Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  But only briefly, for at the same time a large crowd was gathering in Sproul Plaza, the epicenter of campus protests. Student leaders denounced the seizure of People’s Park as in keeping with the fascist policies that had produced the imperialist war in Vietnam and were crushing individual rights in America. One speaker concluded with a call to reclaim the park. The crowd began chanting, “Take the park! Take the park!” They marched down Telegraph Avenue toward the park.

  Blocks before they got there, they encountered the police cordon. Some protesters threw rocks, others pieces of concrete and metal. One person with obvious protest experience employed an oversized wrench to open a fire hydrant that flooded the street with water. The police responded with tear gas and then shotgun fire. Whether most of the guns were loaded with bird shot—light pellets that caused pain but not much damage unless they hit their targets in the eyes and face—or heavier and more lethal buckshot was a matter of subsequent dispute. In fact one crowd member was blinded and another killed. Dozens were wounded. As word of the fighting reached Sacramento, Reagan ordered troops of the state’s national guard to the scene. By the time they arrived, the fighting had ended, but the troops remained and clamped a curfew on the neighborhood.

  REAGAN DEFENDED HIS own actions and those of the local authorities. Recounting at a press conference the series of events leading up to the riot, he said, “After the property was cleared, mob violence erupted and additional police were called to the scene. On that day, police took a tremendous and unprovoked beating from a well prepared and well armed mass of people who had stockpiled all kinds of weapons and missiles. They included pieces of steel rods as well as bricks, large rocks, chunks of cement, iron pipes, etc. Dissidents stood on fire escapes and roof tops and showered officers with steel bars, rocks and chunks of cement. One officer was stabbed in the chest with a thrown dagger.” Police responded appropriately with tear gas and bird shot, Reagan said. “This was done only to protect life and property and in response to felonious assaults with deadly weapons.” He regretted the injuries sustained by the demonstrators and especially the death of the one young man, a twenty-five-year-old named James Rector. Yet the blame lay not with the authorities but with the “street gangs” and “campus radicals” who had organized “this entire attempt at revolution.” The people of California needed to understand that demonstrations like this weren’t innocent pranks. “How much farther do we have to go to realize this is not just another panty raid?”

  Reagan’s words did nothing to calm the situation. More protests broke out in Berkeley, prompting the police, with Reagan’s approval, to deploy a helicopter that sprayed tear gas on the heads of the protesters. An angry delegation of Berkeley faculty traveled to Sacramento and demanded to see the governor; when Reagan invited them into his office, they denounced him for the military occupation of their city and insisted on its lifting.

  Reagan stood fast. He defended his actions to the professors and to anyone else who would listen. A live audience of a thousand heard him address the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco; many more watched the speech on television. “In the past eleven months four major riots have erupted in Berkeley,” he explained. “All of them involve militants from the south campus area”—Telegraph Avenue and People’s Park. “In these eleven months there have been eight major bombings or attempted bombings, nearly 1100 drug arrests, 750 in the south campus area alone.” The police and national guardsmen, he said, had confiscated numerous explosives and hundreds of firearms. They hadn’t always acted soon enough. “There have been dozens of arson attempts resulting in more than $800,000 damage … One policeman has been ambushed and shot and a dozen others fired upon.” The big riot on May 15 was part of the broader pattern. “This was no spontaneous eruption. The rooftops had been stockpiled with rocks and other missiles.” Only after the riot got out of control of the police on hand did the Alameda County sheriff send in deputies with shotguns. “When they arrived, they literally had to step over the bodies of injured officers who couldn’t be helped or moved because the few left standing were under severe assault and literally fighting for their lives.”

  Reagan distinguished between the motives of the leaders of the protest and those of the followers. “The leaders of this property takeover have made it plain their only purpose was political,” he said. “They were challenging the right of private ownership of land in this country.” The followers were mostly well-meaning students alienated by the culture and practices of a large university. They wanted to learn from the great minds of the age but found themselves in oversized courses conducted by teaching assistants. “The feeling comes that they are nameless, faceless numbers on an assembly line—green cap at one end and cap, gown and automated diploma at the other. They want someone to know they are there—they aren’t even missed and recorded as absent when they aren’t there. The majority of faculty are scholars too busy with their own research and writing.” Reagan sympathized with the students against both the radicals and the faculty. “This generation of students—better informed, more aware—deserves much more.” If they didn’t get it, the entire state would suffer. “The challenge to us is to establish contact with these frustrated young people and to join in finding answers before they fall to the mob by default. At this moment in California, the danger of this happening is very real.”

  Reagan typically enjoyed taking on protesters: trading verbal blows with hecklers, giving as good as he got. But one experience disturbed him. He told reporters of visiting a campus for a regents meeting. “I remember one very nice looking little girl, who stood in the crowd of students as I walked to my car and who kept shouting, ‘Fuck you. Fuck you.’ She practically spit at me. I walked over to her and asked her if she didn’t think that when she was a few years older she would be ashamed of what she was doing. She just looked at me and spit another ‘Fuck you.’ ”

  22

  SUMMER AND THE departure of most students eased the troubles at Berkeley, but renewed protests provided the backdrop to Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1970. The hot spot this time was the University of California at Santa Barbara, a campus better known for parties than for protests. Militants rejected the surfer image and battled police over university policies; they then carried their fight to the neighborhood of Isla Vista, where they besieged a branch of the Bank of America, the most convenient symbol of the military-corporate complex.

  Reagan again reacted quickly. He flew to Santa Barbara to confront the protesters. Branding them “cowardly little bums,” he declared another state of emergency and called in the national guard.

  His action contained the violence without alleviating its underlying cause. Reagan thought he knew what that cause was: the desire of a small group of revolutionaries to radicalize the rest of the campus community by provoking the police and state authorities to violence. Some on campus agreed and said his use of force was playing into the militants’ hands. But Reagan refused to be deterred. “Appeasement is not the answer,” he declared. The radicals didn’t want solutions; they wanted disruption. If they weren’t careful, they would get what they wanted and more. “If it’s to be a bloodbath, let it be now.”

  Reagan at once regretted the “bloodbath” remark. Later that day he qualified his comment. “There comes a time when we must bite the bullet, so to speak, or take action when we know it is necessary to do so,” he said. “I certainly don’t think there should be a bloodbath on campus or anywhere else.”

  “Biting the bullet” wasn’t a big improvement, and the comment came back to haunt him. Violence erupted again in Isla Vista, and in the violence a student, Kevin Moran, was killed, apparently by a policeman who was aiming elsewhere.

  The killing shook Reagan badly. He fought back tears as he addressed reporters. “It isn’t very important where the bullet came from,” he said. “The bullet was sent on its way several years ago when a certain element in our society decided they could take the law into their own hands. And every person that has aided and abe
tted them is equally guilty.” He renewed his call for an end to the violence, appealing to the memory of Kevin Moran. “If his death is not to be totally in vain, I hope this will bring some sober reflection and some common sense to the so-called silent majority of students, faculty and administrators to where they themselves will take a stand and say, ‘This is the end. No more attending rallies, no more even supporting with an expression of sympathy those who have resorted to this kind of violence.’ ”

  THE TROUBLES IN Santa Barbara didn’t end right away, but they were overshadowed by much larger protests elsewhere that spring. Campuses around the country erupted when Richard Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia. The president’s strategic purpose was to deny the North Vietnamese sanctuary in Vietnam’s neutral neighbor; his political achievement was to mobilize broader domestic protests than ever. At Kent State University in Ohio, troops of the national guard fired on demonstrators, killing four students and wounding several others. At Jackson State in Mississippi, police shot and killed two students and wounded a dozen.

  The campus violence in California might have complicated Reagan’s reelection had the Democrats run a more compelling candidate. Jesse Unruh tried to make the leap from the assembly to the governorship, but he had difficulty escaping his unsavory reputation as the “Big Daddy” of the legislature. His campaign stumbled and failed to raise the money he needed to challenge the incumbent effectively.

  Reagan ran on his record as a budget balancer and a defender of law and order against radical challenge. The latter role lost some of its luster after the killings at Berkeley and Isla Vista; more than a few voters asked if the authorities hadn’t gone too far. But others shared Reagan’s view that blame for the deaths lay with the radicals, not the authorities.

  He also ran as a pragmatist who got things done. The University of California regents, after clawing back some of the revenues Reagan had proposed to cut, accepted his demand that students start paying tuition. When a new budget stalled in the legislature, Reagan was the one who compromised, dropping his opposition to the withholding of state income taxes. Acknowledging that he had previously said his feet were set in concrete on the withholding issue, he joked, “That sound you hear is the concrete cracking around my feet.”

  Voters liked Reagan’s principles; they also liked his pragmatism. But they weren’t nearly as enthusiastic as they had been four years earlier. His 53 percent of the vote fell substantially shy of the 58 percent he had polled then, and his margin of victory over Unruh was half his margin over Pat Brown. Yet a win was a win, and Reagan was happy to accept it.

  23

  REAGAN’S SLIPPAGE AT the polls took some of the shine off his national appeal. The Republican Party wouldn’t be looking for presidential candidates until 1976, given Nixon’s certainty of renomination in 1972. And when the party did start looking, there was no guarantee it would be seeking conservatives. Nixon confused constituents and pundits by talking like a conservative but acting like a liberal. The law-and-order theme of his 1968 campaign appealed to conservatives and others distraught by the wave of big-city riots and the permissiveness of the counterculture, and the showpiece of his domestic policy, an approach he called the New Federalism, appeared to reverse the centralizing tendencies of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But appearances deceived in this case, as in much Nixon did, for the essence of the New Federalism was the money Washington bestowed on the states for them to spend. What Washington gave, Washington could take away.

  In certain areas Nixon didn’t even pretend to be conservative. He pushed environmental reforms harder than any president since Theodore Roosevelt. The Clean Air Act of 1970 dramatically expanded the power of the federal government to regulate emissions from vehicles and industrial plants. The Environmental Protection Agency, created the same year, enforced the air act and comparable legislation covering water, land, and other resources, besides issuing binders full of regulations on its own authority. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, established in 1971, stuck the federal government’s nose into the affairs of nearly every employer in the country. Nixon’s was the first administration to push affirmative action as a federal policy on race. His Labor Department applied a plan devised to remedy racial discrimination in Philadel phia to cities across the country. Contractors doing work for the federal government were required to hire minimum numbers of black workers. Nixon boosted funding of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and he furnished federal money to school districts striving to ensure compliance with court orders to desegregate.

  Nixon’s most audacious initiative was also his most liberal. Or perhaps it was his most conservative. It certainly was his most confusing, receiving endorsements from both liberals and conservatives, as well as condemnations from both groups. The Family Assistance Plan was designed to make federal aid to the poor more efficient and less costly. This aspect appealed to conservatives, including economist Milton Friedman, who helped design it. But it would do so by means of a “negative income tax”—a federal payment to families with incomes below a poverty threshold—without the onerous and often embarrassing investigations long required for welfare payments. This part appealed to liberals, as did the fact that the efficiencies of the new program would allow its coverage to be expanded to millions of people, especially children, previously uncovered.

  REAGAN WOULD HAVE saved himself a great deal of trouble had he followed Nixon’s lead and endorsed the Family Assistance Plan. Reagan made welfare reform a focus of his second term as governor, chiefly because California’s ballooning welfare rolls threatened to undo the progress he had made toward balancing the state’s budget. Reagan had railed against welfare cheats who lounged on the largesse of honest taxpayers and, he took pains to point out, deprived the truly needy of the help he thought they should receive. He launched his second administration with a promise to reform the welfare system. “Mandated by statute and federal regulation,” he said, “welfare has proliferated and grown into a Leviathan of unsupportable dimensions. We have economized and even stripped essential public services to feed its appetite.” Liberals wanted to raise taxes to cover the shortfall. This path had no end, Reagan said. “Unless and until we face up to and effect complete reform of welfare, we will face a tax increase next year, the year after that, and the year after that—on into the future as far as we can see.”

  The national economy had tipped into a mild recession after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates to curb inflation; Reagan acknowledged the recession’s deleterious effect on California’s state budget. But he rejected the pessimism many Americans felt as a result of the downturn and the disturbing events of the previous several years. “Those who whine of a sick society aren’t talking about us,” he declared for California. “Our young people seek a cause in which they can invest their idealism, their youth and their strength … As Mark Twain once said, ‘The easy and slothful didn’t come to California. They stayed home.’ ” With the optimism that was becoming his trademark in politics, Reagan perorated, “It is time to ignore those who are obsessed with what is wrong. Concentrate our attention on what is right—on how great is our power and potential and how little we have to fear. As I told a group of your fellow citizens who visited this capitol last fall, if California’s problems and California’s people were put in a ring together, it would have to be declared a mismatch.”

  Reagan sent the legislature a detailed proposal for revamping the welfare system. The twin goals of the plan were to boot unworthy recipients off the welfare rolls and to increase payments to people who really couldn’t fend for themselves. Critics accused him of being hard-hearted and of overreacting to the recession; the Democratic leadership in the legislature preferred handing the welfare problem to the federal government, under the terms of Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan.

  Nixon’s offer was tempting, but Reagan refused. A guaranteed income epitomized all that was wrong about the liberal approach to governing, he said. “I believe that the
government is supposed to promote the general welfare,” he quipped. “I don’t believe it is supposed to provide it.”

  Reagan’s opposition didn’t endear him to Nixon, but it did get the president’s attention. “Nixon sent several people out to sit down with Reagan to shut him up on welfare reform,” Michael Deaver recalled. They failed, so Nixon took matters into his own hands. The president kept a house in California, at San Clemente, where he sometimes vacationed. On one trip west he invited Reagan to drop by. Nixon apparently offered Reagan a deal: the governor would moderate his criticism of the Family Assistance Plan, and the president would relax federal welfare regulations sufficiently to allow California to experiment with work requirements for capable recipients of welfare checks.

  Reagan evidently accepted the deal, for his criticism diminished and the experiment went forward. Meanwhile, he wrestled with the legislature, in the person of Bob Moretti, the Democratic speaker of the assembly, over broader welfare reform. Moretti one day asked to see the governor. “I remember he was sitting at his desk and there was a chair right off to the right where I sat,” Moretti later remarked of the visit. “And he said, ‘Yeah, what do you want to talk to me about?’ And I said, ‘Look, governor, I don’t like you particularly and I know you don’t like me, but we don’t have to be in love to work together. If you’re serious about doing some things, then let’s sit down and start doing it.’ ”

  And so they did. Both men took their task seriously; each understood he needed the other. Moretti could deliver the Democrats who controlled the legislature; Reagan could bring the Republicans and possessed a veto. Each was principled, but neither was ideological. For a week they met daily; for another week Reagan’s aides met with Moretti’s lieutenants and his allies in the legislature.