'Outsider' wins the statehouse

Reagan shows his political pluck

On the stump: Reagan presses the flesh during a campaign stop at a suburban Los Angeles shopping mall in the final days of his successful bid for the California governorship in 1966.

It was only months after the Barry Goldwater presidential debacle of 1964 when a handful of wealthy California conservatives began to try to sell Ronald Reagan on the idea that he should run as the Republican nominee for governor of California.

Reagan wasn't buying. "I dismissed them lightly and quickly to begin with, but they just kept coming back," Reagan recalled in a 1979 interview with researchers from the University of California Berkeley's Bancroft Library who were compiling an oral history of his years as governor. "It got to the place where I just said no, and no, and no. And Nancy and I couldn't sleep anymore. You know, we wondered, 'Are you making the right decision? Are you letting people down? What if they're right?'"

By June he decided to test their counsel. He agreed to spend six months traveling the state giving his stump speech on the need to restrain government - the same message that failed Goldwater the previous fall but which somehow sounded less threatening when it came from the amiable Reagan.

By Thanksgiving Day 1965, Reagan knew from the responses he had received from audiences around the state that his friend Henry Salvatori and other members of the Friends of Ronald Reagan group had been right. On Jan. 4, 1966, he announced his candidacy.

Early missteps

Reagan's experience on the General Electric lecture tour had made him a polished speaker, but he was a rookie campaigner - and it showed.

Early on, he opined that North Vietnam ought to be paved into a parking lot. At a candidate forum before a group of black Republicans, he stormed out of the room. His explanation: "I lost my head."

And then there was his famous quote about redwoods: "I mean, if you've looked at a hundred thousand acres or so of trees - you know, a tree is a tree. How many more do you need to look at."

Despite those missteps, Reagan's message and his personality were catching on with voters. By late spring it had become evident just how right his supporters had been.

Recalled former U.S. Rep. Bob Lagomarsino, R-Calif., "I think Reagan was the right guy at the right time. His success was the result of his personality and his message - the Goldwater message packaged in a more presentable way."

Reagan's appeal in that '66 campaign was powerful and obvious.

In his oral history account of the Reagan era, Lyn Nofziger, a reporter recruited from Washington to be the candidate's press secretary, recounted an early impression of the campaign: "I came back from my first road trip and said to (campaign consultant) Bill Roberts, 'Hey, this guy could be president some day!' And he said, 'You're out of your mind! That poor soul - what will we ever do if he gets to be governor?'"

That particular problem presented itself in November.

Reagan swamped two-term incumbent Democrat Pat Brown by almost 1 million votes.

Enter the outsider

Paying a call: As California governor, Reagan meets patients at the state mental hospital in Camarillo.

Reagan would go on to serve two terms as California's governor, from 1967 to 1974. But in those first months after victory at the polls, Reagan himself was struck with the same question Roberts had raised: Now what?

"I did not know anything about the organization of state government, the problems and what the issues would be," he said in his oral history account. "The whole emphasis had been so on winning that when I said yes, I had not actually thought beyond November."

For any new California governor, the transition is a challenge. He has a little over two months to assemble a cabinet and a staff of advisers, and to prepare a detailed, balanced budget.

For Reagan, both challenges were compounded. As a government outsider he had no pool of experienced experts to bring into his administration, and the state finances he inherited from Brown were a mess.

On the first front, his campaign team of Roberts and Stu Spencer helped turn a liability into an asset. As Nofziger recalled, "They went out and got bright new faces, like Bill Clark up in Ventura County."

Years later, Reagan would bring Clark to Washington as his national security adviser. He was one of many members of Reagan's California team who would later become national figures - including Ed Meese, the future attorney general, and Caspar Weinberger, the future secretary of defense.

On the second front, the situation was more dire than anyone on the Reagan team could have imagined. In his oral history account, Reagan related a story he told many times over, regarding the first meeting between his transition team and Brown's outgoing finance director: "We sent someone over to have a meeting - Hale Champion said to him, 'We're spending $1 million more a day than we're taking in. I've got a golf game. Good luck!'"

Among his first acts as governor, the man who ran a campaign based on the theme that government had grown too large and taxes too high was forced to go to the Legislature and ask for a tax increase.

Reagan would later remember those early days in the corner office of the California Capitol as bleak.

"Those first days were very dreary, very dark," he said. "First of all, January and February in Sacramento are dreary and dull. Those damn tule fogs! I was over in that old mansion - oh, that was the most dreary, dismal place in the world."

The office offered no respite: "It just seemed like every day there was someone standing in front of my desk saying, 'We've got a problem.' "

Reagan was also confronted with a frustrating reality, said former U.S. Rep. Anthony Beilenson, D-Calif., who was a state senator at the time.

"Like all new chief executives who've had no legislative experience," Beilenson said, "he had a hard time accepting the fact that he had a legislature to deal with."

Eventually, though, things began to click for Reagan - if not in terms of carrying out an agenda, then at least in his personal level of comfort and confidence.

"I only know that there came a day when the tension left and, don't ask me why, and I enjoyed going to the office instead of dreading it, and I knew we had a handle on it. Things could be done," Reagan said in his oral history account.

Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, who covered Reagan as governor and president for The Washington Post, said such a self-assessment so early on was probably generous. "I think Nofziger was right when he said of the Reagan team, 'We were not only amateurs, we were novice amateurs.' ... But in their first term, nobody has much of a record."

Reagan's first term was marred by indecision as to whether to run for president in 1968, an ambivalence that ended with a botched last-minute effort at the nominating convention. The governor won a second term with a vote margin of about half that of his initial victory.

After Reagan's re-election, he agreed to cooperate with, rather than fight with, the new Democratic speaker, Bob Moretti.

Together, they hammered out a legislative legacy - a tax-reform bill that made the state tax system markedly more fair, and later a landmark welfare-reform bill that cracked down on fraud and fathers who weren't paying to support their children.

Assessing the Reagan era

William Hauck, who today is president of the prestigious California Business Roundtable, was Moretti's chief of staff at the time. "He did become a good governor," Hauck said, "and I don't think he started out that way. ... His view of the role of governor was to establish themes and then let his people carry out those themes.

"He was the person selling the themes, because he knew only the governor could do that. ... Reagan was better in that respect than any other modern governor."

Beilenson - who, like Lagomarsino, served in the legislative branches during both Reagan's tenure as governor and as president - remembered the welfare bill as a practical piece of legislation that didn't match the rhetoric Reagan used to describe it.

The reform bill, he noted, included family-planning assistance and job-training programs for welfare mothers - items that Reagan had vetoed in his previous term. "Most radically," said Beilenson, "we put in automatic cost-of-living increases in welfare benefits."

As a liberal, Beilenson assesses the Reagan era simply: "The reality of his serving was not nearly as bad as the prospect of his serving. I don't think he changed the direction of the state all that much. ... He was far more formidable as president than he was as governor."

In his book "Reagan," Cannon also noted that the governor signed one of the most permissive abortion laws in the nation, one that legalized abortions if a doctor certified that carrying a pregnancy to term would endanger the life or health of the mother.

Over the eight years of the Reagan era, the California state budget more than doubled, from $4.6 billion to $10.2 billion. The state tax burden per $100 of personal income grew from $6.64 to $7.62.

"Nobody's record ever matches his rhetoric," said Cannon.

But Reagan's record as governor, scored on its own merits rather than in relation to the candidate's promises, was reasonably impressive, Cannon concluded. "He clearly braked the rate of growth in the number of state employees. And as for the budget, there was no way the performance could have matched the rhetoric on that because the state was growing so rapidly that every budget was a record budget," he said. "And the tax structure he inherited was clearly worse than the tax structure he had in place when he left."

From a historical perspective, Cannon said, Reagan's second term as governor was important not so much for its specific accomplishments as for the foundation it laid.

"Reagan proved that he was competent," Cannon said. "It was a very useful experience for him. He wasn't doing it as an exhibition game, although he did have this sense of destiny about him."

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