St. Ronnie and the 11th Commandment

Sixteen days ago Atrios posted something offhand about Ronald Reagan and the famous "11th Commandment"—"Though shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican"—that I've been meaning to comment upon, to make some general points about Reagan. But sixteen days is officially 47.6 years in Blog Time, and I was afraid my moment for Reagan bashing had passed.

Until, that is, some useful controversy flared up about the Great Communicator's memory this week.

First, the recent controversy. David Brooks wrote a stunningly simple-minded column claiming that to call Ronald Reagan a panderer for the votes of racist white Southerners was a "slur" against Reagan. Specifically, he tried to rebut the charge that the smoking gun proving Reagan's intentions was the infamous opening of Reagan's 1980 general election campaign at Mississippi's Neshoba County Fair, just down the road a piece from where Klansmen slaughtered three civil rights workers during Freedom Summer in 1964. Brooks, apparently inspired by the account of Bruce Bartlett, basically exculpates Reagan for the Neshoba appearance—in which he praised "states rights," as in the name of Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist States Rights Party—as an accident of scheduling. Now, however, the man who probably knows more about the rise of the Republican Party in Mississippi than any man alive, Emory professor Joseph Crespino, author of In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution, usefully puts the whole conservative-invented "controversy" to rest with both a crucial discussion of historical context, and a documentary smoking gun: a 1979 letter from a leading Mississippi Republican leader suggesting that if he wanted the "George Wallace inclined voters," the Neshoba County Fair was the place to speak.

Come on, Brooks: clear enough for you yet?

Anyhoo. Now to Atrios's post. Atrios offhandly explains that he recently learned that what's been popularly enshrined as "Reagan's" 11th Commandment was actually the coinage of that California's Republican chairman Gaylord Parkinson, in 1966, after that state's divisive 1964 Republican presidential primary.

And so it was. Now to my broader point, which is that Reagan, so uncontroversially enshrined in popular memory as a sunny innocent and freedom-loving optimist, was actually both a calculating and a bad man.

The "11th Commandment" was indeed a crucial factor in the 1966 California gubernatorial election, which Reagan won, and which I've studied very closely for my upcoming book. Since Reagan was a Republican conservative with John Birch Society associations at a time when that was a very controversial thing to be (after, remember, the 1964 humiliation of Barry Goldwater), and since his primary opponent, the much-favored former San Francisco mayor George Christopher, was an then-uncontroversial Republican moderate, the 11th Commandment, which both candidates agreed to uphold, greatly advantaged Ronald Reagan: Christopher couldn't point out that Reagan had associations and held positions that would have made him much more unpopular had more people known about them. And indeed, when Christopher, fading fast late in the primary, eventually decided to chuck it all and "go negative"—he pointed out that a young Reagan had once belonged to groups the Justice Department had labeled "Communist fronts," and that despite running on a platform excoriating University of California students for going on strike, Reagan had led a student strike himself in college—Parkinson roundly censured him, one of the things that helped Reagan win the primary (he went on to beat Pat Brown for the governorship, and the rest is history).

Here's the part few people known about: that Parkinson, quite a hustler--it was revealed in the obscure 1968 book What Makes Reagan Run—had been on paid retainer to the Reagan campaign (reportedly at $33,000, a huge amount at the time) while simultaneously enforcing his Reagan-friendly "Commandment." The whole thing was a sickeningly corrupt hustle.

Parkinson then went on to work for Richard Nixon. Surprise surprise.

How Reagan remains preserved in popular memory as some pure innocent remains to me a mystery. As I've explained before on The Big Con, also in 1966 Reagan covered up his membership in left-wing groups on an FBI security questionnaire, despite the warning on the form, bold as brass, that "any false statement herein may be punished as a felony." And I've also written how he hired a disgraced Watergate-era dirty trickster to run his 1976 presidential campaign in California. We also noted how that selfsame dirty trickster, Ken Rietz—the Washington Post refers to him politely as "an old Nixon hand"—is now a prominent Fred Thompson backer (and also, lest we forget to be ecumenical, a retired executive at Burson-Marsteller, run by top Hillary Clinton strategist Mark Penn).

And may I just say incidentally that Rietz's address, as listed on donor disclosure forms, is on something called "Glimpse of Heaven Lane"? And may I record for the record my belief that neither Rietz, when his time comes, nor Reagan in the here and now, will ever glimpse heaven?

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