During the war Reagan served as a captain with the US Air Force, assigned mainly to the production of training films. In 1948 his eight-year marriage to actress Jane Wyman ended. Her career was just taking off at this point, with The Lost Weekend (1945); Reagan was her second husband and she went on to have two more. Reagan was luckier. In 1952 he married another of his leading ladies, Nancy Davis. They met through SAG. Nancy was accused of Un-American Activities and turned to her Guild President for help. It looks as though Nancy might have turned Reagan rightwards, perhaps simply by re-sanctifying the domestic verities. She is well known to be the woman behind the man, but her contribution seems to involve nothing more sinister than tireless idolatry. There is no hint, as yet, of the manipulative power that Rosalyn Carter is said to exercise over the wretched Jimmy.
At this point Reagan was freelancing with several studios, playing steadily smaller and less attractive parts. His career was temporarily revived by television. After a three-year stint as host of the ‘Death Valley Days’ Western anthology series, Reagan worked for eight years as MC and occasional guest-star for ‘General Electrics Theatre of the Air’. To earn his annual $125,000 he was also obliged to tour the country giving uplift lectures to GE employees. Reagan’s high-point was his televised speech in praise of GE’s latest product, the nuclear submarine. A trio of rich businessmen were attracted by the way Ronnie carried himself on screen. With their backing, Reagan threw himself into Goldwater’s disastrous presidential bid against Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Showing his usual talent for survival, Reagan came through the debacle and in 1966 emerged blinking into the light – as Governor of California.
‘I’ll run on my record,’ says Reagan these days, and points with pride to his achievements as two-term Governor of the richest state in the Union. ‘In real terms California is the eighth richest nation in the world,’ he points out, failing to add that California never had much in the way of foreign policy. ‘When I took office in Sacramento, California was like America is now: bankrupt!’ He fixed things there, he claims, and ‘I believe I can do all that on the national level too.’
How good is Reagan’s record? True, Reagan was Governor for eight years, and California was still there when he left. But one thing is clear: Reagan’s record is nothing like as good as he keeps saying it is. His chief contentions are that he cut taxes, reined in a profligate government, and reformed welfare. The facts are as follows. Reagan doubled the per capita tax burden — $244 to $488 — and then softened the blow with tax rebates and credits. Similarly, there were 158,404 government employees when he took office and 203,548 when he left. As for the crucial issue of welfare, Reagan says he saved $2 billion with his reforms, turned a 40,000-a-month increase in recipients into an 8,000 decrease, and raised benefits for the ‘truly needy’. Several legislators now maintain that the real saving was closer to $40 million. The welfare load was reduced, willy-nilly, by the economic boom, with parallel effects nationwide. And the benefits Reagan claims to have increased had been static since 1958. They rose – after liberal federal pressure — two years behind the deadline mandated by Congress. Reagan stonewalled with a series of court actions, and Washington remained conveniently lax. ‘I remember it very well,’ says Elliot Richardson, who was Nixon’s Secretary for Health, Education and Welfare at the time: ‘It was made quite clear to me that we should be nice to Reagan. The 1972 election was coming up and Nixon didn’t want to upset him.’
Statistics, of course, are malleable — as Reagan himself has frequently demonstrated. But his governmental style is clear enough. Despite liberal aberrations like ecological control bills, conjugal visits for prison inmates, and a wide-open abortion law (which he now thinks of as his worst legacy), Reagan in California showed steady indifference to the poor, the sick, the dissident — and to the tragic mess of the inner cities. The cities are not his base, as he well knows. And while Reagan is no racist (his remark about ‘bucks’ in welfare queues can be matched by Carter’s gaffe about ‘ethnic purity’), he has made no progress whatever in winning the confidence of the blacks. As black leader Aaron Henry said recently, ‘With him, any black that can crawl will be finding a place somewhere to vote against him.’ The question of Reagan’s age may have disappeared as an issue; but his ideas still look very elderly. He is a throw-back, and an undistinguished one.