James Mann: The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

After Reagan became the Republican nominee, Nixon began sending him practical advice about the general-election campaign. Keep the events indoors in the last, late-autumn days of the campaign so that you don’t lose your voice, Nixon told him. And stick to your proven campaign speech. Reagan, a vastly more skilled speaker and performer than Nixon, did not need this advice, but he sent Nixon his thanks anyway.

Reagan’s campaign staff and his new administration included a number of Republicans who had earlier worked for Nixon. Allen, who became Reagan’s first national security adviser, had worked in the Nixon White House; so had Martin Anderson, a domestic policy adviser, and Ken Khachigian, a speechwriter. Moreover, behind the scenes, Nixon went to considerable lengths to try to place some of the officials he liked best from his own administration at the top levels of Reagan’s new cabinet.

Two weeks after the 1980 election, Nixon sent Reagan a detailed, private memo of cabinet-level recommendations, explaining that he was writing “as one who has been there and who seeks or wants absolutely nothing except your success in office.” He recommended Connally as the best candidate both for secretary of defense and also as head of the Office of Management and Budget. For CIA, he recommended William Casey, another Nixon administration alumnus, who had chaired Reagan’s campaign; for deputy CIA director, he suggested Vernon Walters, who had been deputy CIA director for a time in the Nixon administration, be given the same job once again. (Casey got the job; Walters was made a roving ambassador.)

Nixon devoted the heart of his memo to persuading Reagan that the best choice for secretary of state would be Alexander Haig, Nixon’s former deputy national security adviser and White House chief of staff. “He is intelligent, strong and generally shares your views on foreign policy,” wrote Nixon. “He would be personally loyal to you and would not backbite you on or off the record.” The former president went out of his way to warn against the appointment of George Shultz, Nixon’s own former labor and treasury secretary, as Reagan’s secretary of state. “George Shultz has done a superb job in every government position to which I appointed him,” Nixon told the president-elect. “However, I do not believe that he has the depth of understanding of world issues generally and the Soviet Union in particular that is needed for this period.” 11

Reagan didn’t take all of Nixon’s suggestions; he recognized from the start, for example, that the brash, strong-willed Connally would not fit into his administration. Reagan, however, did follow Nixon’s recommendation of Haig for secretary of state. Allen, who had been Reagan’s leading foreign-policy adviser during the campaign, later claimed that Nixon had been the driving force behind Haig’s nomination, manipulating events behind the scenes and working closely with members of Reagan’s kitchen cabinet. 12

Once Reagan occupied the White House, Nixon’s private notes to him took on the nature of fan mail; they were often flattering and unctuous. “Pat and my reactions were the same: ‘Thank God for Ronald Reagan,’” Nixon wrote in early 1981 when Reagan granted a pardon to Mark Felt, the former associate director of the FBI who had been convicted of approving illegal break-ins for surveillance; Nixon did not know at the time that Felt had been Deep Throat, Bob Woodward’s principal source for the Washington Post articles about Watergate.

“Reggie Jackson used to be Mr. October. Now, you deserve that accolade,” Nixon wrote on October 31, 1981, as Reagan was completing a successful month that had culminated with legislative approval of the sale of AWACS planes and other military equipment to Saudi Arabia. At the end of 1981, he wrote Reagan a note saying: “I like and admire [Lech] Walesa, but in my book, Time missed the boat: President Reagan should have been Man of the Year.”

Interspersed with such praise were bits of inside political advice of the sort that only Richard Nixon could have given. In late 1982, Nixon sent Reagan a long letter urging the president to prepare for his 1984 reelection campaign by bringing onto his team some people who could engage in slashing attacks on the Democrats. “You need at least two or three nut cutters who will take on the opposition so that you can take the high road,” wrote Nixon, the acknowledged master at this technique. Vice President Bush had been a good campaigner and a good soldier, but he did not fit the nut-cutting role, Nixon argued. “You need someone (or two) in the Cabinet and the RNC who are heavyweights and who will carry the attack to the opposition as I did for Eisenhower in 1954 and Ted Agnew did for me in 1970.” 13

During the 1970s, two schools of thought emerged within the Republican Party over the Cold War, one symbolized by Nixon and the other by Reagan. The two men were friendly if not friends, a relationship reinforced by their identification with each other as politicians. Both had embraced anticommunism in the late 1940s. Both had been influenced by Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist Party member who had provided dramatic public accounts of his life in the party, describing the former State Department official Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent.

In their early careers, both men spoke of an eventual American triumph in the Cold War. For Reagan, this was an enduring theme: he once told a startled visitor, “My theory of how the Cold War ends is: We win, they lose.” 1During the 1950s and early 1960s, Nixon had sounded a similar refrain. “I know that talk of victory over Communism is not fashionable these days,” he said in one 1963 speech, adding that he could not accept the idea of coexistence with the Soviet Union, because that was “another word for creeping surrender.” 2

Yet despite these superficial similarities, Nixon’s and Reagan’s views of the Soviets had different origins and developed in different ways. As a result, they eventually found themselves on opposing sides in a series of philosophical and factional struggles among the Republicans.

For Nixon, politics came first: he had won election to Congress in 1946, and only subsequently, as a new member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, did he seize upon anticommunism, most notably in the Hiss case, quickly discovering the electoral appeal of the issue. His rise in Republican politics was so swift that within six years, he became vice president. Afterward, from the early 1950s onward, anticommunism was for Nixon tied primarily to questions of foreign policy and geopolitics: the problem to be addressed was how to cope with the Soviet Union. Nixon’s underlying message, carefully honed from the late 1950s through the remainder of his career, was that Moscow was run by tough leaders and that he was the American official most qualified and experienced to deal with them.

One might call this the static version of American anticommunism: Nixon often suggested that American and Soviet leaders were engaged in an unending series of geopolitical challenges to one another. What America needed, he maintained, were officials in Washington who could stand up to the Soviets, as he had as vice president in the famous “kitchen debate” with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow in 1959. Nixon rarely spoke of changing the Soviet system itself; the assumption was that it was a permanent if unpleasant fact of life. Nixon’s message to the American public relied on preserving what he once privately told H. R. Haldeman was his “position as a big-league operator… the unusual world statesman capability.” 3

Reagan’s anticommunism was rooted much more deeply in his personality and political career. He hadn’t seized upon anticommunism after becoming a politician; anticommunism came first and politics, later. It was, indeed, the cause of anticommunism that had propelled Reagan into politics. As an actor and a liberal Democrat, he had joined film-industry organizations of the late 1940s, eventually rising to president of the Screen Actors Guild in the midst of a labor strike over the role of unions in constructing movie sets. In this strike and elsewhere, Reagan became embroiled in the acrimonious fights of this period over communist influence in Hollywood, skirmishing regularly with other left-wing figures such as the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who had for a time been a Communist Party member. Reagan and associates such as the actress Olivia de Havilland tried to win support for statements repudiating communism in the United States; opponents such as Trumbo refused.