By Thomas W. Evans
Every candidate for the Republican presidential nomination does it. Either in the declaration of his candidacy, or in his initial speech before a conservative audience, or in the first two paragraphs of his basic fund-raising letter, he invokes the name of Ronald Reagan. I've written a book about the fortieth president, his vision of America, how he came to develop this vision, and how he managed, once he was elected, to achieve virtually every item on his agenda. I recommend the book to aspiring candidates and to those who are attempting to judge how the aspirants measure up to the standard they have invoked.
In The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of his Conversion to Conservatism (Columbia University Press, January, 2007), I focus on the eight years (1954-1962) when Reagan worked for GE. He was the host of the highly-rated television show, The General Electric Theater. What is not as well-known is how pivotal this job and its duties were to his future political vision - and to his political career.
As the host of General Electric Theater, Reagan's contract also required him to spend a quarter of his time traveling to GE plants and speaking to the company's workers and their neighbors. The premise for his tour at the outset was simply to give a sense of cohesion to the highly decentralized corporation by having the company's most famous face appear at all of its locations. GE was then the nation's fifth largest company, and Reagan estimated that he went to 139 plants in forty states, addressing some 250,000 employees in the two years that he spent as GE's "traveling ambassador." The staple in the early years was Hollywood chatter and product endorsement.
In time, the program changed. Under GE's CEO Ralph Cordiner and the company's vice president for employee, public and community relations, Lemuel Boulware, GE became a major combatant in grass roots politics. GE management described their opponents as "public and union officials" and the contest was for the hearts and minds of GE's blue collar workers and their neighbors. Boulware believed there was "a wide and still widening gap between the economic interests of the union members and the political interests of union officials."
1958 was a pivotal year in this process. The AFL/CIO marked 16 U. S. Senators for defeat and only five of them survived. One journalist described the off-year elections as "a slaughter" for the Republicans, "the worst defeat ever for a party occupying the White House." Cordiner and Boulware met on a small island off the Florida coast (a summary memorandum, located in the University of Pennsylvania library archives and never published before, confirms their plans.) They expanded their activities to go beyond the bargaining table to the voting booths in the communities in which their plants were located.
Boulware was the field commander and chief strategist in the expanded operation. His goal was to go over the heads of the union leaders directly to the blue collar workers. He deluged them with basically conservative materials contained in GE publications which he produced. He was for reducing taxes, limiting the size and scope of government and opposing union-sponsored legislation which would provide, in his view, an unfair advantage to the union leaders. It was his announced goal to make GE employees "communicators" as they learned his message and "mass communicators" as they passed it on to their neighbors and fellow voters. In the course of this program, a great communicator" emerged.
Boulware took Reagan out of the plants. The GE "ambassador" now delivered speeches before the local Lions, the Rotary and other civic groups. Reagan referred to this as "the mashed potato circuit." As the tour continued and the operation grew the Southern states and the smaller states which were the principal focus of GE's campaign moved, in the current political parlance, from blue to red.
In 1960, after a short strike, the company and its employees entered into a new contract. The New York Times described it as "the worst setback any union has received in a nationwide strike since World War II." In that same year, Ronald Reagan led the members of the Screen Actors Guild, where he had been re-elected to the presidency, out on the Guild's first strike against the film producers. As a result, actors gained an expanded pension fund and compensation for the sale of their films to television for the first time. It was viewed as a triumph for the actors' union. The simultaneous negotiations, where the GE was opposing a strike while its traveling spokesman was leading one in his own industry, occupy a separate chapter on the art of negotiation.
Boulware retired at the end of 1960. The IUE commenced unfair labor proceedings against GE, citing "Boulwarism" as the center of its complaint. Although Reagan was not mentioned in the ongoing litigation, the company's new high command felt that he should give up his speeches and return to Hollywood chatter and product endorsements. He declined and left the company in 1962. The GE Theater was cancelled. Ralph Cordiner retired shortly thereafter.
Ronald Reagan continued to give his speeches. He had a three-year backlog of invitations. Only former president Eisenhower was in greater demand as an after dinner speaker. In October of 1964, he gave the speech he had developed over his GE years, slightly modified to suit the special occasion of its delivery on national television in support of Republican presidential candidate, conservative Senator Barry Goldwater. Afterwards, the dean of the Washington press corps referred to the speech as "the most successful political debut since William Jennings Bryan's 'Cross of Gold' speech in 1896."
Two years later, Reagan was elected governor of California by a margin of almost one million votes.
During his years with GE, Ronald Reagan learned more than a set of prepared remarks. His reading covered such diverse writers as Lenin, Hayek, Sun Tzu and Henry Hazlitt. As White House aide David Gergen later observed, Reagan had a tendency to memorize what he read. Secretary of State George Shultz, White House counselor and Attorney General Ed Meese, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev all used the same word to describe Reagan's outlook. They said he had a vision. The pillars of that vision - tax reform, limitation of the role of government, increase of the strength of the military, patriotic theme, strategic defense initiative, reduction of nuclear arsenals, the Reagan doctrine and the pro-active opposition to the Soviet Union - were all born or honed during his time with General Electric.
Reagan had also learned how to turn almost every component of his vision into government policy and law. He went over the heads of the opposition leaders directly to the blue collars while with the company, and, later, when in government, to the electorate. As a result, he had a strong hand when he sat down at the bargaining table as a union president - and at the summits as president. The story of his education is a virtual primer as to how this can and should be done.
Thomas W. Evans is a Marine who used to be a platoon commander, and the author of The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of his Conversion to Conservatism. The book is available via Amazon.com, via Barnes and Noble (where it's less expensive), and in other online and retail outlets.
So in the end he grew from propaganda prop to a propagandist?
Quite the dramatic arc.
No, he grew from a paid communicator to The Great Communicator, with a set of views and principles that he had read, internalized and largely managed to get implemented in practice later on.
Something I doubt taliboto has ever done, anywhere, in his entire life. Clearly no gift, and clearly no training.
The thing is, all politicians are communicators. John Edwards was a litigation lawyer - a paid communicator (or as many would put it, a paid liar on the incentive plan). But it was good training for a political career. Obama served at lower levels of public office, pushing a set of views he agreed with. He was paid. Ergo he was a paid propagandist. Hey, gotta train somewhere. He obviously made the most of the opportunity.
For my part, I have more respect even for a guy like Edwards, who at least gets this training on a non-public dime before their public career begins. That seems to be harder to do these days outside of toxic areas like litigation, and one way to improve leadership in America might be to look at how to create more avenues for that sort of thing.
Not all politicians read and think. Many don't do so well at practicing hands-on, no-handler direct mass persuasion, either. As Tom Evans notes, Reagan did both... and many of his would be successors seem to lack a talent for either aspect of that mix.
Which may help to explain their relative performance.
Very interesting indeed.