A look at the Reagan riddle

Lou Cannon likes to quote Winston Churchill’s cliche about Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Ronald Reagan, he says, “is my Russia.” But Cannon, who began covering Reagan before he became California’s governor in 1966, manages to unwrap the riddle-cum-enigma as well as anybody ever has.

That Cannon’s new book is being published just as Arnold Schwarzenegger, another actor who’s never held public office, campaigns to unseat Gov. Gray Davis can hardly hurt the book, and it certainly will become the basis for a lot of comparisons. How well Schwarzenegger stacks up remains an open question; when Reagan ran, he’d been much more deeply involved in politics. If Schwarzenegger wins, he could do a lot worse than use this story as a model for addressing California’s huge fiscal and governmental problems.

Even some of Reagan’s staunchest critics recognized his power to charm, and Cannon, during his long journalist’s career covering Reagan as governor and later as president, has hardly been immune. But this book, Cannon’s fifth on his riddle, is also his most serious and searching, not just about Reagan but also about a watershed era in California and national politics.

“What made Reagan different was the power of his ideas and his stubborn adherence to them,” Cannon says. His central argument about the Reagan governorship in the years 1967 to 1975 -- and indeed much of Reagan’s political career -- is that his conservatism was always tempered by a common-sense pragmatism that, in the context of today’s hyper-partisanship, seems, if not moderate, at least reasonable by comparison. Among Reagan’s first major acts as governor -- he was facing a large deficit left by his predecessor, Pat Brown -- was his call for, and ultimate approval of, the biggest tax increase ever proposed by any U.S. governor. He also agreed to welfare reforms that reduced eligibility, but accepted a cost-of-living formula that substantially increased individual welfare allowances. He significantly increased the state’s parkland and environmental protections, despite his indifference to redwood trees, and signed a 1967 abortion law that was among the most liberal of its time.

Contrary to Reagan’s later claims about the success of his welfare reforms, the abortion law probably did more to reduce the state’s caseload than the welfare reforms. (Reagan later told Cannon he regretted signing the law, which led to a sharp increase in legal abortions, from 518 in 1967 to 150,000 in 1973, the year of Roe vs. Wade, and nearly 200,000 in 1980, an increase that surprised even the law’s Democratic author.)

Equally telling, Reagan, persuaded by his staff, agreed to state income tax withholding, something he’d once said he had his feet set in concrete against because he believed taxes should be felt, not extracted in small bits from weekly paychecks. When a reporter asked him about his acquiescence, he replied with a wry smile, “The sound you hear is the concrete cracking around my feet.” By the time he left office, California’s annual spending had more than doubled.

That’s hardly to suggest the governor was a liberal sheep in wolf’s clothing. Within weeks of Reagan’s inauguration, embattled UC president Clark Kerr, who’d done as much as anyone to shape the “multiversity” that had been wracked by student protests since 1964, was gone. Contrary to Kerr’s claim, Cannon says Reagan wasn’t the schemer who pushed the president over the side. But he was certainly happy to see him go.

He had no hesitation in cracking down on campus demonstrators with National Guard troops, with tear gas if necessary, to put down the riots that convulsed the Berkeley campus and nearby “People’s Park” in 1969 and Santa Barbara in 1970. Cannon reports that someone put a plaque on the door to the governor’s office that remained through all eight years of his tenure -- “Observe the Rules, or Get Out” -- that, as much as anything, summarized his convictions. Not coincidentally, it also reflected the views of the vast majority of Californians.

The real heart of the Reagan riddle, and surely the source of much of his political success, was the fine line between his conviction-cum-ideology and his pragmatism -- his ability to listen, to sense where the country was and convert his own beliefs into homilies, anecdotes and numbers, some of them totally false, to connect with voters. Cannon wrote in 1982 that Reagan “tried to lead the nation in the direction he thinks it should go rather than follow it in the direction he believes it to be going,” but the dynamic is more complicated. His evolution from New Dealer to avowed Republican tax cutter reflected at least roughly the country’s own growing doubt about the virtues of big government and (perhaps especially) its perceived largess on welfare and its push for affirmative action, often at the expense of what a lot of blue-collar Democrats thought were their rights. The shift was especially obvious in Southern California, where the John Birch Society exercised increasing political power. A cynic might say it also reflected the growth of Reagan’s personal wealth, along with his cowboy romanticism, which Cannon calls his “sacramental vision” of America and his providential mission within it.

That vision didn’t set the new governor on any certain policy path. Despite Reagan’s long record, beginning before the Goldwater campaign in 1964, of excoriating the excesses of big government, he and his sometimes befuddled staffers had little idea what they really wanted to do when they arrived in Sacramento. When asked about it early in his governorship, he replied that he’d never played a governor before. As would also be true of his presidency, he really didn’t know that much about government, wasn’t interested in details, and formed policy ideas from his collection of anecdotes and statistics in newspapers, the Reader’s Digest and the various conservative journals he read. Cannon argues that there were great differences between Reagan in Sacramento, where his Cabinet included such environmentalists as Ike Livermore and Robert Penn Mott, and Reagan in Washington, where, in James G. Watt, he had a secretary of the Interior who measured every hillside in the tons of coal or ore lying under it and every tree in the number of board feet of lumber that could be cut from it. The choice of Watt seems to have had less to do with Reagan’s environmental views than with his political debt to Nevada’s GOP Sen. Paul Laxalt, who was both a personal friend and one of Reagan’s earliest supporters, but it made an enormous difference in the management of public lands.

In other ways, the Sacramento Reagan was the same man who went to Washington in 1981, a man who invented convenient fables and hyped his own record -- often producing, as Cannon says, “a comic book version of history” -- but with “enough truth to get away with it.” There was the same indifference, if not hostility, to civil rights; the same hands-off management style and the same midlevel staff jealousies and screw-ups. There was the same sunny self-confidence; the same conservative convictions, always tempered by pragmatism and personality; the ability to work with Democrats (and sometimes to get snookered by them) to raise taxes when necessary and, as Cannon points out, to take credit for a lot of the work they did. And there was the same ability to convert an inchoate climate of public anxiety and resentment into a successful political narrative. Although Cannon calls Reagan the “Paul Revere” of the tax revolt, and creator of the message that government is not the solution but the problem, he did as much to exploit as to create the mood that drove it.

There likely will be arguments from conservatives who insist he is the template for today’s GOP (which Cannon makes clear he often was not) and from liberals (who’ll say Cannon was charmed out of his journalist’s better instincts and gave the family-values Reagans a free pass on their neglect of their children and on the financial help they got from deep-pocket backers). To what extent was Reagan’s conservative core a dangerously frail vessel floating on sentimentality, ignorance and myth? The Reagan riddle may never permit anything like a definitive biography, but this is likely to be the one that, for the crucial period it covers, is authoritative and thoughtful enough to be worth the argument. *