Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [250]
Reagan’s hard-line approach to campus unrest, which bedeviled him throughout his first term, won him the approval of the middle-class, law-abiding parents whose ungrateful children were taking over administration buildings at Columbia and Duke, staging sit-ins at Harvard and teach-ins at the University of Michigan, shutting down San Francisco State for months on end. “We have been picked at, sworn at, rioted against, and downgraded until we have a built-in guilt complex,” he told The New York Times in August 1968:
This has been compounded by the accusations of our sons and daughters who pride themselves on “telling it like it is.” . . . [A]s for our generation I will make no apology. No people in all history paid a higher price for freedom. And no people have done so much to advance the dignity of man. We are called materialistic. Maybe so. . . . But our materialism has made our children the biggest, tallest, most handsome, and intelligent generation of Americans yet. They will live longer with fewer illnesses, learn more, see more of the world, and have more successes in realizing their personal dreams and ambitions than any other people in any other period of our history—because of our materialism.43
For Reagan, it was the Hollywood strike of 1945–46 all over again: Berkeley was a hotbed of “communism and blatant sexual misbehavior”; the protesters were “criminal anarchists” and “off-campus revolutionar-ies.”44 His sarcasm knew no bounds. A hippie, he liked to crack in speeches, is “a fellow who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.” Another oft-repeated line: “Their signs said, ‘Make love, 4 0 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House not war.’ But it didn’t look like they could do either.”45 For some, such gauche remarks were indicative of Reagan’s fundamental anti-intellectual-ism. Buff Chandler, for example, stepped down from the University of California’s Board of Regents in 1968. Reagan was happy to see her go. He appointed William French Smith in her place and made him chairman.46
Reagan’s crackdown on the Berkeley agitators was overwhelmingly endorsed by the regents at their March 1969 meeting. Even Jesse Unruh voiced approval of the Governor’s handling of the situation, perhaps because the Democrats’ own polls “showed 80 percent in favor of discipli-nary action against students and teachers engaged in disrupting campus life.”47 On March 14, the Third World Liberation Front announced that it was suspending the strike and entering negotiations with university officials. A “gratified” Reagan said he was glad they were taking their dispute indoors, where it should have been all along.
On March 17, Reagan bragged about the turnaround in a letter to fellow Republican governor Jack Williams of Arizona, who evidently had also had a run-in with campus rebels. “I’m convinced we win when we defy the little monsters, as you did,” Reagan wrote. “Two days ago at Berkeley an outdoor rally was broken up by a thunder shower, and now the students have called off hostilities while they take their quarterly exams. We are still on the side of the angels, but a little clout here and there is in order. After all, the Lord took a club to the money changers in the temple.”48
The Governor and First Lady began their spring break in Los Angeles, at a black-tie dinner dance for six hundred given by Jules and Doris Stein to celebrate the opening of the Sheraton-Universal hotel at MCA’s Universal City. The Steins had flown in two planeloads of friends from New York and Paris—Emilio Pucci, Estée Lauder, Oscar and Françoise de la Renta, Kenneth Jay Lane, Adam and Sophie Gimbel, Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis, Clare Booth Luce, Artur Rubinstein—and greeted them at the airport with “a kilted band of Scottish bagpipers.” The three-day extravaganza—medical philanthropist Mary Lasker called it “the most wonderful weekend in the history of mankind”—included the premiere of Universal Pictures’s Sweet Charity the