The Reagans

Hey, hey. Hey. Hey, hey. Gentlemen?

All right? All right.

Glad to have you in Mississippi.

Governor, welcome to Mississippi.

Thank you so much for coming again.

dramatic music

R, R, R-E-A.

G, G, G-A-N.

R-E-A, G-A-N.

Reagan, Reagan! Go, Reagan!

We vote Reagan! We vote Reagan!

We vote Reagan! We vote Reagan!

This time, it's a real pleasure

to present to you Ronald Reagan. Governor.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan

wins the Republican nomination for President,

and he faces an incredibly important decision--

how will he introduce himself to the country?

Nancy and I have never seen anything like this,

because there isn't anything like this any more than...

He has a letter from a Southern official

that invites him to come down to Neshoba County

to the county fair there.

Neshoba County was infamous for one reason and one reason only.

This is backwoods Mississippi,

silent and suspicious.

It is hostile country with a hostile attitude

towards civil rights workers.

James Chaney, Andrew Goodman,

and Michael Schwerner went to Mississippi

to help register Negroes as voters.

They have been missing since Sunday.

They've been the focus of a whole country's concern.

1964, three civil rights workers were kidnapped,

lynched, their bodies stuffed in an earthen dam,

and not found for over a month.

16 years later,

there wasn't a voter alive in Neshoba County

who hadn't been alive

when those three civil rights workers were killed.

He chose that place to stand up

and look at the white South and say,

"I'm for states' rights."

This phrase, "states' rights,"

was prevalent across the South.

We are defending the right of the people of Virginia

and of Alabama to decide some questions for themselves.

Get back to conservative government, state rights.

Not just the saying, "states' rights,"

but the real meaning of states' rights.

"States' rights" has always in the South meant

the North can't tell us what to do about race.

And the federal government can't tell us

that Black people are equal.

It cannot tell us to integrate our schools.

It was a flat out signal to an old South

that thought the Civil War was not over.

The real purpose of Reagan's trip is a speech

to the Urban League in New York tomorrow on Black unemployment.

In Mississippi, it was difficult to find

a Black face in the crowd.

He is saying to white America,

"You can trust me.

"You can trust me to make sure that the forces of change

in civil rights and equality will not affect your life,"

and he received little or no criticism for that.

It's one of the reasons Reagan's record on race

has not been sufficiently examined,

and we're suffering for the consequences to that today.

Our guest today on Meet The Press

is screen and television actor, Ronald Reagan,

who this week announced he would seek

the Republican nomination for Governor of California.

We've reached a period

in which the philosophical differences

between the two parties are so great

that it's high time that more people from the rank and file

of the citizenry involve themselves

so that we can have government that's of and by

as well as for the people.

Ronald Reagan developed the political persona

that we know in the 1960s.

It is not always possible to tell the real

from the unreal, the actual from the artificial,

truth from fiction.

Just so you all know, what you have been watching

is a Hollywood movie premiere.

What you are about to see is a California political campaign.

When he began his political career,

I remember him saying that,

well, he didn't know about running

for Governor of California,

but he would go out and make some speeches.

He would judge the audience reaction to that.

And if the audience seemed to want him to run

for Governor of California,

well, then, sure he wouldn't-- he wouldn't let them down.

For a long time, America sophisticates

couldn't take Ronald Reagan seriously.

As an actor, he had seemed corny to them.

And remember, Boraxo Powdered Hand Soap.

As a politician, he seemed improbable.

Ronald Reagan has played many roles.

This year, he wants to play governor.

You know, I'm running against an actor.

No shot at Abraham Lincoln, don't you think?

You know, the press just love to call him

a fading actor or "B" actor,

and that upset him.

The manner in which the other team

has been campaigning, it's time that some people

are reminded that actors are people.

Decision to run for Governor--

that was a mutual decision that we both,

um, spent a couple of very sleepless nights over.

My wife, Nancy.

That meant a major change in our lives.

It had to be a mutual decision.

When my parents entered politics,

the whole new cast of characters arrived.

I was used to, you know, Jimmy Cagney

coming over around Christmas.

But now there's this whole political crowd,

new kind of money people.

That was a new social circle for them.

My mother was much more socially focused

and acutely focused than my father was.

She understood the value

of having wealthy, powerful friends.

And she was much more involved

in cultivating those friendships.

Thank you all for your work.

Both my husband and I appreciate it.

Reagan was running for Governor against Pat Brown...

And he was a liberal New Deal politician.

Brown created this tremendous infrastructure in California.

Ordinary folks wondered, "Why are my taxes going up?"

And there's Ronnie Reagan ready to take advantage of it.

He's been singing this song about big government,

and it plays well.

You know, for a number of years,

I have been protesting the growth of government.

We have increased our population 18%.

We've increased the number of recipients of welfare 49%.

At that time, conservatism was very much on the fringes

of American politics.

Remember, Ronald Reagan campaigned

for Goldwater in 1964.

Barry Goldwater stood

in the middle of what was happening in America,

and it was still screaming segregation forever.

So for Reagan to attach himself so comfortably

was a sign of where he wanted to go long term.

Governor Brown also called you a party crasher this morning.

- I know. - Said that you're not in

the, uh, progressive Republican side of your party.

Well...

He's called federal aid education a tool of tyranny.

He opposed Social Security.

He wanted to make it voluntary.

On the Redwoods, he feels that we have enough

of the natural resources of our state.

These are all taken from speeches that he's made

either recently or during the past four or five years.

I think his refusal to denounce the John Birch Society

as almost every other Republican leader

in the United States has done,

I think all of these things indicate a philosophy

that would be very dangerous to the people of our state.

The John Birch Society was this fringe group

that believed in all sorts of conspiracy theories,

some of them anti-communist, some of them are just

absolutely absurd fluoride in the water

being intentionally put there to dumb down American voters,

concentration camps in Alaska.

Most of the membership came out of the Republican Party,

and it was a problem for Republicans.

For a political operative like Stu Spencer,

his fear was that Reagan had gotten ahold of a bad script,

and that bad script could be supplied

by the John Birch Society,

because some things are apropos to talk about

and some things not.

They also had a very strong strain

of anti-Black racism.

There was a concerted far right effort

to undermine the legitimacy of the civil rights movement

and the demands for equality

that included even attacking Martin Luther King, Jr.

as a communist even though he wasn't.

One of the things that happened in this country

as a result of winning passage of civil rights

was literally a fracturing of what white politics had been.

The arc of the moral universe is long,

but it bends toward justice.

You have people who left the Democratic Party

and became Republicans

because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I spent most of my life as a Democrat,