Reagan and the ‘60s? Heavy, Man

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

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

Melding pop culture and history, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum has gathered these relics and more into an exhibit opening Saturday called “Back to the ‘60s.”

The show, which also has a wall devoted to some lesser-known Reagan memorabilia, highlights a pivotal decade when the nation discovered the incendiary power of television and wrestled with its schizophrenic identity as the home of hawks and hippies, says museum director Mark Hunt.

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

The library has borrowed some extraordinary artifacts:

* 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 famed 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 B. 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,” Hunt said.

Reagan led the Screen Actors Guild in a successful fight for residual payments from television reruns. He delivered the fiery 1964 convention speech backing Barry Goldwater that launched him 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 was then a hotbed of social activism.

Among the Reagan artifacts on display: his gavel from SAG, Christmas snapshots, clips of his Goldwater speech and a pair of concrete-encased shoes the press corps gave the then-governor when he changed his position on tax withholding.

Flotsam and jetsam of 1960s pop culture also float through the show, everything from Barbie dolls and Beatles lunch boxes to Sonny and Cher’s sequins and “I Dream of Jeannie’s” enchanted bottle.

Also on display are sketches of Goldie Hawn’s dance costume and the actual Flying Fickle Finger of Fate Award 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 mocked-up nuclear bomb shelter re-creates the paranoid practicality of some 1960s Americans in the face of possible nuclear war.

* A 1965 Mustang convertible will be wired for sound, playing period pop songs.

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 watch videotapes of 1960s sitcoms and commercials on 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 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.”