Ronald Reagan is the first President I really remember. I mean, during the election of 1976, I have a recollection of walking down the street by my house with my sister, singing a political jingle to the tune of the Oscar Meyer commercial along the lines of “Jimmy Carter has a way of messing up the U.S.A.” But that’s dim, mists of time kind of stuff. I remember things about Reagan. And I remember really liking him. (I grew up in a Republican household if you couldn’t guess.) All the stuff I remember liking was pretty superficial. I remember during the election of 1984, there was some footage of him making a goofy face or gesture or something toward Nancy when they were at the polling place. And I wasn’t the only one. He won in 1984 by a huge margin. In retrospect — as I got older — I found that some of his policies were maybe not well thought out. And, if you listen to the vision of St. Ronald that shows up at Republican primary debates every four years, it has only a nodding acquaintance with his actual term in office.
Reagan was born in 1911 to an Illinois salesman. Among other things, during his school years, he was a lifeguard, a cheerleader, an actor, involved in campus politics, and a mediocre student. After college, he became a radio announcer. Among his gifts was improvising play-by-play narratives based on limited information he received over the wire. While traveling with the Cubs in California, he had a successful screen test and became a “B” actor with Warner Brothers. During World War II, Reagan served in a motion picture unit where he helped with the production of training reels.
He returned to Hollywood and became president of the Screen Actor’s Guild. In that capacity, he was an informant to the FBI, reporting suspected communist sympathizers to the government. From 1953 to 1962, he became host of General Electric Theater – a series of weekly dramas. This was lucrative – allowing him to earn about $1 million per year (in today’s dollars). As part of his duties, he was also required to tour GE plants and give speeches.
In 1961, Reagan created a recording for the American Medical Association warning that Medicare would mean the end of freedom in America. He warned that, if it wasn’t stopped, he and everyone else would have to tell our children what it was like in America when men were free. 1964, Reagan emerged as one of the leading spokesmen of the Goldwater campaign. He argued that, if Goldwater wasn’t elected, that would mean Americans would descend to the “ant-heap of totalitarianism.”
Having made an impression with his campaigning for Goldwater, he launched his own campaign for governor in 1966. He promised to send the welfare bums back to work and clean up the mess at Berkley. He beat Jerry Brown’s father, Pat Brown and promptly froze government hiring while raising taxes to balance the budget. Reagan floated a Presidential run in 1968 but came in third behind Nixon and Rockefeller. He stomped on the student protest movement with armed force. “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” He initially signed a pro-abortion bill; but in the late 60s, Protestant opposition to abortion — particularly in a political way — was still in its infancy. Later on, he would adopt a pro-life stance. In 1967, he signed a bill that prohibited public carrying of firearms, adopted in the wake of Black Panthers bearing arms. In 1970, Reagan was re-elected, Jesse Unruh. (Unruh first came to my attention as having said about lobbyists, “If you can’t eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, take their money and then vote against them you’ve got no business being up here.”) Reagan did not run for a third term and was succeeded by Jerry Brown in 1975.
Reagan ran a substantial campaign for President in 1976 but was narrowly defeated by Gerald Ford in the primary. Ford was defeated by Carter, and — as a former two-term governor of a large state who had been a near miss in the primary — he was primed for the election in 1980. During his 1980 campaign, he went to the county fair about 7 miles from where civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier and gave a speech advocating “state’s rights.” Regardless of Reagan’s personal feelings, “state’s rights” in the South has been the rallying cry of slavers and segregationists. Carter’s presidency was a tough period for the U.S., and Reagan’s mix of sunny and tough charisma was appealing when compared to what felt to many to be Carter’s weakness.
Leave a Reply