Reagan: The Life (26 page)

Things got worse. Martin Luther King had long preached peaceful resistance to injustice; the principal spokesman for the civil rights movement implored African Americans to eschew violence and exercise their hard-won political rights. King found himself competing with other, more militant voices, including those of
Stokely Carmichael and
H. Rap Brown. In California the militants coalesced behind the
Black Panther Party, founded by
Huey Newton and
Bobby Seale. The Panthers rejected King’s vision of a color-blind America; they preached black nationalism and self-defense. They staged a spectacular protest by storming, armed,
into the California state capitol to protest what they called
police brutality and the selective enforcement of weapons bans.

Yet King kept the nonviolent faith and held the respect and affection of millions of African Americans who wanted to believe that change was possible within the evolving framework of democracy. Then, in April 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis. The motives of the assassin weren’t immediately clear, as he eluded capture for two months, but the reaction among the black community was anger and despair. If King, the apostle of nonviolence, could be gunned down, what hope was there for change within the existing system?

The King killing triggered the broadest violence to date. Rioting broke out in more than a hundred cities across the country. Anarchy seized Chicago; Washington and Baltimore burst into flames. Scores of people died and many thousands were injured in fires and clashes with police; property damage defied calculation.

T
HIS LATEST PHASE
of rioting coincided with the season of presidential primaries. Richard Nixon had followed his 1960 loss to John Kennedy with a 1962 loss to
Pat Brown in the race for California governor. Some imagined that he then retired from politics, not least because he said, following his loss to Brown, that he was calling it quits. But he unobtrusively gave counsel to Republican candidates, helped them raise money, and positioned himself as the moderate who could steer the party out of the conservative ditch into which Goldwater had driven it in 1964.

This position gained enormously in value when Johnson unexpectedly withdrew from the contest on the Democratic side. Johnson was thought to be the ultimate politico, the stubborn Texan who would defend his Alamo to the last breath. But Johnson was haunted by fears of impending mortality, having nearly died of a heart attack in 1955, and he knew enough political history to realize that second terms for presidents rarely end well. He had exhausted his political capital persuading Congress to pass his civil rights measures,
Medicare, and the other reforms of the
Great Society. There was liberal work yet to be done, but he doubted he was the one to do it. Besides, the war in Vietnam had been going badly, despite his cumulative decisions to send more than half a million troops and commensurate resources there. The Southeast Asian conflict took a particularly sobering turn in early 1968, when a communist offensive that started on the Tet holiday demonstrated unexpected strength. Johnson
thereupon reversed his war policy and declared his desire for a negotiated settlement; he simultaneously threw in the political towel and said he wouldn’t seek another term as president.

Suddenly Republicans could see a clear path to the White House, unimpeded by incumbency. The waters appeared to part still further when southern Democrats prepared to bolt in protest of the national party’s embrace of civil rights.

R
EAGAN SUDDENLY BEGAN
to fancy himself the one who would lead his party to the promised land. He had deflected queries about the presidency, saying he had too much to do in California. He permitted his name to be placed in nomination at the Republican convention, but only as a California favorite son; this pro forma gesture would enable the California delegation to draw together behind his candidacy and thereby mend the rift between conservatives and liberals that had vexed the state party since 1964.

But he started to think that the favorite son of California could become the party’s favorite. Nixon lacked charisma; even his supporters admitted that. His two defeats branded him a loser. And his governing philosophy was suspect, indeed inscrutable. No one could say just where he stood on the moderate-to-conservative axis. Reagan was a loyal Republican, but he was also a conservative. He would back the party’s nominee, but he hoped it would be a conservative. As he looked around, the only credible conservative he could see was himself. A candidate who had the support of the eighty-six-member California delegation, the convention’s largest, would have a head start on everyone else. It wasn’t delusional to think he might attract enough additional votes to boost him over the top.

In public he remained coy. He was a “
noncandidate,” he said. But he let his supporters establish a committee that prepared the groundwork for a campaign. When a pollster found significant support around the country for a Reagan candidacy, he began to qualify his disclaimers. “
Naturally I was interested in hearing that,” he said of the pollster’s report. “I’m not going to run away and pretend it isn’t happening. Obviously I’m going to evaluate it.” Asked again if he would seek the presidency, he responded, “The job seeks the man.” To inquiries whether he encouraged those who were working for his candidacy, he responded, “It’s a free country.” What would be his response if he attracted a large write-in vote in the primaries? “
I’ll wait till such a thing happens and make a decision then.”

He undertook a several-state speaking tour that looked remarkably like what candidate Nixon was doing. When he spoke in Boise, Idaho, to a crowd that applauded and shouted with a passion conspicuously denied to Nixon by
his
audiences, he predicted that the race for the Republican nomination would not be decided in the primaries but would go to the convention, in Miami Beach.
Tom Wicker, a columnist for the
New York Times
, followed Reagan in Idaho and thought he saw a contender. “
At close range, Reagan looks and sounds formidable,” Wicker wrote. “He comes on fast and smiling, rocking his audience with a battery of one-liners in the Bob Hope manner … He glides smoothly into a denunciation of big government, welfare, crime in the streets, American foreign policy, and politicians. Before he finishes touching all these exposed political nerves, his audiences are cheering his most innocuous remarks (‘The times cry out for statesmanship,’ he declared last night, to thunderous applause).” Wicker wasn’t about to say that Idaho was the nation’s bellwether. But he quoted a likely convention delegate who said, “The farther west you go, the closer you get to 1964.” In his own words he limned a scenario that could cause the convention to turn to Reagan. “The expectation here is that a pro-Nixon but formally uncommitted delegation will be chosen by Idaho … But the expectation also is that most of the 14 delegates will be Republicans who supported Goldwater in 1964 and who will swing comfortably into the Reagan camp if and when the time comes—maybe on the second or third ballot at Miami Beach.”

Reagan continued to campaign like a candidate. “
The nation is totally out of control,” he told the annual convention of the
National Newspaper Association, conveniently meeting in Los Angeles. The current administration and the leading Democratic candidates, including New York senator Robert Kennedy, were encouraging people to expect something for nothing, he said, while proposing nothing to stem the violence in America’s cities and the erosion of American credibility abroad. “Civilization simply cannot afford demagogues in this era of rising expectations. It cannot afford prophets who shout that the road to the promised land lies over the shards of burned and looted cities. It cannot afford politicians who demand that
Social Security be tripled without coming up with any plans as to how this impossibility could be accomplished; that a national duty in Vietnam be discarded to provide huge make-work programs in the city slums with the money diverted from Vietnam; that no youth need honor the draft; that Negroes need not obey the law … It is a grand design for the Apocalypse.”

T
HE APOCALYPSE CAME
closer in June, though not in a way that benefited Reagan. Robert Kennedy was celebrating a crucial victory in the California Democratic primary when a stranger approached him at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and shot him. Kennedy died a day later. The killing seemed to underscore Reagan’s complaint that the country was falling apart, but politics and simple discretion prevented him or anyone else from trying to turn it to personal advantage. If anyone benefited, it was the candidates closest to the political center, those who seemed least likely to evoke strong passions.

Nixon still didn’t excite voters, but neither did he scare them. And now his work on behalf of other Republicans began to tell. He had scored one primary victory after another in small states, amassing almost enough delegates to claim the nomination on the convention’s first ballot.
Nelson Rockefeller ran second and Reagan third. Rockefeller naturally thought that if anyone should benefit from a Nixon failure, it should be him, not Reagan. In any event, the Rockefeller delegates preferred Nixon to Reagan, just as the Reagan delegates preferred Nixon to Rockefeller.

Nixon recognized this balance of ambivalence before Reagan did. Reagan looked more and more like a candidate as the convention drew near. “
I do not believe the nomination is locked up for any candidate and I do believe it will be an open convention,” he telegraphed the chairman of his unofficial campaign committee. “My name will be placed in nomination. Obviously at that time I can be considered a candidate by any delegate so inclined.” Lest his availability be in any continuing doubt, he added, “I have never subscribed to the Sherman statement”—in which Civil War hero William T. Sherman had said that if nominated he would not run and if elected would not serve. “Indeed it is my belief that any citizen’s response should be the direct opposite.” Reagan’s backers spread stories that Nixon’s support in the South was soft and uncertain. “These delegates are still looking,” one said. Another declared that if Nixon didn’t win at the start of the convention, he wouldn’t win at all. “The front runner cannot lose strength or he’s dead.”

Reagan nonetheless retained the formal pretense of noncandidacy. “
I have not solicited and will not solicit,” he said. Yet he traveled to the South in search of delegates. In Birmingham he met with some hundred delegates and alternates and tried to reassure them that defection from Nixon would not hand the nomination to Rockefeller. One delegate asked
Reagan if he would endorse Nixon if the race came down to a Nixon-Rockefeller contest. Reagan answered obliquely: “It is inconceivable to me that anyone who could support Dick or me could support
Nelson Rockefeller.” In Texas he was asked if he would run harder and more openly, should he receive the nomination, than he was running now. “
I won’t be a reluctant candidate,” he said. “I’ll run like hell.” He met
Strom Thurmond in South Carolina; the formerly Democratic and currently Republican senator took him aside and offered unwelcome encouragement. “
Young man, you’ll be president some day,” Thurmond said. “But not this year.”

Rockefeller’s advisers took heart from Reagan’s more open campaigning. They agreed that Nixon’s southern support was soft, and they expected that Reagan would steal some Nixon delegates before the convention began. Nixon would fall short of victory on the first ballot, and his weakness would feed on itself in the second ballot. “
At that point the convention will be wide open,” a Rockefeller man predicted.

Reagan and Rockefeller both traveled to Miami to sap Nixon’s strength. The Rockefeller group continued to lowball Nixon’s committed delegate count, while Reagan’s people, recalling his speech-making magic of 1964, tried to finagle an appearance in front of the convention as a whole.

But Nixon demonstrated the benefits of long experience in politics. He let southerners know he wouldn’t select a liberal running mate, and he persuaded minor favorite sons not to throw their delegates to Rockefeller or Reagan. Most crucially, he kept Reagan off the stage.

Nixon’s delegates held firm; the defections hoped for by the Reagan and Rockefeller camps failed to occur. Nixon won a majority on the first ballot.

Only at this point did he let Reagan in front of the cameras. He permitted Reagan to address the convention and recommend that the decision be made unanimous.

Reagan did what was expected of him. The party had chosen, he said, and now must unite behind its nominee. “
This nation cannot survive four more years of the kind of policies that have been guiding us.” The delegates bellowed their approval, although how many were approving the message and how many the speaker was impossible to say.

F
OR A PERSON
who remembered college with lyrical fondness, Reagan got great political mileage out of bashing the
University of California. Probably, as in certain other areas of politics, he was compensating for the youthful liberalism he had abandoned with maturity. Likely the very fondness with which he remembered
Eureka College made it impossible for any other institution to measure up. Possibly he resented the intellectual elitism of the University of California, which by the 1960s was sufficiently selective that a mediocre student like himself would have had difficulty gaining admission. The further irony that his first taste of politics had come in a student revolt against the administration of Eureka seems to have been lost on him entirely.

Reagan took special pleasure in attacking the California flagship campus in Berkeley. “
The overwhelming majority of the young people at that university are seriously intent on getting an education,” he had said while a candidate for governor. “But a vacillating administration has permitted a fractional minority of beatniks, filthy-speech advocates and malcontents to interfere with the purpose. This minority has brought shame on the university.” The state needed a new governor if only to clean up the mess
at Berkeley and restore honor to higher education.