The Citizen Politician
CALIFORNIA IS THE LAST STOP ON THE TREK WEST THAT HAS SHAPED America since discovery. It is truly the Golden State, a place of astonishing beauty, with ocean-lapped beaches, scorching deserts, and snow-capped mountains. It is not only El Dorado, where you seemingly can make your fortune in gold, oil, automobiles, or movies, but Utopia, where seemingly you can be whatever you want to be. The California dream, like the American dream, is founded on freedom. “The customs of California are free,” wrote Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast almost 160 years ago.1 But times and customs can change.
California in 1965 had a growing economy, a rapidly growing population, and a very rapidly growing budget. If it had been a nation, California’s economy would have ranked fifth among Western industrialized nations, behind only the United States, Great Britain, West Germany, and France. Each year, tens of thousands of newcomers flowed across its borders, drawn by its climate, its vitality, and its generosity.
For a quarter of a century, California had been governed by liberal politicians—Republicans Earl Warren and Goodwin Knight, Democrat Edmund “Pat” Brown—who believed that the state was rich enough to pay for a seemingly endless variety of services: parks, welfare, medical aid, unemployment compensation. Need a new highway? Raise gasoline taxes. Running short of water? Build a storage dam that “dwarfed the pyramids” and a water aqueduct that ran almost the length of the state. Governor Brown once boasted that what the Johnson administration called the Great Society, “we just call … California.”2
Ronald Reagan did not want to slow the state’s economy, and he was not concerned about the newcomers—he was one himself. But he took a far different view about government spending from that taken by the incumbent governor and his predecessors. Reagan believed that governments, like people, should not spend more than they take in and they should not take in more than was absolutely necessary. He would never forget how, as a movie star in the late 1940s, he had found himself in the 91 percent tax bracket. Why bother to work, he had wondered, if ninety-one cents of every extra dollar he earned went to the government?
Reagan represented the new Republicans—the suburbanites, young managers, and professionals who had done well and wanted to preserve what they had earned. And he reflected the views of the old Democrats—the well-paid blue-collar workers who had joined the middle class and wanted to stay there.
In Washington, LBJ was still basking in the warmth of his historic win over Barry Goldwater and preparing to implement the Great Society. Liberals were busy writing obituaries about American conservatism. But in California, a man who had never run for public office was preparing to offer the people a different kind of society: a “creative society” that would reduce the size and burden of government and make the man in the street feel that he could make a difference in what was going on around him. The Creative Society, Reagan would explain, is “a return to the people of the privilege of self-government, as well as a pledge for more efficient self-government.”3
In late February 1965, a group of influential California Republicans called on Ronald Reagan at his home in Pacific Palisades overlooking Los Angeles. All were conservatives, all had raised millions of dollars for the GOP, and all were tired of losing to Democrats. They told Reagan that he was the only person around whom Republicans could rally in the 1966 gubernatorial race. They were convinced he could defeat Governor Brown. They urged him to travel around the state, find out for himself whether he was acceptable to the party and the people, “and if you are, please, run.”4
Reagan was skeptical. Nearly twenty years earlier, in the late 1940s, he had rejected a suggestion by Democrats that he seek a seat in the House of Representatives. Later, he had turned down pleas from Republicans to run for the U.S. Senate in 1962 and again in 1964. But his old Hollywood friend George Murphy had said yes, had proceeded to defeat Democrat Pierre Salinger, and was now in Washington. Reagan had always campaigned for someone else, but now many people, including those whom he respected, were insisting that it was his turn.
“I’m an actor, not a politician,” he protested.5 But he readily admitted that the public reaction to his national telecast for Barry Goldwater had exceeded anything in his movie or television career. The title of his 1963 autobiography (borrowed from his dramatic hospital bed scene in the highly regarded film King’s Row) was Where’s the Rest of Me? Was it possible, the fifty-four-year-old actor reflected, that he would find the answer in politics?
In several important ways, Reagan was an ideal candidate for California. He had unquestioned charm and voter appeal. As one Los Angeles magazine stated, “He is one of the rare men whom other men can stomach even while large groups of women are adoring him.”6 He lived in the more populous southern half of the state (nearly 40 percent of the electorate was located in the greater Los Angeles area). He was assured of substantial financial backing from many wealthy Republicans who shared his views.
And he had a ready-made organization: the thousands of dedicated conservatives who had worked for Goldwater in the primary and general elections the year before. As a former Democrat, he would be able to appeal across partisan lines in a state where party loyalty had always been weak. He was an acknowledged master of television, a vital medium in a state with an 840-mile coastline. And according to polls, he was already known to 97 percent of the California electorate.7
Finally, Reagan made a deal with the governor makers: if they would underwrite his speaking engagements and travel for six months, he would use the time to find out for himself whether the people—ordinary people, not Republican partisans—really wanted him to run for governor of California. On the last day of 1965, he would tell them whether he would be a candidate. They immediately agreed and hired the best political campaign team in the state—Stuart Spencer and William Roberts—to manage Reagan’s unusual journey into the mind of the California electorate. Most politicians are convinced that the people need them desperately; Reagan had to be persuaded that he could help them.
While Reagan was making up his mind whether to run for governor of the second most populous state in the Union, another conservative was mulling over whether to run for mayor of the biggest and most liberal city in America.
There were, in fact, several reasons why William F. Buckley, Jr., was eyeing the New York City mayoralty. First, he wanted to help block the rapid political rise of Congressman John Lindsay, the golden boy of liberal Republicans who planned to move their man up the political ladder from congressman, to mayor, to governor, to president of the United States. That was a prospect devoutly to be resisted by all right-thinking Americans.
Second, the conservative movement could use a political boost after the Goldwater defeat, and a good showing by a conservative candidate in the citadel of liberaldom would do just that.
Third, Buckley had some ideas about the prudential conduct of a large city’s affairs (borrowed in part from the Harvard sociologists Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer) that merited serious public consideration. And where better to do that than in New York City, headquarters of the nation’s media?
Finally, running for mayor of New York would be fun and anything but boring, the one thing on God’s earth that Bill Buckley could not abide. And he knew he would get a book out of the experience.
Although he insisted at the time and in his witty account of his campaign, The Unmaking of a Mayor, that the conservative movement was not a factor in his decision to run, Buckley was being either uncharacteristically disingenuous or unbelievably naive. In the year 1965, you could no more separate Buckley and American conservatism than you could uncouple the pope and Roman Catholicism. Inevitably, Buckley’s showing in New York’s mayoral race would strengthen or weaken the movement when, following the sinking of the good ship Goldwater the previous November, it was at its most vulnerable.
But first he wanted to prevent John Lindsay from becoming the Republican party’s future presidential candidate. Buckley was so adamantly opposed to Lindsay because the New York City congressman was a Republican in name only. Indeed, based on his political pronouncements, Buckley argued, Lindsay was to the “left of the center of the Democratic Party.” Far from “revitalizing” the Republican party, as his supporters insisted, Lindsay’s election would damage the two-party system and contribute to “the disintegration of New York City.”8
In early June (and not yet a candidate), Buckley wrote a column jocularly titled “Mayor, Anyone?” that set forth a ten-point platform on which a candidate might run. What strikes one on reading it is how libertarian it is.
Buckley recommended that “anti-narcotic laws for adults” be repealed, gambling be legalized, anyone without a police record be allowed to operate a car as a taxi, and communities be encouraged to finance their own “watchmen,” relieving the municipal police force of what he called “an almost impossible job.”9
He also displayed some impressive prescience. He anticipated the enterprise zone proposal of a decade later by suggesting that state and federal authorities suspend property and income taxes for all “Negro or Puerto Rican entrepreneurs” who established businesses in depressed areas in the inner cities. And he proposed, several years before Governor Reagan offered his hard-nosed welfare reform program in California, that all welfare recipients be required to do “street cleaning and general prettification work” for the city. Here, albeit in a rather crude way, was the first conservative enunciation of the workfare principle or, as Buckley put it, “no workee, no dolee.”10
Still asserting his nonsuitability (he was, among other things, a resident of Connecticut), Buckley tried and failed, despite the consumption of several bottles of excellent wine over a long evening, to convince his publisher, William A. Rusher, that he should carry the conservative standard that fall. Rusher was a brilliant political organizer and public debater but preferred the back room to the front line. He declined, firmly. The next morning, Buckley telephoned Conservative party chairman Dan Mahoney and asked “whether he wanted me as a candidate.”11 Mahoney immediately and enthusiastically signed up the best-known conservative in America, next to Barry Goldwater.
The New York Times was not impressed with Buckley’s formal announcement on June 24, dismissing it as an “exercise in futility” and predicting that New York voters would reject Buckley’s “kind of Republicanism” as decisively as the nation had repudiated “Goldwaterism” the previous November. Buckley quickly responded with a letter to the editor, listing the reforms for the city that the Times had not bothered to mention in its news story about his candidacy: an increase in the police force, lower taxes, workfare, a disavowal of those who “encourage racism, lawlessness, and despair” among blacks, decentralization of city schools, and a reduction of the urban renewal and city planning that were “dehumanizing” New York City.12 (The parallels with the policies of President Reagan in the 1980s and those claimed by President Clinton in the 1990s are striking.)
As to “repudiation” by the electorate, Buckley concluded that while it was true that “only” 800,000 New Yorkers voted for Barry Goldwater, it was also true that New York continued “to be misgoverned. There may be,” he added, “a cause-and-effect relationship here.”13
A week later, Buckley delivered the most quoted line of the campaign, demonstrating yet again his defiance of political convention. “What would you do if you were elected?” a reporter asked. “Demand a recount,” Buckley shot back.14
By mid-September, no one was dismissing the Buckley campaign, particularly the two other candidates, John Lindsay and Democrat Abe Beame. Lindsay took to picturing himself as “the alternative to Beame, bosses and Buckley.” He suggested darkly that Buckley was the “creature” of a rightwing conspiracy whose axis ran “between Arizona and Connecticut.”15
An alarmed Walter Lippmann accused Buckley of a “strong streak of fanaticism” and declared there was no “precedent in American politics for the kind of wrecking operation that Buckley is conducting.” Buckley riposted: at least not since 1964 when Lindsay contributed to the wrecking of the Republican party by refusing to support Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee.16
The widely viewed television debates among the three candidates were devastating for Lindsay, revealing, it was widely acknowledged, his humorlessness, short temper, superficiality, and just plain dullness. Columnist Joseph Alsop, a doyen of the establishment, wrote reluctantly, “Lindsay has hardly proven that he is a man with the toughness, ingenuity, and vision to start a giant, near-bankrupt city on a wholly new course.”17 In contrast, the perpetually poised Buckley always seemed to come up with the right word. In one three-way debate, moderator Morton Dean advised the conservative candidate that he had “another moment if you care to comment,” to which Buckley relied, “No, I think I’ll just contemplate the great eloquence of my previous remarks.”18
In between debates and other campaign rituals, Buckley stubbornly offered conservative solutions to societal problems. Borrowing from Moynihan’s and Glazer’s admirable book, Beyond the Melting Pot, he declared that black leaders should stop depending on government and “take on the responsibility of helping their own people.” While admitting that the problems of blacks were in part “of our making,” he also insisted that they were in part “the making of Negro demagogues and of the Negroes who tolerate them.”19 He advocated a one-year residence requirement for welfare recipients, supported the “neighborhood school system,” and opposed a civilian review board that would hamper and harry the police.
In the end, an impressive 13.4 percent of the New York electorate (341,226 voters) voted for Bill Buckley while Lindsay eked out a narrow win, receiving 45.3 percent to Beame’s 41.3 percent. Conservatives failed to defeat Lindsay, but they succeeded in their longer-range objective: to prevent the New York Times from writing something like “Lindsay’s decisive victory catapulted him into a position of national leadership in the Republican Party and established him as a leading Presidential or Vice Presidential possibility in 1968 or 1972.”
The Buckley campaign so energized the Conservative party of New York that only five years later, the party would be able to elect his brother, James Buckley, to the U.S. Senate. Buckley’s mayoral effort also sketched the outlines of a winning coalition of ethnic, Catholic Democrats, and middle-class Republicans. In his landmark study The Emerging Republican Majority, Kevin Phillips cited Buckley’s vote in New York’s Catholic assembly districts as a “harbinger” of the new majority. As Buckley’s biographer, John Judis, says, Buckley’s coalition “perfectly anticipated” the northern urban coalition that Ronald Reagan created in 1980 and 1984, enabling him to carry New York City in those elections.20
Buckley, however, did not join in the general conservative jubilation over his showing. At the tenth anniversary dinner of National Review following the election, he was generous as always in his thanks to colleagues, friends, and supporters but lamented that it was impossible, given the ugly realities of the cold war and the Great Society, to avoid politics—“the preoccupation of the quarter-educated.”
In The Unmaking of a Mayor, published a year later, he concluded that he could not be optimistic about the future. The conservative doctrine, he said, lacked “mass appeal.” Conservatism in America was “a force” rather than “a political movement.” The Republican party probably would not survive as “a major party.” The New York campaign, he asserted, proved nothing. He greatly regretted the coming decline of the GOP, he said, because the alternative was likely to be “a congeries of third parties, adamantly doctrinaire, inadequately led, insufficiently thoughtful, improvidently angry, self-defeatingly sectarian.”21
Buckley’s lamentation was spectacularly ill timed. Even as he tore at his garments, a brilliant new political star was rising in the West, conservatives were organizing from New York to California, a new mode of political fund raising (direct mail) was emerging, and in the nation’s capital an obscure conservative organization, the National Right to Work Committee, was preparing to deny President Johnson, the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, and the powerful AFL-CIO a legislative victory they thought they had in the bag.
At Robert Taft’s insistence, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act had included section 14(b), authorizing state right-to-work laws, which affirm that no individual may be denied employment because he does or does not belong to a union. In other words, these laws protect the freedom to join a union and the freedom not to join a union, leaving the choice with the worker, not union leaders or company management.
Organized labor loathed the principle of right to work and, following Johnson’s 1964 landslide victory, set the repeal of section 14(b) as its top legislative objective in the new Congress. In late July 1965, the House of Representatives voted to eliminate right to work from Taft-Hartley. The vote was surprisingly close—221 to 202—but jubilant union officials were confident that their dreams of repeal would be realized in the more liberal Senate.
The one possible impediment was a filibuster. And the only senator who could bring and keep together the conservative Republican-Southern Democrat coalition needed to sustain a filibuster was minority leader Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, who was popular with many Southern Democrats. Under the leadership of Dirksen, a major sponsor of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the filibuster could not be dismissed as another “Southern filibuster.”22
Hugh Newton, information director for the National Right to Work Committee, recalled that at the initial meeting with Dirksen, the senator “was not optimistic” about waging a successful battle for section 14(b).23 Although he had consistently supported the principle of right to work, Dirsken considered it an issue the general public cared little about. The Right to Work Committee knew that this was not true.
One week later, committee officials walked into Senator Dirksen’s office with over three thousand pro-right-to-work editorials from fifteen hundred daily newspapers and a thousand weeklies. The newspapers ranged over the political spectrum from the New York Times and Washington Post to the Richmond News-Leader and Los Angeles Times. The editorials showed that the majority of Americans were opposed to compulsory unionism and repeal of section 14(b) and would support members of Congress who prevented repeal. “The change in Senator Dirksen’s attitude was immediate,” Newton recalled. And with his active leadership, “victory had become a definite possibility.”24
The National Right to Work Committee concentrated on two objectives: to arouse public opinion at the grass roots, which would in turn influence members of Congress, and to provide sympathetic members of Congress with every possible assistance, especially key legislators who would lead the effort to retain section 14(b). Other important members of the right-to-work coalition were the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.
Both sides prepared for battle, and on October 4, 1965, the opening salvos were fired. Senator Wallace Bennett (R-Utah) used the fewest words with the most impact: “Good unions don’t need repeal of Section 14(b), and bad unions don’t deserve it.”25 One week later, Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield of Montana sought a two-thirds vote to shut off debate and was defeated, 47 to 45.
Talk continued for another two weeks until opponents of section 14(b) reluctantly conceded they did not have the votes and allowed the Senate to adjourn. They went home to try to figure out why they could not dispatch with ease so small a “David” as section 14(b). But the opposition to repeal was even stronger in the next session of Congress.
In January, when Mansfield announced that debate on section 14(b) would soon begin again, Dirksen swiftly replied, in his most Churchillian manner, “We will fight to the end. And there is no amicable compromise possible.”26 By now, other important factors were crystallizing for the right-to-work forces. President Johnson was not pushing as hard as he once had for repeal; he too could measure public opinion. Major strikes around the country, particularly the New York City transit strike, had aroused the public against union leaders and excessive union power. And union officials did not get their members to exert maximum pressure on their senators. This failure was due in large part to the union bosses themselves, who had been so confident of repeal that they had not laid the groundwork for any last-minute push.
On February 8, Mansfield moved again to cut off debate. His motion was decisively rejected by a vote of 51 to 48, far short of the required two-thirds. Two days later, the majority leader tried again to invoke cloture and was again rebuffed. By now, Mansfield had tired of trying to carry organized labor’s water up an impossibly steep hill, and he put aside repeal of section 14(b) for the rest of the Eighty-ninth Congress. Since then, for more than thirty years, repeal of right to work has never been seriously attempted by any Congress.
In its campaign, the National Right to Work Committee followed certain basic guidelines that other conservative single-issue organizations would study and copy in succeeding decades: develop dedicated, articulate leadership; do not be distracted from your basic purpose; build a broad-based grassroots membership; and make a long-term commitment.
Among the specific tools the committee employed were establishing a workers’ group, Union Members Against Compulsory Unionism; setting up a women’s group, WORK—Women for Right to Work; distributing ten thousand information kits to key individuals; providing rapid-response research facilities for members of Congress; underwriting a national advertising program keyed to “doubtful” congressional districts; and holding a series of luncheon meetings with key congressional aides to exchange information and ideas.
No detail was overlooked, even calls of nature. In past filibusters, senators had relied upon “the motorman’s friend” (a long tube attached to the waist and running down the inside of a pants leg) when they had to empty their bladder but could not leave the floor. Committee executive vice president Reed Larson was delegated to buy six of the devices at a medical supply house and turned them over to the Dirksen-led coalition. On the opening day of the filibuster, Senator Dirksen wore a “motorman’s friend” as a joke but also as a sign of the right-to-work group’s commitment. Observers in the galleries wondered why so many senators kept going up to the grinning Dirksen and slapping him so vigorously on the leg.27
The National Right to Work Committee’s “impossible” victory over President Johnson, Congress, and the AFL-CIO was a defining moment in the history of the conservative movement and convincing proof that conservatism could be an effective political force in the nation’s capital, even in the Age of Johnson.
That same year, a young, unknown conservative began experimenting with a new way to raise money and communicate ideas. Richard A. Viguerie was born on September 23, 1933, in Golden Acres, Texas, outside Houston. His parents, of Louisiana French descent, had moved to Texas the day after they were married in September 1929, just before the Great Depression came crashing down. His father started with Shell Oil as a construction worker and worked his way up to top management. His mother, who spoke only French until she started school, worked in a paper mill during World War II. “Our family was thrifty,” says Viguerie; “no money was ever wasted.”28
In college in the early 1950s, young Viguerie’s heroes were the two “Macs”—Douglas MacArthur and Joseph McCarthy. “Even when he was inaccurate,” Viguerie later wrote, “McCarthy articulated my concern about a very big problem. There are communists in this world.”29
Active in local politics (he was Harris County campaign chairman for John Tower’s first Senate try in 1960), Viguerie wanted, above all else, to work in Washington. In the summer of 1961, he answered a classified ad in National Review to work as a field man for Americans for Constitutional Action (ACA).
Viguerie flew from Houston to New York City at midnight to save money and arrived at the offices of National Review to discover that his interview was not for a field position with ACA but for executive secretary of Young Americans for Freedom. Viguerie knew something of the conservative youth group but had not been invited to its founding meeting the previous September because, as he put it, “none of the organizers had any reason to know who Richard Viguerie was.”30 The energetic, idealistic young Texan hit it off with members of YAF’s board of directors and, more important, with conservative impresario Marvin Liebman.
For the next three years, Viguerie learned and practiced the craft of fund raising, particularly direct mail, under Liebman, who was conservatism’s leading political organizer during the 1950s and 1960s. Among the major organizations that Liebman helped create and run were the Committee of One Million, Young Americans for Freedom, the American Conservative Union, and the World Youth Crusade for Freedom. He also filled Madison Square Garden more often than the Ringling Brothers or Barnum and Bailey, and always for conservative causes.
Inspired by Liebman’s example, Viguerie decided to start his own direct-mail company in Washington and opened his doors in January 1965 with one employee, less than $4,000 in the bank, and one tangible asset: the names of 12,500 conservative contributors. How he got the names reveals much about Viguerie and the state of the conservative movement in these early days.
Like other young conservatives, Viguerie was shocked by the magnitude of Goldwater’s loss, but he saw a golden opportunity in the failed campaign that no one else recognized. He went to the office of the clerk of the House of Representatives, which had on file, as required by law, the names and addresses of all those who had given fifty dollars or more to the Goldwater campaign.
Viguerie copied down their names and addresses by hand “until my fingers were numb.” It was then legal to copy such public records and use the names for advertising, but no photocopying was allowed. After two weeks, the finger-weary Viguerie hired several others to do the copying. He wound up with 12,500 conservative donors, the genesis of “my famous list, without which I wouldn’t be in business today.”31 Nor, it must be added, would the many conservative groups and organizations that depend on direct mail for a significant part of their income.
At the time, direct mail was a new technique, and most politicians did not understand its potential. One of those who did was Democrat George McGovern, who called Viguerie to ask whether he would like to help him in his 1968 Senate race. The conservative fund raiser politely responded to the liberal candidate that they were “poles apart ideologically” and that he would be better off hiring someone “more akin with [your] philosophy.”32
McGovern took Viguerie’s advice and deepened his appreciation of the power of direct mail when he won in 1968. McGovern began telling liberal organizations and candidates that he wanted to help them raise money. He signed many fund-raising letters, asking for only the names and addresses of those who responded. As a result, when George McGovern announced in January 1971 for president, he had a resource no else had: a mailing list of tens of thousands of liberals who had contributed to left-wing candidates and causes, primarily to end the Vietnam War. Unquestionably, McGovern’s long list of liberal donors helped him win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972.
Viguerie became the king of direct mail. Over the next quarter of a century, he helped finance dozens of political candidates and as many conservative organizations; refined the use of letters as a means of informing and motivating people; trained young men and women in the art of direct mail, many of whom now head their own marketing companies; brought key conservatives together at countless breakfasts, luncheons, and dinners to advance conservatism and confound liberalism; and helped found the New Right. As he puts it, “I’m frustrated on any day when I haven’t done something significant to help our country.”33
Meanwhile, throughout much of 1965, Ronald Reagan was learning how he might help the state of California. He surprised many observers by soon displaying a solid knowledge of state issues. This was no accident. Spencer and Roberts had closeted Reagan with two academics, Dr. Stanley Plog of the University of California at Los Angeles and Dr. Kenneth Holden of San Fernando Valley State College, behavioral scientists who in their spare time ran a small research firm, the Behavior Sciences Corporation of Van Nuys. Plog and Holden set out to provide the prospective candidate with facts and figures that he could absorb and use in a speech or news conference. They did not try to reconstruct Reagan because they discovered that “Reagan knows who he is and what he stands for.”34
Eventually, some eight briefing books were produced, covering topics from agriculture to redwoods to taxes to water. Reagan used them to write down key facts and phrases on cards, a technique he had developed during his years of speechmaking for General Electric. Reagan had little difficulty keeping up with the cramming. As Bill Roberts said, “Reagan has an extremely retentive mind and is a voracious reader.”35
He was an unquestioned hit on the precampaign trail, captivating audiences from San Diego to Redding with his charm, his candor, and his intelligence. After every speech, people lined up to shake his hand and invariably asked, “Why don’t you run for governor?” He soon realized it was no setup—they really did want him to run. When the six months were almost over, Reagan came home one night and asked his wife and closest adviser, Nancy, “How do you say no to all these people?”36
They knew that if he agreed, their life would change dramatically, probably forever. But he told Nancy, “I don’t think we can run away from it.”37
Reagan’s words, reflecting a willingness to serve and set aside personal desires for a greater good, were remarkably similar to those of Barry Goldwater in December 1963 when he decided, following John Kennedy’s assassination, to seek the Republican nomination for president. There was, of course, an enormous difference between the political circumstances facing the two men. Goldwater knew that if he were nominated, the mood of the nation was such that he could not be elected. Reagan realized that if he won the gubernatorial nomination, the mood of Californians was such that he would have an excellent chance of defeating the incumbent, Pat Brown.
After all, taxes were up. Per capita state taxes since 1959, Brown’s first year in office, had increased 33 percent. State spending was up. During Brown’s tenure, California’s population had increased 27 percent while the state budget soared 87 percent. And crime was up: With 9 percent of the nation’s population, California accounted for 17 percent of the nation’s crime.
Reagan’s major primary opponent was liberal Republican George Christopher, the two-term mayor of San Francisco. Christopher, despite his executive and administrative experience, had several flaws. In the words of one reporter, he “looks and talks like a losing television wrestler.” Asked why Republicans kept losing elections in California, Christopher replied, “We have straddled the fence with both ears to the ground at the same time too long.”38
And he was often careless with facts, implying that Reagan was the candidate of the John Birch Society and at the same time pointing out that Reagan had once belonged to three communist-front organizations—without bothering to add that Reagan had broken publicly and vociferously with all three groups when he discovered their affiliations.
Regarding the Birch Society, Reagan released a one-page statement in September 1965 in which he denounced the “reckless and imprudent” statements of Robert Welch but declined to condemn all members of the society. He quoted the 1963 report of a California Senate subcommittee that concluded that although the John Birch Society had attracted “a lunatic fringe of emotionally unstable people,” the great majority of its members were not “crackpots or hysterical about the threat of Communist subversion.”
Reagan went on to declare that he would not seek the support “of any blocs or groups” because it implied a willingness “to make promises in return for such support.” Rather, he intended to persuade individuals “to accept my philosophy, not my accepting theirs.” As he would put it more colloquially during the coming campaign, “If anyone chooses to vote for me, they are buying my views, I am not buying theirs.”39
The conservative’s prospective candidacy was aided by the chairman of the California Republican party, Gaylord Parkinson. Tired of losing election after election to Democrats and appalled by the self-destructive infighting that had characterized the Republican primaries of 1958, 1962, and 1964, Parkinson laid down the law, warning the gubernatorial candidates: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” Dubbed the Eleventh Commandment by cynical journalists, Parkinson’s proposal was endorsed unanimously by the state central committee, and every candidate-to-be quickly followed suit.40
Reagan was delighted. The Eleventh Commandment effectively blocked Christopher from engaging in ad hominem attacks and guaranteed the united GOP that Reagan needed to win the general election. It also suited Reagan’s affable temperament and strong distaste for personal as opposed to programmatic criticism. Reagan often quoted the Eleventh Commandment in the years to come whenever the tempers of his fellow Republicans grew short and nasty.
To no one’s surprise, on January 4, 1966, Ronald Reagan formally announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for governor. He did it with a televised “fireside chat” rather than at the usual formal news conference. The television address was intended to prevent any possible “Goldwaterizing” by the mass media. If Reagan was allowed to speak directly to the people, reasoned his top advisers, without any interpretation by television anchors or newspaper reporters, the people would make the correct decision whether he would make a good governor.
The news media, however, were not ignored. A preview for journalists (the television program had been filmed the day before) was followed by a formal news conference that ended at 5 P.M.,just one hour before the announcement aired. More than two hundred reporters filled the ballroom of a downtown Los Angeles hotel. They fired questions at Reagan about the John Birch Society, the riots in Watts, his lack of political experience, the Great Society, the state’s most pressing problems and his solutions to them. What was the one issue above all others? one reporter demanded. “To retire Pat Brown,” Reagan said, smiling, and the reporters roared with laughter.41
Reagan was comfortable on the campaign trail. He had, after all, been campaigning for presidential candidates in California for nearly twenty years, from Harry Truman in 1948 to Barry Goldwater in 1964. He had worked vigorously in 1953 for Mayor Fletcher Bowron of Los Angeles in a hard-fought reelection contest. And nine years later, he was honorary campaign chairman for Lloyd Wright in his try for the GOP nomination for U.S. senator.
But this was the first time that Reagan had ever campaigned for himself, and sometimes he made mistakes—as at the National Negro Republican Assembly’s California convention in March 1966. He admitted to the mostly black audience that, although he agreed with the goals of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he nonetheless felt that it “was a bad piece of legislation” and probably would not have voted for it had he been in Congress. Obviously he had read Goldwater’s critique during the Senate debate and agreed that the act was unconstitutional.
The convention delegates did not agree, and both George Christopher and another Republican candidate, businessman William P. Patrick, criticized Reagan, implying that he was a racist and a bigot. Reagan became visibly tenser as the meeting progressed. At last, in the question-and-answer period, a black delegate said bluntly, “It grieves me when a leading Republican candidate says the Civil Rights Act is a bad piece of legislation.”
Suddenly Reagan jumped to his feet, threw down some note cards he was holding, and said loudly:
I resent the implication that there is any bigotry in my nature. Don’t anyone ever imply I lack integrity. I will not stand silent and let anyone imply that—in this or any other group.42
Reagan stalked out of the hall, leaving behind him an astonished, hushed audience and bewildered aides. It was precisely the kind of emotional outburst a neophyte conservative candidate could not afford. Serious, perhaps irreparable political damage might have been done if Reagan’s press aide, Lyn Nofziger, had not followed the candidate to his home in Pacific Palisades and told him bluntly, “We’ve got to go back…. If you don’t show they’ll think either that you don’t like blacks or that you’re afraid to face them.”43
Reagan saw immediately that Nofziger was right and returned to the meeting where, at a cocktail party, he received a generally friendly reception. It helped that neither Christopher nor Patrick stayed for the social event. Reagan learned from his mistake: He never again walked out of a political debate.
Two major issues emerged in May that Reagan and his team quickly seized on to pull ahead in the race. First, the state’s Senate Subcommittee on Un-American Activities accused Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, of having allowed radical students and nonstudents to use the Berkeley campus to become the national “focal point” of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
Reagan called on Governor Brown, in his capacity as president of the university’s board of regents, to act immediately “to restore the university to its once high standing.” And he accused Brown of a “cover-up” in asking UC’s regents, who included Kerr, rather than the state legislature to investigate.44 Reagan’s willingness to criticize campus radicals and support the war in Vietnam was consistent with conservative principles and was good politics, appealing to social conservatives and patriots of both parties.
Second, the state supreme court, by five to two, overturned Proposition 14, which allowed owners of private property to sell or rent their real estate to whomever they wanted, regardless of race, creed, or color. The provision had been approved in a 1964 state referendum by a two-to-one margin. For Reagan, the principle at the heart of Proposition 14 was clear: “the right of a man to dispose of his property or not to dispose of it as he sees fit.”45 Christopher loudly applauded the court’s action; Brown was more muted. He was adding up the issues and the votes, and too many of them were ending up on Reagan’s side.
Reagan was now rolling along, and on primary day, June 7, he won the GOP nomination for governor by better than two to one, carrying fifty-three of California’s fifty-eight counties, and established himself as a favorite to beat Brown in the fall. Analysts used words like earthquake, landslide, and sweeping as they sought to explain the former actor’s political debut. Newsweek detected “a new tide of conservatism” in Reagan’s startling victory, especially significant now that California was close to passing New York as the most populous state.46
Leading Republicans wanted a closer look at the California phenomenon. Former President Eisenhower invited Reagan to have lunch with him in Gettysburg; Ike’s warm embrace spelled serious trouble for Pat Brown and his strategy of trying to pin an extremist label on Reagan. Traveling farther east, Reagan gave a witty and deft address at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. One columnist wrote that “even President Johnson pricked up his ears when Reagan came to town.”47 Reagan took all the plaudits in stride—he was, after all, used to good “notices”—and returned to California to prepare for the fall campaign.
Republicans of all philosophical hues, sensing a winner, happily clambered aboard the Reagan wagon. Joining the conservatives on his steering committee were Caspar Weinberger, a former state GOP chairman and one of the party’s leading liberals (Weinberger would later serve as President Reagan’s secretary of defense); state senator John F. McCarthy, a one-time Rockefeller supporter; and liberal Robert T. Monagan, Republican leader in the state assembly.
Nervous Democrats, sensing possible defeat, released what they called a “profound document,” entitled “Ronald Reagan, Extremist Collaborator—an Exposé.” Among the proofs of Reagan’s extremism: he read and quoted from Human Events, he was on the national advisory board of Young Americans for Freedom, and he had appeared at a rally with Dr. Fred Schwarz, whose book, You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists), was widely acknowledged as one of the best primers on communism.48
An unruffled Reagan kept hitting the Brown administration about high taxes, uncontrolled spending, the radicals at Berkeley, and the need for morality in government. He called for tuition increases at the University of California, warning that the alternative might be a cutback in the entire higher education program. He asked Democrats to join with him to restore balance to the two-party system in California. And he reiterated his position that a property owner should have the right to sell or rent to whomever he wanted.
Californians listened to what the Democrats were saying about Reagan—puppet, extremist, unstable—and then looked at the calm, controlled, articulate Reagan in person and on television, and decided that somebody was wrong. Just as Rockefeller’s people had overplayed their hand against Goldwater in the Republican primary of June 1964, Brown’s people went overboard in the fall of 1966.
Reagan appealed to the best in the electorate, suggesting that “we can start a prairie fire that will sweep the nation and prove we are number one in more than size and crime and taxes.” Brown played on the people’s worst fears in a thirty-minute film telecast one hundred times throughout the state. While talking to a group of black children, Brown said, “You know, I’m running against an actor … and you know who it was who shot Abe Lincoln, don’t you?”49 Democrats made a sixty-second television spot of this scene and saturated the state with it in the last week of the campaign.
On November 7, the last day of the campaign, Reagan held airport rallies in six cities. Four days earlier, he had been covered with confetti and cheered by thousands during a parade in San Francisco, Pat Brown’s home-town. On that last day, the candidate cautioned the sign-waving crowds against overconfidence and urged them to turn out in full force on the morrow. They did.
The last polls showed Reagan ahead by five to six points, a margin that would translate into a 500,000 plurality. But like his opponents, the pollsters underestimated his strength. With Reagan at the head of the ticket, the Republicans won every major state office but one, reduced the Democratic majorities in the assembly and state senate to razor-thin margins, and picked up three seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Reagan trounced Brown by 1 million votes and 15 percentage points—57 percent to 42 percent. And by the following July, after six months as governor, Reagan was ranked as a serious contender in opinion polls for the Republican presidential nomination, running ahead of Nelson Rockefeller but behind front-runners Richard Nixon and Governor George Romney of Michigan. Asked at a western governors’ conference if he would accept the nomination, Reagan replied: “If the Republican Party comes beating at my door, I won’t say, ‘Get lost, fellows.’ ” But he immediately added that he did not expect any draft.50