Vol. 28 No. 20 · 19 October 2006
pages 17-18 | 2573 words
Be Dull, Mr President
Kim Phillips-Fein
- President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination by Richard Reeves
Simon and Schuster, 571 pp, £20.00, March 2006, ISBN 0 7432 3022 1
The night before Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president, he made sure that he got a good night’s sleep, carefully instructing his aides not to wake him until 8 a.m. Jimmy Carter, meanwhile, about to step down from office, had been awake for 48 hours, supervising the negotiations over the release of American hostages in Tehran. In the early hours of the morning on Inauguration Day, he called Blair House, where Reagan was sleeping, with exciting news about progress. Mike Deaver, the president-elect’s aide, told Carter it was too soon to wake him. At 8 o’clock, when Deaver finally tried to rouse the new president, telling him it would soon be time to be sworn in, Reagan groaned: ‘Do I have to?’ On the way to the ceremony, he tried to chat with the exhausted Carter, regaling him with tales of his Hollywood days long ago at Warner Bros. ‘He kept talking about Jack Warner,’ Carter later complained. ‘Who’s Jack Warner?’
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Letters
Vol. 28 No. 22 · 16 November 2006
From Eileen Lottman
Kim Phillips-Fein is wrong about the nature of Ronald Reagan’s 1950s tour of General Electric factories (LRB, 19 October). He wasn’t sent on tour for the purpose of ‘speaking to groups of workers about the dangers of creeping socialism’; he was sent to promote a television show in which he played the host.
I was an employee of the PR firm that represented The General Electric Theater, the half-hour magazine show Reagan presented on the CBS network. Our problem was that everyone knew that Ronnie – as he was universally called in those days – on his own couldn’t draw in the audience needed to keep the show on air every Sunday evening. We came up with the idea that if GE workers could be made to feel pride in the show, they could make up a major core audience. We sent Ronnie out to the GE plants with the message: ‘Live Better Electrically’ and ‘Watch the GE Theater, It’s Your Show.’ I wrote the speech, pleasant and innocuous, a plug for the show and for TV in general (every home should have one) and a call for unity and loyalty to the company. But something odd was happening as the tour proceeded. As he gave the same speech over and over, and the workers happily responded, he began to add some words of his own to my canned speech. Perhaps it was the influence of his new wife, Nancy, maybe it was simply that the enthusiasm of the workers went to his head, but during that tour Ronnie decided he was a star, no longer a featured player. He widened the speech to include some national issues, testing the waters. He went out there a B-list actor and came back a politician.
Eileen Lottman
New York
Vol. 28 No. 24 · 14 December 2006
From Kim Phillips-Fein
Eileen Lottman opens her letter in response to my piece about Ronald Reagan by suggesting that Reagan’s speaking tour around General Electric factories was entirely non-political, but ends by saying that he embellished the speech that she wrote for him with remarks that reflected his development as a conservative political thinker (16 November). I think she understates the level of political anxiety at GE during the 1950s. Following a major strike at the company in 1946, executives embarked on an elaborate exercise intended to neutralise and weaken the unions and to improve community relations. This included such ideological projects as ‘economics education’ classes for workers on company time, and taking a very hard line in union negotiations. Reagan’s time at GE overlapped with all this, and it is hard to imagine that he was unaffected by the political fear, free-market ideology and anti-unionism in GE at the time.
Kim Phillips-Fein
New York University
