THE CAMPAIGN

The 1964 Presidential Election, as historians and journalists have amply recorded, was a disaster for our party. Not only was Goldwater swamped under a Lyndon Johnson landslide, the party came out of the election bitterly divided because of a vicious primary battle between Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller. A lot of liberal Republicans simply refused to support Goldwater against Johnson. The split was especially deep in California, where moderate and conservative factions of the party had already been feuding for years. After the election, I went back to doing what I'd been doing before it - speaking on national issues and doing my job on "Death Valley Days."

The following spring, Holmes Tuttle, a Los Angeles automobile dealer who had been one of the Republican contributors I'd met at the Coconut Grove diner and who later bought the airtime for my speech for Goldwater, called me and asked if he and several friends might drop by our home in Pacific Palisades. After I heard what they said, I almost laughed them out of the house. I can't remember my exact words, but I said, in effect: "You're out of your mind." Tuttle and the other members of his group said they wanted me to run for governor in 1966, when Pat Brown, the liberal Democrat who had beat Nixon for reelection in 1962, was expected to run for a third term. I told them running for governor was out of the question for me, but that I wanted to help the party and made a proposition: Find somebody you think would make a good governor and then I'll campaign for him as hard as I can, the way I campaigned for Barry.

Although I didn't have any thought of retirement, I had a good job and a good life and, at fifty-four, the last thing I wanted to do was start a new career. The pressure didn't let up. I finally decided to make an offer to the people who wanted me to run for governor: "Even though I think you're wrong about my being the only Republican who might be able to beat Brown, if you fellows will arrange it for me to go on the road and accept some of the speaking invitations I'm getting from groups around the state, then I'll go out and speak to them and come back in six months, on the last day of 1965, and tell you whether you're right or whether you should be looking for somebody else to run for governor." I believed that if I continued speaking for six months I'd be able to identify someone whom the people thought would make a good governor, then I'd campaign for him.

Well, my plan worked out that way, but not in the way I expected. Starting roughly July 1, 1965, I drove up and down the length and breadth of California for six months, the speeches had pretty much the same flavor that my speeches had had since the later years on the General Electric plant tours; after the speeches, I'd hear a lot of the same things from members of the audience that I'd heard for years on the GE tours. No matter where I went, in San Jose or Modesto, Los Angeles or Newport Beach, after I'd give a speech, people would be waiting and they'd come up to me and say, "Why don't you run for governor?"

After about three months of this, I returned home one night and said to Nancy, "This isn't working out the way I thought it would. You know, these guys may be right. All these people are telling me after my speeches that I ought to run for governor; this may end up putting us in an awful spot." When the six months were almost over, I asked her: "How do you say no to all these people?" If I decided to run, we agreed our life we knew and loved would change dramatically, perhaps forever. But I told Nancy: "I don't think we can run away from it." She agreed. I called the people who were pressing me to run against Brown and said, "Okay, I'll do it," and on a television broadcast January 4, 1966, I announced my intention to seek the Republican nomination for governor.

I won the chance to run against Brown after a Republican primary campaign that was very bitter at times, largely because of the lingering split between conservatives and moderates in the state party. My principal opponent in the primary was George Christopher, a former mayor of San Francisco who tried simultaneously to portray me as a right-wing extremist and attack me because I'd admitted having been in Communist front groups - without mentioning that I'd resigned and declared war on them as soon as I'd realized what they were.

The personal attacks against me during the primary finally became so heavy that the state Republican chairman, Gaylord Parkinson, postulated what he called the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican. It's a rule I followed during that campaign and have ever since.

After beating Christopher in the primary, I had to deal with Brown whose campaign against me, simply put, asked a question: What is an actor doing seeking an important job like the governorship of California? When Pat Brown commissioned a television commercial in which he told a group of small children, "I'm running against an actor, and you know who killed Abe Lincoln, don't you?," I knew he knew he was in trouble.

Pat Brown brought Senator Edward Kennedy to California to help him campaign, and he began a speaking trip around the state declaring, "Reagan has never held any political office before and here he is seeking the top spot in the government of California." He abandoned that theme after my next speech, when I said, "I understand there's a senator from Massachusetts who's come to California and he's concerned that I've never held office prior to seeking this job. Well, you know, come to think of it, the senator from Massachusetts never held any job before he became a senator."

One of Brown's favorite ploys was to say, "Reagan is only an actor who memorizes speeches written by other people, just like he memorized the lines that were fed to him by his screenwriters in the movies. Sure, he makes a good speech, but who's writing his speeches?" Well, I was writing my speeches. But I couldn't get up and say to an audience, "Hey, I write my own speeches."

We called a meeting and I said; "From now on, why don't I just say a few words to whatever group I'm with, no matter how big it is, and then just open it up to questions and answers? People might think somebody had written my opening remarks for me, but they'll know it would be impossible for somebody to feed me answers to questions I didn't know about in advance." Well, it worked like a charm. From then on, whether the campaign audience was three or three thousand, I'd make a few remarks, then take questions. I hadn't planned it that way, but this turned out to be a wonderful way to learn about the issues that were on people's minds.

The climax to Brown's campaign of bad taste was his guilt-through-association commercial late in the campaign comparing me to an actor named John Wilkes Booth - Lincoln's assassin. On Election Day I defeated Brown by a margin of fifty-eight percent to forty-two percent.

In different ways, the election changed the lives of everyone in our family that night. Although I may have been (as the papers put it) a "citizen politician" whom reporters liked to compare to the Jimmy Stewart character in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, I knew that reality often turned out to be a lot more complicated than Hollywood portrayed it, and I knew I had to do some quick homework about my new job before arriving in Sacramento. After years of criticizing government, I was about to stick my head into the lions' den and the lions would be waiting for me.

Courtesy of Simon and Schuster