Landslide (23 page)

The young Reagan thrilled to Roosevelt’s gifts—he crafted an impersonation of FDR, complete with imaginary cigarette holder—and for a time to Roosevelt’s politics as well. The world would long note that Reagan started his adult life as a Democrat. When asked to explain his political evolution, he would usually give a variation on the same answer: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” It was a good line. It captured not just Reagan’s journey but also the journey of millions of Americans who had grown up with pictures of Roosevelt and Kennedy on their walls but would nonetheless vote for Reagan and the Republicans in the later years of the twentieth century.

But that line left a false impression of Reagan as a creature of the center, watching in dismay as his party lurched to the far left. That was never the real Reagan. Throughout his life, Reagan’s natural preference for clear drama caused him to view politics as a matter of moral certainty, in which one side was right and the other wrong. Mr. Norm understood the New Deal consensus and was careful to stay within its bounds. But like Johnson, who was capable of operating in a world of compromise and contradiction but fantasized of only total glory or total doom, Reagan saw no beauty in gray areas. For him, the simple was always preferable to the complex. He could find that simplicity only on the edges of consensus politics. And so that was where he felt most comfortable, first on the left edge, then on the right.

In the 1940s in Hollywood, he was a committed New Deal Democrat, a liberal who used his celebrity to point out the corrupt practices
of big business and the mortal threat that moneyed interests posed to the forgotten man. Campaigning for Democratic candidates, he played up their noble virtues and sought to expose the greedy interests and secret agendas of their opponents. He had no great affection for Roosevelt’s less media-savvy successor—he called Harry Truman “
as inspiring as mud”—but in the election of 1948, he headed up the Labor League of Hollywood Voters for Truman all the same. That same year, he spoke out against Minnesota’s incumbent
Republican senator Joseph Ball, “the banner carrier for Wall Street,” and urged the election of the liberal lion Hubert Humphrey, mayor of Minneapolis. “
Mayor Humphrey,” said Reagan, “is fighting for all the principles advocated by President Truman, for adequate low-cost housing, for civil rights, for prices people can afford to pay and for a labor movement free of the Taft-Hartley law.”

But with the rise of the Cold War, the struggle against Communism captured Reagan’s imagination. There was a clear good guy (the free West), a clear villain (the Soviets), and dramatically high stakes (the future of American freedom or even the survival of mankind). Talking about the global struggle, Reagan could employ the kind of urgent drama he preferred: “
You have an opportunity to decide now whether you will strike a match,” he told an audience in the early fifties, “and whether you will help push back the darkness over the stadium of humanity.”

In addition, the fight against Communism offered an essential element for Reagan’s worldview: a conspiracy plot. Stories of sinister plans hatched by powerful, hidden interests had long appealed to him. They became vital to the marriage of his taste for vivid drama and his notion of the Communist threat. Mr. Norm, who believed fervently that most people were good, decent, hardworking, and kind, could not entertain the possibility that evil ideas could win over the masses. In a good world, evil couldn’t ever gain advantage fair and square; it had to resort to dark magic or dirty tricks. The foreign treachery of a Moscow cabal played a central part in Reagan’s vision of the Communist menace. In America, he wrote in
1951, “
the so-called Communist Party is nothing less than a Russian-American Bund owing allegiance to Russia and supporting Russia in its plan to conquer the world. The very Constitution behind which these cynical agents hide becomes a weapon to be used against them. They are traitors practicing treason.”

It was strong stuff, driven by motives that were personal as well as political. Reagan had been active in liberal causes in Hollywood in the late 1930s and ’40s, a period when it was not easy to keep track of just who was a Communist and who was not. Two groups of which he had been a member—the American Veterans Committee (AVC) and Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions (HICCASP, “pronounced,” said Reagan, “
like the cough of a dying man”)—came under Communist control. Reagan resigned from each group when he learned of its Communist affiliation, and no evidence exists that he ever knowingly supported Communist causes. Still, he could be fairly described as a leftist political activist and labor leader with known Communist associations. In Hollywood, in the McCarthy era, reputations were ruined for far less.

So he had strong personal interest in proclaiming himself a fierce and ardent Cold Warrior, a hard-line anticommunist. And in the process, he began his shift to the political right. Reagan’s ideological conversion would not happen overnight. He voted for Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 but was no fan of Ike’s vice president. “
Pray as I am praying,” he wrote after the election, “for the health and long life of Eisenhower because the thought of Nixon in the White House is almost as bad as that of ‘Uncle Joe.’ ” (“Uncle Joe” being Stalin—no holding back the drama there.) “Nixon is a hand picked errand boy with a pleasing façade and naught but emptiness behind. He has been subsidized by a small clique of oil and real estate pirates, he is less than honest and he is an ambitious opportunist completely undeserving of the high honor paid him.”

But as the decade wore on, Reagan found the left a more and more alien space. The Cold War liberals’ case against Communism
was aggressive, but it was also nuanced. The totalitarian state that abolished free markets posed a mortal threat to liberty, they argued. But they also believed in the New Deal consensus government: a government that provided a safety net from the market’s excesses, a government that could use planning and fiscal policy to preserve and grow the economy, a government that had the power to actively transform the lives of its citizens. “Containment,” the government’s consensus approach toward international Communism, was, by necessity, complicated and qualified as well. The doctrine held that the expansion of Communism must be met with a willingness to show force around the globe. But it also held that, thanks to the catastrophic potential of nuclear weaponry, force should be avoided at all costs, and conflicts with the Soviets should be carefully and strategically chosen.

Only in the newly radicalized hard right could Reagan find the unqualified moral clarity and dramatic urgency he preferred. By the early 1950s, conservatives had been out of power for nearly a generation. Their worldview was undiluted by the compromise and contradictions that inevitably come with the responsibility of governing. A group of young conservative thinkers—the most prominent of whom was William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of the conservative magazine
National Review
—saw themselves as leading a new, more radical movement. They had little use for classical conservatism’s respect for and preservation of existing institutions. Rather, they viewed themselves as an oppressed minority, standing outside the New Deal consensus with no choice but to condemn it in the strongest possible terms.
National Review
, Buckley wrote in 1955, “
stands athwart history, yelling stop.” The magazine performed “
a predominantly monitoring task,” observed the writer Garry Wills, who served as a staffer at the magazine in its early days. “It came to accuse.”

These movement conservatives accused the governing establishment of creating a leviathan welfare state that threatened liberty. They accused Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower of launching the federal government on a path that would inevitably end in tyranny.
They accused the nation’s elite of corrupting that government and of conspiring to obscure its excesses. And they accused the nation’s leaders of a dangerous naïveté in foreign policy that would lead inevitably to capitulation and defeat. There could be no compromise, they screamed, in matters of life and death. “
The forces of international Communism are … the greatest single threat” to liberty, their statement read. “The United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with, this menace.”

Here was the vivid moral clarity Reagan yearned for. The circumstances of his personal life helped his ideological conversion along as well. From the GE executives who paid his bills, he received a steady diet of pro-business cant. From Nancy’s parents and their wealthy friends in conservative Arizona, he heard a mounting cry of indignation at the consensus mush coming out of the Eisenhower administration. Movement conservatism was critical of the East, which Reagan found foreign and unappealing. It lionized the traditional Midwestern values Reagan had long sought to embody, and it romanticized the rugged individualism of the West, where Reagan had proudly made his home. It preached of excessive taxation’s threat to liberty, a message that resonated with a high-earning actor who worried about his future earnings. Even the movement’s withering critique of those who urged “coexistence” with the Soviet Union—appeasers, the movement had it, who wished for peace and would get war—may have had unique personal appeal. Lew Ayres, the actor with whom Reagan’s first wife, Jane Wyman, was rumored to have had an affair, was an avowed pacifist who had been sent to a conscientious objectors’ camp during World War II.

But one thing more than any other made the conservative movement a natural home for Reagan: the proud place it gave to a speaker who, like him, could stir dramatic passions. The conservative pantheon of stars was almost exclusively populated by operatic, even hysterical, personalities. First and foremost was Buckley, who lived for experience that revealed vitality—a daring sailing voyage through dark and stormy seas, a motorcycle ride through the streets of
Manhattan—and for moments that hinted at the everlasting—a Bach concerto played on his Bösendorfer piano, the miracle of the Eucharist in the Latin mass. In the taut conformity of consensus, Buckley understood, a political thinker could distinguish himself merely by being interesting. “For we offer,” he wrote in the debut issue of his magazine, “
a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D.s in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town.”

The movement had other hot tickets, too. Conservatives cheered Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, whose brief and memorable service as the leading authority on the Communist conspiracy sprang not from any expertise on the topic but from a search for a campaign issue that would get him maximum attention. The spirit McCarthy showed in his
infamous Wheeling address—
I have here in my hand a list of two hundred and five … members of the Communist Party
—was untempered and unattenuated by experience, unburdened by concern for fairness or truth. As such, it made a great show. Phyllis Schlafly, a grassroots activist from the Midwest, captured the movement’s attention by describing the country’s situation as extremely perilous. The name of her radio show revealed the entire movement’s style:
America, Wake Up!

Then there was Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator who, in the latter half of the fifties, filled the void in the movement’s political leadership left by the death of Senator Robert Taft. Goldwater’s press coverage from the period stressed his rebellious roots. As a child, writes biographer Rick Perlstein, Goldwater “
rubbed shoulders with boys of all classes and races, was a basement tinkerer and a hellion who fired a miniature cannon at the steeple of the Methodist Church.” He became a national figure in the fifties by gleefully hurling cannonballs at Eisenhower, the sitting president from his
own party. The spending by Ike’s government harkened “
the siren song of socialism” he declared on the Senate floor.
Conscience of a Conservative
, the slim volume he released in 1960 (actually written by Young Americans for Freedom cofounder L. Brent Bozell), transformed the gray mire of consensus politics into vivid dichotomies:

“
To many young readers,” Perlstein observes, “the argument had almost a Gandhian appeal.… Freedom was indivisible. It was worth dying for.”

By the time 1960, and the choice between Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy, came around, it was clear to Reagan: he had become a Republican.

He showed little public hesitation over inverting his allegiances. Now it was Nixon’s opponent, not Nixon himself, drawing comparison to famous Communists. “
Shouldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s ‘bold new imaginative program’ with its proper age?” Reagan wrote to Nixon, offering his services in the 1960 campaign. “Under the tousled boyish hair cut it is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago.” Nixon liked this kind of talk. “Use him as a speaker whenever possible,” Nixon urged his staff. “He
used
to be a liberal!” (The former liberal, as it happened, was eager to make things official
with the Republican Party, but the Nixon camp, believing he could do them more good as a registered Democrat, told him to sit tight.)

Party member or not, Reagan worked tirelessly for Nixon and the Republicans, making speeches whenever his schedule allowed. He liked these political appearances so much he didn’t stop them after the election in November, remaining on the Republican speakers’ circuit for the early Kennedy years. Now his sinister-sounding proper nouns were attached to the president: Kennedy and aides like
Professor Arthur Schlesinger
were putting programs in place that would inevitably make freedom-loving Americans slaves of the state.