Oral History Tells ‘How’ of Gov. Reagan

Nancy Reagan wanted automobile license plates personalized with her initials, NDR. So Verne Orr set out to fulfill her wish. After all, he was director of the state Department of Motor Vehicles and she was the wife of his boss, the governor.

But Michael Deaver, then a top aide to Gov. Ronald Reagan and later deputy chief of the White House staff, told Orr to drop the idea. Deaver was afraid the plates would make Mrs. Reagan’s car easily identifiable to terrorists. A month later, Mrs. Reagan called back and asked Orr, “How is my license plate coming?”

“ ‘Mrs. Reagan, I am sorry but I was told to stop it,’ ” Orr recalls saying. “There was a pause on the other end and she said, ‘Verne, whose car is it?’ I said, ‘It’s yours, Mrs. Reagan.’ She said, ‘I want that license plate,’ and she hung up the phone. So she got NDR (for Nancy Davis Reagan).”

That anecdote from Orr, who went on to become secretary of the Air Force, may not shake the political world. Yet it is the kind of tidbit historians and biographers use to get a flavor of public personalities and their relationships.

That’s why it is included in the state’s official--and recently completed--oral history project about Ronald Reagan’s eight years as governor.

The project is massive. The transcriptions of tape-recorded interviews with 114 Reagan appointees, associates and enemies take up 7,100 single-spaced, typed pages in 33 volumes, the last of which was published in September. The interviews are arranged mainly by issues such as welfare reform, the environment, state finances and election campaigns. The emphasis is not so much on what happened in Sacramento from 1966-74, but on how .

“People don’t write the personal memoirs they used to in the 19th Century. Officials’ papers today tend to record that this decision was made but seldom go into the different points of view and how they worked out,” explained Gabrielle Morris, director of the Reagan project, which was done mostly through her office at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.

So, she said, in an age of ephemeral telephone conversations and formulaic computer memos, it is important to capture the reminiscences and opinions of historic figures in their own words. “Most of our work is done for the future. When these guys can’t speak for themselves anymore, historians will have a view of how they looked at the world,” Morris said.

Many of the interviews do not make for scintillating reading. And historians say the project contains no bombshells; these are not like the secret tapes Richard M. Nixon made in the Oval Office.

But because of Reagan’s rise to the presidency, the Reagan gubernatorial era interviews have attracted more interest than similar projects about the three California governors who preceded him, said Dale Treleven, director of the oral history program at UCLA, which also helped in the project.

For the same reason, however, some scholars are concerned that the interviews may be tainted by fear. People may be less than candid about a President still in office because the President could still affect their careers and lives, according to both Treleven and John Burns, the state’s chief archivist.

Nevertheless, all say the project was worthwhile. “On balance, a historian is likely to be a little more suspicious when the subject is still occupying such a prominent position (as President). But any historian has to weigh the evidence,” said Burns. “History isn’t clean. It’s putting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together. The idea is to get the best evidence possible.”

In addition, such oral history fills in the gaps left when state officials take away or destroy their official papers at the end of their terms, according to Burns. A state law that went into effect after Reagan left the governorship gives the chief archivist power over most official papers, but Burns said that is violated “sometimes through ignorance, sometimes through malice.” The Reagan gubernatorial papers are stored at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the archivist is now trying to get former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown to return some papers.

sh Two Reagan Sessions

The interviews include two sessions with Reagan and one with his brother Neil. Other subjects range in prominence from a receptionist in the governor’s office to such Reagan stalwarts as political consultant Stuart K. Spencer, political affairs adviser Lyn Nofziger and Caspar W. Weinberger, Reagan’s director of finance in Sacramento and later secretary of defense in Washington.

The topics go back to Reagan’s childhood and his career in movies and television. For example, Earl B. Dunckel, former General Electric public relations man, recounted how he and Reagan toured the nation in 1954 when the future President was host of the “General Electric Theater” television show. Reagan persuaded a stage-stuck girl not to move to Los Angeles but to stay at home in Erie, Pa., and afterwards, according to Dunckel, Reagan said: “I’d do almost anything to keep another one of these little girls from going out there and adding to the list of whores out in Hollywood.”

But according to Morris, interviewers emphasized Reagan’s years in Sacramento and tried to avoid discussing his presidency. “The general theme is that Reagan and Jerry Brown after him stand for a reevaluation of resources that are finite and a feeling that choices had to be made,” she said.

Recurrent Themes

Some of other themes reveal similarities between the Reagan of the Sacramento years and the one who occupies the White House:

- Reagan is a great communicator in public but somewhat aloof in private. “I always felt for a long time that there was a kind of a veil between him and the rest of the world,” former press secretary Nofziger said. “You could never really get in next to him.” Reagan was distant from his own children, his brother Neil said.

- The former governor is portrayed as needing to be spoon-fed information by his staff, but as having a sharp memory from his days of learning Hollywood scripts. “He knew zero about California when we came in. I mean zero,” said Stanley Plog, the psychologist who helped cultivate Reagan’s image in 1966. Political consultant William Roberts said Reagan was “very retentive” except for names: “I think I was working for him for two or three months before he finally really got my name down pat.”

- Back then, Reagan was wary about allowing work to encroach too much on his home life. “I used to run around the offices when I’d find out that some of that staff of mine were staying in the office till 8, 9 o’clock at night,” he said. “I’d go in and curse them out and tell them they had families; go home to their families. But I went home with a full briefcase.”

Annoyed at Legislature

-Then, as now, Reagan showed frustration with the legislative branch. Anthony C. Beilenson, former Democratic state legislator and now U.S. congressman from Los Angeles, commented: “I think he was offended by the fact that he had just been elected governor by a million votes or so and that he even had to bother to deal with this other branch of government. . . . He was probably genuinely surprised when he arrived, you know, that he as governor couldn’t do things all by himself.”

Donald Livingston, former director of the state Department of Consumer Affairs and director of policy development in the governor’s office, recounted how Reagan did not want to meet Assemblyman Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), then chairman of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee, about the budget: “The governor said ‘Willie Brown! A street protester!’ and he just wanted to avoid him.” But the meeting was a success and the two men became friends, Livingston said, adding, “Willie Brown knows Ronald Reagan is not a racist.”

Reagan said he decided he had to woo state legislators with parties at the governor’s mansion: “You know when they’ve sat there and had cocktails with you and sat around at dinner in your own home, they can’t be quite as sharply resentful as they might have been.”

Moments of Great Luck

Moments of great political luck, as well as of disappointment, are discussed.

For example, several interviewees mention how badly then-incumbent Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown blundered in making commercials during the 1966 campaign that pointed out that Abraham Lincoln’s assassin was an actor. Tipped off about the ads, Reagan, slyly, gave a high-road answer. “Pat wouldn’t say anything like that,” he first told reporters, according to Nofziger, who recalled later joking that Reagan deserved an Academy Award for that dead-pan response.

Reagan himself said those commercials drove many Hollywood people from Brown. “I couldn’t understand the stupidity of it,” he said.

Two years later, the Reagan camp tried to block Nixon from gaining the Republican presidential nomination. “If we had stopped Richard Nixon on that first ballot, almost everyone agrees, who knew anything about the vote counts and how the delegates were going to switch after the first ballot, that Reagan would have been nominated on the third ballot,” Robert Walker, former political adviser to Reagan and former head of the state Department of Navigation and Ocean Development, said of the 1968 GOP convention. “This would have saved us (from) Richard Nixon, saved us Watergate, probably saved us Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.”

Major, Minor Questions

Along the way, other major and minor questions were raised by a dozen interviewers between 1979 and 1986 in sessions ranging from one hour to seven. Why did the state parks switch to unisex toilets? How influential was the so-called Kitchen Cabinet of wealthy businessmen? Why was reform in welfare and health care so difficult? How bad was the tension between moderate and more conservative Republicans? How much emphasis did Reagan put on ending his governorship on an upbeat note so he could run for president?

Much of the answers are friendly to the Reagan years in California. But the voices of opponents are also heard. For example, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, former Democratic assemblywoman and congresswoman, gave her caustic view of Reagan’s relationship with minorities: “The impression I got was that there was a black on his football team when he played football in college and that was probably the end of his exposure. So it was very superficial as related to blacks. There was never any real awareness, just as it is today. I think that he was very insulated from blacks, from poor people.”

Morris concedes there are some big gaps. She and her staff never got Nancy Reagan, William P. Clark, Reagan’s chief of staff who went on to become a California Supreme Court justice and later national security adviser in the White House, or William French Smith, member of the Kitchen Cabinet who went on to become U.S. attorney general, to agree to sit for an interview. In addition, Morris said she regrets now that she didn’t try to reach Maureen E. Reagan, the President’s elder daughter. But she insists, “I think we’ve got pretty good coverage in terms of trying to get a picture of the broad concerns of Reagan as governor.”

Available for Purchase

Scholars and the just plain curious can read full sets at the special collections libraries at UCLA and UC Berkeley and at the State Archives in Sacramento; individual volumes can be purchased, with a complete set costing about $1,300.

The project cost about $200,000 for salaries, travel, typing, printing and some overlap with expenses for the oral history about former Gov. Pat Brown. Funds came from the state archivist’s office, grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and private donations, including some from such wealthy Reagan backers as the late Justin Dart of Dart Industries and David Packard of Hewlitt-Packard. Further work was stopped when money ran out and the state archivist changed the focus of future oral histories.

According to Burns, there will be no project devoted just to Jerry Brown. “What we’ve done is replace that with a much more comprehensive program on the executive and legislative branches for all the following administrations,” he said. Burns said he realized some legislators might resent all the attention on the governor’s office and that he had to widen the scope of the oral histories to obtain more money. Yet, he stressed the new format will give historians a better picture. “Principally, it’s a matter of intellectual honesty,” he stated, describing the change.

Meanwhile, the Reagan era transcripts join scores of other volumes of oral history at Berkeley on such diverse topics as the California wine industry, forest management, the suffragist movement and the history of the Jewish community in California.

“A lot of people are not aware how valuable oral history is,” said Morris. “It gets better with the years. It ages like wine.”