Ronald Reagan, Snitch of the Golden State
Before becoming the president who wrecked the middle class and sold illegal arms to Iran, Ronald Reagan ruled California like an angry Tahitian demigod.
“If it takes a blood bath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.”
Quiz: Who said that?
a) Genghis Khan
b) Pol Pot
c) Ronald Reagan
d) Robespierre
If you guessed c) Ronald Reagan, you are correct. It was a line from an otherwise unremarkable speech Reagan delivered to a growers convention in Yosemite in April 1970. He was referring to student protestors at the university campus in Berkeley, who had proved to be a pain in his side ever since taking office.
His remark was greeted with the predictable thunderous applause from the right and handwringing from the left. In the excitement of the moment, though, the press and the public absent-mindedly overlooked the fact that Reagan had already enjoyed one bloodbath at Berkeley. It had happened about a year earlier when students stormed a chain-link fence surrounding a public park that the university wanted to turn into a soccer field. The riot that followed came to be known as Bloody Thursday.
But here was Reagan, wistfully fantasizing another assault against his own constituents. A month later, the wish came true – a genuine shoot-em-up student bloodbath. Not at Berkeley, though. This one came courtesy of the Ohio National Guard on the Kent State campus. Sixty-something rounds fired into an unarmed crowd. Four dead and nine injured, many of them unlucky pedestrians walking past the nearby field. The Guard apparently couldn’t shoot straight. The whole thing was over in about 15 seconds, too quick to get any good footage for the evening news.
Ohio’s favorite son Gov. Jim Rhodes took the credit for Kent State,* but Reagan could take comfort in remembering that while Kent State had a higher body count, his Bloody Thursday had far superior production values.
Kent State was over in seconds. Bloody Thursday lasted hours. It featured a cast of thousands, charges and retreats, gunfire, helicopters dumping tear gas, cars set on fire, and a bystander killed by police gunfire as he sat watching the melee from the roof of a neighborhood bookstore. A local carpenter was shot in the face and blinded for life. Children at a nearby school suffered bouts of vomiting from the wafting gas. And of course, there were cameras everywhere. Kent State was a quick massacre. Bloody Thursday had been a spectacle worthy of Hollywood.
Hollywood of course was Reagan’s domain. He’d started as an aww-shucks smalltown boy from Illinois who got lucky with an impromptu screen test but who never found a spot among A-list stars. By the 1950s Reagan had settled into a comfortable career as host of weekly television dramas and pitchman for Chesterfield cigarettes, General Electric, and 20 Mule Team Borax. There he might have remained, except for the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, where the party nominated Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for president.
Barry Goldwater, to his credit, was overall an honorable politician with a host of skewed opinions, but he represented a batshit-crazy wing of the party. In the ’64 election, he was doomed to failure from the start. America wasn’t ready for batshit-crazy . . . not yet, though it soon would be. Everyone knew Goldwater was going to lose (as he did, by a landslide against Lyndon Johnson). Ronald Reagan, however, spotted an opportunity: to stand on the shoulders of Goldwater, who he recognized as a prophet of America’s impending right-wing insanity.
During that ’64 campaign, Reagan delivered a speech for Goldwater called “A Time for Choosing.” It was riveting. Biographers today praise it as Reagan’s single greatest performance – greater even than his portrayal of a psychologist who teaches moral values to a chimp in the film Bedtime for Bonzo (Universal Pictures, 1951). That shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Though he may have been a mediocre actor, Reagan was a topnotch pitchman. He could sell anything. Watch one of his old ads from his days on GE Theater, and you yourself will be tempted to drop 150 bucks on a genuine General Electric Keyboard Range with Family Size Automatic Rotisserie, Lift-Off Door, and Oven Timer. No kitchen should be without one.
From “A Time for Choosing” to the governor’s mansion in Sacramento took a mere three years. In office, though, Reagan seemed a changed man. Gone was the genial host and huckster of his tv days, replaced by an angry man who constantly pounded his fist on any available lectern, denouncing students, welfare recipients, and some California farm workers who were tired of being exploited by the mega-rich growers association.
Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers union proved to be a favorite target for Reagan’s wrath, especially after a national table grape boycott started digging into the growers’ profit margins.** Chavez wanted to draw attention to labor conditions. Things really hadn’t changed much in the California fields since the day the Joads rumbled into town. Reagan labelled him a Communist and found common cause with J. Edgar Hoover in using every dirty trick to discredit Chavez that the FBI’s COINTELPRO agents could devise.
Those unwashed, ungrateful university students at Berkeley and on other campuses were Communists, too. Everyone knew it. Reagan took extraordinary steps to prove it. Wiretaps, surveillance trucks, infiltrators, informers, break-ins, planted news stories, false arrests, frivolous prosecutions, military draft boards. Nothing was off the table. It may have been the closest California ever came to a genuine police state.*** Since it was directed at students, though, the general public didn’t notice much of what was happening around them.
The group Low Anthem recorded a song about those days on their album Smart Flesh. It’s titled “Hey, all you hippies,” and the refrain goes like this:
Hey all you hippies, you got a bad name
Ever since you let your guard down.
Here comes Ronald Reagan o'er the Hollywood Hills –
It don't look like he's fooling around.
What was behind Reagan’s anger, though? He seemed downright gleeful in demonizing students. One theory is that he was still resentful that his friendly chimp Bonzo had gone on to star in a sequel, Bonzo Goes to College (Universal Pictures, 1952), dropping Reagan from the cast.
Uppity chimp. Fancy college boy. I’ll show him.
There’s likely a more complex explanation, though – one that involves a broken heart rather than a bruised ego. Some of Reagan’s happiest days were the ones he spent testifying before the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) at the height of the Red Scare days of the 40s. Reagan loved to snitch on his Hollywood cohorts. He testified even when he had nothing more to say, and pestered the FBI to use him as an informant for any bit of skullduggery they chose.
The other source of Reagan’s joy during those halcyon days was his marriage to the actress Jane Wyman. His wife was not only a better actor (1948 Best Actress Oscar for her role in Johnny Belinda); she also had a far more successful career than Reagan. He didn’t mind. He loved her. Truly. Deeply. She however was fed up with his snitching on all their Hollywood friends, branding them as Commies and getting them fired from their studios.
Ronnie came home one afternoon after another appearance before the House (more darn Hollywood Communists!) to find that Jane had packed his bags and was ordering him out of the house. He was heartbroken. Those Red sympathizers had destroyed his love nest, his happy home.
Damn the left. Damn them all to hell.
He eventually found solace in the arms of another actress, Nancy Davis, who went on to become his wife, then first lady of California and of the United States.**** The injuries he’d endured at the hands of the Communists must have continued to rankle, though. As governor, he finally had the tools for revenge. The students and the farm workers just happened to be there. Wrong place. Wrong time. The spurned lover and the long-time snitch had a field day with them.
Such is the role of love in American history.
~ D. Gray
Author, Timberline (or, Politics Is Hell)
Endnotes
*There’s a government office tower named after Gov. James Rhodes today in downtown Columbus, with the man’s statue out in front. Fittingly, the statue is smaller-than-life, depicting a strutting Hobbit of a man. Rumor is, the left-leaning sculptor had inscribed the names of the Kent State dead and wounded inside the statue’s hollow interior. Hollow is as hollow does.
**The Delano grape strike (1965-1970) was a major victory for Chavez and the UFW, and inspired later strikes. The growers retaliated by calling in recruits from the Teamsters to harass workers in the field, events alluded to in my novel Timberline. At the height of the nationwide boycott of table grapes, Reagan negotiated a deal with the Pentagon to have grape shipments sent to American soldiers in Vietnam. Yum. The GIs were able to serve their country in two ways at once: bombing a country back to the Stone Age abroad and squashing unions at home.
***In my novel Timberline, when the fiction Phineas Beauclerk first spots the fictional Ronald Reagan playing poker in his Bel Air mansion, he thinks: “Here sits the man who has crushed all of California's student protests, suppressed its entire anti-war movement, throttled free speech, and established a surveillance state that would have made Stalin envious – all with the goal of eliminating every hippie from his domain. Here sits the man who has single-handedly turned the life of every freak in California into a dystopian, Mao-esque nightmare.”
**** Nancy Reagan is best remembered for completely and permanently eliminating drug addiction and premarital sex in America with her 1982 “Just Say No” campaign.
Watch a news report about Bloody Thursday, below.