Quote of the Day (John Sayles, on the 1980 GOP National Convention)

“In 1980, I covered the Republican National Convention in Detroit for a magazine [The New Republic]. The Republicans put most of their delegates across the river in a hotel in Canada. They put cardboard over the windows of the buses so when they went through the funky Detroit neighborhoods they wouldn’t see them on the way to the Joe Louis Arena. These delegates from Kansas and other parts of the country did not even see these neighborhoods, so in effect they could never admit that these areas exist. They never saw them. This is what you’re asked to do for most American films, and it may be appropriate for certain movies, but it’s one of the reasons that Americans don’t know anything about their own history.” — Indie actor-screenwriter-director-novelist John Sayles interviewed by Antonio D’Ambrosio, “An Interview with John Sayles,” The Believer (Issue 61, March 2009)

Forty years ago today, in his third attempt, Ronald Reagan took the decisive step in his 12-year campaign to achieve the nation’s highest office when he accepted the Republican nomination for President. He would go on to move the GOP in a new, more conservative direction and solidify the support of the party faithful in a manner not seen until the rise of Donald Trump. 

The so-called "Rockefeller Republicans" of moderate liberals--named for the New York Governor who, 20 years before, had successfully pressed Richard Nixon to add a more pro-civil-rights stance to the party platform at that year's convention--were well on their way to dinosaur status.

With a genial smile and a wave of the hand, Reagan had also confirmed that the Republican commitment to civil rights that had been a part of its philosophy since Abraham Lincoln had considerably softened—or, at very least, had become secondary to its visceral dislike of government, the primary means for ensuring equality before the law.

In his acceptance speech at the convention, Reagan hailed "that American spirit which knows no ethnic, religious, social, political, regional, or economic boundaries." It is easy to miss from the sonorous tones that the word "racial" is missing from this list. From the perspective of 2020, it is much harder to miss a particularly piquant phrase: "a great national crusade to make America great again."

The role of racism in the GOP realignment that began with Richard Nixon’s election in 1968 is a fraught one. Arguing that race has been central to the swing toward the GOP over the last half-century is counter-productive, as it not only angers individuals who resent being labeled racist, but also fails to account for the concerns of particular elections, including prosperity and national security.

But the observation by filmmaker John Sayles offers another way of viewing this. After the postwar period of convulsions over race, much of the electorate preferred not to look at its continuing presence on the American scene. It was just too ugly and painful. Better to move away, even to block one’s view of this.

That tendency was embodied in Reagan. In a PBS “Newshour”roundtable discussion of "The Reagan Legacy" with Jim Lehrer following the President’s death in 2004, historian Richard Norton Smith noted that Reagan was “one of those classic examples of conservative Republicans who on the personal level would gift their shirt off their back to someone in need whoever it is but who on a cultural and philosophical level can often be accused of at least insensitivity.” He was personally kind to individual African-Americans.

In recent years, Reagan’s stock among historians has risen, with Siena College Research Institute poll results released last year showing that he had risen from 18^th in the last time these scholars were surveyed to 12^th. But I think that improvement will itself come in for revision, and that Reagan will slip back to something close to his prior ranking.

Although the U.S. economy recovered in the Reagan era, the results were not shared evenly. Inequality rose during his eight years in office, as shown by Capital and Main’s Abby Kingsley in an article for Fast Company Magazine. Numerous initiatives begun during his administration widened the gap between rich and poor, including:

* The Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1981, which made hundreds of thousands of families ineligible for Aid to Families with Dependent Children;

* A 74% reduction in the budget allocation for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1980s;

*Reagan’s 1981 breaking of a strike by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, which dramatically underscored the decline of American unions;

*The 1981 tax cut, which reduced the tax burden for the top bracket while redistributing it toward the middle; and

*Stock buybacks' legalization in 1981 by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which encouraged corporations to prioritize stock value over distributing earnings to employees through bonuses or salary raises.

African-Americans’ economic advances, only recently gained, were materially affected by all of this. Reagan’s tone and rhetoric likewise signaled that Blacks could not look to the federal government for help. 

Campaigning in Georgia in 1980, the candidate noted that Confederate President Jefferson Davis was “a hero of mine.” His continual invocation of “states’ rights” cut little ice with a group that had heard that concept used to undercut their rightful demand for their own rights at the ballot box and in the workplace.

Reagan's belief in laissez-faire government was matched only by his laissez-faire managerial style—a work practice that got him in trouble during the Iran-contra scandal. He simply did not notice things, much like the bus riders from outside Detroit who propelled him toward the Presidency in July 1980.

Whatever else happens this election year, there will be no more cardboard that can be used to obscure  problems experienced by African-Americans. It will be impossible to turn away from them again, and the burden will be all the heavier on Americans 40 years after the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to find the solutions that he did not see as a priority.

This Day in Film History (Birth of William Holden, ‘Golden Boy’ and Gipper Friend)

April 17, 1918— William Holden, who became a box-office star and Oscar winner by playing characters forced to survive by their wits in desperate, even morally dubious circumstances, was born into a comfortable middle-class environment in O'Fallon, Ill. Though born in the same state, he was miles apart psychologically from the fellow actor whose best friend and wedding best man he would become, Ronald Reagan. 

Holden and Reagan were a study in contrasts throughout their lives. Their career trajectories demonstrate the variety of ways in which fame and posterity treat Hollywood’s leading men.

Suzanne Vega’s song "Tom's Diner" refers to “an actor/who died while he was drinking/he was no one I had heard of." That actor was Holden, who passed away alone, on a throw rug in his apartment, possibly when drunk, in 1981. To me, a fellow baby boomer raised on TV, those lyrics are mystifying, as Holden starred, over three decades, in approximately 70 films, including several among the best-known of their era: Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Sabrina, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Wild Bunch, and Network. 

When Ms. Vega wrote these lyrics, while she might not have heard of Holden, it was a certainty that she would have heard of Reagan, who was in the first year of a Presidency that altered American politics and society. Virtually every obituary of the actor would have mentioned the shock expressed by the President and First Lady Nancy Reagan over the death of the man who had served as best man at their wedding in 1952.

The psychological distance between Reagan and Holden at the end of the latter’s life mirrored how the two began. Although O'Fallon is only a bit more than a three-hour drive south from Reagan’s birthplace in Tampico, Ill., the two could not have been farther apart in terms of their families.

Holden’s parents—an industrial chemist and schoolteacher—provided financial stability and an opportunity to travel abroad. But the sole breadwinner in Reagan’s family was his father, whose job (shoe salesman) and abiding health issue (alcoholism) led to constant moves in northern Illinois.

Though both landed in Hollywood in the late 1930s, it was Reagan who achieved a more secure foothold early on, with high-profile roles in Dark Victory, Santa Fe Trail, and, beating out Holden, John Wayne, and Robert Young, doomed Notre Dame gridiron star George Gipp in Knute Rockne—All American. He scored a special triumph as a happy-go-lucky small-town playboy who becomes the victim of a sadistic doctor in Kings Row, and was high enough in the Warner Brothers constellation that he was seriously considered for the role that eventually went to Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. 

Meanwhile, after making a splash in Golden Boy and Our Town, Holden began to be typecast as a clean-cut, innocent young man.

World War II brought a change in their fortunes and, in Holden’s case, temperament. Reagan missed four years in what should have been his prime, sliding perceptibly from “A” to “B” list consideration. His energy was increasingly taken up by politics—first the attempt to stymie Communist influence in Hollywood unions, then in larger national questions. 

Neither man saw combat in the war, but Holden—an Air Force second lieutenant who served stateside on P.R. duties and making training films for the Office of Public Information—was crushed by the loss of a brother killed in action. 

The 1950s represented the zenith of Holden’s career and the nadir of Reagan’s, as one performance style was suddenly in sync with the public while the other lost traction. While never particularly flashy, Reagan was a highly professional actor—well-prepared and amenable to direction. But he didn’t give his directors any unexpected dimension, and his straight-arrow image now seemed vanilla. 

With WWII and Korea darkening the nation’s mood, the path was cleared for a new breed of actors—notably Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster and Holden—who possessed every bit of the glamour associated with pre-war leading men but also an underside that made them natural anti-heroes. 

In particular, Holden seemed drawn to a particular kind of role: tall, well-built, handsome, charming, intelligent, irresistible to women—but a hollow man who felt or behaved like a fraud. On the big screen, he was Don Draper before he had been given a suit, a martini and a borrowed name.

Holden made the most of this new environment, appearing among the top 10 box office stars six times, as ranked by Quigley Publications' annual poll of movie exhibitors. But in 1954, the same year he strode to the podium to pick up an Academy Award for Stalag 17, Reagan suffered through a humiliating Vegas variety emceeing gig.

Success or the lack of it rechanneled their energies and, consequently, careers. A shrewd deal for acting in The Bridge on the River Kwai led Holden to accept roles merely to keep his hand in a business from which he derived increasingly less pleasure. He could certainly rise to the occasion when presented with the opportunity (as in his Oscar-nominated turn in Network), but alcohol had now ravaged his face and let younger competitors such as Paul Newman and Steve McQueen in a better position to snag choice roles. On one of the foreign trips he'd taken ever since he was a child, he became so fascinated by the wilds of Kenya that he subsequently became involved in a game ranch dedicated to conservation--what he increasingly felt was the most important work of his life.

On the other hand, Reagan—with his career plummeting faster and further down than Holden’s—chose to leave acting behind altogether, in one of the most startling acts of reinvention in American history. 

It is astonishing, where different combinations of circumstance and character can lead people. In spite of a hard-scrabble lifestyle, Reagan grew up with an innate faith in the goodness of his countrymen. The “morning in America” commercial of his Presidential re-election campaign may or may not have reflected economic reality, but it certainly accorded with his faith in what people could do if left to their own devices. 

It was far different for Holden, whose performances, Bruce Bennett noted in a 2008 essay for The New York Sun, “invariably bear an end-of-the-season autumnal sadness.” Each of his characters seldom seems surprised by the world because, having taken a good, long look at himself, he has already been gravely disappointed. 

Materially comfortable in childhood, blessed with more than the normal allotment of good looks, intelligence and talent when he grew up, Holden came to believe he didn’t have what mattered—a profession that ultimately meant anything or people who would be there for him in his last hours alive.

Photo of the Day: ‘Sandra Day O'Connor,’ Exhibit Hall, Supreme Court, Washington DC

“Society as a whole benefits immeasurably from a climate in which all persons, regardless of race or gender, may have the opportunity to earn respect, responsibility, advancement and remuneration based on ability." —Sandra Day O'Connor, The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice (2003)

I took the image accompanying this post—a bust of Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the Exhibit Hall of the U.S. Supreme Court—while visiting Washington, DC last November. But now seemed an appropriate time to post about it, as today marks the 35^th anniversary of the unanimous confirmation of her nomination to the highest court in the land by the U.S. Senate.

The O'Connor-related artifacts surrounding this bust garnered a great deal of visitor attention in the Exhibit Hall—not surprising, because of her status as the first female Supreme Court justice. But it also testifies to the larger ideal advocated by O'Connor in the above quote. In a building where “equal justice under law” is engraved on the front, her iconic position results from Americans’ hard-won belief in equal opportunity for all.

Just how hard-won it was for O’Connor can be seen in her post-Stanford Law School entrance into the job market. Though finishing with the third-highest average in her class, the best offer she received from California’s biggest law firms was a job as a legal secretary. (Nearly 30 years later, a partner in that latter white-shoe firm, William French Smith—by this time, Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General—phoned to tell her of her nomination to the Supreme Court. "Oh, I guess you must mean in a secretarial position!" she joked.)

Even after nearly a decade on the Supreme Court, O’Connor hadn’t forgotten the sexism that hindered women’s advancement in the legal field. “We have a long way to go before women are on an equal footing with men," she told a conference on “Women in Power” in November 1990.

A few more points about O’Connor:

*Her nomination was a shrewd political move by Ronald Reagan—it not only fulfilled his pledge to name a woman to the court, but put Democrats in the near-impossible position of opposing a trailblazer.

*Her personal friendship with fellow Arizonan Barry Goldwater and governmental experience outside Washington helped persuade Reagan that she would be reliably conservative and pro-states’ rights.

*Her pre-Court background made O’Connor something of an anachronism. While both Republicans and Democrats have, in the past few decades, selected nominees whose backgrounds have rarely extended beyond the legal realm (federal judges have been most popular), O’Connor worked in all three branches of government: executive (Assistant Attorney General of Arizona), legislative (first female majority leader in any state senate), and judicial (the Arizona Supreme Court of Appeals).

*One of her last dissents, in the 5-4 Kelo v. City of New London decision, was in keeping with much of the justice’s prior career in blurring bright lines between liberal and conservative ideologies, as she chastised the majority for handing the well-heeled “disproportionate influence and power” over individual property rights through their approval of eminent domain: “The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.”

Photo of the Day: Daniel Patrick Moynihan Place, DC

Daniel Moynihan Place is set amid the much larger Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, which, at 1.9 million sq. ft., is one of the largest federal structures in our nation’s capital. 

It was inexplicable to me that such a large complex would be associated with such an unrelenting critic of the federal government. But then again, it’s probably not more of a head-scratcher than the decision to name a national airport in that metro area after the President who fired air-traffic controllers after they went out on strike, then refused to rehire them.

Likewise, it seemed unexplainable that this particular of space within the complex would be named for the late U.S. Senator from New York, one of the most perceptive critics of Reagan’s policies in the White House.

But unlike many in Washington now, Senator Moynihan was not one to let politics become overly personal, or to let such ill feeling interfere with a larger objective. When Bill Clinton signed the legislation naming the building after Reagan 20 years ago Tuesday, the senator said the structure was "named for a great president and a good cause."

That statement might need some context, particularly since Moynihan continually assailed Reagan’s urban policies, signature tax cuts and "consuming obsession with the expansion of Communism – which is not in fact going on." By the time Clinton signed this legislation, however, Reagan had publicly disclosed his struggle with Alzheimer’s and the GOP, now in control of Capitol Hill, wished to honor its hero. Moynihan had an eye on a prize of his own: the revitalization of Pennsylvania Avenue, a charge given him by then-boss John F. Kennedy after the latter noticed the dingy street on his inaugural day parade.

The Reagan Building, then, fulfilled one element in Moynihan’s long-range, quarter-century vision, so he yielded on the naming of the site with good grace.

I did not know any of this history when I visited Washington last month and took this picture. This open space merely seemed to offer a great nocturnal image, the kind of place that up-and-coming politico Francis Underwood would stride through in the TV series House of Cards.

On second thought, however, I wondered about that. As seen here, Moynihan Place offers a blaze of light. It would be far too bright for the machinations of Underwood, who prefers an infinitely darker, more solitary place to implement his ruthless schemes.

Quote of the Day (James Reston, on Barry Goldwater)

“Barry Goldwater not only lost the presidential election yesterday, but the conservative cause as well. He has wrecked his party for a long time to come and is not even likely to control the wreckage….The only theory he proved is that part of the Deep South, particularly the rural South, favors his policies of leaving the Negro revolution to the judgment of the States. His gamble that the North would put its prejudices against the Negro ahead of its conscience was disproved. His belief that the American people would turn against the principles of social security at home and collective security abroad was rejected. Even the Middle Western Bible Belt on which he centered his moral yearnings, turned against him.”— James Reston, “News Analysis,” The New York Times, November 4, 1964

Post-mortems on the landslide Presidential election loss by Senator Barry Goldwater were a-plenty on this date 50 years ago. But the one from New York Times columnist James Reston will do nicely, since he was, according to Ronald Steel, “the quintessential Washington insider.” It reflects a belief of the time in consensus politics, what Arthur Schlesinger called “the vital center”—a center from which the Republican Presidential nominee had strayed, the conventional wisdom ran. Goldwater was an anomaly; no similar nominee would ever win the Presidency, even if he made it through the convention. Or so the thinking went.

Reading Reston now, it’s obvious that nearly every point he made was true—and yet he missed the larger picture. Goldwater was soundly rejected, but he had hardly “wrecked his party for a long time to come.” In fact, the GOP returned to power four years later, at least partly because Richard Nixon adopted a “Southern strategy” that wooed the constituency that turned out for Goldwater. That cadre of voters remains at the core of the Republican Party, making Goldwater, as Nicolaus Mills noted in an article for The Daily Beast, the "Father of the Tea Party."

The trouble with Reston and his colleagues in 1964 was that they were too busy talking to each other to ask the obvious question of how activists who had grabbed the party’s machinery—and managed to put a portion of the nation never previously in its column—could be prevented from doing so again. The same thing happened eight years later in the case of a landslide loser for the other party, the Democrats’ George McGovern.

In fact, the shifts of large groups of voters into the candidacy of the losing party heralded a long-term earthquake in politics. The Goldwater candidacy presaged the New Right shock troops for the GOP just as surely as Al Smith’s race in 1928 had led to the New Deal coalition that would hold sway for several decades after the Depression.

The voting blocs that made their first appearance in 1928 and 1968 only needed a more reassuring face than their first nominee, along with circumstances that would create a fireball of discontent. The Democrats found it in Franklin Roosevelt—who would not disturb the party’s overwhelmingly Protestant base in the Midwest and South, as the Catholic Al Smith had done, while capitalizing on the Great Depression. Right-wing Republicans, after an initially successful but uncomfortable alliance with Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972, found their more appealing candidate in Ronald Reagan, whose sunny optimism contrasted so much with Goldwater--and with incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter, undone by stagflation at home and hostage-taking abroad. (Indeed, the actor’s televised speech late in the election in support of Goldwater served notice on conservatives that a potent new force lay waiting in the wings.)

It’s one thing to make a mistake once; it’s another, however, to make another, perhaps more egregious one. Yet that is precisely what happened in 1980, when Reston—probably after reading one too many articles about the gaffe-prone GOP nominee—wrote that Republicans "are giving Carter their favorite candidate ... and Carter's favorite opponent -- Ronald Reagan."

In fact, more than a few reporters felt likewise. One notable exception: Reston’s former Times colleague James Wooten. At a dinner at my college newspaper where he was a guest of honor, someone asked the reporter to appraise the chances of the man whose successful 1976 candidacy he had chronicled in Dasher. Wooten responded that he thought the President might be “in trouble” with the electorate. That turned out to be putting it mildly.

Leave aside, if you can, the question of whether GOP domination of Washington has been good or bad for the country in the three decades since. It’s still remarkable that a group of men whose profession was closely observing the men who race for public office could so misjudge the electorate.

Perhaps these pundits believed that Americans would not fall into a syndrome encapsulated in a title of a late 1960s novel by C.P. Snow: The Sleep of Reason. But there is probably a better explanation, offered by Rick Perlstein, a historian who has charted the rise of the New Right, in an interview with Harold Pollack for the Washington Post's Wonkblog: “What is the sociological nature of this group of people, pundits? They so desperately wished for the self-fulfilling prophecy that conservatism will die out and is dying out. Why is that mistake made over and over again?”

You would think that the commentariate would learn some humility in their electoral forecasts. But the media never seem to grasp that American civilization and its discontents have made voter psychology virtually impossible to predict in the long term.

The one person who did grasp that conservatism was hardly dead back in 1964 was not a member of the media, but as consummate a political pro as existed—in fact, the winner of the Presidential election that fall: Lyndon Johnson. Earlier that summer, as he signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, he confided to aides that he was handing the South to the Republicans for generations to come.

(This photo from the Reagan Presidential Library shows Ronald Reagan stumping with Goldwater in Los Angeles in 1964.)