Looking Back: 50 Years Ago, Ronald Reagan Launched Political Career with 11th Commandment

Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty (right) Congratulates Governor-Elect Ronald Reagan, November 9, 1966Courtesy Los Angeles Public Library, Herald-Examiner Collection

2016 is the 50th anniversary of the transformative year of 1966 in California, and since the beginning of the year, this blog has been looking at the different ways events in 1966 changed the Golden State (and nation). We have taken a particular look at two diametric forces that began to reach their apex 50 years ago: the rise of the hippie counterculture, particularly in san Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, and the rise of Ronald Reagan. Our very first post of the year spelled out this historical dichotomy.  

Continuing this focus, today is the exact 50th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's victory in the race to be California Governor, a race that defined Golden State and National politics for decades to come. We asked longtime California political journalist, Steve Swatt, lead author of Game Changers: Twelve Elections that Transformed California (winner of the 2014 CHS book award) to offer his reflections on Reagan's first victory. 

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Looking Back: 50 Years Ago, Ronald Reagan Launched Political Career with 11th Commandment

By Steve Swatt

As Donald Trump – the brash reality star – attracted monster television ratings and brutally ridiculed and carved up sixteen Republican opponents to win his party’s nomination, how many times did we hear, “What would Ronald Reagan think?”  

A half-century ago in his inaugural run for California governor, Reagan had adopted the party’s so called “11^th Commandment,” which said, “Thou shalt not speak ill of any Republican.” The commandment pertained to personal – not policy – attacks and actually was created by state party chairman Gaylord Parkinson after the bitter and divisive 1964 GOP presidential primary campaign between Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. 

Reagan had dipped his toes into politics by famously delivering a rousing defense of Goldwater and conservatism. In response, he received thousands of letters, many urging him to run for governor, even though party officials had lined up in support of San Francisco mayor George Christopher. “The farthest thing from my mind was running for political office,” Reagan recalled in an oral history conducted by the UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. “It didn’t look attractive to me at all. I liked my life.”

Reagan, however, agreed to test the waters and interviewed potential campaign specialists. At first, consultants Stu Spencer and Bill Roberts had their doubts. “We wanted to know, is this a right-wing nut or what?” Roberts remembered. In the primary campaign, Reagan vanquished the moderate Christopher by articulating his vision of conservatism and criticizing what he called bloated government and wasteful spending. Christopher later said Reagan had “no depth” but acknowledged he had “an actor’s ability to steal the scene.” 

During the general election, when Gov. Pat Brown – seeking this third term as chief executive – suggested that Reagan was nothing more than an actor regurgitating rehearsed lines that had been written for him, Reagan turned the tables. He insisted that his standard stump speech be shortened and that each speaking engagement include a question-and-answer session. “Someone may think that someone else wrote that short speech,” Reagan said, “but they’ll have to know that nobody could write the answers to those questions.”

Fifty years ago today, Reagan’s million-vote victory over Brown launched him on his presidential trajectory. He’d run for the White House twice (1968, 1976) before enjoying success in 1980. Looking back, Reagan’s campaign style was quaint and decorous by today’s standards. In this season of electile dysfunction -- with a sensory overload of belligerent, bellicose and personal attacks -- we’ve witnessed a sea change in campaign tactics and behavior tailored to twenty-four-hour cable news and Twitter. An anomaly? Or will they now become de rigueur in future campaigns?

Steve Swatt is lead author of Game Changers: Twelve Elections that TransformedCalifornia, winner of the 2014 CHS book award.

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Other posts about 1966:

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2016/01/1966-year-that-hanged-california-and.html
http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-rise-of-ronald-reagan-50-years-ago.html

The Rise of Ronald Reagan: 50 Years Ago Today

Ronald Reagan, San Francisco Airport arrival, 1966, photo ©Bob Campbell,

San Francisco Chronicle, courtesy, California Historical Society,

CHS2016_2127

With conclusion of yesterday's California primary season, we look back to one of the most significant party primaries in State history: the Republican race in 1966. It was 50 years ago today when Californians awoke to the news that actor Ronald Reagan had won his party's primary on June 7, 1966, defeating San Francisco mayor George Christopher by nearly 35% percentage points.

Reagan's primary victory in 1966 set the stage for an epic showdown in the Fall with two-term governor, Edmund G. 'Pat' Brown, the father of current California Governor Jerry Brown. At the time, Governor Brown (who defeated Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty in the Democratic primary) was pleased that Reagan defeated Christopher, thinking that Reagan would be easy to beat in the Fall. But Reagan would end up defeating Brown in November, setting the stage for the "Reagan Revolution" nationally and foreshadowing the themes that many Republicans, including Reagan, would use against Democrats in the decades to come: soft on crime, pro-welfare, tolerant of citizen unrest.

As we noted at the very beginning of this year, the 50th anniversary of 1966 allows us to look back at a revolutionary year in California history when two opposing forces that continue to shape the State and country were unleashed. In the primary against Christopher and then against Brown, Reagan ran explicitly against the growing tide of student activism in the Bay Area, saying he "would clean up the mess at Berkeley." Meanwhile, across the Bay, student activism had merged with a growing youth culture in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury area, creating the counterculture of the "hippies" that would capture the attention of the country the following year during the infamous "Summer of Love."

Yet, just as the masses were starting to gather on Haight Street and "rock dances" were being held every weekend at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium and The Avalon, Ronald Reagan won his first significant political election. In short, California's complicated history and split personality was on full display in 1966.

1966: A Year that Changed California, and the World.

With the start of 2016, the California Historical Society is turning its attention from the Centennial of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to the 50th anniversary of the critically important year of 1966 in California. It was a year that put into motion powerful—yet diametrically opposed—forces that transformed the State and country, then and...now.

One set of forces was the rise of a "counterculture" in San Francisco. In early January 1966, the city's youth scene was well on its move from the "Beat Generation" neighborhood of North Beach to the cheaper Western Addition, near the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets. In fact, it was only a few months earlier, in September 1965, that the word 'hippie' was used for the first time in a West Coast newspaper. The term was used to describe young people who had begun congregating—with unique, identifiable customs and interests—in a coffee shop in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

CHS's next exhibition, "Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966-1971 (January 21-May 1)" about the famous interdisciplinary workshops led by Lawrence and Anna Halprin (he a landscape architect, she an avant garde dancer), opens on the exact 50th anniversary of an event that would catalyze this nascent hippie culture and launch it with a dynamic power that would soon transform youth culture around the world: The Trips Festival.

The Trips Festival combined music by the Grateful Dead, dance performances by Anna Halprin (whose studio was located right off Haight Street), innovative light displays, and more over three days from January 21-23, 1966.

Yet it was on this very day 50 years ago that another set of forces—perhaps even more powerful than the cultural might of the hippies—were set in motion. On January 4, 1966, actor Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for Governor of California. Shortly after a press conference in Southern California, Reagan released a half-hour film that was aired on television outlets throughout the State. The film captures many of the themes—fiscal responsibility, limited government, welfare reform—that Reagan would use to win the White House less than 15 years later and user in a new era of American politics. In the 1966 election Reagan defeated former San Francisco Mayor George Christopher for the Republican  nomination and incumbent California Governor Pat Brown in the general election to win the Governor's Mansion. Part of Reagan's campaign, as seen in this campaign film, was a reaction to the cultural excesses and anti-war sentiments of the hippies—and a pointed rebuke of the University of California's handling of student protests and the Free Speech Movement.

The rise of the hippies, and the rise of Ronald Reagan, together, yet apart, in California in 1966. Happy 50th Anniversary...

Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966-1971 opens at the California Historical Society on January 21. Join us for the opening celebration, and several other events marking the 50th anniversary of the Trips Festival. Learn more about the exhibition and related public programs at experiments.californiahistoricalsociety.org

This Day in History - August 10: The U.S. Rights a Wrong

Japanese Americans sell their belongings prior to evacuation from the West Coast. 
Photographer: Russell Lee. Library of Congress. 

On August 10, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act which issued a formal apology and a sum of $20,000, to every American of Japanese ancestry imprisoned in “relocation” camps during World War II.  “Here we admit a wrong,” said President Reagan in his accompanying remarks, “Here we affirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law.”