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Yet, there is no major candidate in the U.S. today who has stirred so much speculation, even calumny. Where—really—does Ronald Reagan stand? Says New York G.O.P. Governor Nelson Rockefeller: "Reagan was a Roosevelt New Dealer once, wasn't he? I don't know what he is now." Snaps former California Democratic Chairman Roger Kent: "He's a man with no views of his own." A veteran California G.O.P. campaigner—a moderate—comes closer to the truth: "He was never as far right as people said. And he isn't going as far left as people suggest." After all, reasons House Minority Leader Jerry Ford, "I don't think it's a great mark of character to put your feet in cement and then stand there."
Off the Letterhead. Not in California certainly. Pat Brown ran for the state assembly as a Republican in 1928, vowed on becoming Governor that he would follow the illustrious example of Earl Warren and Hiram Johnson, Republicans both. Actor George Murphy, once a New Deal Democrat, was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Republican in 1964. And Ronnie Reagan was once an outspoken Roosevelt-Truman Democrat and A.D.A. activist. As president of the Hollywood Screen Actors Guild, he could not believe that he was being gulled by Communist officials, as he admits today, and himself earned a reputation as a fellow traveler. During California's savage 1950 Senate election fight between liberal Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas and Republican Richard Nixon, Reagan worked hard to elect Mrs. Douglas. Yet her top strategists voted to keep Ronnie's name off the campaign letterhead because of his far-left connections.
Over the next decade or so, disenchantment set in. In 1952 and 1956 Reagan voted for Dwight Eisenhower, and in 1960 he campaigned for Nixon for President. And by 1962 Reagan had leaped a pole apart from his original Democratic allegiance: he campaigned for California Congressman John Rousselot, who ran—and lost—as an avowed member of the John Birch Society. The same year, Reagan was state campaign chairman for Birch Backer Loyd Wright in his Republican primary contest against moderate G.O.P. Senator Thomas Kuchel. In 1964 Reagan, as co-chairman of California Citizens for Goldwater, went on TV with a sensational fund-raising speech in which he criticized the TVA, called the graduated income tax an example of "immorality," and accused liberals of advocating "appeasement" of Russia. When Goldwater lost, Reagan blamed the debacle on party "traitors."
Now, well removed from the passions of 1964, Reagan has a considerably different perspective: "Perhaps we needed the bloodbath. Perhaps we needed the bitterness on both sides. I think it made us all realize that we have too much in common to be separated by intolerant differences."