Ronald Reagan

Marriages
Reagan married actress Jane Wyman on January 24, 1940; they had a daughter, Maureen in 1941; an adopted son, Michael in 1945, and a second daughter, Christine, born and died June 26, 1947. They divorced on June 28, 1948. Reagan was the only United States President to have been divorced. Reagan remarried on March 4, 1952, to actress Nancy Davis. Their daughter Patti was born on October 21 of the same year. In 1958, they had a second child, Ron.


Early political career

Ronald Reagan advertising boraxRonald Reagan was originally a Democrat, supporting Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal. In the late 1940s, he was one of the most visible speakers in the country defending President Harry S. Truman. By the early 1960s, he had become a staunch social and fiscal conservative, and in 1976, he said "fascism was really the basis of the New Deal." His admiration for classical liberalism and economic laissez-faire can be seen in a speech from 1964: "The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government set out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing."[3] His first major political role was president of the Screen Actors Guild, the labor union that included most Hollywood actors, but which, he claimed, was being infiltrated by Communists. In this position, he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee on Communist influence in Hollywood. He also kept tabs on actors he considered disloyal and informed on them to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under the code name "Agent T-10," but he would not denounce them publicly. In public statements he opposed the practice of blacklisting in Hollywood, while in practice he and his first wife, Jane Wyman, met with FBI agents in 1947 and named "suspected subversives." Among those he allegedly fingered were actors Larry Parks (The Jolson Story), Howard Da Silva (The Lost Weekend) and Alexander Knox (Wilson). Each of them was later called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted in Hollywood. (This information was not revealed until a 2002 Freedom of Information Act request.)[4] FBI files supposedly show that over time he repeatedly gave the FBI names of people he suspected of communist ties.

Believing that the Republican Party was better able to combat communism, Reagan supported the presidential candidacies of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 and Richard Nixon in 1960, although he remained a registered Democrat.


Governor of California
Order: 33rd Governor of California
Term of office: 1967–1975
Predecessor: Pat Brown
Successor: Jerry Brown
Political Party: Republican
Lieutenant Governor: Robert Finch, Ed Reinecke, John L. Harmer
In 1966, he was elected the 33rd Governor of California, defeating two-term incumbent Pat Brown; he was re-elected in 1970, defeating Jesse Unruh, but chose not to seek a third term. Ronald Reagan was sworn in as governor of California on January 3, 1967. In his first term, he froze government hiring but also approved tax hikes to balance the budget. Reagan quickly controlled protest movements of the era. During the People's Park protests in 1969, he sent 2,200 National Guard troops onto the Berkeley campus of the University of California. In a speech in April 1970, he stated, "If it's to be a bloodbath, let it be now. Appeasement is not the answer."[5]

He worked with Democratic Assembly Speaker Bob Moretti to reform welfare in 1971. Reagan also opposed the construction of a large federal dam, the Dos Rios, which would have flooded a valley of American Indian ranches. Later, Reagan and his family took a summer backpack trip into the high Sierra to a place where a proposed trans-Sierra highway would be built. Once there, he declared it would not be built. One of Reagan's greatest frustrations in office concerned capital punishment. He had campaigned as a strong supporter; however, his efforts to enforce the state's laws in this area were thwarted when the Supreme Court of California issued its People v. Anderson decision, which invalidated all death sentences issued in California prior to 1972, although the decision was quickly overturned by a constitutional amendment. Despite his support for the death penalty, Reagan granted two clemencies and a temporary reprieve during his governorship. As of 2006, no other clemency has been granted to a condemned person in California. The only execution during Reagan's governorship was on April 12, 1967, when Aaron Mitchell was executed by the state in San Quentin's gas chamber. There was not another execution in California until 1992. When the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst in Berkeley and demanded the distribution of food to the poor, Reagan suggested that it would be a good time for an outbreak of botulism.[6]After the media reported on the comment, he apologized.

Reagan promoted the dismantling of the public psychiatric hospital system, proposing that community-based housing and treatment replace involuntary hospitalization, which he saw as a violation of civil liberties issue. The community replacement facilities have never been adequately funded, either by Reagan or his successors. Reagan was strongly influenced by the classical liberals. When asked in an interview in 1975 which economists were influential on him, he replied: "Bastiat and von Mises, and Hayek and Hazlitt–I’m one for the classical economists." [6]

Reagan was the first governor to use a corporate business jet for official travel. California received one of the first Cessna Citation jets manufactured. His pilot, Bill Paynter, changed his Democratic voting registration to Republican within six months of meeting Reagan. Paynter often told listeners the Reagan on TV was the same Reagan in person, a man who walked his talk. Reagan would often ask his flight crew if it would be any inconvenience to change the published flight schedule because he did not want to keep his support staff from being with their families and any family planned events.


Presidential campaigns

Ronald Reagan on the cover of TIME as "Man of the Year," 1980.[edit]
1976 presidential campaign
Reagan's first attempt to gain the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 was unsuccessful. Reagan's candidacy was late to start and was in large part part of a broader "Stop Nixon" campaign that also included then-New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Reagan took some 600-odd delegates but Richard Nixon soon took the nomination and Reagan asked the convention to nominate Nixon unanimously.

In 1976, Reagan chose to run against incumbent President Gerald Ford, a moderate Republican and symbol of the "old guard" who had never been elected as President or to his previous post, Vice President. Reagan quickly established himself as the conservative candidate in the race and conservative organizations like the American Conservative Union and Jesse Helms' Congressional Club in North Carolina were critical in sustaining his candidacy.

Relying on an early strategy crafted by campaign manager John Sears of winning a few key primaries to knock President Ford out of the running, the strategy quickly fell apart when poor management of expectations and an ill-timed speech promising to shift responsibilty of federal services to the states without any promises on funding sources caused Reagan to lose New Hampshire and later Florida. Reagan found himself cornered and desperately needed a primary win or else likely be forced to withdraw from the race.

Under the leadership of Senator Jesse Helms and campaign operative Tom Ellis, Reagan made his critical stand in the North Carolina primary. Hammering President Ford on the Panama Canal, detente with the Soviet Union and Henry Kissinger's performance as Secretary of State, among other issues, Reagan, Helms and Ellis engineered a come-from-behind victory, winning the state 53 to 47%, marking the first time that an incumbent President that had campaigned in a state lost his party's primary there. According to author Craig Shirley of "Reagan's Revolution: The Unfold Story of the Campaign that Started it All,"

Had Reagan lost to North Carolina, despite his public pronouncements, his revolutionary challenge to Ford, along with his political career, would have ended unceremoniously. He would have made a gracious exit speech, cut a deal with the Ford forces to eliminate his campaign debt, made a minor speech at the Kansas City Convention that year, and returned to his ranch in Santa Barbara. He would probably have only reemerged to make speeches and cut radio commentaries to supplement his income.

And Reagan would have faded into political oblivion.

With Reagan's critical win in North Carolina and President's Ford veneer of invincibility removed, Reagan won several primary states, including Texas and California, though he was eventually slowed by Ford with wins for the latter in such places as Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky and his home state of Michigan. Reagan fared well in state conventions but as the Kansas City Convention neared, Ford looked close to winning the nomination, thanks to delegates in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania thought to be controlled by forces of liberal Republican and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.

To combat this, Reagan, despite protests from his base, chose moderate Republican and Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker to be his running mate if nominated. While this affected Ford in being able to win the nomination, eventually Ford won, taking 1,187 delegates to Reagan's 1,070.

Following a strong acceptance speech by President Ford, Reagan was asked to take the stage and deliver some remarks. Reagan proceeded to give a stirring speech, discussing the dangers of nuclear war and the moral threat represented by the Soviet Union, which prompted several Ford delegates to quietly remark that "they had voted for the wrong man."

This speech and the 1976 convention as a whole marked a turning point for the Republican Party. The moderate Ford may have won the nomination but the conservative movement took hold of the party, reinivograting a struggling party and moving the Republican geographic base from the Northeast to the South and the West. Conservatives successfully elected Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire, Roger Jepsen of Iowa and Bill Armstrong of Colorado to the Senate in 1978, and turned back Jimmy Carter's efforts to pass the SALT II treaty. These and other events set the stage for Ronald Reagan to come back in 1980 to run again for the Republican nomination, and ultimately for the Presidency of the United States.


1980 presidential campaign
Main article: United States presidential election, 1980
In 1980, Reagan won the Republican nomination for President, handily winning most of the primaries after an early defeat in the Iowa caucuses. During the convention, Reagan proposed a complex power-sharing arrangement with Gerald Ford as Vice President, but nothing came of it. Instead, Reagan selected his opponent in the primaries, George H. W. Bush, who was a former Congressional Representative, United Nations ambassador, Envoy to China, RNC Chairman, and CIA director—although Bush had declared that he would never be Reagan's Vice President.

Bush was many things Reagan was not — a lifelong Republican, a combat veteran and an internationalist with UN, CIA and China experience. Bush's economic and political philosophies were supposedly more moderate than Reagan's. Bush had referred to Reagan's supply-side influenced proposal for a 30% across-the-board tax cut as "voodoo economics."

On August 4, 1980, on the opening day of the presidential campaign, Reagan declared his support for states' rights at a speech at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the scene of a brutal murder of civil rights workers 16 years earlier. Critics said that Reagan's use of the term "states' rights" was a code word for his opposition to civil rights for African Americans in the South, some even saying that it was "the closest Reagan could come to telling southern racists 'I’m a racist too.'"[7], but his supporters maintained that the speech was in keeping with his philosophy of a limited federal government, including or excluding racial matters. In his biography of Reagan, Edmund Morris states that Reagan was still a firm believer in the supremacy of the federal government. Reagan, who had opposed every major civil rights bill of the 1960s, including the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was vulnerable to charges of at least insensitivity to the cause of black civil rights. Eventually, though Reagan came around to expressing support for these laws. Still, according to the book Running on Race: Racial Politics in Presidential Campaigns 1960-2000, when Carter tried to accuse Reagan of racism, because of his record and the Neshoba event, it largely backfired against Carter. When one of Carter's main black supporters, former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young tried to whip up black opposition to Reagan by stating that if he were elected, it would be "okay to kill niggers" the strident language probably alienated more whites than it attracted blacks.

The presidential campaign, led by William J. Casey, was conducted in the shadow of the Iran hostage crisis; Every day during the campaign the networks reported on Carter's unavailing efforts to free the hostages. Most analysts argue this weakened Carter's political base and gave Reagan the opportunity to attack Carter's ineffectiveness. On the other hand, Carter's inability to deal with double-digit inflation and unemployment, lackluster economic growth, instability in the petroleum market leading to long gas lines, and the perceived weakness of the U.S. national defense may have had a greater impact on the electorate. Adding to Carter's woes was his use of the term "misery index" during the 1976 election, which he defined as the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates. This so-called "misery index" had considerably worsened during his term, which Reagan used to his advantage during the campaign. With respect to the economy, Reagan said, "I'm told I can't use the word depression. Well, I'll tell you the definition. A recession is when your neighbor loses his job; depression is when you lose your job. Recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his."

Reagan's showing in the televised debates boosted his campaign. He seemed more at ease, deflecting President Carter's criticisms with remarks like "There you go again." His most influential remark was a closing question to the audience, during a time of skyrocketing prices and high interest rates, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"


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