As the nation’s most populated state, with the largest budget and plenty of problems, not to mention millions of people who had welcomed into their homes the friendly host of GE Theatre, the California governorship was ripe for the picking. And though Reagan’s driving concern was perched much farther away, in Moscow, he was quite interested in domestic politics. California could be a microcosm, a laboratory, for his domestic conservatism, giving him an opportunity to develop policy and score some legislative bona fides for his political resume. It was a plan that seemed seamless, if not for an obstacle that stood in the way: The current governor, Pat Brown, was a popular incumbent. Reagan decided to run regardless, sure of his chances, and his destiny.
Reagan laid out that sense of destiny in a 1965 memoir. While the book voiced many of Reagan’s ideas from past speeches, it also gave him the opportunity to express himself in yet another new medium and to appeal directly to voters in California and around the country. Titled, Where’s the Rest of Me?, the book finished with a revealing flourish. In its final paragraphs, which borrowed from his 1960s speeches, including the “Time for Choosing” speech, lay the logic that compelled him to forcefully reject the coming policy of détente that propelled him to pursue the presidency. Displaying the crisp anti-Communism which would come to define many of his stances toward the USSR, he charged that a “policy of accommodation is appeasement, and appeasement does not give a choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender.” He went on:
We are told that the problem is too complex for a simple answer. They are wrong. There is no easy answer, but there is a simple answer. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right, and this policy of accommodation asks us to accept the greatest possible immorality. We are being asked to buy our safety from the threat of the [atomic] bomb by selling into permanent slavery our fellow human beings enslaved behind the Iron Curtain. To tell them to give up their hope of freedom because we are ready to make a deal with their slave masters.1
Reagan rejected any “deal” between the United States and USSR that sold into “permanent slavery” those Eastern European captives behind the Iron Curtain. Such deals were not simply wrong and immoral, but the “greatest possible immorality.” Insisting that a nation which chose such a course was opting for “disgrace,” Reagan said that Alexander Hamilton warned that a nation that prefers disgrace to danger is prepared for a master and deserves one. America, he said, should choose the high road, not the low road. “Should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery rather than dare the wilderness?” asked Reagan. “Should Christ have refused the Cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have refused to fire the shot heard round the world?”2
The future president concluded that Americans must choose “courage” over accommodation, telling his compatriots that all of America had a collective rendezvous with destiny. Together they could preserve for their children “this, the last best hope of man on earth,” or, rather, they could “sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.” If they tried but failed, said Reagan dramatically, at least their children and children’s children could “say of us that we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.” At the very least, this meant summoning the moral courage to reject accommodation with slave masters if and when such deals reared their cowardly heads.3
STAYING FOCUSED ON THE CAMPAIGN
While his memoirs provided him with the opportunity to address larger, international issues like Soviet Communism, such grandiose, apocalyptic thinking must have made Reagan’s gubernatorial bid at times agonizing. The campaign forced him to set aside the global issues that stoked his passions in favor of the more immediate task of winning the governorship. With the help of a campaign team spearheaded by Phil Battaglia, Bill Clark, Tom Reed, and, among others, Lyn Nofziger, Reagan did his best to stay focused on California questions.
To that end, Nofziger, a California newspaper man who became candidate Reagan’s press secretary, was mystified over how Reagan “exuded confidence” during the campaign. He puzzled: Politically, Reagan was a novice who spent his entire life in radio or the movies. He knew little about governing. He had never been through the rough-and-tumble of a campaign. He never dealt with a political press, most of which was registered Democrat. Sure, Reagan ruminated often on the world’s daunting problems; those issues, however, were not part of the agenda of the California state assembly. And yet, said Nofziger, “none of this bothered Reagan.” “From the beginning he was serenely confident that he could handle himself.” During that 1966 campaign, “nobody had more confidence in Ronald Reagan than Ronald Reagan.”4
Pat Brown certainly had little confidence in him. The Democratic governor proceeded to make the mistake of nearly every left-of-center individual who sized up Reagan over the next twenty-plus years: he dismissed and underestimated him.
In November 1966, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California by the stunning margin of a million votes, carrying 400,000 Democrat defectors with him, and fifty-five of fifty-eight counties. Numerous Republican legislators were swept in on his coattails. Though that first term saw its ups and downs, his governorship still won encomiums from the state’s top (even liberal) editorial boards. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that in his first term Reagan had “saved the state from bankruptcy.”5 The Los Angeles Times judged Reagan an “accomplished practitioner in the art of government” and a “proven administrator.” The national media was also impressed: Newsweek dubbed him “one of the most brilliantly gifted politicians anywhere in the U.S. today—a campaigner unmatched for sheer star quality since the departure of Dwight Eisenhower and the arrival of the Kennedys a decade ago.”6
THE GUBERNATORIAL YEARS—THE BATTLE RAGES ON
While far removed from his concerns for the Soviet bloc, it was clear from these first-term successes that Reagan’s strategy to use California as a stepping stone to a national office was working. And though he lacked the ability to shape national policy toward the Soviets, thirty years in radio, film, and television had taught him the power and utility of the spoken word. The realities of holding the highest state office in California made it such that Reagan’s “war” rhetoric needed to lessen, but it did not need to disappear. Since he was considered by many to be a potential presidential candidate, Reagan needed to speak out on national and international issues, including the Cold War. This also meant that he routinely was called upon to voice his opinions on the story that was dominating all of the headlines: the Vietnam War.
One episode that embodied such elements, and then vanished into the past, was a fascinating May 15, 1967 debate between Governor Reagan and Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY). The subject: Vietnam. The debate was titled, “The Image of America and the Youth of the World,” and was billed by CBS as a “Town Meeting of the World.” It was broadcast from 10:00 to 11:00 pm (EDT) by CBS TV Network and CBS Radio Network. It was produced by later 60 Minutes brainchild Don Hewitt and hosted by CBS News correspondent Charles Collingwood.7