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with G.E. chairman Ralph Cordiner, whom he greatly admired, he even agreed to head Democrats for Nixon in California.3 Reagan later wrote that he was ready to change parties at that point, but “[Nixon] said I’d be more effective if I campaigned as a Democrat.” Joe Kennedy, he said, tried to persuade him to support his son, “but I turned him down.”4 Reagan had an “almost visceral loathing” of JFK’s New Frontier agenda, historian Matthew Dallek observes in The Right Moment, and was soon urging Nixon to expose Kennedy as a socialist at heart. “Shouldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s bold new imaginative program with its proper age?” he wrote Nixon shortly after Kennedy’s nomination. “Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx.” Nixon passed Reagan’s letter on to his campaign staff, after scrawling across it,

“Use him as speaker whenever possible. He used to be a liberal.”5

Reagan was swimming against the tide, since Hollywood was solid Kennedy territory. The sexy young Democrat became a familiar presence at his brother-in-law Peter Lawford’s parties in Malibu, and Frank Sinatra was busy rallying everyone from Gregory Peck to Marilyn Monroe to back him.

Only the most diehard Republicans—Dick Powell, Edgar Bergen, George Murphy, John Wayne, Irene Dunne—supported Nixon. At a Nixon rally in Beverly Hills, Reagan met William F. Buckley Jr., who had founded the National Review in 1955—Reagan was a charter subscriber—and was already considered the country’s leading conservative intellectual. Shortly after that Reagan initiated a correspondence with Buckley that would go on for decades and greatly influence his political thinking; Nancy, in turn, would become close to Buckley’s outspoken socialite wife, Pat.

“I was having dinner at a restaurant across from the hall where I was to give this speech, and Reagan was there with Nancy,” Bill Buckley recalled.

“He got up and introduced himself. He had just read my book Up from Liberalism, and he rambled off a couple of lines that had amused him. We went into the auditorium together, and there was this great panic because the kid who was supposed to turn on the loudspeaker system couldn’t be found. Reagan jumped up on the stage and tried to soothe the crowd while we waited for the superintendent to bring a key to the control room.

They couldn’t find him, so Reagan asked, ‘Where is this machine?’ They The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966

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pointed way up to the balcony to a room abutting the street. The next thing we knew, he had poked his head out the window—there was a little ledge there—and he did one of those Cary Grant things. Nancy was practically ready to kill herself. I stuck my head out and thought, How is he going to do this? He got up to the window that corresponded to where the speaker system was, then sort of jutted his elbow in and broke the window, climbed in, turned on the loudspeaker system, and the show went on.

That was a great introduction to Reagan.”6

Over the next two years, Reagan traveled as far right as he would ever go. He gave several speeches for Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade in 1961 and was campaign chairman for Loyd Wright, the archconservative Los Angeles lawyer who challenged moderate Republican senator Thomas Kuchel in the 1962 primary. (Wright won only 15

percent of the vote, perhaps because he made statements such as “If we have to blow up Moscow, that’s too bad.”)7 Reagan was also the featured speaker at a 1962 fund-raiser for Republican congressman John Rousselot, who was a member of the John Birch Society.

This highly controversial organization—named after a Christian missionary and U.S. Army intelligence officer killed by the Chinese Communists—had been founded by Massachusetts candy manufacturer Robert Welch in 1958. It claimed 100,000 members, at least a quarter of them in Southern California, where the Birchers, as they were called, were system-atically taking over local Republican clubs and volunteer organizations—

much as the Communists had tried to take over liberal groups affiliated with the Democrats in