The ‘great-souled man’

In October of 1965, Ronald Reagan came to speak at the University of California in Los Angeles. I was a senior, and it was a depressing time to be a College Republican (CR). Barry Goldwater had been thrashed the previous year, and my professors were so left wing that I took one to court because of her biased grading.

The UCLA Student Union was packed. There was a buzz that Mr. Reagan was considering running for governor against the entrenched Democrat, Pat Brown. My buddy and fellow CR Bill Anthony sat expectantly in the audience. As Mr. Reagan began to speak, he filled the room with an energy that was both exciting and soothing, and the thousand-plus students were entranced.

Then he caught us by surprise. He said the conventional political spectrum of left versus right made no sense and he rejected it. “Rather than communists and Marxists on the extreme ‘left’ and Nazis and fascists on the extreme ‘right,’ I think the political spectrum should be ‘up’ and ‘down’ — up toward individual freedom and down toward control of the individual by the state,” he explained.

“The extreme up would be anarchy, no government at all,” he continued, “while the extreme down, at the bottom of the spectrum, would be all forms of totalitarianism: both fascism and communism, Nazism and Marxism, which together in common advocate the abolishment of individual freedom. On this spectrum, I place myself on the up side, not an anarchist, but as an advocate of individual liberty in accordance with a constitutional democracy and rule of law.”

I turned to Bill and whispered, “That settles that.”

“Settles what?” he whispered back.

“That’s my man,” I answered. “I’ve always dreamed of someone publicly saying just that.”

When I was home over the weekend a few days later, I asked my father, “Dad, you know Ronald Reagan, don’t you?” My father, Jackson Wheeler, was a well-known television producer and personality in Los Angeles and knew most people in Hollywood.

“Sure,” he replied. “Why?”

“Because he gave the most amazing speech at UCLA, and it really affected me. I was wondering if I could meet him.”

I had never made such a request before, and my father knew it. So he looked up Mr. Reagan’s number in his address book and called it.

“Ron? This is Jackson Wheeler. My son is a senior at UCLA and heard your speech — he wants to meet you.” When he put down the phone, Dad said, “Ron says to come on over.”

So we drove from Glendale to Pacific Palisades and Ronald Reagan’s home. He greeted us at the door. He was home alone; Nancy wasn’t there. We went to his den, where he sat down in an easy chair, I on a bar stool, with Dad sitting nearby. We talked, and I can’t remember what he said. But when he finished, he raised his hands palms up above the arms of his chair, shrugged his shoulders and said, “And that’s the way I feel.”

I replied, “That’s exactly the way I feel, too.” Then I found myself saying, “Mr. Reagan, I have never worked in a political campaign before, save for walking precincts for Barry Goldwater last year. But I believe in you — so if you decide to run for governor of California, I will do anything I can to help.”

I could not believe what I had just said. I had spent the two previous summers setting up a business in South Vietnam. I was graduating in January and had to hurry back to Saigon. It was lunacy for me to offer to postpone that. Yet something told me I had to.

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