Suburban Warriors by Lisa McGirr

Author:Lisa McGirr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

Ronald Reagan speaks amid a sea of faces at a Garden Grove shopping center. (Reprinted by permission of the Orange County Register.)

By the summer of 1966, Reagan was leading in the polls.112 Brown sought to dampen Reagan’s popularity by charging him with “extremism,” the tag that had so damaged Goldwater only two years before: “My opponent,” he railed, “is the captive of the radical right in California and … he will not, cannot, repudiate the John Birch Society because it would cost him the support of wealthy ultra-conservatives.”113 The CDC similarly attacked Reagan’s close links to prominent right-wing ideologues. Its campaign kit contained a report titled “Ronald Reagan, Extremist Collaborator,” a thirteen-page document that connected the Reagan campaign to conservatives like Walter Knott, Patrick Frawley, Henry Salvatori, and others who were donors to conservative causes and who indeed now played important roles in Reagan’s campaign.114 But the charges proved ineffective. While Reagan refused to repudiate the John Birch Society, this refusal simply did not do to him the damage it had done to Goldwater only two years earlier. With students occupying campus buildings and militant African-Americans in the streets, it was the Left that became increasingly vulnerable to charges of “extremism.” The world, it seemed, had turned upside down. Nixon, who only four years before had demanded the ouster of the John Birch members from the California Republican Party, now responded to Democratic charges of right-wing extremism by remarking that the only extremist issue “is Brown’s refusal to repudiate the California Democratic Council which harbors the draft card burners, troop train blockers, and beatniks which brought the greatest university to its knees.”115

Such attacks, not surprisingly, struck a chord with the conservative Republican grass roots. As one conservative, a deputy clerk of the municipal court in Whittier and a Reagan precinct worker, wrote, “Reagan should call the CDC ‘the Communist leftist Dominated Council of California’—that is what it really stands for.”116 It was not only conservative Republicans who mocked Brown’s “extremism” charges, however, but also many rank-and-file Democrats. As one Southern California Democrat asserted in a letter to Brown: Because “you have chosen to run most of your campaign against the John Birch Society we have chosen Ronald Reagan as our choice for governor.” He continued, “The extremist CDC is worse than the JBS.”117 And one Santa Ana woman, who had received a copy of “Ronald Reagan, Extremist Collaborator” through her husband’s union and who had voted for Brown in 1962, informed Reagan, “Even if you do believe as the Birch Society teaches, you still are better for California than the ADAs,” the Americans for Democratic Action.118

Aware of his widespread support in the southland, Reagan spent time there in the last weeks of his campaign, working to get out the vote. One Orange County conservative activist remembered some thirty years later that “he was really truly grassroots. He was everywhere, he was out at Leisure World, he was over here, he was at so many places being with grassroots elements.”119 In

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