A footnote in a book about Ronald Reagan led Gene Kopelson to drop by the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas, in the fall of 2012. Kopelson is a physician, not an academically trained historian. But he had begun research on Reagan’s presidential run in 1968, a campaign to which historians have paid little attention and Reagan himself never counted as his first bid for the White House.
The author of the footnote was Kiron Skinner, a Reagan scholar at the Hoover Institution. It pointed to a connection between Reagan and former president Dwight D. Eisenhower during the 1960s when Reagan was running for governor of California and, later, having won the election, was considering a presidential race. Kopelson was intrigued. He lives in Seattle and spends half the year in medicine, half pursuing his interest in history. He had planned a trip east along I-70. It would take him to three places in Missouri—the Truman Library in Independence, the scene of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, and Mark Twain’s hometown in Hannibal—and to the Lincoln Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois.
Prompted by the footnote, Kopelson added an I-70 stop at the Eisenhower Museum, Library and Boyhood Home in Abilene. “I thought this would be a good thing to look at,” he says. It was a history-making decision in the sense that Kopelson discovered the breadth of a little-known but historically significant episode in Reagan’s path to the presidency.
When Dwight Eisenhower left the White House in 1961, he didn’t divorce himself from politics. He worried about the future of the Republican party, and this led him to Reagan. From 1965 to 1968, he advised Reagan—and not just on foreign affairs and national security policy. His guidance also focused on the practical politics of running for office. Ike was the teacher, Reagan his pupil. They met in person four times, once at Ike’s farm in Gettysburg and twice at the former president’s winter home in Palm Desert, California. The fourth location is unknown—at least, Kopelson hasn’t nailed it down. And they communicated by telephone and by mail.
Kopelson was amazed at what he found at the Eisenhower Library. “My gosh! What a treasure trove of new information,” he says. “None of Reagan’s advisers knew that Ike was there all along.” There was so much compelling material about what Kopelson calls “the hidden mentor-protégé relationship” that it gets equal footing in his book with Reagan’s actual (though secretive) 1968 campaign. A publisher advised Kopelson to separate the topics—Ike and 1968—into two books. But he said no, and it was a wise decision. Many of the themes of Reagan’s speeches as an unannounced candidate for president in 1967-68 (he was governor of California at the time) grew out of lessons from Eisenhower. And these themes have proved to be indelible. Reagan emphasized the same ideas—such as the use of strongly worded language in dealing with adversaries—in the 1970s and ’80s as well. Kopelson’s account is copiously researched to the last small detail and an important addition to the library of Reagan studies.
Eisenhower took a special interest in Reagan: He thought his vice president, Richard Nixon, was the most qualified Republican to be president; but he feared that Nixon, after losing to John F. Kennedy in 1960, couldn’t get elected in 1968. But Reagan could, thus Eisenhower’s eagerness to help. Ike never saw Reagan as too conservative; quite the contrary. He watched Reagan’s famous television speech (“A Time for Choosing”) for Barry Goldwater in 1964 with an expert’s eye. “Looking and listening to Reagan, a new Republican star in the making, Eisenhower liked what he saw and heard,” Kopelson writes. He saw Reagan as “an important part” of rebuilding the GOP after the Goldwater loss.
When Kopelson requested Ike’s papers with a Reagan link at the Eisenhower Library, he learned that a man named Freeman Gosden had contacted Eisenhower in July 1965. Gosden had been the voice of Amos on the old “Amos and Andy” radio show, and was a friend of Reagan and Eisenhower. He sought Ike’s advice on Reagan’s entry into elective politics. In responding to Gosden, Eisenhower made several points, and Gosden passed the letter on to Reagan.
First, he said that Reagan should declare himself a faithful Republican. Second, he should say that he had helped the party and its candidates in 1964. Third, Reagan should call for “common-sense solutions.” (This became a Reagan slogan in 1966 when he ran, successfully, for California governor.) Fourth, Reagan should seek the support of all voters, including Democrats and independents. Fifth, if running for office, he should define his convictions and present them to voters “at every possible opportunity.” And last, Ike urged Reagan to meet frequently with the press.
“Reagan would end up following Eisenhower’s recommendations and advice almost to the letter,” Kopelson writes. He disputes Douglas Brinkley’s insistence that Franklin Roosevelt was Reagan’s biggest influence. Rather, it was Reagan’s “true role model, mentor and hero,” Eisenhower. While still a Democrat, Reagan had backed Ike in 1952.
In a second letter, Gosden sent Eisenhower a set of polls on the California governor’s race and asked, again, for advice. (By then, Reagan and Eisenhower had talked personally.) Ike answered Gosden in a letter urging Reagan to woo his primary opponent’s supporters, promising to back their candidate, San Francisco mayor George Christopher, if he won the Republican nomination. This would create party unity, which Eisenhower felt was critical.
Ike decided, at some point, to “launch Reagan personally well beyond the governorship in Sacramento and potentially right into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” Kopelson writes. After their June 1966 meeting in Gettysburg—the summer before Reagan won the governorship—Eisenhower told reporters that “you can bet he will become a presidential possibility.” Ike’s endorsement “defused any accusations that Reagan was an extreme far right-wing candidate.”
The Gettysburg session lasted two-and-a-half hours. “Eisenhower gave Reagan specific and detailed military strategic and tactical lessons,” writes Kopelson. He said that Americans should always fight to win, deploy overwhelming force, and make threats. In Korea, he had threatened to use nuclear weapons; in Vietnam, Ike told Reagan that he had advised Lyndon Johnson to “mine Haiphong harbor.” He favored bombing North Vietnam “hard” and the “hot pursuit of troops or aircraft into havens.”
Subsequent Reagan comments “indicate that he learned a great deal from the general that day,” Kopelson notes. In his 1968 presidential campaign, Reagan recommended pursuit of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops. He called for the bombing of dams in North Vietnam, as Ike had urged, and, again like Ike, he recommended that the Navy “practice amphibious invasion drills off the North Vietnamese coast so that both the civilian and military populations would worry about an imminent invasion from the sea.”
Kopelson did the math on one point to substantiate that Eisenhower was Reagan’s role model: President Reagan’s direct quoting of Eisenhower’s words, or praise for his programs, occurred at least 178 times, far outstripping Reagan’s references to any other presidents “whom prior historians have said were role models.” Case closed.
These Eisenhower revelations dwarf, in historical importance, what constitutes more than two-thirds of Kopelson’s 931-page study: an account of the 1968 presidential campaign that Reagan and wife Nancy always denied ever happened. But it did happen—indeed, it struck fear in Richard Nixon’s heart that Reagan might steal the nomination at the GOP convention in Miami Beach, despite not having run in any primaries.
Kopelson isn’t the first to cite Reagan’s stealth effort that year. Thomas Reed, Reagan’s chief campaign operative in 1968, wrote about it in his first-person narrative, The Reagan Enigma 1964-1980 (2014), another worthwhile addition to the Reagan bookshelf. So why did Reagan insist he hadn’t run in 1968? The answer “is basic human nature,” Kopelson says. “Much of his campaign was hidden. And he lost.” Nonetheless, Kopelson believes that Reagan’s 1968 clandestine campaign was key to his winning the presidency 12 years later: “It was his true—and needed—dress rehearsal.” And everything he learned about foreign affairs, much of it from Dwight D. Eisenhower, “would be stored away in his mind for future use.”
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
