James Mann: The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

During their Bohemian Grove meeting, Reagan told Nixon that he really didn’t want to run for president but would allow his name to be put forward as a favorite-son candidate from California. He said he wanted to do so in order to preserve party unity within the state’s delegation and to smooth over the divisions between Rockefeller and Goldwater forces that had plagued the party in 1964. 3Thus Reagan, like Nixon, managed to advance his own political interests while cloaking them in the guise of what was best for the Republican Party.

As he often did, Reagan was feigning modesty. As the 1968 presidential campaign unfolded, he began touring the country to give speeches, and while he didn’t enter the primaries, neither did he forswear the nomination. Yet a full-scale Reagan campaign never materialized that year. Nixon had managed to lock up the endorsements of other prominent conservatives, including Goldwater and Strom Thurmond, the leader of the newly emerging southern Republicans. Reagan’s own aides seemed to be far more enthusiastic about the 1968 campaign than Reagan himself, who had just settled into his new life as governor. “We pushed… , but Reagan was not interested, really, in being president [in 1968],” Lyn Nofziger, who served as Reagan’s communications director when he was governor of California, later ruefully concluded. “He gave us damn little help, I must say…. What we did, we did pretty much on our own.” 4As the Republican National Convention in Miami opened, Nofziger and former California senator William Knowland persuaded Reagan to drop his status as merely a favorite-son candidate of California Republicans and declare himself a full-fledged nationwide candidate. They hoped Reagan on the right and Rockefeller on the left could come up with enough delegates to deny Nixon the nomination.

Reagan went along with this last-minute strategy, but it did no good. At the convention in Miami, Nixon won easily on the first ballot. Later, William Safire, who was working for Nixon, would observe that the potential challenge from Reagan had been “the only one that Nixon had ever been concerned about.” Reagan later maintained he was relieved when Nixon was nominated. “I knew I wasn’t ready to be president,” Reagan said. 5

After Nixon was elected president in 1968, he and Reagan no longer saw themselves as rivals. From the White House, Nixon was cordial to Reagan—understandably so, since Reagan was the Republican governor of the largest state in the nation. In response, Reagan treated Nixon with considerable deference.

Privately, however, Nixon spoke of Reagan with disdain. Brent Scowcroft, who was working on the National Security Council (NSC) as an aide to Henry Kissinger, recalled years later that the president thought of Reagan as a lightweight politician, someone who should not be taken too seriously. “Nixon used to call me periodically, and he’d say, ‘It’s time to stroke Ronnie. Find somewhere for him to go, on a presidential mission,’” Scowcroft said. “So we’d send Reagan out here and there and elsewhere.” 6Reagan made four trips overseas as a presidential emissary for Nixon, meeting with eighteen heads of state. Nixon always provided him with the trappings: an Air Force plane, Secret Service protection, and other aides to pay all of Reagan’s expenses. Reagan later joked that he’d once traveled to seven European countries for Nixon with a total of $5.11 in his pocket.

Although officials such as Scowcroft made light of these trips, they served a political purpose. Nixon used them in order to profit from Reagan’s anti-Communist credentials. The most important mission was to Taiwan less than three months after Nixon had stunned the world by announcing that Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, had paid a secret visit to Beijing. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government was celebrating its sixtieth birthday on October 10, 1971, and Nixon sent Reagan to Taipei as his special envoy to the festivities. The trip provided some small degree of reassurance to Chiang and his aides that the United States would not abandon them. More important, Reagan’s mission helped Nixon protect his political flanks at home by demonstrating that America’s most prominent conservative politician was working alongside Nixon and would not oppose his new opening to China.

From Sacramento, Reagan strongly defended Nixon throughout the Watergate scandal until the very end of his presidency. On August 6, 1974, as Nixon’s support in Washington was rapidly collapsing, Reagan said he had finally changed his mind and concluded that Nixon had not told the public the truth about Watergate. Even then, Reagan said he still felt that Nixon should not step down and that instead, the “constitutional process” of impeachment should go forward. 7Nixon resigned three days later after even Barry Goldwater told him that he had lost virtually all support in the Senate and that Goldwater himself might have to vote for impeachment.

Two months later, when Nixon—by then a depressed, shunned, and marginalized ex-president—was hospitalized in California with potentially life-threatening blood clots in his leg, an apparently distraught Reagan called to cheer him up. “Gov. Reagan called and told Tricia, ‘I just hope your father knows how many people love him and are pulling for him,’” Julie Nixon Eisenhower told her father in a handwritten note. “What we want to tell you about the call is that Gov. Reagan could hardly speak because he was so emotional—really crying.” 8

Gradually, the relationship between Nixon and Reagan began to shift. In the mid-to-late 1970s, Reagan was the rising Republican star, while Nixon remained a political untouchable. The former president began to court the aspiring presidential candidate, sending him regular letters, memos, speeches, and newspaper clips, usually offering bits of advice. Reagan always responded graciously, if cautiously.

On August 20, 1976, after Reagan’s challenge to President Ford failed at the Republican convention, Nixon sent him a handwritten note of consolation. “Having won a few and lost a few, I can say that winning is a lot more fun!” Nixon said. “But you can take pride that in losing you conducted yourself magnificently…. Keep fighting and speaking for those ideals in which you so deeply believe.” Reagan’s thank-you note supplied the tidbits of insider politics and anti-Rockefeller sentiments he knew Nixon would love. “Where delegates had freedom to vote, we did well,” he said. “Defeat came in those three North East states where the party structure controlled the vote and I suspect ‘Rocky’ controlled the party structure.” 9

Reagan seemed to want to draw closer to Nixon, but his wife, Nancy, made sure that a certain distance was preserved. When the Reagans were traveling through Europe in 1978, they found themselves in Paris at the same time as Nixon, who was making his first sojourn abroad since his resignation. Richard Allen, the conservative foreign-policy expert who was traveling with the Reagans, suggested that he could call Nixon and arrange a meeting.

“That’s a great idea,” Reagan told Allen.

“No, Ronnie, no,” said Nancy Reagan. “No, I don’t want to. We shouldn’t see Nixon.” She won the argument. 10

For his own part, Nixon, while solicitous of Reagan, did not take his side in intramural Republican political battles. Nixon operated within the party only behind the scenes, in private conversations with friends and with Republican politicians, because in the wake of his Watergate resignation, no candidate sought his public endorsement. He of course did not support Reagan’s 1976 challenge to Ford, who after all had been Nixon’s vice president and was seeking to perpetuate Nixon’s foreign policies. In 1980, the year Reagan won the presidency, Nixon’s first choice for the Republican presidential nomination had been John Connally, who had been Nixon’s treasury secretary and since then his favorite politician.