Three Days in Moscow Read online

  By the early 1950s, Reagan was facing an identity crisis. His acting career was winding down. Even when scripts came his way, he found them uninteresting and rejected them, along with some big paydays. Television beckoned, but he dismissed the idea of a series. He needed to find a way to make money, but how? Then, in 1954, he received an intriguing proposal from MCA Television. The General Electric Company was backing a new series called the General Electric Theater, an original weekly production adapting novels and plays to the TV format. It needed a host to pull the whole thing together, and Reagan was offered the role. He thought it sounded like a classy idea and decided to take it.

  In a move that would provide him with financial security, he was also offered part ownership of the show. For eight years he was the face of the General Electric Theater, welcomed into the homes of millions of Americans every Sunday night. But it was his travels to GE plants across the country that broadened his education in working-class concerns and simultaneously provided him with his first political platform. The tours, originally devised as a goodwill gesture by GE, allowed him to speak to hardworking Americans across the country about their values, trials, and aspirations. In time, he visited all 139 GE plants and spoke to more than 250,000 workers. Often, at the end of his speeches, he would stay to talk to the audience. He wanted to listen to their stories. “Those GE tours became a postgraduate course in political science for me,” he wrote. “I was seeing how government really operated and affected people in America, not how it was taught in school.”

  Reagan was creating a political ideology during that time, a conviction that big government was the problem not the solution to America’s troubles. He also continued to develop a theme that had been with him since the 1940s: the threat of communism to the American way of life. By then, the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union had spiraled into a cold war, both nations living under the threat of nuclear destruction. “Whether we admit it or not, we are in a war,” he told an audience in 1962. “This war was declared a century ago by Karl Marx and reaffirmed by Lenin when he said that communism and capitalism cannot exist side by side.” Aiding and abetting it, he believed, were liberals who envisioned a society growing closer and closer to socialism. He found the response of his audiences gratifying.

  Frequently, on the road, he wrote Nancy colorful, romantic letters, addressing her variously as “Nancy Pants,” “Mommie Poo Pants,” “Mommy,” and “My Darling.”

  “I love you & miss you and I mean it differently than ever before,” he gushed in a typical letter. “I’ve always loved you & missed you, but never has it been such an actual ache. The clock is standing still and April 16th seems a year away. . . . I’m all hollow without you and the ‘hollow’ hurts.”

  On one train ride home, he jumped off in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to send a telegram:

  POWDER DOWN YOUR LIPSTICK. I AM ON THE DOWNHILL SIDE OF ALBUQUERQUE. I LOVE YOU.

  Their devotion was complete, a tight circle of romance that could sometimes seem to exclude their children, which caused tension. “Every family has problems, and we were no exception,” Nancy wrote in a candid reflection many decades later. “What I wanted most in the world was to be a good wife and mother. As things turned out, I guess I’ve been more successful at the first than the second.”

  Patti and Ron might have agreed. A letter to Patti when Reagan was away filming a movie and she was not even two years old is telling: “I’m counting on you to take care of Mommie and keep her safe for me because there wouldn’t be any moon or stars in the sky without her.”

  “He was easy to love, but hard to know,” his son Ron wrote of him. “He was seldom far from our minds, but you couldn’t help wondering sometimes whether he remembered you once you were out of his sight.”

  The net result was two defiant children and two disaffected stepchildren, none of whom was particularly interested in defending Nancy. Maureen and Michael blamed her, not entirely fairly, for their distance from their father. Patti and Ron blamed her for being the recipient of their father’s worship while they often felt like afterthoughts or intruders in a great love affair.

  But it wasn’t just that. As they grew older, Patti and Ron also had to share their father with the nation, and that furthered the rift, especially since they were both liberals who disagreed with his politics and most of his policies.

  In a thoughtful interview with Katie Couric after Reagan’s death, Patti acknowledged having had “an odd sibling rivalry with America. America had taken my father from me.” But her mother bore the brunt of her anger, and their relationship began a tentative healing only in the last years of Nancy’s life. Both children came to see their mother as an extension of their father, never separate in her own right. “I think you could make the case,” Ron told the Today show’s Matt Lauer, “that the Reagan we came to know would not have existed without Nancy Reagan.”

  Sharing Dad with the nation was their lot in life, because by the early 1960s, Reagan was making a transition. A cynical view of his emerging political popularity was that he was an attractive, engaging actor who knew how to tug at the heartstrings by persuasively delivering good lines. But his years as the head of the Screen Actors Guild and his on-the-road tours for GE had given him a clarity about his own beliefs and where they fit into the political spectrum. In a sense, he came to politics with a purity of vision—not through party alignment but through the power of conviction. He believed what he said.

  His official entrance into politics came in 1964 with Barry Goldwater’s campaign for president. Goldwater had positioned himself as the standard-bearer of a Republican revival, but he was a polarizing figure, an extremist in a party of cautious moderates. As the cochairman of the Goldwater campaign in California, Reagan, who was then the popular host of Death Valley Days, was doing his part on the stump, and he was gaining attention from party leaders. More than one of them privately wondered, “Why can’t he be our candidate?” Reagan’s optimism and personal charm were a breath of fresh air.

  A week before the election, the faltering Goldwater campaign, somewhat reluctantly, agreed to let Reagan give a televised speech to the nation, financed by well-heeled California supporters. He called it “A Time for Choosing,” and it would become one of the most famous speeches he ever made:

  This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in the capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan for our lives better than we can plan them ourselves. . . .

  You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.

  We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

  There was a tremendous outpouring of response to the speech—Time magazine called it “one bright spot in a dismal campaign,” which must have annoyed Goldwater, who was fighting for his political life. “I didn’t know it then, but that speech was one of the most important milestones of my life,” Reagan wrote.

  The speech also caught the attention of Dwight Eisenhower, who had spent the years since he had left office in 1961 laboring behind the scenes to restore his party. Eisenhower was no great fan of Goldwater, whose views, he felt, were unrestrained and whose rhetoric was careless. “I have a feeling that that man is dangerous,” he once told a journalist. His eventual endorsement was reluctant—a concession made out of party loyalty. He was already calculating how to remake the party after a certain defeat. Watching Reagan, he began to think that he might be seeing a new standard-bearer for Republicans.

  Like Eisenhower, Reagan appealed to America’s patriotic spirit and optimistic sense of itself. Americans liked him, just as they’d liked Ike. Eisenhower was drawn to him, too. Perhaps he saw something of himself in Reagan, a nonpolitician and a political independent who as a Democrat had voted for Ike in 1952. (In this sense, you could say that Reagan was the original “Reagan Dem
ocrat”!) By the 1960s, Reagan had become a Republican, saying “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me.”

  Reagan’s dramatic appeal wasn’t enough to make a difference in the election. Goldwater was slaughtered by the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, who earned 61 percent of the popular vote and 486 electoral votes. After the election, many Republicans, conducting a 1964 version of a party autopsy, believed that the conservative strain had been decisively defeated. But others recognized alternative reasons for the loss, not the least of which was Goldwater himself, a poor candidate incapable of rousing excitement beyond his base. His most famous statement—“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue”—had alienated the moderate wing of the party and scared off many Americans who might otherwise have been looking for an alternative to Johnson.

  There was also the matter of timing. Only a year after Kennedy’s assassination, with President Johnson receiving favorable reviews, it’s likely that the nation lacked the stomach for another transition so soon.

  But in spite of the loss, the Goldwater campaign marked the start of a movement. Fifty years after the fact, the political analyst Larry Sabato cited the lasting effects of “a race that produced a significant switch in both Northern and Southern party loyalties; pushed Democrats to the left; created the modern conservative GOP that took a giant step to the right with Goldwater; made polished, vicious negative advertising the campaign tool of first resort; and showed the collective power of ideologically driven, broad-based grassroots organizers and small donors.”

  Undoubtedly, Reagan’s speech launched him as a voice of the conservative movement. Goldwater’s failed candidacy taught Republicans a lesson that Reagan would fervently embrace for the rest of his career: you don’t win hearts and minds by being angry, gloomy, and dour; you win them with a blend of solid principles and relentless optimism. “He believed basically what Barry believed,” the political consultant Stuart Spencer said. “He said a lot of the things that Barry said, but he said them differently. He said them in a soft way, in a more forgiving way. Style was the difference. Barry was a hard-nosed, up-front Arizonan cowboy, and that’s what scared people.”

  After the election, Reagan returned to his ordinary life of giving speeches and hosting Death Valley Days. But his speech for Goldwater and his campaign presence had caught the attention of party leaders and supporters. One of them, Holmes Tuttle, a California auto dealer and Republican contributor, came to see Reagan one day, along with a group of like-minded men. They proposed that he run for governor in 1966 against the entrenched administration of Edmund “Pat” Brown, who would be making a try for a third term. Brown was considered a daunting foe. In 1962, he’d defeated Richard Nixon by three hundred thousand votes—a stunning loss for Nixon, who had thought he had a sure shot at victory.

  Reagan laughed. “You’re out of your mind.”

  Reagan enjoyed giving speeches and talking to people, but he still did not view himself as candidate material. “I’m an actor, not a politician,” he said, promising that if the party found a candidate, he’d go on the road for its choice. He loved his life; he didn’t want to run for office, and Nancy wasn’t sold on the idea either. But they kept coming back to him, and finally he agreed to deliver some speeches around the state. To his surprise, audiences began asking him, “Why don’t you run for governor?” He’d give his practiced response: “I’m an actor, not a politician.” But the public interest was beginning to have an effect. “How do you say no to all of these people?” he asked Nancy. Six months after he began giving speeches, he called Tuttle. “Okay, I’ll do it.” He hired Spencer to run his campaign.

  In truth, his timing could not have been better. There wasn’t much happening in his television career; hosting Death Valley Days wasn’t fulfilling. In addition, he had a lot to say about the state of California, which was embroiled in student upheavals and racial unrest.

  From the start, Reagan was barraged with criticism that not only was he too right wing, but, God forbid, he was an actor. He was most annoyed by the charge that he had no ideas of his own and was merely propped up by canned talking points that someone else had written for him. After all, he’d been on the circuit, speaking his own mind, for years. To still the criticism, he increasingly began giving shorter speeches and devoting more time to question-and-answer sessions with his audiences. You couldn’t fake that give-and-take. You had to know your stuff. And if his advisors were initially nervous about the dangers of spontaneity, they need not have worried. He was a natural. His sense of humor helped. A big part of his appeal was his ability to be self-effacing. For example, he quipped (in reference to his second-lead status in Hollywood), “When Jack Warner, head of Warner Brothers, first heard that I was running for Governor of California, he said, ‘No, no. Jimmy Stewart for Governor; Reagan for best friend.’ ”

  His campaign press aide Lyn Nofziger, a former newspaperman, recalled that as they started traveling the state, Reagan’s connection to ordinary citizens became clear. “There was something about him that appealed to the people he talked to. I’ve never been able to put a finger on it. It’s probably that word charisma, which is a word that I absolutely hate.” Once he’d been out with Reagan two or three times, he became convinced that he could be elected.

  Reagan’s most loyal aides acknowledged that he wasn’t a mastermind or genius political strategist. He knew how to delegate those roles. What he was, according to Spencer, was “the best communicator I’ve seen in my political life and that starts with Roosevelt, who was good. That’s how good I think he was.”

  Reagan had authenticity; it wasn’t an act. The people could feel it. Even those who disagreed with his positions could find it hard to resist his plainspoken sentiments and his ability to use humor to make a point. He could draw in a crowd. He looked camera ready, and most people assumed he wore makeup and dyed his hair. When a supporter wrote urging him to wear less makeup and not dye his hair, he replied graciously, “But there is a problem—I don’t have a makeup man or wear makeup and would have to dye my hair to have grey at the temples.” He added that he hadn’t even used makeup when he was in pictures and on TV.

  Spencer viewed Reagan’s comfort with television as a clear plus. “There are lots of people that are good on the stump speaking, but they can’t translate it to television. Reagan was different. He knew all the tricks, knew how to present himself.”

  Eisenhower watched Reagan’s campaign for governor with interest and even wrote him some talking points for speeches. He had one piece of advice that stands out: he told Reagan to be expansive rather than narrow in his appeal—to impress upon the people of California that he would be governor of all of them, that there was no place for the divisiveness of special interests, and that they were all Americans.

  The strategy worked. Reagan easily defeated his primary opponent, former San Francisco mayor George Christopher, to win the Republican nomination. He penned a grateful handwritten note to Eisenhower:

  Dear Mr. President,

  Now that the shouting has died (at least for a while) I want to thank you for your invaluable advice and suggestions. I realize of course this was offered within the framework of neutrality, and was born of your great interest in and devotion to the cause of Republicans.

  Nevertheless, my TV appearances profited by a reduction in verbiage and the resulting slow pace drew some appreciative comments. Thanks to you, the creative society was described more understandably as a “do things” society.

  Most of all however I am deeply grateful for your willingness to share your time, thoughts and philosophy with me.

  To his peril, Governor Brown thought Reagan would be an easy candidate to beat and was pleased when he won the Republican nomination. “Ronald Reagan for Governor of California?” he wrote years later. “We thought the notion was absurd and rubbed our hands in gleeful anticipation of beating this politically inexperienced, right-wing extremist
and aging actor in 1966.”

  During the campaign, Brown often mocked Reagan the actor, taking cheap shots, which might have pleased his high-minded base but became disastrous with the airing of one TV commercial entitled “Man vs. Actor.” In it Brown was shown telling a group of schoolchildren that he was running against an actor, and the man who had shot Abraham Lincoln was an actor!

  The effort to paint Reagan as an extremist backfired terribly, said Reagan advisor (and future attorney general) William French Smith, “because when Reagan goes on television and makes a speech or what have you, one impression he does not create is of being an extremist of any kind. So that campaign just fell absolutely flat. And by the time they realized that it was just almost too late, and they couldn’t do anything right.”

  Reagan was genuine and charming. He really liked people, and they could feel it. Once Nixon had advised him that when he was out doing events, he should keep his distance from the people. “Never eat with them. Go up to your room and have a steak and a good wine and then come down when you’re announced.” Reagan replied, “Well, Dick, you know, I kind of like to be with them.”

  Reagan portrayed Brown as ineffective at addressing California’s multiple crises, including economic decline, urban blight, and campus unrest. Eight years of promises had yielded few results, he claimed. “Keeping up with Governor Brown’s promises is like trying to read Playboy magazine while your wife turns the pages.”