Blast From Past at Reagan Library

Hot Wheels, Beatle boots, the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate.

The Mercury space capsule, civil rights speeches, a Vietnam War-era Huey.

Melding pop culture with powerful history, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum near Simi Valley has gathered these relics and more into a show opening Saturday called “Back to the Sixties.”

It was a pivotal decade, museum Director Mark Hunt says, when the United States discovered the incendiary power of television and wrestled with its own schizophrenic identity as a nation of hawks and hippies.

“There is a real renewed interest in the ‘60s,” said Hunt, also curator of the show, which sprawls through three galleries in a lush melange of artifacts, sound snippets, photographs and video clips.

“I think a lot of this is because people who grew up in the ‘60s are adults with their own children now, and they’re trying to think back and make sense of it all.”

The library has borrowed extraordinary artifacts for the show:

* Copies of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and the Medicare Act.

* A rare photo of black Islamic leader Malcolm X talking to Cassius Clay before the famous boxer changed his religion to Islam and his name to Muhammad Ali.

* President John F. Kennedy’s disjointed, scribbled notes from a 1962 National Security Council meeting on the Cuban Missile Crisis, which read, “Missile. Missile. Missile. Camouflage. Soviet ship. Barrier, barrier.”

* The hand-noted text of President Lyndon Johnson’s rousing 1964 speech before Congress supporting the Voting Rights Act. In it, Johnson declared, “There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern or Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met as Americans to solve it.”

But what does any of this have to do with Ronald Reagan?

Hunt hears that question constantly, and has a ready answer: “It was a really important decade for him, at the beginning of his political career.”

Reagan led the Screen Actors Guild in a successful fight for “residual” payments from television reruns. He delivered the fiery 1964 GOP convention speech backing Barry Goldwater that launched the future president into politics. And he won the California governorship in a 1966 landslide, partly on the strength of his promise to quell student protests by “cleaning up that mess in Berkeley”--referring to the university town that then was a hotbed of radicalism.

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The exhibit includes some Reagan artifacts: his gavel from SAG, commercials from his campaign for governor, and a pair of cement-encased shoes the press corps gave the governor when he changed his position on tax withholding. Earlier, he had said his feet were “set in concrete” on the issue.

Here, too, are an Andy Warhol portrait, Lady Bird Johnson’s snappy red and black suit, and the jeweled celadon dress that Pat Nixon wore to her husband’s 1969 inauguration concert.

The flotsam and jetsam of ‘60s pop culture also float through the show, everything from Barbie dolls and Beatles’ lunch boxes to Sonny and Cher’s sequins and the enchanted bottle from “I Dream of Jeannie.”

Also on show are sketches of Goldie Hawn’s dance costume and the actual Flying Fickle Finger of Fate statuette from TV’s “Laugh-In.”

While some artifacts are protected behind glass, Hunt and exhibit designer Lucinda Bray have set out others for visitors to touch and interact with:

* A mock nuclear bomb shelter re-creates the paranoid practicality of some 1960s Americans in the face of possible nuclear war.

* A ’65 ragtop Mustang will be wired for sound, playing period pop songs.

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One gallery is being redesigned as a “hooch,” or Vietnam War encampment, staffed by veterans who can answer questions about life during wartime. Another will invite visitors to plop down in period furniture and gape at tapes of ‘60s-era sitcoms and commercials played on nearby vintage TVs.

The exhibitors even plan to set out a rack of far-out 1960s clothes so people can dress up for photos as hippies, soldiers, even astronauts.

“We are unabashedly and unashamedly trading on nostalgia for this exhibit,” Hunt said. “We are going to have a Huey [helicopter] fly in this weekend so people can look at it, we’ll have a Beatles look-alike group, an Ed Sullivan look-alike’s going to emcee the show, and we’ll have a ‘60s dance contest.”

And they plan a series of panel discussions--two each month for the six-month run of the show--starring actors, politicians and possibly astronauts who were prominent at the time, Hunt said.

Putting together the exhibit “has been a crunch,” said Hunt, who picked up the idea from his predecessor four months ago when he replaced former museum Director Richard Norton Smith.

But exhibit designer Bray said, “It’s more rewarding working on recent history that people remember. . . . I think it was a turning point for all of us that lived through it. It was very colorful.

“People were really individuals in that period. They picked a cause to work for. It was probably the first time in our history that people could come out and become activists. I also think it was the first time that we had mass media to learn about the events in the world, so we saw Vietnam.”

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Hunt agreed. “War in Technicolor is far worse to look at than war in black and white. It really brought it home to people.”

The 1960s is close enough in the recent past for museum-goers to remember, Hunt said, but far enough gone to encourage deep perspective.

Visitors will see eight-track tapes and bell-bottom jeans, vintage GI Joe action figures and a psychedelic Volkswagen beetle.

But they also will be reminded of how the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall crystallized East-West tensions between the United States and the Communist nations, how the civil rights movement was bloodied and beaten before succeeding in winning laws that promised equal rights for all races, and how the Vietnam War tore the nation in two.

“This was only 30 years ago, but 30 years is longer than you think,” Hunt said. “I tell you, trying to take a decade of 10 years and distill it down to three galleries was not a simple task, but it’s been great fun.”

FYI

“Back to the Sixties” and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library are open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. except for holidays. Admission is $4 for adults, $2 for senior citizens, and free for children under age 16. During the show, anyone born in the 1960s gets in free on Saturdays and Sundays.