THE RISE OF RONALD REAGAN
Murray, David
THE RISE of RONALD REAGAN by DAVID MURRAY When Ronald Wilson Reagan was elected governor of California by a million-vote majority on November 8, 1966, most observers attributed the victory to the...
...Tax reforms, he said, were the subject of study by a task force, although they could not be expected to be put into effect immediately...
...he said, for example, that he thought "the enemy should go to sleep at night wondering whether we're going to use nuclear weapons," and that "you don't negotiate with gangsters" like the National Liberation Front...
...In Sacramento, Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, the most powerful Democrat in California these days, rumbled that Reagan "is attempting to justify tuition as a punishment for student activities...
...his mind has a natural ability to learn lines and absorb information...
...If he had had his choice, his friends say, he would have twisted Shirley Temple Black's arm (if that is not treason in Hollywood terms) to keep her out of her race for a Congressional seat...
...Later, I heard complaints from Californians that he had surrounded himself with such a palace guard that even those with legitimate business found it increasingly difficult to see the Governor, and that he spent too little time at his desk as it was...
...On gun control: Reagan has said he would "resist any effort that would take from the American citizen his right to own and possess firearms...
...Despite his record-breaking budget, Reagan supporters claim that public spending is down by eight per cent...
...Reagan, at the moment, appeals to the hard-shelled conservatives in the GOP as a more acceptable alternative than either George Romney or Nelson Rockefeller...
...In the meantime, the fiscal experts promise, with fire in their eyes, they are really going to go after "Medi-Cal," the state version of Medicaid...
...But the question is: Who is going to do the programming...
...policy and welfare to the whim of the United Nations...
...Legislatively, he accomplished few of his stated goals in his first year...
...There was nothing to indicate any positive steps to head off trouble or to come to grips with the causes of conflict...
...Now, a year later, the picture has changed...
...He recently completed a series of speech making tours, and has become the most-sought-after and highest-paid workhorse in the Republican stable...
...I'll tell you one reason," said a knowledgeable Illinois GOP leader...
...Reagan's rise to national prominence, then, is the result of the new life he has brought to the Goldwater wing of the Republican Party...
...It was the GE-plant speech that formed the basis for the talk entitled "A Time for Choosing," which he delivered on television during the Goldwater campaign and which some members of the Gold-water campaign staff tried to have killed because of its attack against the Social Security system...
...it was the transfer of patients to day-care centers and other facilities that had produced the reduction...
...During the gubernatorial campaign, he inveighed against "the mess at Berkeley," and when he was elected and found that cutting $500 million-plus from the budget was not going to be accomplished, he chose to try to make some economies by charging tuition at the University of California and at its state colleges...
...We were waiting for his weekly confrontation with the press and television cameras to begin...
...Program this guy right and he can go a long way," said a California newspaper editor recently...
...In Sacramento, one of his aides said of him: "You know, he really believes he's Jack Armstrong, the Ail-American Boy, eating Wheaties for breakfast every morning...
...The complexities of open housing, for example, seemed to Reagan to center around "the individual's right to dispose of property as he sees fit...
...THE RISE of RONALD REAGAN by DAVID MURRAY When Ronald Wilson Reagan was elected governor of California by a million-vote majority on November 8, 1966, most observers attributed the victory to the political peculiarities of the land of movie make-believe...
...another movie star from California would be bad for his national image...
...The cost of tuition for Reagan's education could be staggering to the nation...
...The psychiatrists struck back...
...It is hard enough to keep a grip on reality in Los Angeles without this sort of thing floating at you across a thousand heads from a banquet dais...
...Political reporters in California, however, say that trying to pin down members of the administration on how this eight per cent decline is estimated, is next to impossible, and the word "projected" is used with abandon by the Reagan staff...
...But the audience ate up Reagan's flat, ungarnished, unqualified statements...
...More recently, as he has worked to make himself more palatable to independents as a Presidential contender, he has sought to create the impression that despite all his past pronouncements in favor of far-out right-wing policies, his political home is really in the center...
...On civil rights: Reagan opposed the 1964 and 1965 civil rights laws because of "legislative flaws and faults and parts of them were, in my view, unconstitutional...
...There he was, the presiding governor of a state with many potential and actual racial flash points— Watts, Oakland, Richmond, San Francisco, Monterey, and others—and the explosive conditions of the ghettos apparently were something to be sat on by police force—rather than be improved with constructive programs...
...That sort of talk was never heard during Pat Brown's administration...
...I'll take questions," he said, and it was the governor of California talking...
...Since his inauguration, Reagan has taken particular pains to keep the right wing at bay and to avoid conservative-moderate fights within his own party...
...At the Los Angeles dinner, Reagan told his well-to-do, black-tie audience that "backward nations are backward and undeveloped, not because of their climate, and not because of their soil," but rather because they do not have the blessings of a stable democratic government and a free-enterprise economic system...
...And while it seems unlikely, at this point in time, that, if nominated, Reagan could unseat President Johnson, it would be a mistake to write off the man who dumped a Democratic governor—in a nominally Democratic state—by a million votes, who has become the most sought after Republican banquet speaker, and who would be the beneficiary nationally of the racial backlash and other moods of discontent with the Johnson Administration...
...Reagan had just handed the state a record $5 billion budget and $1 billion in new taxes, and he defended these on the grounds that they were necessary because of the "political fun and games" which had been practiced by the previous administration under Democratic Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown...
...Kaiser either got his signals mixed, or, more likely, followed them correctly, because all he could talk about, when he emerged, as reported on page one of The New York Times, was that there seemed to be "a genuine Reagan groundswell" which might prove uncontrollable...
...The word one hears most in San Francisco, in Los Angeles, in Sacramento, and even in Berkeley about Reagan is "potential...
...At his widely publicized appearance at Yale, Reagan was pressed by students to stop talking in generalities and get down to details...
...I don't want to name individuals," he replied...
...He could have made himself a hero, or at least a Sir Galahad, but instead, he raised what The Washington Star called in an editorial poetically entitled "The Fallen Knight," "some very real doubts about his personal dedication to the truth and his fitness for the high office to which he so obviously aspires...
...Columnist Mike Royko of the Chicago Daily News has characterized the Golden State as "the world's largest outdoor asylum," and much of the world inside and outside the state's borders generally agrees...
...His rising popularity among Republicans adds fuel to the fear that the Grand Old Party could readily turn to him if the front-runner, Richard Nixon, should falter in the primaries...
...I started out by subject matter, seeing how things changed, reading prepared speeches, things like that...
...Reagon lost the tuition gambit...
...There can be no mistaking that smile, whose earlier beneficiaries have included Ann Sheridan, Shirley Temple, and Bonzo the chimpanzee...
...I told Reagan I wanted to ask him the same question I had asked New York's Mayor John Lindsay after six months in office—how did the campaign dream differ from the present reality...
...A speaking schedule last fall took him throughout the Midwest and South and onto national television on the eve of a well-publicized Caribbean cruise by forty-five of the nation's fifty governors...
...Why...
...But his staff leaked the news—loudly—and Reagan's mistake was trying to cover it up by denying it ever happened...
...Thus, he has appointed a real estate spokesman to oversee the real estate industry, a trucking magnate to run the highway commission, and a management consultant to supervise labor-management relations...
...But until the nation knows more about Reagan, he must be regarded, on the basis of the evidence at hand, as little more than a spruced-up and more plausible Goldwater who, though more attractive and articulate than the Arizonan, lacks the latter's integrity...
...Martin Luther King...
...And that was the extent of his assessment of the Black Power and civil rights movements and how they relate to civil disorders...
...Aside from strengthening police forces, what was being done to prevent serious violence in California...
...Soil and climate and natural resources obviously have a great deal to do with the politico-economic health of any nation, and a social welfare system of government, aimed at providing decent jobs, housing, and education has more to do with preventing juvenile delinquency than with fomenting it...
...Reagan told me that a great deal of his "conversion" can be traced to his speaking tours when he was "host" of the General Electric Theater on television, but others disagree...
...It led to more and more getting it pointed out to me what had happened to government, the constant growth...
...Today, Republican leaders throughout the country have acknowledged a new entry...
...Reagan's support, as evidenced in the public opinion polls, stayed majestically high...
...The public opinion polls show him readily recognized by the voters because of his long movie and television career...
...Let me put it this way—there's a lot of competition for leadership in the civil rights movement...
...And, with obvious sincerity, he charged that "the Federal Government, in its desire to provide cradle-to-grave care for our citizens, is one of the big reasons for juvenile delinquency...
...Then the smile disappeared and Reagan was all business as he stepped to the microphones...
...Crowds cling to his words, his agents talk quietly in the back rooms of a potential role for their hero as a spoiler in several primary races this spring...
...When I asked him what he felt his administration had accomplished in the first months of office, Reagan talked about "sizable economies" and reducing what he called "the spending trend...
...Suddenly, a door opened in the rear of the room and there was a babble of louder voices...
...These are obviously political as well as military determinatives...
...On the United Nations: "Until the United Nations sits down and reorganizes on a realistic basis, the United States should not subjugate U.S...
...What has brought this political amateur, this Golden Boy of the sound stages, to a position where— despite a mediocre record of accomplishment as governor with the label of "kook" and "showman" clinging to him—he has become such a serious threat to moderate Republicans' hopes that they can return their party back into what Nelson Rockefeller calls "the mainstream of American politics," after Barry Goldwater had led them to the extreme right in 1964...
...In other things, too, the same things were happening...
...Migrant workers: On the employment of braceros, which Reagan supported, he said California growers had been "treated like guinea pigs in a sociological experiment by the Federal Government"—certainly a new twist to the problem of braceros...
...Reagan's is a startling and dangerous departure from the American tradition of civilian control of the military...
...But after a year of non-delivery on promises of tax reforms, reduced spending, tighter welfare rolls, and tuition for the state university system, why is it that his polls t "1 still seem to show that Californians generally think this performance has been pretty good...
...Reagan included the decision to mine the Haiphong harbor as well as the use of atomic weapons...
...A handful of Reagan's staff members stood off in a corner, talking quietly...
...There is no easy answer, I learned...
...They were slogans, liturgical responses, that, like movie film, tend to blur and distort when exposed to too much light...
...This is by no means evidence of political amateurism...
...The state's leading psychiatrists and lay experts on mental health predicted that within a year, if the Reagan program were carried out, the state would be back to the old "snake-pit" conditions of custodial care...
...How these objectives are to be achieved remains cloaked in the pieties and platitudes which characterize Reagan's speeches and answers to news conference questions...
...Stephen Hess and David S. Broder, in their excellent book, The Republican Establishment, make the ironic point that GE management, and this presumably includes its arch-conservative head, Ralph Cordiner, was rather surprised when the Reagan speech to GE workers included many references to "the dangers of Big Government" —when Big Government was in fact a major GE customer...
...A few days before the press conference, there had been a brief flareup of racial violence in San Francisco, and the reporters wanted to know what he planned to do to forestall another Watts-type riot...
...He said that he was so busy that he was "having trouble getting home for lunch these days" and that while the suggestion was tempting, he did not think he could go...
...But if the voters did, they seemed to react with the pleasure of a young man inspecting the center fold' of Playboy...
...DAVID MURRAY is a political writer for the Chicago Sun-Times...
...The great hope is that he will learn and gain the experience before it is too late...
...I don't know what the mayor's answer was," he said, "but the main difficulty with this job is that I didn't expect it to be as confining as it is...
...Reagan, he said, "listens good" and has "put together a remarkably good staff...
...I had my first look at Reagan last spring, in a paneled news-conference room in the California State Capitol in Sacramento...
...Against all his campaign assertions, Reagan not only did not reduce taxes but his record $5 billion budget required him to raise taxes...
...Urban problems are thus far outside his experience," the lawyer said...
...And that is the way his public relations advisers are packaging him today—as a middle-of-the-roader...
...Her defeat was undoubtedly a relief to Reagan...
...There have been some bad miscues which theoretically should have dropped Reagan's stock...
...He is creeping up in national popularity until he is challenging Richard Nixon and George Romney, who, it was thought until recently, would fight it out for the nomination without having to worry about the upstart from California...
...In mid-October, for example, appearing on the ABC-TV'show, "Issues and Answers," he seemed to modify his stand on Vietnam, talking, like Senator Charles H. Percy, more about neutralization than nuclearization...
...I had been president of the Screen Actors Guild, and I saw the things that had happened to our industry, taxwise and legislationwise...
...The questions were tough and skillful, but Reagan had ready answers and the reporters' pens flew over their pads...
...In Sacramento, crew-cut Bob Monagan, Republican minority leader in the state assembly, praised Reagan's "great insight and ability to grasp things quickly...
...As Californians began to sit back and get used to their yearling governor, Governor Reagan himself was out letting the rest of the country have a look at him...
...On another political front Reagan stubbed his toe when he denied dismissing at least two members of his staff because they were found to be homosexuals...
...Reagan the conservative has given way—to a small degree—to Reagan the moderate, but the easing of his position has been largely form without substance...
...Who...
...More significant, so far, his "tax reforms" have not dealt with the most sensitive issue, reduction of the real estate property tax, which is viewed by Republicans and Democrats alike as onerous...
...Someone's stirring the pot...
...But it was during those eight years with General Electric, probably the most stubbornly anti-union of the large corporations, that Reagan built and consolidated his name-recognition...
...He has called civil rights proposals "grandstand stunts" to attract Negro voters...
...The afternoon of the Sacramento news conference Reagan was scheduled to fly to Los Angeles for a speech to the Merchants and Manufacturers Association...
...so did many conservative Democrats who have always carried high the banner of free tuition...
...The first was his war with the University of California, with its nine-college campus...
...But he was soon back at the old stand hawking for escalation in Vietnam...
...Let's not get all mired down in specifics," he replied...
...My notes on the answer he gave contained such phrases as "a matter for the police," "I have been in touch with the law-enforcement agencies involved," "massive control," and "whatever force is necessary...
...He tossed off a flip answer to a questioner who wanted to know whether he planned to go to Vietnam in the summer...
...Later, I talked in Los Angeles with a bright young lawyer who had worked in his campaign, and who still harbored feelings of admiration for Reagan...
...Besides, Monagan added, "There's an attitude that we're going to try to economize and to run things with efficiency...
...when his legs were cut off in King's Row, the good guy in a hundred cinematic and television monuments to American culture...
...Rap Brown...
...The schedule of appointments—people who don't feel they can see anyone but the governor—that makes you wonder if you're going to get through the day...
...The reasoning, as expressed by Reagan staffers, was that because the number of occupied beds in the state hospitals had dropped sharply, the need for the other services must have declined...
...But the answers were somewhat less than what one would expect from the governor of the nation's most populous state and a potential occupant of the White House...
...His rocketing political success as governor of the nation's largest state has stirred the hopes within the conservative Republicans that were cooled by the Goldwater debacle of 1964...
...He had been a moderate New Dealer, he said, and "actually, I sort of converted myself...
...Ronald Reagan, fifty-six years old, was regarded as something of a fluke, an aging film star who had won election, largely because of a zany electorate, over what many considered a tired, unimaginative Democratic administration...
...Stokely Car-michael...
...As he walked toward the floodlit platform with its lectern, an aide made a remark and the governor smiled...
...On escalation in Vietnam: "That decision properly should be left up to the military...
...the enemy should still be frightened that we might [use atomic weapons...
...Reagan also took some questions on Vietnam, and his views were hawkish...
...He became a readily recognizable television character and, in addition, he talked to all 250,000 GE employes in thirty-eight states, delivering as many as fourteen speeches a day...
...That's California," was the common judgment...
...Among his recent statements on foreign policy questions are these: On Vietnam: "We have the power to wind it up fast, and I think we should use it...
...There he was—the Gipper, Drake McHugh, the actor who yelled "Where's the rest of me...
...What had come across in this series of talks with Reagan and in watching him perform in public was a picture of a man whose experience in urban problems and in foreign affairs was near zero, whose interest was equally negligible, and who felt that society was somehow not responsible for what went on in the ghettos...
...Now that he has begun to take himself seriously as a Presidential prospect, Reagan is anxious to shed his image as a hard-line right-winger and to project himself as a moderate...
...They are watching Reagan as he moves from state to state talking glibly about the virtues of individual freedom and the evils of big government...
...This "attitude" is one of the most incredible things about the Reagan administration...
...In his lifetime, Ronald Reagan has ranged widely over the political spectrum as he moved from left of center to right of center...
...Reagan is what is known in the theater as a "quick study...
...Most of us in the middle or on the left of our party thought that we had given the conservatives a chance to be heard, to present their case in 1964...
...He is completing a book on Senator Charles Percy...
...With Reagan, however, they've got a Goldwater who talks better and sounds more plausible—and who they think can win—and I'm not sure they're wrong...
...This was months before his greatly expanded speaking schedule around the country...
...He sent a close political ally, Leland Kaiser, into New Hampshire with the announced intention of discouraging any attempt at a write-in campaign in the March primary...
...Of course the hospital population had dropped...
...On domestic issues, Reagan clearly sides with the right...
...Apparently, Reagan did the decent thing first, dropping them quietly, and treating the matter as a personal tragedy...
...Reagan was considerably more willing to talk to me about his own background and the thinking that had brought him to his present philosophy of conservatism than he was to provide answers to specific questions on current issues...
...Almost anything can happen in California, and generally does...
...At the end of it, I decided that my position wasn't compatible with the leadership of my party...
...The Young Republicans have adopted Reagan with wild enthusiasm...
...I don't think the full technological power of the United States is being used...
...The form sheets a year ago showed far more likely names, such as Romney, Nixon, Percy, and Rockefeller, for the 1968 Presidential Sweepstakes...
...In this age of social planning by government, Reagan seems to reject the Constitutional mandate, as expressed in the Preamble, that one of the prime purposes of our Government is "to provide for the general welfare...
...Late in 1967, while Reagan was making his Ivy League debut at Yale, California newspapers reported that the same Texas millionaires who financed Barry Goldwater in 1964 had hired a professional organizer to promote a Reagan-for-President campaign...
...The surface impression, then, was of a man who fields questions well, who neither falters nor fluffs, who gives little impression of the kookery with which his name and his right-wing cause are identified...
...Another opera bouffe that Reagan found himself in was the attempt to trim the state's mental health budget by eliminating out-patient day-care centers, geriatrics screening services, and mental-retardation projects...
...The theme of the sales campaign, it appeared, was to portray Reagan as the average, non-political American who wants to get the war in Vietnam "over with"—and who wants to clean up crime on the streets, quit coddling criminals, end the high cost of welfare, and stop riots and demonstrations in the cities...
...It might be expected, they thought, that now his supporters, particularly moderates and independents, 'would begin to discern the nudity of the emperor...
...I traveled with him in order to pursue some of the questions that had set off the alarm signals during the press conference...
...Since then, however, he has drawn fire from California critics who feel that he should not spend quite so much time in other states campaigning ostensibly on behalf of the Republican Party...
...On the mental health issue, as with tuition, Reagan backtracked while Democrats beamed...
...The California liberal establishment, already upset by the firing of the university's President, Clark Kerr, reacted sharply...
...If this was nudity, they liked what they saw...
...What about California's racial crisis areas?, I asked...
...Reagan is without experience in statecraft, has no known program for the compelling issues that confront America today at home and abroad, and has displayed a tendency to doctor his political views to accommodate his ambition of the moment...
...Judging by the polls, he has apparently succeeded in convincing Californians that his bigger-than-ever budget was really the fault of the Democrats...
...Television technicians were doing whatever it is they do with cables and lights and microphones...
...In this respect, Julius Duscha, member of the faculty of the Department of Communications at Stanford, noted recently in The New York Times, that Reagan is like General Eisenhower in having a "grade-school textbook view of government in believing that 'the best government is the least government.' " Duscha came away from his study of Reagan, as I did, with the impression that, again like Eisenhower, he has supreme faith in the judgment of business men, so much so, indeed, that, as one observer noted, he has "put the foxes to guard the chickens...
...For the most part he repeated his emphasis on the use of force, and when I suggested that reducing pressure in the boiler might be one method of keeping it from bursting, he replied: "Oh, I'm not one of those who believe these things happen spontaneously...
...His position on this vital national concern directly parallels the stand taken by Goldwater in 1964...
...Reagan put back his head and laughed and the years fell away from a face that looks older when he is being serious...
...This would provide $38 million in new funds, his aides told the University Board of Regents...
...When they took their lumps with Barry Goldwater, we figured they'd come to their senses...
Vol. 32 • February 1968 • No. 2
