Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  He dodged questions as to whether he would run for governor. A reporter told him a movement was afoot to place his name on the ballot for 1966; if the movement gained strength and the Republicans made him an offer of the nomination, how would he react? Reagan replied, “I hope I could turn it down.”

  But he decided this sounded too negative, and when the enthusiasm persisted, he rephrased his response. He still disclaimed a desire for office but said he couldn’t ignore the will of the people or the call of duty. “I have some other thoughts about where an individual’s responsibility lies despite his tastes and personal desires.”

  THE 1960S WERE the worst of times for conservatives, and the best. Conservatives value tradition and stability, and during the 1960s a confluence of forces challenged tradition and stability in America as rarely before. A century after the Civil War, African Americans demanded that the nation honor the pledges of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The Supreme Court had knocked several bricks from the wall of the Jim Crow system in 1954, when its decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka outlawed segregation in schools. Congress loosened a couple more with the Civil Rights Act of 1957. But as the 1960s began, American blacks, especially in the South, remained largely segregated and disenfranchised.

  They took measures into their own hands. A bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, had vaulted a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. into the national spotlight. Handsome, articulate, and charismatic, King became the face of the civil rights movement. Thousands of blacks, many of them students, rallied in protest of Jim Crow provisions in state laws, municipal codes, and corporate practices. They sat down at segregated lunch counters and refused to leave until arrested. They marched to state capitals and county courthouses to demand to be registered to vote. They endured taunts, threats, and physical violence that ranged from cuffs with fists and blasts from fire hoses to bullets and bombs.

  Their movement would not have succeeded without the modern media, especially television. Americans in the North had long read about Jim Crow in newspapers, magazines, and books, but words on a page, and even photographs, had limited emotional impact. Television dramatically reduced the felt distance between the South and the rest of the country, and it brought the violence visited upon the black protesters into living rooms throughout the land.

  Television never operated more effectively in favor of civil rights than during the summer of 1963. For decades black leaders had tried to organize a protest march to Washington to highlight discrimination in the workplace, in public accommodations, in education, and elsewhere in American life. One thing and then another had postponed the march, but in the centennial year of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, several civil rights groups collaborated to bring it about. The event drew some 200,000 to the National Mall; the highlight was a riveting address by Martin Luther King. “I have a dream,” King said, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The crowd, silent at first, fell into King’s rhythm; millions watching on television were mesmerized and then moved to tears as he riffed on “America the Beautiful” in calling for freedom to ring out across the country. “And when this happens,” he concluded, “when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ ”

  King’s speech lit a fire under the Kennedy administration, which had hesitated to make civil rights a priority lest the president lose the support of white southerners, who had formed a critical element of the Democratic coalition since the Civil War. Kennedy’s allies in Congress advanced a civil rights bill in the autumn of 1963, but the measure had far to go when Kennedy was assassinated that November. Lyndon Johnson inherited the bill, and he brought to civil rights both a passion and a credibility Kennedy had lacked. Johnson’s passion arose from experience teaching Mexican American children in the small town of Cotulla, Texas, where he saw how racial prejudice stunted his pupils’ opportunities and sapped their self-confidence. His credibility came from his southern roots, which let him speak to southerners on their own terms and in their own language.

  It didn’t hurt that Johnson was a master legislator. As Senate majority leader in the 1950s he had perfected the arts of persuasion and coercion essential to successful lawmaking; as president he employed those arts along with the powers of the presidency on behalf of the civil rights bill. Victory came within months, when Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The new law barred most forms of public racial discrimination, opening restaurants, hotels, theaters, and stores to patrons of all races and reinforcing existing laws and rulings mandating equal treatment in schools and the military and at the ballot box. Bolstered by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the new law kicked the props from under the Jim Crow system and guaranteed its rapid dismantling.

  In so doing, it simultaneously laid the groundwork for the resurgence of the party that would make Ronald Reagan president. Hours after signing the civil rights law, Johnson seemed less elated than aide Bill Moyers thought he ought to be. Moyers asked him why. “Because, Bill,” Johnson said, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.”

  OTHER EVENTS DELIVERED California to the Republicans. The civil rights reforms of the Johnson administration moved too slowly for many blacks who lived in America’s large cities, and their frustration and anger at continuing inequality burst into violence. The first wave hit Harlem in the summer of 1964, just days after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. A white policeman fatally shot a black teenager, touching off rioting that lasted five days and caused hundreds of injuries and one death. In the following weeks similar eruptions occurred in Philadelphia, Rochester, and Jersey City.

  The violence leaped to the West Coast, to Reagan’s backyard, the next year. In August 1965 the black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles exploded after police arrested a black motorist for drunk driving. City and state officials hoped to forestall anything like the eastern violence by flooding the neighborhood with police and national guard troops, but the show of force simply elevated the tension. Many thousands of blacks took to the streets; whole blocks went up in flames as arsonists torched white-owned buildings. The local press hesitated to send white reporters into the battle zone, but the Los Angeles Times pulled a black man from its advertising department to cover the story. He quickly realized he needed to act like one of the rioters. “I, too, learned to shout, ‘Burn, baby, burn’ ”—the slogan of the rioters—“after several shots were fired at me,” he wrote. “Luckily none of the bullets hit my car, and luckier still, none hit me.” The destruction was as mystifying as it was appalling. “The rioters were burning their city now, as the insane sometimes mutilate themselves. A great section of Los Angeles was burning, and anyone who didn’t return the crazy password was in danger.” He could gather impressions from his car, but filing his story required him to phone the paper. “I had to do all of my telephoning from street-corner booths in gas stations,” he explained. “You have no idea how naked you can feel in an exposed, lighted telephone booth. But I was hep by that time. Whenever a group of Negroes approached to look me over I k
new what to do. You open the door, stick your head out, and shout, ‘Burn, baby, burn.’ Then you are safe.” Many locals who didn’t participate in the violence, which ultimately exacted 34 deaths and more than a thousand injuries, not to mention tens of millions of dollars in property damage, professed to understand the feelings of the rioters and sympathized. “That’s the hate that hate produced, white man,” a black service station owner told a white reporter. “This ain’t hurting us none. We have nothing to lose. Negroes don’t own the buildings. You never did a decent thing in your life for us, white man.” Another black man said, “This is a grass roots thing, white devil. Negro leaders can’t stop this. The U.S. Army can’t stop this. It just has to run its course.”

  Until the mid-1960s the principal complaint of conservatives against government was that it was growing too large; the riots in Harlem, Watts, and the other cities made them think it was sometimes too small. They demanded stricter enforcement of laws and an increase in the number and power of the police, augmented if necessary by state and federal troops. Meanwhile, they interpreted the riots as another manifestation of the bleeding-heart liberalism that blamed bad behavior not on the misbehavers but on social conditions, in this case poverty and inequality. The conservatives had long alleged that liberalism corroded the American character; they interpreted the riots as confirming evidence.

  OTHER CHALLENGES TO the status quo evoked a similar conservative response. For generations colleges and universities had acted in loco parentis—as surrogate parents—toward their students. But when the children born after World War II began arriving on campuses during the 1960s, they demanded greater autonomy than their elders had enjoyed. They protested restrictions on speech, contending that the First Amendment applied to them as fully as to independent adults. The University of California at Berkeley was the initial hotbed of the protests; leaders and members of the Free Speech Movement there demanded the right to speak their minds even when their speech irked or infuriated those individuals and groups who professed to run the state and the country. The student protesters were fully as arrogant as youth often is; they were often obscene and occasionally violent. They indicted the “establishment” for its complicity in racism; they condemned the “military-industrial complex”—a term they gleefully stole from Dwight Eisenhower—for America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam.

  The antiwar protests particularly irked the conservatives, whose model war was World War II, when the country had been united in the all-out struggle against fascism. Many conservatives branded resistance to the draft as sedition; they judged obstruction of operations at military bases and depots as treason. The conservatives couldn’t decide who was more culpable, the protesters or the government officials who allowed the protests. Many couldn’t fathom why the Johnson administration didn’t insist on a war declaration from Congress and mobilize the country against Asian communism the way Franklin Roosevelt had mobilized the country against fascism—unless Johnson was as foolish or venal as liberals typically were.

  While the protests outraged most conservatives, some concluded that they would be good for conservatism and the country in the long run. Liberals were a lost cause, these political strategists reasoned, but voters would respond to the riots and the student unrest by demanding a return to the verities that had made America great. The political tide would shift in a conservative direction. With the right candidate, conservatism would rule once more.

  18

  RUNNING FOR GOVERNOR—or not running for governor—was not a paying job, and Reagan needed to work. Finding a new gig took time, but eventually he landed another hosting role. Death Valley Days was a rare series with roots in radio that had successfully leaped the media divide into television. Stanley Andrews, playing the part of the “Old Ranger,” had hosted the show since its television debut, but after thirteen years the producers wanted a fresher face. In 1965, Reagan got the part.

  The job kept him in front of the viewing public while he tested the waters for a political run. He tramped about California and occasionally, but significantly, beyond the state speaking to the same kinds of councils, committees, chambers, and boards he had addressed under the General Electric label, but this time in the service of his own brand. He told the Inglewood Chamber of Commerce that the philosophy behind the New Deal and every other attempt at social engineering was morally bankrupt. “Each individual has inalienable rights,” he said. “The acceptance of the statement ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ will not bear up under examination. Our country was founded on the belief in the individual.” He told the Republican Associates of Orange County, meeting at the Disneyland Hotel, that a proposal to withhold state income taxes from California paychecks was designed to lull voters into complacency. “I don’t believe in painless taxes. Everyone should know exactly when he is paying his taxes and how much he is paying.” Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty was hopeless. “It’s just a new pork barrel and a rehash of old ideas that do not work.” The Civil Rights Act was misguided and illegitimate. Reagan didn’t oppose equal treatment for people of different races. “I’m all for it and have been all my life,” he said. But the federal law was “badly written” and trampled the rights of individuals and the states. He condemned Medicare, approved by Congress and signed by Johnson in the summer of 1965, as “socialized medicine.” It was another step down the road to collectivism. “If you can socialize the doctor, you can then socialize the patient.”

  Public opinion polls showed him far ahead of George Christopher and other potential Republican candidates, and the national press began to take notice. “The most startling fact on the listless Republican horizon today is the emergence of Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan as the new messiah of the Goldwater movement,” columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak declared after a Reagan address in Cincinnati. “Indeed, many militant conservative Republicans who paid $100 a plate to swelter at the Cincinnati Gardens and hear Reagan excoriate the welfare state have all but forgotten Barry Goldwater. They talked to us quite seriously of Ronald Reagan running for President in 1968 (though some would prefer Richard M. Nixon as a sacrificial lamb against President Johnson in 1968, saving Reagan for 1972). Preposterous? Not completely.” Evans and Novak explained that though Reagan hadn’t announced for California governor, he was widely expected to do so and to win the Republican nomination. Governor Brown’s fortunes were declining on account of an eighth-year itch in voters exacerbated by popular distress over the demonstrations on the state’s college campuses and especially the Watts riot. Consequently, Reagan appeared, to Evans and Novak at any rate, a cinch to beat Brown in November 1966. And that might be just the start. “As governor of the nation’s most populous state and with the loyalty of the fanatical Goldwater movement behind him, Reagan would be a formidable figure in the Republican Party. This tends to prove that not nearly so much was settled last Nov. 3 as liberal Republicans once thought. Far from admitting that Goldwater-style conservatism spells disaster at the polls, the conservatives now contend all they need is a candidate to package the doctrine in more appetizing fashion. That candidate is Reagan.”

  Evans and Novak profiled the former actor for their readers. “Reagan (though shaky in dealing personally with the press) is an absolute master of the banquet dais. Immaculately groomed and in superb physical condition, the 54-year-old movie hero could pass for 34 from a distance. But his greatest asset is his carefully polished basic speech. It amounts to Barry Goldwater’s doctrine with John F. Kennedy’s technique. Rather than coaxing applause in the time-honored manner, Reagan follows the JFK system of spewing out a profusion of statistics, wit and literary allusions (including one quote from Hilaire Belloc). The audience is too fascinated to clap.” His celebrity power was obvious. “Reagan has captured the same starry-eyed devotion from female Republicans that Goldwater enjoyed. One trim young Cincinnati matron confided that she sat entranced through the Reagan TV speech three times last year. A state government official revealed: ‘My wif
e says she’s going to vote for him for President whether he’s nominated or not.’ ” Yet the road to the top wouldn’t be completely smooth. “Inherent in Reagan’s meteoric rise are the same immutable factors that destroyed Goldwater. In a rambling press conference at Cincinnati, Reagan stumbled into the same ideological traps that undid Goldwater. He equivocated on the John Birch Society, refused to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ about a voluntary approach to Social Security and declared his opposition to the most important provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act … Reagan’s major goal in the California primary campaign will be to keep his devoted right wing militants happy without scaring the wits out of everybody else (a feat Goldwater never managed). For this reason, the coming struggle in California takes on national implications for the Republican Party.”

  William F. Buckley Jr. thought so too. Buckley in the 1950s had laid the intellectual foundations for the modern conservative movement in America; his combative National Review lambasted liberals and provided a home for libertarians, McCarthyites, reformed leftists, and others convinced that America was headed toward collectivist perdition. As a result, he was inclined to approve of Reagan, whose performance during 1965 confirmed the inclination. “He is developing a political know-how which astounds the professionals, who believe that it is immoral that an actor, as distinguished from a haberdasher, should be a good politician,” Buckley pronounced, referencing Harry Truman’s pre-political occupation. Buckley noted that Jesse Unruh, the Democratic speaker of the California state assembly, was paying Reagan sufficient respect to have developed a plan for neutralizing him. “The Unruh strategy is to provoke Ronald Reagan so as to cause him to reveal his ‘mean streak,’ ” Buckley said. “The theory is that if a professionally good man like Ronald Reagan could be got to snarl, c-rrr-ack would go the image built up by 20 years of good-guying on the screen, and the public disillusion would be bitter and purposive.” Buckley was skeptical. “The difficulty with Unruh’s strategy is that if there is a mean streak in Ronald Reagan’s character, it is deeply buried. I have not gone spelunking into his depths, and I would suppose there is a certain amount of bile in his system, as I suppose there was bile in the system of St. Francis of Assisi. But I should think it very unlikely that it would surface under even the severest political provocations.” Unruh and Reagan’s Republican opponents, notably George Christopher, were painting him as an extremist, Buckley observed. Perhaps in the wake of the Goldwater defeat Reagan had spoken harshly of moderates in the party, but now he was the soul of discretion. “He has gone around the state uttering nothing but kindnesses concerning his Republican competitors, denying himself even the pleasure of flirtatious animadversions on the tactics of some of his Republican opponents who preach the necessity of Republican unity by blasting everyone to the right of their impeccable selves. Reagan smiles, continues to speak vigorously his dissent from the wild spending policies of Gov. Brown, and the creeping anarchy whose manifestations at Berkeley and Watts are the big issue in California this year.”