Landslide (44 page)

He attacked Lyndon Johnson with biting humor:

He attacked Johnson’s record with his familiar cascade of numbers, leaving the impression of irrefutable precision:

He used the righteous indignation of Mr. Norm, enraged that the architects of the Great Society had called someone like
him
an extremist in the last presidential campaign:

He employed his old habits, using vague language to mask factually dubious claims:

And he attacked with the sweeping, dramatic imagery he most favored, and which he believed the moment required:

He attacked Lyndon Johnson and the entire mythic vision of the American future Johnson had worked so hard to spread. When he’d
finished, his audience gave him a standing ovation. In the next day’s
Boston Herald
he was “
the one-time motion picture star who often played the guy who didn’t get the girl” but who “overwhelmed more than 1,400 of them” in his speech. “From sub-debs to septuagenarians,” the
Herald
wrote, “the female hearts fluttered as he told them what they wanted to hear: that theirs was the historic role of saving the Republic from a government ‘that tends to grow until freedom is lost.’ ”

I
T WAS ALWAYS
nice to get a standing ovation, but there were plenty of cheering crowds in California. His trip to Boston was part of a larger East Coast swing, during which he could attract national media attention and talk to wealthy conservative easterners who’d write checks for his gubernatorial campaign. But more important, he had come to places like Boston to prove a point. He wasn’t a conservative fringe candidate who could only play rooms in San Diego or Santa Rosa. He could stand before a group of New Englanders, moderate and conservative alike, and bring them all to their feet. This was his most important message that fall: he didn’t plan on being in B movies forever. Ronald Reagan didn’t want another campaign like Barry Goldwater’s. Ronald Reagan was going to win.

Reagan could win
—it had been the guiding principle of his candidacy since its inception. The first person in need of convincing had been Reagan himself.
Two months after Johnson’s 1964 landslide, a group of millionaires convened at the house of Holmes Tuttle, the Los Angeles car dealership mogul, to commiserate over the Goldwater embarrassment. Among Republican donors, this was a rarefied group. And its members had a unique perspective. Across the country, in those first weeks after the Johnson landslide, mainstream Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller and Michigan governor George Romney were taking a hard line against conservatism. To survive, they argued, the party had to rein in its extremist right wing. Tuttle’s group of hard-line conservatives did not share in this view. But they also did not agree with movement activists who thought that the way
forward was to demand that the party become more pure. Among Goldwater’s mistakes, Tuttle believed, had been his tendency to double down on extremism in the general election. Instead of the horror show at the Cow Palace, Goldwater should have changed the subject from the divisive primary by adding a moderate like William Scranton to the ticket. For conservatism to triumph, Tuttle and his friends maintained, it had to seek out alliances with the party’s mainstream. They set their sights on the upcoming California governor’s race in 1966 as their best shot to prove their theory.

They had been at the Coconut Grove fund-raiser that spawned the “Time for Choosing” telecast. They understood that Reagan had superior gifts of communication.
“Reagan,” said Cy Rubel, another supporter, “is the man who can enunciate our principles to the people.” Some of “the people” already agreed. Grassroots activists in the party were talking up Reagan as a candidate before Johnson’s hundred days of progressive legislative action had even begun. Maureen Reagan, a plugged-in Republican, urged her father to jump into the governor’s race. “
Oh, my God,” Reagan said to Nancy, “they’re closing in all over.”

He’d been hesitant in those early months. Later he would claim he was shocked when Tuttle and his friends approached him with their plans. “
I almost laughed them out of the house,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I’d never given a thought to running for office and I had no interest in it whatsoever.” This, as we have seen, rings false—he would have jumped at a chance to run for office if he’d thought he could do it and still manage to support his family. But his practical concerns were real. A campaign for governor would be a lengthy commitment. The television show he was hosting,
Death Valley Days
, had proved a reliable source of income. Once he announced his candidacy for governor, he would have to give up the show lest his opponents demand equal time on the public airwaves. Reagan, realistic as always about his own interests, was not going to make the leap unless he believed he had a decent shot at winning.

In those early months of 1965, it was not at all clear that he did.
California’s Republican Party was badly divided after the Goldwater campaign. Conservatives had grabbed hold of much of the party apparatus in the state, but moderate voters remained a major force in the GOP. Thomas Kuchel, the state’s moderate Republican senator, had been making noises about coming home to run for governor. Reagan, who some still saw as a John Birch Society–supporting extremist, would potentially face a long, bloody primary fight that might end in an embarrassing loss.

Even more daunting was his probable general election opponent, the sitting governor, Pat Brown. In the winter of 1965, there were few liberal politicians in the nation as formidable as Brown—perhaps none besides Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. Brown had already established himself as a national figure when, in 1962, he had run for reelection against no less a figure than Richard Nixon, who’d planned an easy victory in the governor’s race as a launching pad for a second try at the White House. Brown won the election by nearly 300,000 votes. It was this stunning defeat that prompted Nixon’s retreat from politics in the infamous “You don’t have Nixon to kick around any more” rant. At that time, Brown’s future had seemed bright. “
Double parking in Sacramento on the way back to Washington,” an aide had quipped. In 1965, even as Brown considered running for an unprecedented third term as governor in 1966, he was at the top of the list of potential successors to Johnson in the White House in the long Democratic era to come.

For Reagan, then, life as a political candidate still meant risk—the risk of failure or ruin. He was hesitant to jump in. So, with the help of Tuttle’s group, he found a way to run without really running. The wealthy benefactors would form a group, Friends of Ronald Reagan, to supply Reagan with enough funds to acquire the best political assets available. Reagan would spend much of 1965 traveling California, meeting with party officials, and trying to determine whether there was sufficient support within the party for him to run as a serious challenger to the Democrats, not just as a factional favorite of the conservatives.
He would effectively
be
a candidate for
governor without ever outright declaring it, a distinction that would allow him to keep receiving checks for
Death Valley Days
into 1966.

This solution suited Reagan. It would be a campaign designed for a proud actor: he could
suggest
himself to the people without having to audition for their support. As he began his travels, he explained that he hoped to meet a cross section of California Republicans to determine who could best run as the party’s unity candidate. The press quickly realized that Reagan himself was a candidate in all but name. What if, one reporter asked him, after meeting that cross section of Californians, he determined that the best candidate was someone other than himself? “
Oh gosh, Jack!” Reagan replied. “You’ve asked me one I’ve never even thought about. Maybe I’m naïve, but I just sort of figured that if, when I found out who the cross-section wanted, it wasn’t me, they at the same time, would indicate who it was and I guess that’s the way I go.”

Clearly, he wanted the choice of the cross section to be no one other than himself. To help things along, Friends of Ronald Reagan enlisted the help of Spencer-Roberts, a highly regarded political consulting firm headed by two young stars, Stuart Spencer and Bill Roberts. The firm had run Nelson Rockefeller’s campaign against Goldwater in the photo-finish 1964 California primary and resided well outside the sphere of alternative reality from which had sprung the calamitous Goldwater candidacy. The firm’s sterling reputation was well known in Southern California—and beyond. While visiting Nancy’s parents in Arizona, Stu Spencer would later say, Reagan had paid a call on Goldwater. “
I’m thinking of running. What would you do? Tell me.” Goldwater’s reply, according to Spencer, was simple. “I’d hire those sons of bitches Spencer-Roberts.”

Spencer-Roberts had also been approached to run a primary campaign for George Christopher, the moderate mayor of San Francisco. Christopher was not a thrilling candidate, but he was a far safer bet than Reagan. Still, the fact that Reagan wanted to work with a bunch of Rockefeller Republicans surprised them: he was more practical than they’d thought. After a two-hour meeting at the
Cave du Roy in Beverly Hills, they found that Reagan had charmed them. “
We had heard,” one of the partners said, “that Reagan was a martinet, a conceited ass, that he would be hard to work with. We found this was totally false. There’s not a phony bone in his body.” It didn’t hurt that Reagan’s backers would cut substantial checks to a firm whose young partners were looking to grow their business. Asked later in the campaign to explain the ideological gap between the Spencer-Roberts partners and their conservative candidate, Bill Roberts shrugged: “We are mercenaries.”

But the governor’s race was more than a paycheck: Spencer-Roberts wanted to win. And after a few more meetings, they came to believe they
could
win with Reagan. The more they talked to him about the issues, the more they came to see that he was no rigid ideologue. “
He was obsessed with one thing,” Stu Spencer would later explain, “the Communist threat. He has conservative tendencies on other issues but he can be practical.”

Reagan’s new team knew that their first order of business would be removing the taint of extremism from their candidate. Grassroots activists loved him. Voters in the middle remembered him fondly from television and found him likable. The immediate problem was with the elite. To the establishment, Reagan’s embrace of the hard right during the heyday of the Kennedy-Johnson era still seemed bizarre. National elites thought of him as a failed actor who could give a good speech but who had gone off the Goldwater deep end. Reagan was the “
darling of the Goldwaterites and the choice of the John Birch Society,” Evans and Novak wrote in 1965, a man whose primary victory would signal “rightist control of the Republican party in the nation’s most populous state.” Reagan’s advisers knew that if that was how donors and primary voters thought of him, he would be dead in the water.

So they focused their initial energy on removing the odor of extremism. Traveling the state that spring and summer of 1965, Reagan began preaching against “
hyphenated Republicans”—those who regarded themselves as conservative-Republican or liberal-Republican
or moderate-Republican voters. They should all just be Republicans, he said. The line had a sort of genius to it. It was a message of unity, meant to appeal to moderates. But it had unconscious echoes of Teddy Roosevelt’s early-twentieth-century worries about unassimilated “hyphenated Americans.” To California conservatives, who’d gone to war rather than accept “unity” with moderates in the past, Reagan’s preaching sounded like just the thing: he wanted a party that was more pure!

What they didn’t notice, for the most part, was the moderation creeping into his words. “
I’m sure that we all recognize that as the state grows,” he told one group, “we must have growth in government also and in government services. But there should be some proportionality.” Asked what caused the Watts riots, Reagan was careful with his words. “
I think you have to preface anything you say about Watts with the recognition that ninety-nine percent of the people there are fine, responsible citizens and had no part in the trouble,” he said. “We’re talking about a one percent minority.”

He was even wary of being called a conservative. When a reporter asked if the term applied to him, Reagan dodged: “
You’d have me going counter to the talks I’ve been giving to Republican groups. I have been saying to all Republicans who’ll listen that the descriptive adjectives and the hyphens have no place in our party. I actually believe they were first foisted off on us by … opponents, and that we should give them back and from now on just be Republicans.”

It was easy for Reagan to say this sort of thing, because he actually believed it. After thirty years as a Democrat he had converted and was proud to wear the label of the Republican Party. He was Mr. Norm, convinced, always, that he shared the values of the good and decent majority. He knew he was a Republican; therefore, by definition, the majority of Republicans must see the world the way he saw it. What was the point of squabbling when there were evil conspiracies to stop? Better for him to play the role of unifier, healer of the party’s wounds.
That
was a hero’s role, one he knew he could play.