1/11/1976 Ronald Reagan smiling in his Los Angeles office.
Joyce Comments: Nestled in the Gubernatorial Papers of Governor Ronald Reagan uploaded to the Digital Library of The Ronald Reagan Library, was this December 30, 1974 press release of Reagan's statement at the Los Angeles Press Club where he talked about life after the California Governorship:
"I have said before that 'government works if the people work at it.' In these eight years, I have tried, to prove that it is true. Hundreds of men and women left major jobs in the private sector to join us for periods ranging from a few months to several years to help make government more efficient; to keep in under control. When I came to office in 1967 I said that I wanted to find common sense solutions to problems. Not every problem has been solved, of course, and new ones have come along, but on balance I think we have accomplished something. we brought a runaway welfare system under control and, based on our welfare reform experiences, many other states are success-fully emulating California. Now, California has even proposed a blue-print for reform nationwide. When we leave there will be virtually the same number of state employees as when we came. This means that productivity has increased sharply in most departments and agencies of state government. And, for the first time in more than twenty years, the outgoing governor will leave the new governor a surplus---in this case approximately $400 million.
"Individual liberty depends upon keeping government under control. I have learned that you must guard constantly against the government's tendency to want to grow and grow. This is coupled with the tendency of those groups with a vested interest in big government to campaign ardently for such growth, to the exclusion of virtually any other consideration.
"What we have experienced and learned I want to communicate to others when I leave office. I want to share one of my disappointments, too, for I think it is an idea whose time is here. That is, a limitation on the percentage of the people's total income that government may take to run its affairs. Our tax limitation initiative did not pass in 1973, but today some eleven other states have similar plans under consideration.
"The hour is late in America for freedom and liberty.
"The doomsayers keep telling us that America's problems can be solved only by government regulation. So, slowly but certainly, we are allowing government to intrude more and more into our lives; to dig deeper and deeper into our pocketbooks. America and its people have great strength. They can reverse this erosion of freedom; and I want to do everything I can to help.
"There has been much speculation about my activites when I leave office. Now, I would like to share some specific plans with you:
"As you know, I will have a daily radio program of commentary which goes on the air January 20. It is being syndicated nationally. I was delighted to learn that a station serving my hometown of Dixon, Illinois was the first one to sign up. There are some other important markets, too, among the first 100 to sign: WHO, Des Moines; WOC, Davenport, Iowa, where I got my first job; San Diego, Seattle, Denver, Phoenix, Kansas City, and San Antonio, to name a few. The producer tells me he expects most of the nation's major markets to be included by the time we go on the air.
"Beginning the week of January 13, I shall also be writing a weekly newspaper column for the Copley News Service.
"I will begin my first speaking tour in just two weeks in Dallas, San Antonio, Nashville and Richmond, Virginia.
"Several offers have come to me to write a book in 1975 and they are under serious consideration.
"Two of my assistants, Michael Deaver and Peter Hannaford, are opening a new public relations firm, Deaver & Hannaford, and I have retained their services to manage and coordinate my program of activities. They have assembled a small support staff for me. Included in it will be my secretary since 1969, Helene von Damm; Nancy Reynolds, who. has served as a Special Assistant to the Governor since 1967; Willard Barnett, retired California Highway Patrol Officer, who has served as my driver for eight years; Dennis LeBlanc, from the security detail; and clerical personnel. My office will be in the Westwood area of Los Angeles."
Reagan Seeks Platform for White House Bid
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/01/26/archives/reagen-seeks-platform-for-white-house-bid.htmlBy Wallace Turner; Special to The New York Times
Posted: Jan. 26, 1975
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 25—Heads turned to follow the slender, square‐shouldered man who moved in graceful strides across the hotel lobby, a thoroughbred walking between his aides, two exercise ponies.
A word has been much over used to label the quality Ronald Reagan shares with so many others who were produced by what he calls “my former occupation.” The word is “glamor” and refers to what is involved when these persons pass and draw stares.
Ronald Reagan. Former Governor. Former actor.Former New Deal Democrat. Conservative political activist. Once and future Presidential candidate.
Ronald Reagan now searches for a platform and recognition device that will keep him alive in the political marketplace.
Presidential Prospects
QUESTION: They say that you're drawn to the Presidency. Is that right?
ANSWER: No. And no more than I was drawn to the governorship, and believe me, I set out in 1965 to prove to those people who were pressing me to run for Governor that I shouldn't run, that I should campaign for someone else. I have never been able to understand the person who could just within himself say, “I want to be President of the United States. I'm going to go out after it.”
So his style as he looks toward the White House during thenext 18 months will be somewhat as it was in 1968. He will tend his political flock with speeches of the sort it likes to hear. He will speak out frequently and he will be critical of those who may be in the field against him. Perhaps it will not end this time as it did in 1968, when his campaign fell apart at the convention.
Q. What do you think of Ford's performance up to now?
A. He was an instant President so I think he's entitled to a little longer honeymoon. And particularly when he's come in under, not only the circumstances, but the situation as it prevails.
Q. Your answer suggests that there may be some things that he's done that you don't approve of?
A. To be very frank about that, yes. I'm in agreement with his tax rebate idea, and I was opposed to the original trial balloon about a surtax. Raising taxes to cure inflation is like giving a drunk another drink to sober him up. But this present plan, the energy thing, I do not believe that tax is the way to go unless there's something in the international chess game that I don't know about. I believe that the National Government and the Presidency could be used to persuade the people of the seriousness of this [energy crisis] and ask them to engage in a voluntary conservation program.
Pardon Defended
As with most of his constituency in the Republican party, Mr. Reagan defended President Ford's pardon of former President Richard M. Nixon.
“I thought the punishment fit the crime,” he said. “I don't think that anyone has yet evaluated what an actual punishment that was—that was Napoleon to Elba.”
Mr. Reagan has abandoned his defensive position about Mr. Nixon.
“I don't want to jump on the guy,” Mr. Reagan said:
“I think he made great mistakes.”
As the evidence closed in against Mr. Nixon in 1973 and 1974, Mr. Reagan said such things as “I think he's entitled to be believed” and argued that talk of impeachment helped the nation's enemies.
Mr. Reagan was asked if he considered himself the chief conservative Republican spokesman since Spiro T. Agnew resigned the Vice‐Presidency after pleading guilty to income tax fraud.
“I think I am one of them,” he said.
He named Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Senator James L. Buckley of New York, Senator John G. Tower of Texas, Gov. Meldrim Thompson Jr. of New Hampshire and Gov. Arch A. Moore of West Virginia as others.
“Maybe I'm the most active now because I've made up my mind to go out on the road and do this sort of thing which I have done so many years before and speak the philosophy which I believe in,” he said.
‘Mashed Potato’ Circuit
He returns to what he calls the “mashed potato circuit” out of need for a platform. That same need has caused him to return to his professional origins—radio—through syndication of a three‐minute commentary that will be supplied to subscribing stations five days a week.
The money earned from these efforts will fund his staff, it has been explained. About 130 stations have signed up for the radio program. The syndication is handled through the firm of Michael Deaver and Peter Hannaford, who were members of Mr. Reagan's staff in the Governor's office.
They are also offering a oncea ‐ week newspaper column, through the facilities of Copley Newspapers of San Diego. About 121 newspapers have signed up for Mr. Reagan's column, Mr. Hannaford said.
Q. What would you have done with these past” years if you'd gotten beat in the primary in 1966?
A. Oh, I'm sure I would have continued in the career I was in. I had taken over the hosting and was starring in a certain number of the Death Valley Days series. Bob Taylor replaced me. Out of the General Electric years had come, fairly regularly as a sideline, tours on the mashed potato circuit.
Age a Liability
But he did not lose the primary and founded his political base in eight years as Governor. His most serious liability as a potential Presidential can didate is his age. He was born Feb. 6, 1911; will be 65 years old when the Republican National Convention is held in 1976. Also, his record as Governor is controversial.
Q. Ten years from now, what are they going to look back at and say, “Oh, yeah, Reagan did that”?
A. We've had one Governor in California, the great reformer, Hiram Johnson, who came in and did turn the state around. Others and in a case or two like that, I don't think any one governor—or even President—can do that because all you can hope is that if you accomplish something, maybe it sets a tone that others will want to continue.
Mr. Reagan took office promising to cut expenditures. But the budget he inherited in 1966 was less than half his last budget eight years later.
Q. In those years, there was an inflation factor of 45 per cent, which would have raised your first budget to $6.7‐billion in 1974 dollars but it was actually $10.8‐billion in 1974. Why?
A. Over a billion dollars was to subsidize local government, which depends on property tax so as to relieve the homeowner. An another thing: Pat Brown had been spending money more than was budgeted so we had to come in for a tax increase. And you've left out the cost of state growth.
Fight on Crime
In 1966 he also campaigned with a promise to cut crime rates, which he could not deliver. He attributed the failure to the Democrats who controlled one or both houses of the legislature most of his term in office. They would not pass any anticrime bills, he said.
Mr. Reagan's positions on national issues have moderated slightly. An example is the Vietnam war. He once proposed that it be legitimatized by a formal declaration by Congress.
He is critical of President Kennedy for having sent troops to Vietnam.
“My position was that once we did that,” he said, “once you committed young men to fight and die, you have no moral justification for not turning them loose to win it and get the damn thing over with. You can't ask a man to fight and die in the cause that is not worth winning.”
Mr. Reagan and his admirers assert that he has successfully reformed California's welfare system.
In the Jan. 17 issue of the National Review, Charles Hobbs, who used to take special assignments for Governor Reagan, wrote, “In the spring of 1971, Ronald Reagan singlehandedly cleaned up the federally created ‘welfare mess’ in California.”
Mr. Hobbs wrote that Mr. Reagan's move within 30 days leveled off the soaring increase in welfare rolls and that there were now 400,000 fewer people on welfare in California than there were in February, 1971.
Contention Disputed
This is disputed by Mr. Reagan's critics.
In The Nation issue of June 22, a Larry Agran, former legal counsel to the California State Senate Committee on Health and Welfare, wrote that Mr. Reagan had filled his first administration with “novices and incompetents.”
Mr. Agran wrote that Mr. Reagan's welfare changes were declared illegal by courts of review and that “thousands of poor families were brutalized by Reagan's bureaucratic thugs.”
In 1973, Mr. Reagan put all his prestige behind an attempt to revise California's Constitution and to change the method of tax collection and state finance. The proposal was defeated. It might have been his monument.
Ronald Reagan, Author
Source: https://www.hoover.org/research/ronald-reagan-authorby Paul Kengor
Posted: April 1, 2001Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, Martin Anderson, editors.
Reagan, In His Own Hand. The Free Press.
549 pages. $30.00
Not long ago, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Kiron Skinner, stumbled upon a box tossed in among Ronald Reagan’s private papers. It turned out to be a treasure chest: It was one of several boxes of handwritten drafts of radio broadcasts, speeches, correspondence, and other documents. From 1975 to 1979, Reagan gave a daily syndicated radio broadcast, a commentary on politics and policy. He gave over a thousand of these commentaries. And as the contents of the boxes demonstrated, some 670 were written by Reagan alone, with no assistance. No speechwriters, no ghostwriters, just Reagan.
Reagan researchers (myself included) have dug and dug and never thought we’d find these broadcasts. I was told they didn’t exist. But they do, and what emerges from them is a far fuller portrait of the mind of Ronald Reagan than the public has ever had before — and the complete discrediting of the caricature of him as an ill-informed and half-witted actor dependent on others for his lines.
The editors of Reagan, In His Own Hand are Skinner and Annelise and Martin Anderson, all three of whom are fellows at the Hoover Institution. Martin Anderson was a key Reagan economic advisor and has done some of the best work on the president. Annelise Anderson was a senior advisor to Reagan’s 1980 campaign and served in his Office of Management and Budget.
Of the 670 broadcasts, this book publishes 220, many with photos of the handwritten copy. Included are all abbreviations, misspellings, notes, carats, crossed out lines — everything. Each is roughly 500 words in length. The photos are remarkable. Among them is a picture of one of Reagan’s famous 4x6 cards, which contains a speech in itself. What Reagan was able to do with the shorthand, nonsensical mish-mash on this card, in terms of delivering a clear, well-communicated speech, is extraordinary. We only have the copy because one of the book’s editors, Martin Anderson, was shrewd enough years ago to retrieve it from the wastebasket after seeing Reagan fold it in two and pitch it.
First and foremost, Reagan, In His Own Hand is a major research document. Perhaps its greatest value is as a primary source for Reagan scholars to mine and apply to their own research. I speak here from personal experience. This could be viewed as another Reagan diary — a contemporaneous memoir of his thoughts from 1975 to 1979, a historically neglected period in Reagan scholarship. This book shows how crucial that period was in focusing and formulating his policy positions for his 1980 presidential run and presidency.
The book shows that much of what happened in the 1980s is traceable to Reagan himself. Second, and more important, is that the book backs its claim — which I first suspected was hype, and I say this as an admirer of Reagan — that the broadcasts show that in the late 1970s he was a “one-man think tank.”
What emerges is the Reagan hardly anyone but Nancy knew, not even many of his own speechwriters — Reagan the writer. The prolific writer.
Nancy Reagan relays: “[H]e was a very, very good writer. All of his ideas and thoughts were formulated well before he became governor or certainly president.” On the writing of the radio broadcasts from 1975 to 1979, she recalled:
He worked a lot at home. I can see him sitting at his desk writing, which he seemed to do all the time. Often he’d take a long shower because he said that was where he got a lot of his thoughts. He’d stand in the shower and think about what he wanted to write. And then, when he got out, he’d sit down and write….Nobody thought that he ever read anything either—but he was a voracious reader. I don’t ever remember Ronnie sitting and watching television. I really don’t. I just don’t. When I picture those days, it’s him sitting behind the desk in the bedroom, working.
The book provides pages of similar testimony from Reagan assistants Dennis LeBlanc, Barney Barrett, and David Fischer, as well as Mike Deaver, Ed Meese, and William P. Clark.
LeBlanc, a member of the California State Police, was assigned to the security detail of Gov. Reagan in 1971. He was with Reagan during the three-year period after he left the governorship. He was the only aide to travel continually with Reagan during that time, often traveling alone with him. “He was constantly writing,” LeBlanc remembered. “What was amazing to me was the fact that Ronald Reagan never slept on planes when he was traveling. It was the same way when I was with him in the station wagon. It was like — you’re wasting time if you are sleeping. You know, everyone’s got things to do. And his thing to do when I was with him was his writing.”
Shame on those in the press and academe who portrayed the man as precisely the opposite. They were lazy, not Reagan. They lazily accepted an easy caricature that was easily refutable. It appealed to them because it fed their own biases and agenda. If there’s a mystery, an “enigma” about Reagan, it’s that he contentedly allowed this caricature to be developed without caring to refute it — with such testimonies as these. Why didn’t he? My view is that it was because he was confident and secure enough not to care what critics said about his mind.
This book is also a credit to Reagan’s work ethic. Without assistance, and while maintaining the full travel schedule (including a presidential campaign) of a working politician, he wrote 670 essays, some 335,000 words, in just four years. That’s about one every other day. A syndicated columnist writing twice weekly will produce perhaps 75,000 words a year — less than Reagan’s output, in other words.
The radio transcripts cover just about every policy issue of the day. The detail on taxes is rich. The material on foreign policy is overwhelming, particularly the breadth of countries Reagan analyzed, including the Third World. To give an example of Reagan’s range, one roughly 20-page cluster of transcripts (about 3 percent of the total in the book) includes these titles: “Fish,” “Apples,” “Youth Employment,” “OSHA,” “Rapid Transit,” “Agriculture,” “Transportation,” “Kettering,” “Telescope I,” “Telescope II,” “Technology,” “Phone,” “Bugs,” “Seal Hunt,” “Alaska,” “Federal Lands,” “Land Planning,” and “Property Rights.”
Reagan wrote about these topics articulately and persuasively, with precision, and in single drafts with only a few edits. These essays reveal, first and foremost, a communicator of ideas to the ordinary man. “I know a lot of intelligent people who can’t write,” commented Martin Anderson. “But I don’t know any person who writes this well who is not intelligent.”
One of the most compelling broadcast scripts is one he titled simply, “Communism, the Disease,” written in May 1975. “Mankind has survived all manner of evil diseases and plagues,” wrote Reagan, “but can it survive Communism?” This disease had been “hanging on” for a half century or more. As a result, Reagan felt it imperative to remind us “just how vicious it really is.” This especially needed doing because the practitioners of communism, like many practitioners of medicine, sometimes came up with euphemisms or “double talk” to “describe its symptoms and its effects.” For example, said Reagan, “if you and I in America planted land mines on our borders, ringed the country with barbed wire and machine gun toting guards to keep anyone from leaving the country we’d hardly describe that as ‘liberating’ the people.” This was classic Reagan, on the attack, always speaking candidly, calling evil by its name. “Communism,” he added for good measure, “is neither an economic or a political system — it is a form of insanity.” He then made one of those seemingly wild predictions we’d hear throughout his presidency, mostly greeted by ridicule from his critics: Communism was “a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature.”
Aside from radio broadcasts, the book contains 20 other Reagan writings from 1925 to 1994, even some poems and college essays. These include a remarkable find from October 4, 2000, by Martin Anderson. On that day, at Nancy Reagan’s request, he examined the papers in the former president’s desk in his office in Century City, Calif. There, he found a gem: a September 23, 1984, memo written by Reagan, titled simply, “Mr. Minister,” which lays out talking points for U.S. strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union.
As an economist, Anderson was most surprised by the February 5, 1981, economic speech given by Reagan in New York shortly into the presidency. “It was a major speech,” he recalled. “I remember it well.” Anderson found the handwritten 15-16 page version by Reagan in his own hand. “I never knew he wrote it,” Anderson told me. “I don’t know that any of us knew. The speechwriters I’ve talked to didn’t even know he wrote it.”
Another remarkable speech he wrote circa 1963 states that an arms race would bankrupt the Soviets. That’s a very important find from the viewpoint of historians and presidential scholars. It means that Reagan had the notion as early as 18 years before his presidency began that an “all out race” could kill the Soviet Union. That was his own view. One can’t argue that it came from the people around him.
Thanks to this book, we now also have access to the full text of Reagan’s remarkable March 17, 1980, speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, written by Reagan himself on March 13, 1980, titled “‘State of the Union’ Speech.” I knew of the speech and found quotes from it in newspapers and other documents. This, however, is the first full copy I’ve seen. The lengthy speech broadly lays out what would become Reagan administration policy toward the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
He begins by describing the Soviet Union as “an imperialist power whose ambitions extend to the ends of the earth,” which “has now surpassed us in virtually every type of weapon. The Soviets arrogantly warn us to stay out of their way.” And how have we responded? Reagan takes aim at the Carter administration: “by finding human rights violations in those countries which have been historically our friends & allies. Those friends feel betrayed and abandoned and in several specific cases they have been.” Attacking the Soviets, Cuba, and Carter policy, he adds: “A Soviet slave state has been established 90 miles off our coast; our embassies are targets for terrorist attacks; our diplomats have been murdered and half a hundred Americans are captives going into the 5th month now in our embassy in Iran.”
In this vintage Reagan speech, the message is clear: The problem is weakness. “May I suggest an alternate path this nation can take,” Reagan then asks, “a change in foreign policy from the vacillation, appeasement and aimlessness of present policy?
“That alternate path must offer three broad requirements,” assessed Reagan. “First it must be based on firm convictions, inspired by a clear vision of, and belief in America’s future. Second, it calls for a strong economy based on the free market system which gave us an unchallenged leadership in creative technology. Third, and very simply we must have the unquestioned [military] ability to preserve world peace and our national security.” He then details all three, distilling the approach he would take in the 1980s.
Reagan, In His Own Hand offers little in the way of interpretation. That was the editors’ intent. Their aim was to “show not tell,” leaving interpretation to other scholars.
The book holds a lesson for presidential scholars: Quit simply reading and citing each other and start digging into primary sources. To know a president, one must do far more than just read the writings of other scholars who never met the man and, worse, in Reagan’s case, have frequently harbored political biases against him. Also, in Reagan’s unique case, there is a great deal of prepresidential material, far more than for the vast majority of other presidents — itself a telling fact about his intellect.
This book lifts a veil. It offers us a long, careful, extremely informative look. Again, Skinner and the Andersons have shown, not told. Still, the telling needs to be done. If there is fairness in the world and in academe, others will mine this material and begin the telling.
Ronald Reagan's former Campaign Advisor Peter Hannaford was interviewed by Stephen F. Knott, Ph.D. and Russell Riley on January 10, 2003 for the Oral History series at The Miller Center. Hannaford talked about working with Reagan in the mid to late 1970s when he had his syndicated newspaper columns and his popular daily radio commentary that aired from 1975 to 1979. An excerpt of that lengthy interview follows:
He never spoke ill of Ford personally. Well, he took a long time deciding. He came to the conclusion at some point—it must have been by the summer of ’75—that Ford just wasn’t cut out to be the leader of the country. He was a nice man. He was a good man to heal after Nixon had left, because on the congressional side he got along well with the Democrats. But he’d been in the minority so long that he had a minority mentality about doing things and wouldn’t push for bold answers. There were a lot of specific policies on which Reagan disagreed with what the Ford administration was doing. Those just accumulated.
He was going around on the rubber chicken circuit all that year. One of the reasons Deaver and I formed a company the day after Reagan left Sacramento was, among other things, in the Governor’s office in ’74 we were getting a lot of letters from organizations wanting him to speak after he left. As Deaver said to me when he mentioned that, All we can do is send a pro forma response saying,
You’ll hear from his private office.
Of course, the joke is, there is no private office. And unless somebody does something about it pretty soon, come January 5 or 6, whatever it is, the mailbags are going to be tumbling through the door, and the phone is going to be ringing nonstop, with nobody but Ann, the housekeeper, to deal with it.
And hence was born Deaver and Hannaford, Inc. That’s really the beginning of it right there. I had reported to Mike that I had just come back from L.A. where I had talked to Harry O’Connor, the radio producer, who had persuaded me that there would be a great market for a daily radio commentary by Reagan, conservative commentary. I’d already been in negotiations with Copley News Service—because they’d approached us—for a syndicated newspaper column, and I mentioned this to Mike. That’s when he talked about the speech thing.
So by January, Reagan was scheduled for about ten days a month out on the rubber chicken circuit. And he was just getting an earful everywhere he went about, Oh, you’ve got to get in there and run,
and on and on and on. Then these friends all over the country were clamoring. It was growing. And he was uncomfortable with Ford’s brand of leadership.
I’ll tell you another revealing thing about Reagan, and what his mental attitude was. Right after New Year’s ’75, he flew back to Sacramento, on the second of January, toward the end of the week, Thursday, I think. Sacramento was embedded in one of those awful winter tule fogs, which is bone-chilling. You can hardly see a car length in front of you. He was scheduled for an exit interview at one of the TV stations. He was just doing a few mop-up things.
I went with him over to the station. As we got in the car, he said, Ford called me last night.
I said, Oh, yes? What did he say?
He said, He wants me to join his Cabinet.
I said, What job?
He said, Secretary of Transportation.
And he laughed. I said, What did you tell him.
He said, I told him I thought I could do the party and the cause more good on the outside.
I think he had a pretty good idea where he wanted to go even then, but he didn’t say. Ten months later we’re in Washington. Reagan flies in from Dallas, where he’d been giving a speech to some group. Deaver flies in from somewhere. Mrs. Reagan flies in. We’re all coming from different directions. I’d been in Washington for several days working on this announcement speech. They all coalesce at the Madison Hotel, and Deaver and I had arranged for the hotel to send up some champagne. Laxalt came over, and Nofziger was there. It wasn’t a big group.
When the champagne came, I said to Reagan, Governor, we want to propose a toast to you, to success. But I have a question to ask first of all.
He said, What’s that?
I said, Are you going to run?
He smiled, and he said, Well, of course.
But you never told us you were.
That’s true, he never did. He just let it all happen. He may be the only politician in modern history who has worked that way. We all just kind of knew at various times it was okay to do certain things. That was the way he did things.
Now the radio broadcasts became very important.
Yes they did. They were very important, and they were big support builders, as it turned out. I must confess that at the beginning, as we were putting it together—because I had come out of a business background, advertising agency, then public relations, public affairs—I was thinking in terms of this as a business assignment. That is, if this is a big success, he’ll make good money at it, and he needed to make a living. We’ll be properly paid for the support work we do, and it will continue to be popular and build upon it. So I didn’t see it as building a volunteer army of campaign workers. I just didn’t think of it in those terms, in those early days. But it turned out to be just that. It was a huge recruitment device.
I think Nofziger sensed that it would be, because after the ’76 campaign, once the dust settled, it turned out we had about a million and a half dollars left in the bank. This is a huge contrast, because in mid-campaign we were poor as church mice. One day, on a trip that would end with the North Carolina primary, we were to fly from Los Angeles very early in the morning to—with the three hour time difference—end up in Salisbury, North Carolina, at about 10 a.m. eastern time. So you know how early we were getting off. We had a chartered United plane. And the plane wasn’t taking off. I said to Deaver, What are we waiting around for?
He said, We’re waiting around for the office in Washington to open the mail to see if there are enough checks to pay for the airplane today.
This was when?
It would have been March ’76. So it was a huge contrast when, in the fall, the dust settled and all the reporting was ready to be done, and we had a million and a half dollars in the bank. Nofziger proposed to form something called Citizens for the Republic, which was formed, I think, in February of ’77, or January. Citizens for the Republic would be a volunteer campaign training organization which would put out educational informational materials, too. But the real thing it was going to do was have regular campaign training sessions for political activists in cities around the country. Reagan would be the bait. That is to say, he would come in and give the keynote speech on a Saturday, and then you’d have these panels, all morning and all afternoon on how to do direct mail, how to do ads, how to run the telephone operations. The nuts and bolts. CFTR would bring in experts to conduct the panels. Reagan would be the chairman of this organization.
Reagan couldn’t receive any contributions from it, but it was, under the law, legal for them to pay for his airline ticket to come to the event and give the speech. It was a stroke of genius on Nofziger’s part, because what was he doing? Creating a volunteer army of campaign workers for 1980. And the radio programs and the newspaper columns were feeding the same process, particularly the radio programs.
I began to change my views from a marketing mode to a political mode, when—I guess by late spring and summer—Deaver took the first several trips with Reagan in ’75. Our contract called for one or the other of us to accompany him on all these trips, because you needed somebody there to sort out all the well wishers and political types who wanted to have a meeting with him. Deaver took the first several ones because I was in charge of the editorial support, and in those days, pre-computer days, your computer was two or three file cabinets. You couldn’t get very far from your database.
But then I started taking some trips. I remember, the first one I took, we landed, I think somewhere in Iowa, maybe it was South Dakota. After a while they all look alike. We landed in a small-town airport, and he was going to give a talk that night to the county committee or something like that. As it turned out, in most cities in those days, you’d have a little tiny motorcade of a couple of cars. It would be the local sponsor of the radio program who would provide the cars and the drivers, and he or she would be one of them, usually.
Then our advance man would go forward, and usually we’d get a policeman to volunteer to escort us into town. But time after time, the volunteer driver in the Governor’s car, which was the one I would be in, would say something along these lines, Oh, Governor, I heard your program today, and it was terrific. You were right on target.
Or words to that effect. Others would sometimes say, Governor, I’ve been with you ever since you gave that wonderful speech for Barry Goldwater.
It began to coalesce in my mind what was going on here. It was building that whole complex matrix of volunteers. It was quite impressive.
Tell them about Reagan’s response to those wonderful accolades on the—
Oh yes. We recorded these radio programs fifteen at a crack, or three weeks’ worth, because they were on the air Monday through Friday. The producer sent them out on discs in those days, and he would just put in a cover sheet with a title of each one. But there was no restriction on how they used them. They could run them in any order they wanted. They didn’t have to run them one through fifteen, so in any given market, we didn’t know what they were running. If the driver said, Oh, Governor, that was a wonderful commentary today. I just think you were terrific. You made all your points so well,
we had no idea what they were talking about. So Reagan’s device usually was, Oh, I’m so glad you think that way. Tell me what you think about that.
That way he’d find out what the subject was.
And the newspaper columns, how often did they run?
Well, it was weekly until he declared for the ’76 Presidency, at which time all of that stopped. It all stopped the minute he became a candidate. It resumed again a little while after the convention in Kansas City in ’76. When we started again, I moved it from Copley News Service to King Features, which was the biggest of the syndicates, and we went twice a week from then on. It was popular, it was well received. It didn’t have the impact that the radio had, because you’ve got his voice, reminding people all the time. But it helped.
But you wrote most of them.
I wrote most of the newspaper columns. But he and I had frequent editorial conferences, I guess you’d call them, where one or the other of us would say, Hey, here’s an idea. What do you think about it?
And he’d say, Yes, I like that. I’ll do a radio spot. You do a newspaper column.
Or he’d come to me with one and say, I’m going to do a radio spot on this. You want to do a newspaper column?
Did that workload ever reverse? Were you ever responsible for any of the radio, or was it—
Oh, I did a lot of radio spots. I wrote a lot of the radio, particularly in the early stages. I probably wrote as many as he did. And we also had three or four outside people who would submit them from time to time. Nofziger wrote a few, John McClaughry wrote a few. There were two or three others. Chuck Hobbs may have written a couple on special topics. And then he would work them over. They would provide the draft. Yes, I did quite a number in the early days, not all of them, but quite a number. But after the convention in Kansas City, he wrote almost all of them from then on until they stopped in mid-November ’79.
Was there a reason for that?
He had the time. And he liked writing for radio. Remember, he had a lot of experience at it. Right after the convention, the day after— (July of ’76, on the last night of the convention, Ford had asked him to come down and speak to the entire convention.) The next morning the Reagans went around to their youth volunteers, to two or three of the delegations. It was very emotional, his farewell.
Then we went out to our chartered plane at the airport. The Reagans had the first row, and Mike and I had the second row. Once we were airborne and the seatbelt sign went off, the Governor got up, and he said, Well, fellas, I guess we’ve got to go back to work now, don’t we?
I said, Yes, sir, your first radio taping will be in two weeks, and your first newspaper column will be a week from Friday.
He said, You didn’t think I was going to win, did you?
I said, Well, we wanted you to win, and we thought you were going to win, but one always has to make contingency plans.
He understood.
But he fell right back into it. All of us at that time—I’m sure you’ll hear this from others you talk to who were involved then—thought that elected politics was all over for him in that fall of ’76.
Reagan As Pundit
Source: https://www.aei.org/articles/reagan-as-pundit/Steven F. Hayward
Posted: November 8, 2004
Reagan’s Path to Victory: The Shaping of Ronald Reagan’s Vision: Selected Writings
Edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson
Free Press, 538 pp., $35
It has been said that history is too important to be left to historians, and proof of this remark is given by the fact that the most significant work done on Ronald Reagan has come not from historians, but from two economists and a political scientist, Martin and Annelise Anderson, and Kiron Skinner. The trio’s publication in 2001 of Reagan in His Own Hand, a collection of Reagan’s handwritten radio addresses and speeches, marked a watershed in the public’s knowledge and estimation of Reagan. It proved that Reagan was no mere creature of speechwriters and handlers, as his detractors had long alleged, but was in fact the prime mover of his public career.
Skinner and the Andersons followed up last year with a collection of Reagan’s personal letters (he may have written as many as 10,000), and now complete the cycle with a fresh batch of Reagan’s handwritten radio commentaries from the last half of the 1970s, which reflect Reagan working out his views on the full spectrum of domestic and foreign issues. Thanks to the Andersons and Skinner, the slur that Reagan was lazy, uninformed, and ignorant of the details of federal policy should have been consigned once and for all to the ash heap of history.
This prominent aspect of the Reagan story is surprisingly little known. When he left the California governorship in 1975, Reagan began a twice-weekly newspaper column and a five-day-a-week syndicated radio commentary that was carried on more than 300 stations, reaching an estimated 20 to 30 million listeners. It was a way of making a good living as well as keeping his views in front of the public, but it was also a way of making himself the rallying point for the conservative movement that was readying itself for a drive to power. In this respect, Reagan’s media career during his “wilderness years” in the late 1970s resembles Winston Churchill’s “wilderness years” in the 1930s, when he too used his writing to make himself the rallying point against his government’s weakness.
Most of Reagan’s newspaper columns were ghostwritten for him by Peter Hannaford, and it was always assumed that the radio commentaries were ghosted as well. But Reagan, an ex-radio broadcaster, took a keen interest in his radio portfolio and wrote the bulk of those commentaries himself. Over five years, Reagan broadcast 1,027 commentaries; the Andersons and Skinner discovered Reagan’s handwritten drafts of 682 of them. It is likely that Reagan wrote even more than this, but the handwritten drafts were lost or discarded.
The Reagan that emerges from this enormous corpus of writings is full of curiosity: He cast a wide net for information, and went far beyond generalities to discuss the inner workings of obscure government programs and regulations. Reagan displayed a talent for explaining complicated regulations, such as how the Clean Air Act’s “prevention of significant deterioration” policy works, in just three minutes, along with a critique and alternative ideas for achieving the same goals. (On another occasion, he took after the Consumer Product Safety Commission for its regulation of lawn mowers.) Often Reagan would devote three or four commentaries to the same subject over the course of consecutive broadcasts. Stitched together, these serial commentaries offer a complete teaching on issues such as inflation, tax policy, welfare reform, the environment, and foreign policy.
The remarkable range and depth of Reagan’s writings suggests that he was arguably the best-prepared person to enter the White House in modern times. This was not a person who needed to consult polls and policy wonks to decide what was important or what he should think. The commentaries presage several prominent themes of his presidency, especially the centrality of controlling inflation along with the arguments for cutting income-tax rates. One especially significant commentary was his attack in 1977 on the Federal Communications Commission’s “fairness doctrine,” which President Reagan’s FCC abolished in 1987, helping to open the way for conservative talk radio. And scattered throughout are a number of familiar arguments and quips that he used during his presidency. (My favorite is his quip about liberal economists “who have a Phi Beta Kappa key on one end of their watch chains and no watch on the other.” This appeared in one of his first commentaries in 1975, and he used it in one of his presidential speeches in 1981.) Reagan’s remarkable economic literacy shines forth in his domestic-policy commentaries.
Some readers may find the format of this collection slightly difficult, as the editors have reprinted Reagan’s words exactly as he wrote them (and in chronological order), with his changes and crossouts marked in italics or capital letters. The editors do not interpolate Reagan’s lacunae or correct his idiosyncratic shorthand spelling (“burocrat” for bureaucrat). This literalness is useful, however, in illuminating Reagan’s self-editing abilities and his talent for achieving economy of expression. The reader will also appreciate more fully that the Reagan style originated with him and not his speechwriters. The format of Reagan’s commentaries required him to write pithy, one-sentence leads, or “teasers,” after which he’d say, “I’ll be right [or sometimes “rite”] back” before breaking for a commercial. He wrote leads worthy of the best op-ed practitioners. An example: “The ability of Burocracy in the field of self preservation should be an inspiration to all those who teach survival courses. I’ll be right back.”
He was a skillful aphorist. My favorite is one from 1977 that holds up well today: “If words could be burned as fuel Congress would have the energy crisis solved and we’d be in the export business.” Another: “I’ve always suspected the Russian Athletes do as well as they do [at the Olympics] because they think there are real bullets in the starters gun.”
The commentaries were not all-politics-all-the-time. Reagan would often do a “human interest” commentary that sounded more like Paul Harvey than an aspiring president. Commentaries about sports figures, children struggling with debilitating diseases, and the rare uplifting Hollywood movie show the side of Reagan that innately connected the greatness of the nation to its character as well as its principles. But it requires someone not wholly consumed with politics as are most national figures these days to understand this and express it as Reagan did. Remember, this is a man who read the comics and the sports section in the morning before the news pages.
It is rare to have a window into a public figure working out his views in real time. This collection, along with the previous two by the Andersons and Skinner, constitutes a primary source for all future historians and political scientists who evaluate the 40th president. No appraisal of Reagan can be complete without reckoning with the self-discipline and seriousness that is revealed here.
Steven F. Hayward is the F. K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Ronald Reagan: Intelligence and the End of the Cold War [Excerpts]
Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/cold-war/ronald-reagan-intelligence-and-the-end-of-the-cold-warPosted: May 28, 2013
REAGAN’S DEVELOPING VIEWS ON INTELLIGENCE, 1975-1979
Reagan put the knowledge he acquired from his member-ship on the Rockefeller Commission to good use during his “wilderness period” from January 1975, when he stepped down as California’s governor, to October 1979, as he was preparing to announce his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president. During this period, Reagan wrote and delivered hundreds of commentaries for his syndicated radio spot that ran five days a week; he also drafted opinion pieces, private letters, and public remarks.30 In these writings, Reagan commented on a broad range of foreign, national security, and domestic topics, including intelligence and CIA. Early on, in a radio broadcast he titled “CIA Commission,” Reagan in August 1975 highlighted his service on the Rockefeller Commission and emphasized that, though instances of CIA domestic espionage were found, it did not constitute “massive” spying as reported in the media, the misdeeds were “scattered over a 28-year period,” and CIA had long ago corrected them. Reagan reiterated his concern that congressional investigations were assuming the character of “witch hunting” and threatened “inestimable harm” to CIA’s ability to gather intelligence. “There is no doubt,” Reagan warned, that intelligence sources worldwide “have been frightened into silence” and that CIA officer themselves were now less likely to take risks.31
The need for secrecy in intelligence and the potential harm of publicity is a frequent theme in Reagan’s writings and public statements during this period, frequently coupled with statements of enthusiasm for the work of US intelligence officers and of the overall need for a strong intelligence posture to protect US national security in a perilous world. Many of Reagan’s radio commentaries were mostly or entirely devoted to the subject of intelligence: “CIA Commission” (August 1975); “Secret Service” (October 1975); “Glomar Explorer” (November 1976); “Intelligence” (June 1977); “Spies” (April 1978); “Intelligence and the Media” (October 1978); “Counterintelligence” (January 1979); “CIA”(March 1979). Many more touched on intelligence subjects, sometimes to make a broader political point, sometimes for their own sake. Americans have more to fear, Reagan often said, from domestic regulatory agencies like the Internal Revenue Service and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration than from intelligence agencies like CIA or the FBI. The threat from Soviet expansionism, terror, and domestic subversion required robust US capabilities in intelligence collection—Reagan highlighted the need for human and technical collection alike—as well as in counterintelligence. Addressing well publicized intelligence issues of the 1970s, Reagan advocated allowing journalists to volunteer as intelligence sources but declared “the US should not be involved in assassination plots.” He strongly favored covert action programs that might lead to freedom for people living under Communist regimes, and he supported FBI surveillance and infiltration of domestic extremist groups. Not leaving any major intelligence function untreated, Reagan cited intelligence analysis to inform his radio audience of the threat from the North Korean military or from Soviet strategic weapons. He even praised liaison relationships for the intelligence they could provide while US agencies were “hamstrung” by investigations.32
Beginning in 1977, Reagan began to increase his public advocacy for the work of US intelligence agencies as he stepped up his criticism of President Jimmy Carter, who had called CIA one of the three “national disgraces” (along with Vietnam and Watergate) during his presidential campaign. Reagan had supported George H.W. Bush when President Ford had nominated him as DCI in early 1976, and a year later Reagan declared that Bush should remain DCI because of his success in rebuilding CIA’s morale. Reagan was reportedly horrified at Carter’s nomination of former Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen as DCI. “We need someone who would be devoted to an effective CIA” and who recognizes the danger posed by the Soviet military buildup so that the US would not be “flying blind in a dangerous world.” “Let’s stop the sniping and the propaganda and the historical revisionism,” Reagan said, “and let the CIA and other intelligence agencies do their job.”33
The evidence of Reagan’s pre-presidential experiences demonstrate that the man elected in November 1980 to be the 40th President of the United States had a broad knowledge of and deep appreciation for intelligence and CIA and that he had reflected on the wide range of intelligence issues, including its proper missions and activities.
CONCLUSIONS
The view that Reagan was not a reader but at best a casual watcher of intelligence has been perpetuated by political conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans alike. That view is not consistent with the general reap-praisal of Reagan’s intellectual abilities as evidenced by new scholarship over the past decade, but it has persisted. Logic and evidence, rather than political bias or personal opinion, paint a different picture. Logic would support the notion that Reagan, whom recent scholarship has established as an enthusiastic reader, was also a reader of intelligence, and new evidence presented herein has confi rmed as myths the perceptions that Reagan was ignorant of intelligence, read little of it, and consumed it primarily in video form.
The record regarding Reagan’s pre-presidential experiences as an actor, union leader, state governor, and especially as a member of the first high-level investigation of CIA (the Rockefeller Commission) indicates that these experiences gave the future president a background in and an understanding of many areas of intelligence, including espionage, secrecy, oversight and necessary safeguards, and the law. As a prolific radio commentator in the 1970s, Reagan reflected and propounded on intelligence issues of the day, particularly on the balance between democratic values and intelligence operations, the value of espionage and counterintelligence in the Cold War, and the damage to intelligence operations and CIA morale stemming from leaks, media exaggerations, and an overly intrusive Congress more interested in civil liberties than national security. The preponderance of direct and indirect evidence, beginning with detailed observations of Reagan’s reading of the PDB as president-elect, conclusively demonstrates that he was an engaged and appreciative “First Customer” of intelligence who carefully read and used what he learned from intelligence products.
