THE RIGHT MOMENT: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point In American Politics. - Review - book review

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2000 by Michael Waldman

THE RIGHT MOMENT: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point In American Politics by Matthew Dallek Free Press, $25.00

AS YOU DRIVE PAST THE RONALD Reagan Federal Building in Washington to Reagan National Airport, it is sometimes hard to remember just how extreme, even radical, the Californian appeared when he plunged into big-time politics in the 1960s. Today we remember him as a twinkling grandfather, wrapping hard-edged policies in "there you go again" gauze. But when he first ran for public office, defeating incumbent governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown by one million votes in 1966, he was the avatar of an angry backlash--a precursor to the campaign waged by George Wallace two years later.

In The Right Moment, a history of the Reagan-Brown race, Matthew Dallek marks a moment very different from our received memories of the 1960s. For all the "Behind the Music" documentaries and Baby Boomer nostalgia, the most important political legacy of that turbulent decade was a sharp turn to the political right. After that 1966 election, Dallek argues, liberalism has never been the same.

This is a refreshing and well-written book, and it tells a good story. It focuses unapologetically on electoral politics, chock-full of striving candidates, scheming local officials, and colorful party operatives--all of which would mark it as highly unfashionable in many academic history departments. There are signs of a backlash among the youngest of historians, a return to history in the grand style reflected not only by this book but by Jeff Shesol's Mutual Contempt (about the LBJ-RFK feud), among others. Interestingly, both Dallek, who now works for Richard Gephardt, and Shesol, who works for Bill Clinton, went into speechwriting rather than academia.

Today's Democrats are still grappling with the anti-government tide that began surging in 1966. Pat Brown represented the self-confident liberalism of the post-New Deal decades. He was the "giant-killer" who beat Richard Nixon and drove him to his "last press conference" in 1962. He built California's public university system into the best in the nation, spent lavishly on public works and improvements, and championed civil rights. Californians are still living off the social capital accumulated during those years.

Brown foundered not on taxes, or the economy, or even on the Vietnam war, or the other issues we think of as being Reagan's battle flags but on social disorder. The Watts riots in 1965 shocked moderate voters, and the Berkeley student protests, such as the Free Speech movement, were seen by middle -class voters (in Reagan's words) as the work of a "neurotic minority? More dramatically, violent crime had risen sharply in the years before the election. Voters saw Brown as temporizing, as unable or unwilling to impose social order on an increasingly unruly state. Reagan opposed civil rights legislation, denounced "beatniks," and dropped broad hints about his views of racial issues. It was this quest for order, and the first stirrings of the unfortunate white backlash, that provided the fuel for Reagan's ascent.

The Ronald Reagan we see here was, in many respects, fully formed, speculating about a White House run even before he won the GOP primary. His outburst at a debate, storming out when he thought his integrity had been challenged, seems like a tryout for his later "I paid for this microphone!" theatrics. Then as later, his opponents underestimated him; Brown foolishly intervened in his primary to try to defeat a moderate GOP rival on the theory that Reagan would be easier to beat. His opponents have always loved to laugh at Jack Warner's famous line: "Ronald Reagan for governor? No, Jimmy Stewart for governor. Ronald Reagan for best friend."

Above all, Dallek shows Reagan not as an empty-headed actor memorizing lines, but as an intensely serious rightwing ideologue, and a gifted proponent of his views. The anti-government tide that began surging in 1966 has been the most powerful political force of the last 40 years. We saw it in the flood of white Democrats into the Republican party in the South, and in the tax-cut wave that began with California's Proposition 13 in 1978 and became the supply-side policies of 1981. It has set the terms of debate. With the Contract With America, this anti-government movement crested and, just as quickly, receded. Clinton and Gore certainly have believed their mission, in part, was to find a way to drain off the anti-government energy. This year, for the first time in decades, no presidential candidate is echoing the language and arguments first heard in Reagan's 1966 race. Perhaps the era of anti-big-government is over.

MICHAEL WALDMAN, former White House director of speechwriting, is the author of POTUS Speaks: Finding the Words That Defined the Clinton Presidency.