Landslide (45 page)

And as he played that role, he would accept no carping from the
right. “
I have no intention of compromising my beliefs,” he wrote testily to a rare conservative critic, “but I do know this. If we are to have the constitutional government we all desire, then we of the so-called conservative philosophy must recognize we have to convert those people of a more liberal view. We don’t win elections by destroying them or making them disappear.”

Mainstream Republicans were pleasantly surprised by this kind of talk. Never mind that the policies Reagan advocated differed little from Goldwater’s. To candidate Reagan, Social Security was necessary but horribly construed. Medicare was an atrocity that should be dismantled. The Civil Rights Act was well intentioned but unconstitutional. The problem with Johnson’s policy in Vietnam was a lack of resolve to
win
, come what might. And the federal government was an encroaching behemoth, steadily enslaving the people it was supposed to protect.

Never mind all of that. Reagan didn’t sound like Goldwater when he talked, and he didn’t look like him, either. He sounded, and looked, like a winner.

And that was what he desperately wanted to be. If all he wanted to do was make speeches, raise his profile, and cement his status as a darling of the hard right, he could have looked to New York City. There, in the summer of 1965, William F. Buckley, Jr., had announced his intention to run for mayor in the November elections on a conservative party line. It was, self-evidently, a fruitless task. But winning was not the point for Buckley. “
Do you really want to be mayor?” a reporter asked the
National Review
editor as he announced his campaign. “I’ve never considered it,” Buckley replied. Elsewhere, he admitted that for a conservative candidate to win in New York City would take “
a miracle.” But, the devout Catholic added, “I happen to believe in miracles.” Buckley’s platform,
The New York Times
noted, included “
a ban on mid-day truck deliveries; the sale of narcotics to adult addicts who submit to a doctor’s care; the abolition of rent controls; a constitutional amendment, if necessary, to permit school prayers; separate schools for laggard students and city
clean-up work for those on relief.” He would entertain, he would provoke, he would draw attention to movement principles. He would hopefully win some converts. And then he would go home. It was, in a sense, a mannerist, erudite updating of the Goldwater effort: winning was not the point of his campaign. His campaign was the point of his campaign.

Once, Reagan, too, had sought nothing more than to win converts to the true faith. No longer. His break with the hard-line conservatives had its awkward moments. When a reporter asked him if he was a candidate in the Goldwater mode, he grew uncomfortable. “
I don’t think it’s very pertinent,” he said. “This is the present and the future now, and the problems of California.” It was awkward with his friend Goldwater, too. “
I have received some kick-back,” he wrote to Barry during the campaign, “and in checking it out, discovered some of my remarks were quoted by the press as indicating you might be unwelcome in California. This, of course, I’m sure you know is untrue, but just for the record, I tried to keep my answer to the question regarding your possible participating in line with your own remarks on this subject, namely that the forthcoming primary was a California affair between California Republicans and their candidates, and that you had expressed yourself as believing it would be improper for anyone from another state to intervene.” This was a weak excuse for keeping the Republican Party’s most recent presidential nominee out of the state, and Reagan knew it. “Nancy sends her best. Please give Peggy a kiss from both of us, and I hope we’ll be seeing you soon.”

Movement conservatives could see what Reagan was doing. They knew that by distancing himself from the movement’s touchstones, he was conceding the moderates’ point about conservatism being toxic. But for the most part, they didn’t complain about his abandonment of movement principles. They had heard him speak and they knew he was one of them. And they wanted a winner, too. Writing in the movement journal
Human Events
, the conservative pamphleteer Lee Edwards mentioned the long list of moderates that
Reagan’s consultants had represented. “
Spencer Roberts does not handle any Democrats, but quite obviously does service a wide variety of Republicans. However,
all
Republicans are agreed that the firm is first in political management in California.”

Reagan’s early adjustment to the candidate’s life was not flawless. He struggled with the gripping and grinning that fill any politician’s days. From a speaker’s rostrum, he could form an instant connection with his audiences, but when he walked into a roomful of strangers, he was sometimes shy and tended to keep to himself. He prided himself on appearing always decent and respectful. He was repulsed by the politician’s “Hey there! I’d appreciate your vote!” Plus, he was Ronald Reagan, the star—he wanted people to come to him.

Eventually he learned to introduce himself, reverting to his standard routine of friendly comments and silly jokes. His preference was always to keep things as light as possible. Supporters who tried to engage him on substance were disappointed. “
I think he should have been briefed on the people he was talking to,” one potential donor wrote to Bill Roberts. “Admittedly, we were a rather unimportant group, but the magnitude of his impression would have been much greater had he had even the slightest idea who we were and why we were there.”

It was clear, too, that he had little passion for the parochial issues that are the bread and butter of any governor’s race. “
If he can zero in on California as he has done [on] the national and international problems,” one supporter tactfully observed to Stuart Spencer, “we should have a winner.” His benefactors were less circumspect. At a meeting at his house in late November, the donor Henry Salvatori expressed concern that Reagan’s candidacy lacked sufficient substance. W. S. McBirnie, a right-wing radio host, was present at the meeting. “
I think Henry tried to say that he had no criticism of
you
,” he told Reagan afterward, “but he was waiting for a definite
program
which would stamp you as electable.”

Reagan tried to do the work required. Spencer and Roberts hired
BASICO, a team of behavioral scientists, to help Reagan flesh out his positions on local issues. BASICO developed a file system for candidate Reagan with index cards containing digestible bits of information on a variety of issues. With his photographic memory, he crammed facts and figures to develop positions on water policy and early childhood education. But his heart wasn’t in it. “
Damn,” he exclaimed to BASICO co-founder Stanley Plog, “wouldn’t this be fun if we were running for the presidency.”

So, to solve the problem, they started to act as if they were. They nationalized the governor’s race. After the November 1965 meeting at Reagan’s home, McBirnie proposed “a
positive direction” for Reagan’s campaign. “Almost every successful candidate of any historic importance in modern times has offered a positive program, packaged in some kind of slogan or neat description: New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, Great Society, New Order, etc. Why not try: ‘The Creative Society.’ ”

Stu Spencer saw the opportunity right away. “The Great Society,” he later explained, “which was Lyndon Johnson’s, was going on at the time. Everybody liked it conceptually, but it didn’t work out. We were taking advantage of the society aspect, not the great.”

They would offer an alternative to the Johnsonian vision, on Johnson’s own terms. The goals were the same: a better country, a fuller, more meaningful life. So was the basic assumption: that a magnificent future was possible, that soon Americans could master their own fate. The difference was in the means of doing it. “You could base it upon the firm belief that there exists within this state the resources,” McBirnie advised, “to solve any problem—without the growth of bureaucracy. But to release this tremendous latent, creative power, more citizens must be
led
by the ‘Creative Society’ type of government to organize in volunteer associations to deal directly with these problems.”

And so Reagan was unleashed to do what he loved—to tell a story about the threat facing the country under its current president, and the way that
he
would stop it. As 1965 came to a close, the voters
who, a year earlier, had thrilled to Johnson’s message in the aftermath of his landslide election—“
These are the most hopeful times in all the years since Christ was born in Bethlehem”—were rapidly giving up faith in the president’s promises. Offering his alternative vision, Reagan told the voters of California they didn’t need to give up their hope, they just had to look for it to be delivered in another form. “
We must show the voters,” he told an audience, “that major issues cross party lines. Almost half of them have grown up under a planned society leaning toward a socialist system. We must match dreams of utopia with the hard facts of actuality, and show them that a free economy is far more attractive than the deadly dullness of a planned society.”

O
NE MAJOR PROBLEM
remained for Reagan as he sought to prove that he could be a serious candidate. It was the most basic: What was a B-movie actor doing trying to run the country’s largest state? In many press accounts from 1965 and early 1966, the idea that Reagan could fancy himself a candidate for high office played as a bad joke. “
The idea of an actor named Ronald Reagan becoming the next governor of America’s largest state evokes a political vision approximately as radiant as a nomination of Rock Hudson to be the next Secretary of State,” Emmet John Hughes wrote in
Newsweek. The Saturday Evening Post
quoted an anonymous Reagan rival: “
Sure he’s drawing the crowds … so would Jayne Mansfield.”

In Sacramento, Pat Brown acted as though he barely knew who Ronald Reagan was. He’d seen the actor only once onscreen, he said. “
It was on the late show,” Brown recalled. “He played a sheriff.… He was a very attractive sheriff. He was shot in the end, though.” (Watching Brown’s remarks, Reagan pointed at the screen: “In the back. I was shot in the back.”)

Reagan’s “actor problem” came with two dangerous prongs. First, it invited the notion of Reagan as an intellectual lightweight. A bad day on the campaign trail inevitably ended with this conclusion.
“Ronald Reagan,” wrote one critic in January 1965, “who recently
announced he was seeking the Republican nomination for governor of California, proved he might be able to portray a politician, as an actor, but also that every actor needs a good script—which he did not have when he faced several newsmen Sunday on … ‘Meet the Press.’ ”

The second, more dangerous concern was that Reagan was acting out the part of politician too well. “
He is assiduously playing the role of a political figure up and down the State of California,”
The Fresno Bee
worried in the summer of 1965. The paper compared Reagan’s performance as a politician to Raymond Massey playing a doctor on television. “What happens when an actor simulates a role so well he is called upon to perform it off stage in real life? Then you have Raymond Massey actually attempting an appendectomy or Ronald Reagan actually making crucial decisions of government. Frightening thoughts.”

Attacking the “actor problem” became a central focus of the campaign. Humor was a first line of defense. The candidate had any number of canned jokes at the ready.
He would tell crowds that his son Ron Jr. thought his father, the
Death Valley Days
star, should “just go up to Sacramento, stand in the street and call out to the governor, ‘Pat, one of us has to be out of town by sundown.’ ” Or he’d try to beat those who questioned his qualifications to the punch: “I’ve never played a governor.” Or he’d joke that the concerns about his background signaled progress: “
Only a generation ago, people in my profession couldn’t be buried in a churchyard.”

After a life spent trying to get onto Hollywood’s A list, he suddenly found himself scrambling to get off. In campaign materials, he was listed not as an actor but as “an actor-rancher.” A campaign résumé made the most of his non-Hollywood professional life. It was thin gruel.
Entries included “Operates horse breeding and cattle ranch” and “Member Board of Directors International Holding Company & Coast Life Insurance Company.” His Midwestern radio career merited two separate entries. These billowed with extraneous nouns in a manner familiar to job applicants in their early twenties:
“Radio sports announcer and editor—Central Broadcasting Company” and “Broadcast Chicago Cubs & White Sox home games, Big Ten and Notre Dame Football.” At
GE Theater
, he had been not just host or actor but “Production Supervisor.” Meanwhile, a single entry in the middle—“Motion Pictures, Warner Bros., Universal and free-lance. Appeared in 50 featured pictures”—encapsulated his entire movie career.

As a last defense, the campaign actually made the case for actors. For help in the cause, they enlisted no less a figure than John Wayne, who put on his cowboy costume to cut a Reagan ad. “
So what’s this empty nonsense about Ronald Reagan being just an actor?” asked Wayne, standing in front of a desert backdrop. “I’ve watched Ronald work his entire adult life preparing for public service.” Reagan was no lightweight, the ad suggested. Anyone arguing otherwise would have to talk to the Duke.

Still, the actor attacks stung Reagan. It had been more than twenty years since the brief moment he’d been a hot-ticket movie star. In several of those years, he’d struggled to make a living as an actor at all. But to listen to his critics, he’d been a matinee idol all along. “
I’ll probably be the only fellow who will get an Oscar posthumously,” he joked, only half concealing his bitterness. He would grow testy at the suggestion he was just looking for another stage. “
There are no jobs in politics,” he wrote to one critical newspaper editor, “that offer comparable rewards to those obtainable in show business.”

But that was the biggest problem Reagan faced when fighting the actor charge. The rewards of the job—the job itself
—were
similar to being a Hollywood star. Certainly there was plenty of Hollywood staging. In January 1966, when he finally made his campaign official, he announced it in a highly produced television special taped in the same studio as
Death Valley Days
. Hours before the telecast, the campaign held a premiere for two hundred reporters in the Pacific Ballroom of the Statler Hilton in Los Angeles. “
Roll it,” Bill Roberts ordered, and the broadcast began to play on a movie screen. In the
program, Reagan appeared on a set made to look like a comfortable upper-middle-class living room, complete with books, framed pictures, and a roaring fire. He moved effortlessly around the set as he spoke.