The Rise of Ronald Reagan, a Product of California

On May 12, 1966, Ronald Reagan—former Hollywood actor, one-time New Deal Democrat, experienced corporate pitchman, and now a rising star in the conservative GOP firmament—strode to the podium at a rally of California Republicans in San Francisco’s cavernous Cow Palace convention center. Introduced to the crowd by television’s Rifleman, Chuck Connors, Reagan stood with a floor-to-rafters American flag at his right. Bathed in the incandescent gaze of his wife, Nancy, he launched into what he would turn into the central theme of his gubernatorial campaign: the imperative to clean up “the mess in Berkeley.”

Reagan had announced his candidacy for governor of California four months earlier, on January 4. In a pre-taped speech broadcast statewide on fifteen television stations, he touched on many of the themes beloved of the Republican Party’s right wing: cutting taxes, having “faith in our free economy,” pushing back the rising tide of crime. But he introduced an element of culture war by alluding to the student protests that had erupted at Berkeley in support of civil rights and in opposition to the Vietnam War. The university administration’s efforts to drive the protests off campus had spawned the free speech movement, which intensified the atmosphere of outcry. “Will we allow a great university to be brought to its knees by a noisy dissident minority?” Reagan asked on the tape. “Will we meet their neurotic vulgarities with vacillation and weakness?”

Reagan expanded on that theme at the Cow Palace. Across the bay, he said, “a small minority of beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates have brought shame on a great university, so much so that applications for enrollment have dropped 21 percent and there’s evidence that they’ll continue to drop even more.” He cited a report published only days before by the state senate committee on un-American activities that labeled the anti-war protests a “rebellion” and called the campus “a rallying point for communists and a center for sexual misconduct.” He admitted that he had not read the report—“I only know what I’ve read in the paper about it”—but quoted almost verbatim its description of a dance sponsored by the campus anti-war Vietnam Day Committee on March 25. During the dance held in a campus gymnasium, Reagan told his audience,

three rock and roll bands were in the center of the gymnasium, playing simultaneously . . . and all during the dance movies were shown on two screens at the opposite ends of the gymnasium.  They consisted of color sequences that gave the appearance of different colored liquids spreading across the screen, followed by shots of men and women, on occasion, shots [of] the men and women’s nude torsos, on occasion, and persons twisted and gyrated in provocative and sensual fashion. The young people were seen standing against the walls or lying on the floors and steps in a dazed condition with glazed eyes consistent with a condition of being under the influence of narcotics. Sexual misconduct was blatant. The smell of marijuana was prevalent all over the entire building.

Reagan ascribed this behavior to “a leadership gap and a morality and decency gap” at Berkeley. “The ringleaders should have been taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown out of the university, once and for all.”

Reagan’s listeners interrupted him with repeated ovations. Many of them surely recognized his speech as a direct attack on his prospective opponent, Democratic governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, and on Brown’s most significant gubernatorial achievement, the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, which reinforced the stature of the University of California— consisting in 1966 of Berkeley and seven other undergraduate campuses—as the preeminent tuition-free public system in the nation.

*

The master plan underscored California’s position as a national pacesetter in social and economic policy. Thanks to numerous lucrative industries now firmly in place across the state, California’s ascendance had seemed almost irresistible. The state was unimaginably rich, not only in dollars and cents but in ideas for using its material affluence to achieve social progress. It was nothing less than “a state rushing to redefine the American Dream.” In early 1963 it became the most populous state in the nation.

The major question Californians faced was how to manage the postwar influx of wealth so it would serve more than a narrow segment of its burgeoning population—the very question that Henry George had raised nearly one hundred years earlier, when he contemplated the coming of the trans-continental railroad to San Francisco. “The California of the new era will be greater, richer, more powerful than the California of the past,” George had written. “She will have more wealth . . . but will she have such general comfort, so little squalor and misery; so little of the grinding, hopeless poverty that chills and cramps the souls of men, and converts them into brutes?”

Public education was the tool Brown hoped would spread the wealth equitably. This was a quintessentially Californian concept; David Starr Jordan, though the founding president of the private Stanford University, had declared public higher education to be the “coming glory of democracy” in a 1903 address to students.

In the 1920s, California boasted the largest public education enrollment despite ranking only eleventh in population among the states. Observed historian John Aubrey Douglass, “To a degree unmatched by any other state in the twentieth century, California embraced public higher education as a tool of socioeconomic engineering.”

Most other states had founded public universities, especially after the federal Morrill Act of 1862 provided funding for so-called land-grant colleges. But California was unique in creating a coherent state structure for its public institutions, aimed at providing all high-school graduates with access to higher education. The dream, wrote Douglass, was “a higher education system to match the ambitions of Californians.” The University of California became not only the nation’s largest university in enrollment but the first multicampus university and the first public university to receive direct state funding.

The university was also granted constitutionally protected independence from legislative meddling, although this status was not invariably honored during periods of partisan tumult (such as during the Red Scare of the 1950s). Its role as a premier research institution was safeguarded by the creation of two complementary higher education systems dating back to the turn of the century: a network of two-year junior colleges later known as community colleges, and a system of “normal schools” that expanded from institutions for teacher training into the California State University. By the twenty-first century it comprised twenty-three campuses with combined enrollment of nearly half a million students.

This interrelated system guaranteeing universal access to higher education at several levels became known in educational circles as the California Idea. Its principal achievement, in the view of educational theorists early in the twentieth century, was overcoming the competing goals and missions that had torn apart public universities in other states. The California system, observed the education advocate Edwin Emery Slosson in 1910, was one that “cultivates both mechanics and metaphysics with . . . equal success,” that “looks so far into space, and, at the same time, comes so close to the lives of the people,” and that “excavates the tombs of the Pharaohs and Incas while it is inventing new plants for the agriculture of the future.”

*

California’s postwar growth spurt added new urgency to the state’s educational policymaking. “We faced this enormous tidal wave, 600,000 students added to higher education in California in a single decade,” recalled Clark Kerr, president of the University of California and the master plan’s principal architect. “It looked like an absolutely enormous, perhaps even impossible, challenge.” But Californians showed a predisposition to support their university system: In 1960, about 45 percent of graduating high-school students went on to college when the national average was 25 percent. The master plan’s goal was to improve on that record by creating “a place in higher education for every single young person who had a high school degree.”

The master plan aimed to manage the further expansion of higher education by codifying the system’s three rungs of the “educational ladder.” The University of California was to select from among the top 12.5 percent of the state’s graduating seniors and received the exclusive authority to issue doctorates and professional degrees, such as those in law and medicine. One rung down, California State University campuses focused on undergraduate instruction and teaching degrees. Finally, the network of two-year community colleges provided academic and vocational education, remedial instruction, adult courses, and workplace training. The plan also confirmed the principle that the system should be tuition-free to state residents.

Notwithstanding its historical roots, the master plan was very much a product of its time. The 1950s were an era of unexampled national prosper ity, the start of a period in which “the United States came closer to becoming a meritocratic nation than at any time before or since.” After the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 provoked a nationwide panic over America’s apparent inferiority in technical know-how, government investment in education was seen as “not just legitimate, but . . . expected.”

The master plan’s authors foresaw annual public expenditures on education rising from four hundred million dollars in 1960 to seven hundred million in 1975. (Both figures work out to about four billion dollars a year in today’s buying power.) To the question raised in a chapter titled “Will California Pay the Bill?,” the drafters answered with a hopeful yes, despite the necessity of funding the expansion through new taxes and bond issues.

Perhaps inevitably, the master plan produced a partisan backlash, and not only because of its cost. The plan also coincided with a period of extraordinary social and political unrest in the United States. During the sixties, the civil rights movement came to maturity. Mass protests and demonstrations during congressional debates over the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 and 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were often met with violent official responses in the South. Protests against the Vietnam War took root beginning in 1965. It was entirely natural for these movements to manifest on university campuses and also natural that Berkeley, where the student body was diverse, inquisitive, and politically engaged, would be the epicenter from which the intellectual energy of the protests radiated nationwide.

Berkeley activists held the nation’s second teach-in against the Vietnam War in May 1965 (following a similar event in March at the University of Michigan), drawing to the campus prominent war critics from university faculties around the country.

The campus was already simmering with discontent. Since the 1930s, the university had been a major recipient of government contracts. By the 1960s, Berkeley’s undergraduates felt thoroughly neglected amid the university’s focus on government research. “Students were alienated and ripe for revolt,” observed a historian of the period.

*

Governor Brown had won his party’s nomination for reelection virtually unopposed in 1962 and had seen off a challenge from former vice president Richard Nixon in the general election. Nixon took the loss hard.

Meeting with reporters in a famous encounter the next day, he told them, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

Still, there were disquieting signals for Democrats in the 1962 results. The party had won all but one statewide office in the 1958 election that brought Brown to the governorship. This time, however, Brown’s vote majority ran behind the Democrats’ commanding lead in voter registration. Polls had shown Brown and Nixon running roughly neck and neck all during the campaign—until the Cuban missile crisis. President Kennedy’s October 22 televised announcement of the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba and of his decision to “quarantine” the island to block further deliveries upended election campaigns nationwide. Analysts eventually found it to have favored incumbents in close races, as voters showed a reluctance to change political leadership in that fraught atmosphere.

Brown’s popularity continued to fade after the election; a race riot in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in August 1965 and the protests at Berkeley beginning in 1964 gave voters the impression that civil society was breaking down. Brown was almost defenseless against Reagan’s promise to bring tranquility back to the streets of California.

Reagan’s attack on Berkeley at the Cow Palace presaged the tactics he would employ throughout his governorship and presidency. He uttered assertions of dubious veracity with earnest self-confidence, pledging to relieve voters of their kitchen-table economic concerns and re-create an era of gold-hued serenity that was largely mythical. His demeaning implication at the Cow Palace that the Berkeley protesters were a fringe of “beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates” minimized the breadth of anti-war sentiment on the campus. As for his claim that campus disorder was the reason for the 21 percent decline in applications to the flagship school, university officials attributed the drop to both a new requirement that applicants submit scores from the Scholastic Aptitude Test and to their own efforts to steer students away from overcrowded Berkeley in favor of one of the system’s seven other undergraduate campuses. In any case, instead of continuing to fall the following year as Reagan had predicted, applications to Berkeley rose by 36 percent.

When Reagan launched his political career in the 1960s, the conservative movement was searching for a way to become relevant again. The members of the old guard of the 1950s Republican right were either dead (Ohio senator Robert A. Taft), retired (General Douglas MacArthur), or discredited (Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy).

Barry Goldwater, who donned the mantle of conservatism, calculatedly clothed himself in cowboy iconography, conjuring up “the classic western hero of popular culture”—the very image of rugged individualism—and associating himself with “the cult of ‘true westernness.’”

One of the best descriptions of the power of this image came from Henry Kissinger, who scrutinized this all-American character with the eyes of an immigrant, an outsider—albeit one who would spend his career embedded in the highest echelons of American politics: “Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else,” Kissinger said. “He acts . . . by being in the right place at the right time. In short, a Western.” Goldwater’s stock campaign photo played that image for all it was worth, showing him with a shotgun perched on one knee, “in jeans, rawhide jacket, and a cowboy hat, a saguaro by his side.”

Goldwater’s presidential ambitions, however, ended with his landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Conservatism again had a vacuum to fill.

It was a stemwinding, nationally televised speech late in the 1964 campaign in which Reagan extolled Goldwater’s candidacy that led Republicans to perceive the former actor’s potential as a national political figure. Reagan embodied the man in the right place at the right time. Among his finer qualities, he gave the conservative movement a California polish. (Reagan was not the only entertainment figure to move smoothly into the California political arena; Helen Douglas had preceded him in the 1940s, song-and-dance man George Murphy was elected to the US Senate in 1964, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor in 2003.)

In his Hollywood career, Reagan had not been cast in many westerns; the public probably knew him best from his portrayal of the doomed Notre Dame football player George Gipp in Knute Rockne All American (1940) and as second banana to a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo (1951). But having honed his skills as a pitchman and public speaker first as the host of the omnibus drama program General Electric Theater, then as a roving ambassador for GE, he knew how to project the valor and steadfastness of iconic cowboy heroes. “Reagan was a competent actor with limited range,” his biographer Lou Cannon wrote. “As a politician, however, he was so enormously gifted that he seemed a president-in-waiting almost as soon as he began campaigning.”

Reagan’s personality appealed to a circle of wealthy California entrepreneurs looking for a successor to Goldwater as the flag carrier of Republican conservatism. Chief among them was Holmes Tuttle, the owner of a string of Ford dealerships who had supported Goldwater and had known Reagan since the 1940s. During the 1960 campaign, Tuttle had invited Reagan to speak at a thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner for Goldwater in Los Angeles. There he gave the speech for Goldwater in which he inveighed against government involvement in Americans’ lives that he later delivered on national television. It was titled “A Time for Choosing.”

_____________________________

From the book GOLDEN STATE: The Making of California by Michael Hiltzik. Copyright © 2025 by Michael Hiltzik. Published on February 18, 2025, by Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpted by permission.