James Mann: The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Reagan laughed at the story and its irony. The White House taping system, of course, was what had eventually led to Nixon’s resignation.

Returning from his reverie to the situation at hand, Nixon took his awkward attempt at humor one final step further. He said that Carlucci could take written notes of the meeting if he wanted, and then joked: “I assume that the place isn’t taped.” Trying to ease the awkwardness, Reagan asked Nixon if he’d like a drink. Nixon, who’d enjoyed his share of cocktails in the White House, might have liked one, but decided that Reagan’s offer seemed a bit late and perfunctory. He declined.

This was not to be a social occasion. Reagan and his top aides had invited Nixon to this clandestine White House meeting to talk about the Soviet Union. They wanted Nixon’s endorsement for far-reaching new steps Reagan was preparing to take with the Soviet Communist Party secretary, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, steps that were aimed at easing the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. Nixon wasn’t going to give Reagan what he wanted.

This was not merely a meeting of two men, or even of two presidents. Reagan and Nixon were more than that: they had been the two most successful anti-Communist politicians of the entire Cold War. Between them, their careers had spanned virtually the entire period. In the late 1940s, Nixon, as a young congressman, had led the campaign against Alger Hiss, the former State Department official who was eventually convicted of perjury after being accused of serving as an agent of the Soviet Union. In the early 1980s, Reagan, as president, had branded the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”

When it came to the foreign policy of the Cold War, Harry Truman held pride of place among America’s leaders; his administration had come up with both the strategy and the structure for containing the Soviet Union. For charting the paranoiac outer limits of American anticommunism, Senator Joseph McCarthy was the symbol of the age. But for sheer electoral politics, for comprehending the mood and voting habits of the nation, no other American leaders of the Cold War could compare with these two men, Nixon and Reagan. Each man had mounted a full-scale nationwide campaign for the White House three times. Each had won the presidency twice. Nixon had also been elected twice as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president. Of the ten presidential elections in the United States in the Cold War era from the end of World War II through 1984, there had only been two (1948 and 1964) in which neither Nixon nor Reagan had figured prominently as either a presidential candidate or as a vice presidential nominee.

The two men were, essentially, of the same generation; both had been born in the half decade before the outbreak of World War I. Reagan was two years older than Nixon. Politically, however, Nixon was the senior figure, having begun to run for office much earlier in life. In the 1940s and 1950s, while Reagan pursued an acting career, Nixon had served as congressman, senator, and vice president. For most of the time Reagan was governor of California, his first job in public life, Nixon overshadowed him as president of the United States.

Yet Reagan, once he started in politics, proved to have an unsurpassed touch with American voters, one that Nixon had sought but always failed to achieve. Nixon could never escape the accurate perception that he was a career politician; Reagan, having not campaigned for public office until age fifty-five, managed to convey the impression, an inaccurate one, that he was a reluctant candidate, one who stood outside of politics and whose career was elsewhere. Nixon’s identity was built upon the fact that he suffered adversity along with the victories; he had lost the 1960 presidential election, failed when he ran for governor of California in 1962, and finally, lost the White House and support of the nation in the middle of his second term. By contrast, Reagan won virtually every election in which he ran. Even the lone exception, the time Reagan didn’t win, demonstrated his popularity: in 1976, Reagan challenged an incumbent president, Gerald Ford, for the Republican nomination, winning several primaries before he was defeated.

Reagan and Nixon had dealt with each other in a cordial if guarded fashion for more than a quarter century, since Nixon’s presidential campaign in 1960. At that time, Reagan was still a Democrat, a devoted admirer of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. In 1950, Reagan had even campaigned for the Democrats against Nixon when Nixon had run for the Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas (whose husband, the actor Melvyn Douglas, was Reagan’s friend).

Reagan had grown ever more disenchanted with the Democrats through the 1950s. After first hoping Dwight Eisenhower might run for president as a Democrat, he voted for Eisenhower on the Republican ticket. Later in the decade, Reagan began speaking out against the evils of big government, high taxes, and communism while touring the country as a spokesman for General Electric. Nixon, who had noticed what Reagan was saying, asked for his support in the 1960 campaign against John F. Kennedy. Reagan gave his assent and told Nixon he planned to switch his party registration to Republican. But Nixon asked him not to do so: it would be better, Nixon said, if Reagan endorsed him and campaigned for him as a Democrat. This was, in retrospect, an episode tinged with irony. Despite Reagan’s help, Nixon never succeeded in attracting many Democrats; but two decades later, Reagan himself would build a new Republican majority with his startling ability to win over formerly loyal Democratic voters. 1

Reagan finally registered as a Republican in 1962, supporting Nixon’s losing race for governor of California. Then, encouraged by wealthy conservative friends, Reagan began to move into Republican politics himself—and for a time in the 1960s he emerged as a potential rival to Nixon. The week before the 1964 election, Reagan delivered a nationwide television speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater, repeating his favorite antigovernment themes. Goldwater lost badly, but Reagan’s speech transformed him from the role of actor to rising political star, the natural heir to Goldwater’s conservative constituency.

After Reagan won California’s gubernatorial election in 1966, some of his conservative supporters and Reagan’s own staff began putting his name forward as a possible presidential candidate. The leading candidate for the 1968 Republican nomination was Nixon, who was seeking to occupy the center of the party, between Goldwater-Reagan conservatives on the right and the party’s liberal wing, which supported Nelson Rockefeller, on the left.

In July 1967, Nixon and Reagan crossed paths in northern California, where both were guests at the Bohemian Grove, the annual, exclusive all-male retreat of business executives and political leaders. Delivering the main address for the gathering, Nixon revived some of his traditional anti-Soviet themes. “They [Soviet leaders] seek victory, with peace being at this time a means towards that end,” Nixon asserted.

Outside the formal sessions, Nixon and Reagan sat down privately to talk presidential politics. On a bench under the lofty redwoods, Nixon probed Reagan’s intentions concerning the coming presidential campaign. Nixon said he was planning to enter the presidential primaries. He would try to unite the party by campaigning only against Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats, not against other Republicans. This message was perfectly tailored to appeal to Reagan’s loyalties. One of the enduring clichés of Republican politics, the Eleventh Commandment, which holds that “thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican,” originated during California’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign, when Reagan was an untested new candidate. His political strategists were trying to prevent attacks by his Republican primary opponent, San Francisco mayor George Christopher. “We created [the Eleventh Commandment] for his protection,” recalled Stuart Spencer, Reagan’s political consultant in the 1966 campaign. 2