Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  Reagan was formal, even stern, to this point in his speech. His lighter side emerged as he described the budget. “Our fiscal situation has a sorry similarity to the situation of a jet liner out over the North Atlantic, Paris bound. The pilot announced he had news—some good, some bad—and he would give the bad news first. They had lost radio contact; their compass and altimeter were not working; they didn’t know their altitude, direction or where they were headed. Then he gave the good news: they had a 100-mile-an-hour tail wind and they were ahead of schedule.”

  The sternness resumed as he described the fiscal hole the previous administration and legislature had dug and what must be done for California to climb out. Drastic cuts were necessary and would be made. “For many years now, you and I have been shushed like children and told there are no simple answers to the complex problems which are beyond our comprehensions. Well, the truth is, there are simple answers; there just are not easy ones.” The culture of taxing and spending had to be changed. “The time has come to match outgo to income, instead of always doing it the other way around … We are going to squeeze and cut and trim until we reduce the cost of government. It won’t be easy, nor will it be pleasant, and it will involve every department of government … We will put our fiscal house in order. And as we do, we will build those things we need to make our state a better place in which to live and we will enjoy them more, knowing we can afford them and they are paid for.”

  He closed with another anecdote, more touching than the one about the wayward plane. He pointed to the state flag flying over the gather ing and observed that it was smaller than the flag that usually flew there. “There is an explanation. That flag was carried into battle in Vietnam by young men of California. Many will not be coming home.” One young man, Sergeant Robert Howell, did come home, but badly wounded. “He brought that flag back. I thought we would be proud to have it fly over the Capitol today. It might even serve to put our problems in better perspective. It might remind us of the need to give our sons and daughters a cause to believe in and banners to follow. If this is a dream, it is a good dream, worthy of our generation and worth passing on to the next. Let this day mark the beginning.”

  DETAILS OF GOVERNING would rarely interest Reagan. He was an idea man, a purveyor of big principles. Details he left to others. William Clark, who jumped from the campaign to the governor’s office as chief of staff, put it charitably when he said of his boss and the issues that confronted him, “He had the underlying philosophy and the vision in approaching these issues, but he had to rely on expertise.” Reagan’s philosophy and vision would prove his strength; his reliance on others would prove his weakness. Both became apparent in the first big job he faced as governor: balancing the state budget.

  California, like most states, had constitutionally prohibited itself from running a deficit. But its elected officials hadn’t eliminated the temptations that afflict their class when it comes to spending the people’s money. Pat Brown’s parting gift to Reagan was a budget that was balanced only by dint of an egregious fiction: a onetime shift to accounting methods that allowed the state to tally revenues at the time they were levied rather than at the time they were collected. By this means Brown’s last budget was able to claim fifteen months of revenues to cover twelve months of spending. Reagan had criticized the gimmick during the election, and the criticism contributed to Brown’s defeat. But now Reagan had to deal with the consequences, starting with a budget that was impossibly out of balance.

  He tackled the problem by proposing a 10 percent reduction in state spending across the board. This had the merit of simplicity, and it reflected Reagan’s long-standing assertion that government as a whole was bloated. He left to others to defend this program or that; he aimed to slash them all.

  The problem with Reagan’s approach was that it antagonized everyone who looked to any government program for assistance, patronage, or votes. His budget produced no winners, only losers. California’s lawmakers, like lawmakers everywhere, used government spending to build networks of support; Reagan’s plan threatened every such network.

  The new governor didn’t help his cause by refusing to adjust his habits to the political culture of the California capital. Reagan wasn’t a natural socializer. “My father was a very private person,” Ron Reagan observed later. But the governor was expected to socialize. Michael Deaver, who joined William Clark in the governor’s office, explained, “All of those guys who went to Sacramento loved Sacramento, to get to Sacramento, to get away from their wives—it was allegedly a part-time legislature—and go to Frank Fats and Posey’s every night and sit around and chase young staffers and drink. And Reagan went home at six o’clock every night and had a TV tray with Nancy or the kids or whoever was at home and never did that. They were always bitching about that. Why doesn’t he ever do like the governors are supposed to? He’s supposed to have us down to his office at six o’clock at night, pull out a couple of bottles, and we put our feet up on his desk, and that’s how we get things done.” The complaining prompted Reagan to make a modest effort to accommodate. “We finally tried to have the legislators over to the house once a week,” Deaver continued. “We’d pick five or six of them. I don’t think we had the wives. I think we just had the legislators. They would have dinner. Nancy would be there. Then they’d go down in the basement, and they had a pool table down there. It was just awful. It just didn’t work. I mean, he could be charming, and he would have a good time. But it just wasn’t what they—they didn’t want to be at somebody’s house with a wife there.”

  The simpatico gap became apparent as soon as Reagan’s budget was sent to the legislature. The majority Democrats, led by assembly speaker Jesse Unruh, declared it utterly unacceptable. Unruh believed budget writing was the responsibility of the legislative branch of the state government, not the executive branch, and anyway he was happy to cross swords with Reagan, whom he intended to challenge for governor in 1970. Unruh argued that the governor’s budget blindly cut essential programs as well as the wasteful. The Department of Mental Hygiene, for instance, would have to terminate thousands of staff who cared for the mentally impaired. Was the governor willing to accept responsibility for the suffering his cuts would impose on these most vulnerable members of society? Or for the harm the untreated patients might inflict on the rest of society?

  There was a broader problem with Reagan’s budget. Even with the 10 percent cuts it wouldn’t come close to reaching balance. Unruh and the Democrats held that tax increases were unavoidable. The governor needed to acknowledge this before he could expect any cooperation from the legislature.

  In the 1960s, American conservatives prided themselves on fiscal responsibility. They disliked taxes but disliked deficits even more. Reagan shared this set of priorities and consequently suffered no crisis of conscience in proposing a revised budget that included new taxes. All the same, he winced when he saw the headlines his proposal engendered. “RECORD TAX HIKE,” the Los Angeles Times blared in a page-wide head just two months after the governor had inaugurally promised to “match outgo to income” rather than the other way around. The tax increases would total nearly $950 million. And state spending would top $5 billion, another record, and another reversal for the governor who had pledged to “squeeze and cut and trim.”

  The revised budget proposal furnished the basis for a deal with the legislature. Reagan and Unruh wrangled at the margins, with Unruh wanting state income taxes withheld from paychecks and Reagan resisting. Unruh argued that withholding would be fairer to honest taxpayers by making cheating harder; Reagan contended that withholding, by easing the pain of taxes, would simultaneously lessen demands to cut them. Reagan won this round, in part by promising future property tax relief, which Unruh wanted. But so did Reagan, which meant that on withholding he basically got something for nothing.

  By the time the budget passed the legislature and received Reagan’s signature, the tax hike topped $1 billion. Some conservatives complained that the g
overnor had betrayed his principles. Reagan responded that compromise was inherent in democratic politics. “I’m willing to take what I can get,” he told reporter Lou Cannon.

  COMPROMISE CAME HARDER on another bill, but it came nonetheless. Opposition to abortion wasn’t yet a litmus test for conservatives, not least because abortion was generally illegal and had been since the nineteenth century. But attitudes toward abortion changed along with attitudes toward women, and as women assumed greater legal and political freedom during the twentieth century, many began to demand greater control of their reproductive processes as well. The development of oral contraceptives during the 1950s triggered a debate about sexuality and who should speak for women; at about the same time, the birth of deformed babies to mothers who had taken thalidomide, a medication frequently prescribed for morning sickness, produced a desire to consider legal means for terminating high-risk pregnancies.

  California wasn’t the first state to liberalize its abortion laws, but a bill introduced during Reagan’s first year in office was one of the most sweeping. The author, Democrat Anthony Beilenson, had previously co-sponsored a bill in the state assembly to allow abortions to save the life of the mother. He and the bill’s supporters heard testimony describing the gruesome deaths of women who had felt compelled to obtain illegal abortions from incompetent amateur surgeons. But the Catholic Church adamantly opposed the bill, and the measure failed.

  Beilenson tried again in 1967 after moving from the assembly to the state senate. Attitudes toward women and sex continued to evolve, and Beilenson’s new bill gained ground. The measure would allow abortion in cases of rape or incest, in pregnancies in which the physical or mental health of the mother was in danger, or where there was a substantial risk of deformation in the child. As the debate proceeded, the last clause was the one that attracted most of the negative attention. The Catholic Church still condemned abortion under any circumstances, but a growing number of Californians were willing to let women choose to end pregnancies that had been forced on them or that endangered their lives or well-being. Yet even among these, the idea of aborting a pregnancy simply because the infant might be malformed often seemed a step too far.

  Reagan was among this group. He had no profound convictions about abortion, never having considered the matter carefully. If, as a boy, he had followed his father into the Catholic Church, he might have adopted the church’s views without having to think too much. But he had not, and so he had more room to make up his own mind. He was pondering the matter while the Beilenson bill moved forward. “It is a very profound and deep issue,” he told reporters at a capitol news conference. “There are legal questions that have not been resolved yet.” He mentioned “loopholes” in the language regarding statutory rape. Yet the matter that gave him the greatest pause was the provision for abortion of deformed fetuses. “There is a very great question to me as to where we can actually stand, trying to judge in advance of a birth that someone is going to be born a cripple and whether we have the right to decide before birth what cripple would not be allowed to live. We have had some great contributions made to mankind who have been in the technical sense crippled.” The logic behind this part of the bill could lead to infanticide, he said. “Would anyone here advocate that we should, after they are born, make a choice and line up which cripple should be destroyed and which should be saved?”

  Reporters asked if he would veto the bill if it passed the legislature.

  He hadn’t decided. “I’m still waiting,” he said. “I’m not going to make a comment until I see what the bill is.”

  A reporter commented that North Carolina had passed a law that required residency in that state before an abortion could be performed. Would the governor favor such a restriction?

  Reagan said he hadn’t thought about it. But it seemed a good idea. “I’d not want to create a kind of an attraction in the state for this kind of thing.”

  Reporters asked what the governor liked about the bill.

  “Certainly the protection of the mother—the health, the life of the mother—and very frankly I think there is justice in not forcing someone who’s been the victim of a forcible rape or incest to go through with this.”

  Again he was asked his overall verdict.

  “This is not in my mind a clear-cut issue,” he reiterated. “And I just can’t give you a decision.”

  Reagan would have preferred that the bill expire in the legislature. He was no crusader for women’s rights, but neither was he a defender at all costs of the unborn. And yet, as the bill moved forward, he gradually made his peace with most of it. “I am satisfied in my own mind we can morally and logically justify liberalized abortions to protect the health of a mother,” he declared at another news conference. Yet he still had qualms about the deformity clause. “I cannot justify the taking of an unborn life simply on the supposition that the baby may be born less than a perfect human being.” The dangerous next step would be deciding after birth that some had to die, and this, he said, “wouldn’t be much different from what Hitler tried to do.” He repeated himself as he thought aloud: “Where would you draw the line? We’ve had a great many contributions to humanity by persons who are crippled or deformed.”

  But would he veto a bill with the deformity provision? he was asked.

  He still wouldn’t commit. “Don’t put my feet in concrete yet on this,” he said. “I’ve laid my soul bare already.”

  He continued to hope not to have to decide. The bill narrowly passed the senate and moved to the assembly. Hours before the lower house was to vote, Reagan still refused to declare whether he would sign it or not. But when the assembly approved the measure by a surprising 48-to-30 margin, he realized he had to choose, and he decided that the sooner he chose, the better. He signed the bill, saying, “I am confident that the people of California recognize the need and will support the humanitarian goals of the measure.” Yet his doubts surfaced once more in a caveat: “We must be extremely careful to assure that this legislation does not result in making California a haven for those who would come to this state solely for the purpose of taking advantage of California’s new law.”

  20

  MUCH AS THE Watts riot helped the Republicans elect a governor in California, so disturbances in other cities made them think they could elect a president two years later. Summer became the riot season in America during the 1960s; as the temperature rose and tempers grew short, urban police forces braced for violence. The summer of 1967 brought an outburst in Newark in early July, and it was followed two weeks later in Detroit by what could only be called urban warfare. The Detroit violence started, like the violence elsewhere, when police responded to minor trouble and met resistance that then escalated. In the Detroit case the burning, looting, and shooting lasted five days, prompting Michigan governor Romney to dispatch state national guard troops and President Johnson to send U.S. Army forces. More than forty people died in the fighting, hundreds were injured, thousands were arrested, and scores of millions of dollars of property were destroyed. Detroit’s survivors were shell-shocked; Americans elsewhere watched in disbelief and fear that what happened in Detroit might be coming to a city near them.

  Things got worse. Martin Luther King had long preached peaceful resistance to injustice; the principal spokesman for the civil rights movement implored African Americans to eschew violence and exercise their hard-won political rights. King found himself competing with other, more militant voices, including those of Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. In California the militants coalesced behind the Black Panther Party, founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. The Panthers rejected King’s vision of a color-blind America; they preached black nationalism and self-defense. They staged a spectacular protest by storming, armed, into the California state capitol to protest what they called police brutality and the selective enforcement of weapons bans.

  Yet King kept the nonviolent faith and held the respect and affection of millions of African Americans who wanted to
believe that change was possible within the evolving framework of democracy. Then, in April 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis. The motives of the assassin weren’t immediately clear, as he eluded capture for two months, but the reaction among the black community was anger and despair. If King, the apostle of nonviolence, could be gunned down, what hope was there for change within the existing system?

  The King killing triggered the broadest violence to date. Rioting broke out in more than a hundred cities across the country. Anarchy seized Chicago; Washington and Baltimore burst into flames. Scores of people died and many thousands were injured in fires and clashes with police; property damage defied calculation.

  THIS LATEST PHASE of rioting coincided with the season of presidential primaries. Richard Nixon had followed his 1960 loss to John Kennedy with a 1962 loss to Pat Brown in the race for California governor. Some imagined that he then retired from politics, not least because he said, following his loss to Brown, that he was calling it quits. But he unobtrusively gave counsel to Republican candidates, helped them raise money, and positioned himself as the moderate who could steer the party out of the conservative ditch into which Goldwater had driven it in 1964.

  This position gained enormously in value when Johnson unexpectedly withdrew from the contest on the Democratic side. Johnson was thought to be the ultimate politico, the stubborn Texan who would defend his Alamo to the last breath. But Johnson was haunted by fears of impending mortality, having nearly died of a heart attack in 1955, and he knew enough political history to realize that second terms for presidents rarely end well. He had exhausted his political capital persuading Congress to pass his civil rights measures, Medicare, and the other reforms of the Great Society. There was liberal work yet to be done, but he doubted he was the one to do it. Besides, the war in Vietnam had been going badly, despite his cumulative decisions to send more than half a million troops and commensurate resources there. The Southeast Asian conflict took a particularly sobering turn in early 1968, when a communist offensive that started on the Tet holiday demonstrated unexpected strength. Johnson thereupon reversed his war policy and declared his desire for a negotiated settlement; he simultaneously threw in the political towel and said he wouldn’t seek another term as president.