Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  Suddenly Republicans could see a clear path to the White House, unimpeded by incumbency. The waters appeared to part still further when southern Democrats prepared to bolt in protest of the national party’s embrace of civil rights.

  REAGAN SUDDENLY BEGAN to fancy himself the one who would lead his party to the promised land. He had deflected queries about the presidency, saying he had too much to do in California. He permitted his name to be placed in nomination at the Republican convention, but only as a California favorite son; this pro forma gesture would enable the California delegation to draw together behind his candidacy and thereby mend the rift between conservatives and liberals that had vexed the state party since 1964.

  But he started to think that the favorite son of California could become the party’s favorite. Nixon lacked charisma; even his supporters admitted that. His two defeats branded him a loser. And his governing philosophy was suspect, indeed inscrutable. No one could say just where he stood on the moderate-to-conservative axis. Reagan was a loyal Republican, but he was also a conservative. He would back the party’s nominee, but he hoped it would be a conservative. As he looked around, the only credible conservative he could see was himself. A candidate who had the support of the eighty-six-member California delegation, the convention’s largest, would have a head start on everyone else. It wasn’t delusional to think he might attract enough additional votes to boost him over the top.

  In public he remained coy. He was a “noncandidate,” he said. But he let his supporters establish a committee that prepared the groundwork for a campaign. When a pollster found significant support around the country for a Reagan candidacy, he began to qualify his disclaimers. “Naturally I was interested in hearing that,” he said of the pollster’s report. “I’m not going to run away and pretend it isn’t happening. Obviously I’m going to evaluate it.” Asked again if he would seek the presidency, he responded, “The job seeks the man.” To inquiries whether he encouraged those who were working for his candidacy, he responded, “It’s a free country.” What would be his response if he attracted a large write-in vote in the primaries? “I’ll wait till such a thing happens and make a decision then.”

  He undertook a several-state speaking tour that looked remarkably like what candidate Nixon was doing. When he spoke in Boise, Idaho, to a crowd that applauded and shouted with a passion conspicuously denied to Nixon by his audiences, he predicted that the race for the Republican nomination would not be decided in the primaries but would go to the convention, in Miami Beach. Tom Wicker, a columnist for the New York Times, followed Reagan in Idaho and thought he saw a contender. “At close range, Reagan looks and sounds formidable,” Wicker wrote. “He comes on fast and smiling, rocking his audience with a battery of one-liners in the Bob Hope manner … He glides smoothly into a denunciation of big government, welfare, crime in the streets, American foreign policy, and politicians. Before he finishes touching all these exposed political nerves, his audiences are cheering his most innocuous remarks (‘The times cry out for statesmanship,’ he declared last night, to thunderous applause).” Wicker wasn’t about to say that Idaho was the nation’s bellwether. But he quoted a likely convention delegate who said, “The farther west you go, the closer you get to 1964.” In his own words he limned a scenario that could cause the convention to turn to Reagan. “The expectation here is that a pro-Nixon but formally uncommitted delegation will be chosen by Idaho … But the expectation also is that most of the 14 delegates will be Republicans who supported Goldwater in 1964 and who will swing comfortably into the Reagan camp if and when the time comes—maybe on the second or third ballot at Miami Beach.”

  Reagan continued to campaign like a candidate. “The nation is totally out of control,” he told the annual convention of the National Newspaper Association, conveniently meeting in Los Angeles. The current administration and the leading Democratic candidates, including New York senator Robert Kennedy, were encouraging people to expect something for nothing, he said, while proposing nothing to stem the violence in America’s cities and the erosion of American credibility abroad. “Civilization simply cannot afford demagogues in this era of rising expectations. It cannot afford prophets who shout that the road to the promised land lies over the shards of burned and looted cities. It cannot afford politicians who demand that Social Security be tripled without coming up with any plans as to how this impossibility could be accomplished; that a national duty in Vietnam be discarded to provide huge make-work programs in the city slums with the money diverted from Vietnam; that no youth need honor the draft; that Negroes need not obey the law … It is a grand design for the Apocalypse.”

  THE APOCALYPSE CAME closer in June, though not in a way that benefited Reagan. Robert Kennedy was celebrating a crucial victory in the California Democratic primary when a stranger approached him at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and shot him. Kennedy died a day later. The killing seemed to underscore Reagan’s complaint that the country was falling apart, but politics and simple discretion prevented him or anyone else from trying to turn it to personal advantage. If anyone benefited, it was the candidates closest to the political center, those who seemed least likely to evoke strong passions.

  Nixon still didn’t excite voters, but neither did he scare them. And now his work on behalf of other Republicans began to tell. He had scored one primary victory after another in small states, amassing almost enough delegates to claim the nomination on the convention’s first ballot. Nelson Rockefeller ran second and Reagan third. Rockefeller naturally thought that if anyone should benefit from a Nixon failure, it should be him, not Reagan. In any event, the Rockefeller delegates preferred Nixon to Reagan, just as the Reagan delegates preferred Nixon to Rockefeller.

  Nixon recognized this balance of ambivalence before Reagan did. Reagan looked more and more like a candidate as the convention drew near. “I do not believe the nomination is locked up for any candidate and I do believe it will be an open convention,” he telegraphed the chairman of his unofficial campaign committee. “My name will be placed in nomination. Obviously at that time I can be considered a candidate by any delegate so inclined.” Lest his availability be in any continuing doubt, he added, “I have never subscribed to the Sherman statement”—in which Civil War hero William T. Sherman had said that if nominated he would not run and if elected would not serve. “Indeed it is my belief that any citizen’s response should be the direct opposite.” Reagan’s backers spread stories that Nixon’s support in the South was soft and uncertain. “These delegates are still looking,” one said. Another declared that if Nixon didn’t win at the start of the convention, he wouldn’t win at all. “The front runner cannot lose strength or he’s dead.”

  Reagan nonetheless retained the formal pretense of noncandidacy. “I have not solicited and will not solicit,” he said. Yet he traveled to the South in search of delegates. In Birmingham he met with some hundred delegates and alternates and tried to reassure them that defection from Nixon would not hand the nomination to Rockefeller. One delegate asked Reagan if he would endorse Nixon if the race came down to a Nixon-Rockefeller contest. Reagan answered obliquely: “It is inconceivable to me that anyone who could support Dick or me could support Nelson Rockefeller.” In Texas he was asked if he would run harder and more openly, should he receive the nomination, than he was running now. “I won’t be a reluctant candidate,” he said. “I’ll run like hell.” He met Strom Thurmond in South Carolina; the formerly Democratic and currently Republican senator took him aside and offered unwelcome encouragement. “Young man, you’ll be president some day,” Thurmond said. “But not this year.”

  Rockefeller’s advisers took heart from Reagan’s more open campaigning. They agreed that Nixon’s southern support was soft, and they expected that Reagan would steal some Nixon delegates before the convention began. Nixon would fall short of victory on the first ballot, and his weakness would feed on itself in the second ballot. “At that point the convention will be wide open,” a Roc
kefeller man predicted.

  Reagan and Rockefeller both traveled to Miami to sap Nixon’s strength. The Rockefeller group continued to lowball Nixon’s committed delegate count, while Reagan’s people, recalling his speech-making magic of 1964, tried to finagle an appearance in front of the convention as a whole.

  But Nixon demonstrated the benefits of long experience in politics. He let southerners know he wouldn’t select a liberal running mate, and he persuaded minor favorite sons not to throw their delegates to Rockefeller or Reagan. Most crucially, he kept Reagan off the stage.

  Nixon’s delegates held firm; the defections hoped for by the Reagan and Rockefeller camps failed to occur. Nixon won a majority on the first ballot.

  Only at this point did he let Reagan in front of the cameras. He permitted Reagan to address the convention and recommend that the decision be made unanimous.

  Reagan did what was expected of him. The party had chosen, he said, and now must unite behind its nominee. “This nation cannot survive four more years of the kind of policies that have been guiding us.” The delegates bellowed their approval, although how many were approving the message and how many the speaker was impossible to say.

  21

  FOR A PERSON who remembered college with lyrical fondness, Reagan got great political mileage out of bashing the University of California. Probably, as in certain other areas of politics, he was compensating for the youthful liberalism he had abandoned with maturity. Likely the very fondness with which he remembered Eureka College made it impossible for any other institution to measure up. Possibly he resented the intellectual elitism of the University of California, which by the 1960s was sufficiently selective that a mediocre student like himself would have had difficulty gaining admission. The further irony that his first taste of politics had come in a student revolt against the administration of Eureka seems to have been lost on him entirely.

  Reagan took special pleasure in attacking the California flagship campus in Berkeley. “The overwhelming majority of the young people at that university are seriously intent on getting an education,” he had said while a candidate for governor. “But a vacillating administration has permitted a fractional minority of beatniks, filthy-speech advocates and malcontents to interfere with the purpose. This minority has brought shame on the university.” The state needed a new governor if only to clean up the mess at Berkeley and restore honor to higher education.

  The cleanup started sooner than he expected. Clark Kerr had been chancellor at Berkeley and was president of the several-campus University of California system; he naturally concluded that Reagan’s criticisms were directed at him. Upon Reagan’s inauguration as governor he asked the board of regents for a vote of confidence. Several members of the board, which now included Reagan ex officio, had their own doubts about Kerr’s handling of the Berkeley turbulence, and they didn’t like being put on the spot. To the surprise of both Kerr and Reagan, the latter’s first meeting with the regents resulted in the dismissal of the former.

  Few beyond the board believed Reagan’s disclaimers of intent, which were accurate as to timing if not to eventual outcome. Liberals in California and around the country wrung their hands that the crown jewel of public higher education in America was being threatened by Reagan and the know-nothings. They lamented the more when Reagan’s first budget projected sharp cuts to the university, and California liberals in particular assailed his proposal to begin charging tuition at the university. The no-tuition policy possessed greater significance as symbol than as substance; student fees of hundreds of dollars served much the purpose of tuition in other states. But the symbol mattered to those many Californians who boasted that the finest higher education in the country was available to even students of the most modest means. Reagan countered that honesty was the best policy in government as in life; if a fee was the equivalent of tuition, it ought to be called tuition. And in the current state of financial distress, it ought to go up.

  Reagan’s proposal ignited new protests, this time aimed directly at him. Ten thousand students and faculty descended on Sacramento. “Don’t Loot the Colleges to Balance Your Budget,” their signs read. “Impeach Ronnie Reagan.” “Lousy, Just Like His Movies.” Reagan’s schedule had called for him to be in Oregon on this day, but he postponed his trip to meet the protesters. “I wouldn’t miss this for anything,” he told William Clark. He let the demonstration form outside his office, then he headed out to meet the protesters. Clark accompanied him. “We walked through the double doors to the steps where this man was carrying on, I think he was a student leader,” Clark recalled. “He couldn’t see us approach—his back was to us as we went out the doors—but this vast crowd suddenly spotted the governor and their shocked faces told the speaker that something was going on behind him. He turned around and saw the governor and in shock just handed him the mike as a matter of courtesy.”

  “A funny thing happened to me on the way to Oregon,” Reagan said to the students, who didn’t think it funny at all. They had read his schedule and were counting on his absence. “Hey, hey, what do you say? Ronald Reagan ran away!” they were chanting before he showed up. They booed and tried to shout him down when he explained his change of plans. “I don’t think any group of citizens should come to the capitol with the expressed purpose of delivering any message to the governor and have the governor be absent,” he said. When the booing persisted, he remarked, “I believe nothing I can say would create an open mind in some of you.” He asserted his desire to keep politics out of education, but he added, “The people of California, who have contributed willingly and happily to educational growth, do have some right to have a voice in the philosophy and principles that will go along with the education they provide. As governor, I will never inject politics into the board of regents, but as governor I am going to represent the people of this state.”

  THE COMPROMISE BUDGET Reagan and Jesse Unruh worked out spared the universities the worst of the cuts and postponed a decision on tuition. But higher education remained a polarizing issue. African American students at San Francisco State College had established the Black Student Union, which in 1968 led a strike against the college administration, against Reagan and the state government, against the Vietnam War, and against the exploitation of the masses by the capitalist system. The strike and surrounding violence produced damage to property, arrests of perpetrators and passersby, the resignation of the college’s president, and his replacement by S. I. Hayakawa, a faculty semanticist who wore a tam-o’-shanter to work and promised to bring the militants into line. “You are a hero to some,” he said of himself, “and a son of a bitch to others.”

  The strike in San Francisco challenged radicals across the bay at Berkeley to match it. In February 1969 a group calling itself the Third World Liberation Front attempted to close the Berkeley campus; students walking to their classes were threatened and in some cases assaulted.

  Reagan responded vigorously. He declared a state of “extreme emergency” in Berkeley and dispatched state troopers to assist the local police. “We are winning the ball game at San Francisco,” he said, a bit prematurely; “they had to try someplace else.” Asked how long the troopers would remain on campus and in the neighborhood, he replied, “As long as may be necessary.” He elaborated: “The lives and safety of students and faculty, and the property of the university, must be protected. The campus must be free of violence, threats and intimidation.”

  The property of the university became the flash point several weeks later. The Berkeley administration had acquired a piece of property south of campus for future expansion, but in the spring of 1969 it lay fallow. An alliance of hippies—the countercultural dropouts who preached love, peace, and drugs—and political radicals determined to put the site to use. The hippies wanted to plant flowers and vegetables, the radicals to sow seeds of confrontation. Together they christened the block “People’s Park” and proclaimed it a brave experiment in a new form of property relations.

&nbs
p; Reagan didn’t care much about the hippies, but he was as eager to accept the radicals’ challenge as they were to pose it. His diffident campaign for president had cost him credibility as a decisive leader, and like the radicals he was looking for a chance to show he mattered. Over the heads of the university administrators, who didn’t want a confrontation they could avoid, he ordered the property cleared of unauthorized persons and a fence erected to keep additional intruders out.

  Both Reagan and the radicals got what they wanted and then some. Before dawn on May 15 some 250 California state police arrived and ordered all those sleeping or loitering in the park to leave. All did, except for a few who were too drugged to know what was happening and had to be hauled away. The police sealed off several blocks around the park to prevent other people from getting close. A bulldozer arrived a short while later and began scraping the perimeter of the property for the fence. By noon the fence was completed and the site secured.