Landslide (24 page)

And he learned quickly what an ambitious conservative had to do to advance in the movement. His passion, first and always, was the global threat of Communism, but he backed conservative crusades against statism at home as well. In a 1961 speech, he spoke of the evils of a favorite New Deal consensus cause: a medical-care bill for the elderly. He urged his listeners to block the program, injecting his message with all the drama he could summon: “
If you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Real conservatives, he discovered, had a long list of people they mistrusted. The kind of conservatives who formed Young Americans for Freedom chapters on college campuses, the kind who were organizing for a Goldwater presidential campaign in 1964—they loathed and mistrusted not just the John F. Kennedys and Adlai Stevensons of the world, but the Dwight Eisenhowers, Nelson Rockefellers, and Richard Nixons, too. These establishment Republicans were hardly better than the Democrats. As proponents of consensus politics, they were naïve appeasers themselves.

Reagan was never quite as enthusiastic about attacking establishment figures as were his movement compatriots. Usually, before he went after a Democrat or wobbly Republican, he took time to note that they were well intentioned but woefully naïve. But he did what
he had to do to get along in a movement that valued purity. When Nixon asked for Reagan’s endorsement in the 1962 California gubernatorial primary, the actor coolly volunteered that he thought he’d be more help in a general election campaign. Unlike many California conservatives, Reagan did not join the extremist John Birch Society, a hard-line right-wing group whose leadership preached fantastic conspiracy theories, suggesting that Eisenhower was a double agent working on the Kremlin’s behalf. But he did campaign for a Bircher candidate, John Rousselot, in the congressional election of 1962.

Before long, he was acquainted with all the movement’s leading lights. He struck up a warm relationship with Goldwater, a social acquaintance of Nancy’s parents, who had retired to Arizona. Buckley first encountered Reagan as his opening act at a 1960 speech before a group of California doctors.
When the loudspeakers wouldn’t turn on, Buckley watched as Reagan “cat-walked above the traffic” to the window of the locked control room “and smashed it open with his elbow.” Buckley was taken with the handsome actor’s heroics: “Turning on the juice,” he would note approvingly, “the show must go on.”

To the movement’s leaders, Reagan’s conversion was a boon. Here was a handsome and familiar face who had been in the clutches of the liberal behemoth—only to see the light and live to tell the tale. He told it in a friendly but thrilling fashion, with a seemingly endless supply of facts and figures that made the conservative case sound as indisputable and sensible as they all knew it to be. Who cared if in Hollywood he was a has-been. In the movement, he was a shining star. Right-wing audiences loved him. When he appeared onstage with Goldwater, people wondered: Why didn’t Reagan just run for office himself?

Why indeed.

Until the end of his life, Reagan swore that he never imagined a life in politics, not even in the early 1960s. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, this version of events has largely prevailed in histories
of Reagan’s life. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. Both Reagan’s admirers and critics share a common interest in a history in which Ronald Reagan’s political career just
happens
.

Some facts are indisputable. Sometime before he announced his candidacy for California’s governorship in 1966, the idea entered Reagan’s head that he could have a career in electoral politics. Some Reagan admirers on the right are inclined to push that date as late as possible. Years spent planning an entry into politics does not fit with his image as a flawless conservative hero—Reagan, after all, was the man who said “
Government is not the solution to our problem, government
is
the problem.” It is inconvenient for that man to have spent years planning a career in government. They prefer to remember Reagan as a modern-day George Washington, leaving behind his beloved farm and field to heed duty’s call, or as the perennial cowboy hero, coming down from the mountains to save California and then the world.

On the left, Reagan’s political career is often treated as an accident that he stumbled into. It is difficult for his liberal critics to accept that a B-movie actor, a man who costarred with a chimp, could rise to lead a coalition that would in time roll back a generation’s worth of liberal progress. Reagan couldn’t have plotted his own ascent. He must have been a pawn for wealthy, well-connected interests, rich men who wrote a script for him and, when the moment was right, told their puppet with his pretty face to look into the camera and smile.

And then, most formidably, there is the narrative put forth by Reagan himself. Again and again, Reagan maintained that a career in politics was something he’d never imagined and never planned. In his postpresidential autobiography, he told of a group of conservative California businessmen coming to his home in early 1965 to speak with him about running for governor of California. “
I almost laughed them out of the house,” Reagan wrote. He tried to convince them they had the wrong guy. “ ‘I’m an actor, not a politician,’ I said several times, ‘I’m in show business.’ ”

Reagan wrote these words after he had left the White House. He knew his disciples on the right—already out proclaiming him the twentieth century’s greatest president—and understood the distaste with which they viewed professional politicians. “
I’d never given a thought to running for office,” he wrote firmly. “I had no interest in it whatsoever.” He recalled the advice of one of his conservative touchstones, Nancy’s father, Loyal Davis: “
He said I would be crazy to run for office; he said there was no way a man could go into politics without sacrificing his honesty and honor.”

Here it is important to recall, however, that Reagan was never inclined to admit he’d plotted much of anything at any point in his life. His was the natural way of the movie star: make it all look effortless. In Hollywood, Edmund Morris notes, the real stars were the ones who don’t have to audition. Reagan understood the rules of the game early. Shortly after arriving in Hollywood, he wrote a guest column for a newspaper back in Iowa describing his adventures in the film colony. In it, he excises his ardent efforts to get noticed. Instead, his career is something that happens to him: “
I was introduced to Max Arnow, Warner Bros. casting director, invited to make a screen test and suddenly woke up with a movie contract in my fist.” And that was how he wanted people to think of his political career, too: that he was invited to run for office and suddenly woke up clutching the keys to the governor’s mansion.

Yet Reagan’s version of events, wherein he was shocked by the suggestion that he run for office in 1965, doesn’t square with the historical record. He had been approached to run for governor of California in the year 1962 (the year, coincidentally or not, that he finally changed his party registration to Republican). The talk of Reagan the candidate was serious enough to reach his adult daughter, Maureen. “Run,” Maureen, already a partisan Republican, urged her father, “
you can win back California.”

“Mermie,” her father wrote to her in reply, “I really appreciate your support, but if we’re going to talk about what could be, well, I
could be President—ha, ha!—but of course, that’s not going to happen, is it?”

His other children also remember talk of political campaigns in the Reagan house, at points earlier than in the official narratives. It was obvious to his daughter Patti, who was on the brink of adolescence in the early 1960s, that her father’s acting after GE was “
a day job, not a passion. Politics was his passion, and it was becoming stronger all the time.” His son Michael recalls eavesdropping on a rare argument between Ronnie and Nancy at Christmas 1963 in which Nancy was pressuring her husband to start a gubernatorial campaign: “
She said her stepfather was willing to raise $200,000 in campaign money if Dad agreed to run. Personally, I don’t think Dad ever had really strong ambitions to be a politician, but Mommy—his name for Nancy—prodded him.”

Reagan’s version of events—the version in which his political career just happened—is also complicated by the heights to which he aspired. Stuart Spencer, the California political operative, first met Reagan in 1965. Within months, he was
convinced that Reagan had his eye on the presidency. And indeed, in two years’ time, Reagan would hatch plans for a presidential campaign. The desire to run for president, and the conviction that the presidency can be won, is not born overnight. It is nurtured by mind-altering ego and ambition over years and years. In Reagan’s case, it was most likely born in the dark days of the Depression, listening to Roosevelt’s wonderful voice on the radio. Here was a man whose office afforded him the grandest stage of all.

That was what Reagan saw in the blurry haze of his political crowds in the first half of 1964: a chance to be the hero once more. It would be impossible for any man to stand on those stages and not think,
What if they were all cheering, and voting, for me?
There is little doubt he would have found that possibility alluring. For Reagan, politics gave him the opportunity that Hollywood couldn’t: to spend his middle age as a star.

W
ANTING A CAREER
in politics was one thing. Abandoning his acting career to pursue it was quite another. To do that, Reagan would have had to look at the opportunities of the modern conservative movement in a coldly practical light.

Pragmatism is not a virtue people usually ascribe to Reagan. The Reagan of popular memory is the one the country came to know as president, the one who preferred to keep things pleasant and let other people sweat the small stuff. It is certainly true that Reagan was drawn to fantasies, that he often clung to an oversimplified view of the world, that he relied on the people around him to understand the difference between the world as he wanted it to be and the world that really was. Even so, there was one thing about which Reagan was usually quite realistic: himself. When it came to his own self-interest, Reagan the dreamy idealist was a deeply practical man.

It had always been that way. Working as a lifeguard those sweltering summer days in Illinois, the teenage Reagan would resist the temptation to drop into the water to cool off, knowing that wet trunks would chafe his skin over the course of his long shift. Upon graduation from Eureka, he set out for a career in show business, but he gave himself an ultimatum: if after five years of trying he wasn’t making five thousand dollars a year, he would have to find another career. (He beat his goal.)

Even in his picture-perfect romances, pragmatism reigned. As Cannon notes, in the studio propaganda about his marriage to Jane Wyman, a rare sour note appears when Wyman dishes on their plans to lavishly furnish a new house they are building in the Hollywood Hills. “
Depends on conditions and prices and war and things,” Reagan interjects. “We don’t intend to get out on a limb.” So, too, in the early days of his marriage to Nancy, when his Hollywood career was at a standstill, Reagan was conscious of his financial limitations. “
It was a year and a half,” said Nancy, “before we could afford to furnish our living room.” His uncommon ambition required him to be ruthlessly realistic about his own interests. And when his ambition
conflicted with his need for self-preservation, self-preservation usually won out.

Now, too, as politics beckoned, Reagan would have to look squarely at the circumstances of his life. His two children from his second marriage—Patti and Ron Jr.—were attending expensive private schools. His two children from his first marriage—Maureen and Michael—were both having a rough time in their transition to adulthood. He and Nancy were now running in a social circle—wealthy Republican businessmen and their wives—that could make even top tax bracket earners feel destitute. “
Money was a big issue in my family,” wrote Patti, “a live wire that always seemed to be sizzling.” However drawn Reagan was to politics, it was against his nature to let it endanger the security of his family.

By 1964, Reagan had come to understand that self-preservation in politics was no simple task. He had learned that lesson bitterly in his final years at GE. At first, the company’s management applauded Reagan’s burgeoning interest in politics; they liked his pro-business talk. But as Reagan’s tone grew harsher and his politics grew more extreme, he sensed discomfort coming from his corporate overlord. GE did business with the current government, after all, and Reagan’s movement talk didn’t mesh well with the Kennedy moment.

Reagan felt isolated within GE. He imagined powerful new enemies gunning for him. In a postpresidential memoir he would claim, preposterously, that during the Kennedy years, in any city he spoke in, “
there’d be a cabinet member or other high official from the … administration who’d be giving a speech on the same day. In the television business, we used to call that ‘counter programming,’ an effort to knock out the competition with a rival show. I don’t have any proof they planned it that way, but I don’t think it was coincidental.”