” And then there was his lack of experience. Would voters select someone who had never held public office? Perhaps he was too conservative for California, a state that had gone very heavily against Goldwater. “Some political ‘pros’ now are wondering whether Reagan could or would modify his views enough to reach the vast bulk of the Republican voters in California who have demonstrated they don’t want political extremes.” Finally, Reagan didn’t travel by plane. “In a state like this, and in a fast-moving gubernatorial campaign, that’s a severe problem.”

  But Reagan had certain advantages, Bergholz said. His speech had been a huge hit and won him an instant following. His likely Republican opponent, George Christopher, suffered from being from Northern California. “Reagan is a Southlander,” Bergholz said. “And this is where the votes are.” It was also the home of television, which Reagan used so well. “He would be expected to have his greatest pull where his televised image would have the greatest impact. And Southern California yields to no other area when it comes to taking its politics through the electronic tube.”

  Reagan read the columns about him but was canny enough to be noncommittal. He spoke of principles rather than politics. The Goldwater defeat reinforced his conviction that conservatives must stand fast. “The conservative philosophy was not repudiated,” he told a Los Angeles gathering of Young Republicans. These were the zealots of the Republican right, and Reagan gave them what they wanted to hear. He laid the blame for Goldwater’s loss not on the conservatives but on party moderates. Calling the moderates “traitors” to the party, he declared, “We will have no more of those candidates who are pledged to the same socialist goals of our opposition and who seek our support. If after the California presidential primary our opponents had then joined Barry Goldwater at the national convention and pledged their support, we could very well be celebrating a complete victory tonight.” Reagan described the letters and calls he had been receiving from across the country; he said they told him and other conservatives, “Stay together and keep on working.”