The Crusader

produced by later 60 Minutes brainchild Don Hewitt and hosted by CBS News correspondent Charles Collingwood.⁷

The debate was watched by 15 million Americans and served as a wake-up call to those who underestimated Reagan. Revealing the governor to be exceptionally well-informed on the Vietnam issue, there was total agreement—even among media sources such as the San Francisco Chronicle and Newsweek who revered Bobby Kennedy—that Reagan overwhelmingly won the debate. “To those unfamiliar with Reagan’s big-league savvy,” reported Newsweek,“the ease with which he fielded questions about Vietnam may have come as a revelation.” Newsweek judged that “political rookie Reagan… left old campaigner Kennedy blinking when the session ended,” and thoughtfully speculated whether the debate might be a “dry run” for a future set of “Great Debates” between these two promising presidential aspirants.⁸

Historian David Halberstam, a liberal, acknowledged that “the general consensus” was that “Reagan… destroyed him.”⁹ Lou Cannon agreed as well, saying that, “Reagan clearly bested Kennedy,”¹⁰ as did another of Reagan’s first biographers, Joseph Lewis. In his 1968 work on Reagan, Lewis recorded that the “tanned and relaxed” Reagan “talked easily and precisely without a hint of uncertainty or hostility,” and “deflated” the “anguished” Kennedy, who “gulped in restrained agony” when answering questions. Kennedy, said Lewis, “looked as if he had stumbled into a minefield”—which is a good metaphor, since the hostile questioners treated both him and Reagan like war criminals.¹¹

Truthfully, this was not a debate between Ronald Reagan and Bobby Kennedy. Rather, it descended into a venomous America-bashing session by a panel of extremely rude international students, who seemed to bask in their big chance to unleash their torrent of anger on the two available representatives of the country they despised. Newsweek rightly described the students as “interrogators.” In this atmosphere, Reagan and Kennedy ended up debating the group of students, not one another. And it was there that Reagan was so effective, whereas Kennedy was passive, meek, apologetic, and ineffective. Those looking for a defense of the United States not merely in Vietnam but as anything other than history’s greatest purveyor of global misery were frustrated by Kennedy’s lame responses but buoyed by Reagan’s strong retorts.

In one of the evening’s many disturbing moments, the students mockingly laughed out loud when Reagan said (obviously correctly) that the people of Mao’s China had never chosen their government. In a more gratifying exchange, a contemptuous British student, who Kennedy permitted to roll all over him, complained that the Diem regime, with the alleged help of U.S. advisers, had incarcerated six million Vietnamese in “forced prison camps.” With a smile, Reagan told the angry young man that there was no record whatsoever to confirm the allegation and that there were only sixteen million people in all of South Vietnam. Newsweek was impressed by this exchange, writing that Reagan “effortlessly reeled off more facts and quasifacts about the Vietnam conflict than anyone suspected he ever knew.”¹² Especially notable, but forgotten by history, were Reagan’s remarks that evening concerning the Berlin Wall. The governor asserted:

When we signed the Consular Treaty with the Soviet Union, I think there were things that we could’ve asked in return: I think it would be very admirable if the Berlin Wall, which was built in direct contravention to a treaty, should disappear. I think this would be a step toward peace and toward self-determination for all people, if it were.

Here was possibly Reagan’s first public call for the removal of the Berlin Wall, offered in May 1967, twenty years before his famous plea to Mikhail Gorbachev.

Once the hour had passed, Chris Collingwood jumped in to mercifully stop the spectacle. Despite the unpleasant nature of many of the student interactions, Reagan had performed well—so well that his presidential boosters eventually sought to use clips from the debate during the 1968 Oregon primary, and requested a copy from CBS. Kennedy, however, reportedly did not want the video to be made available; CBS acceded to his request.¹³ Kennedy himself conceded defeat to Reagan, telling his aides after the debate to never again put him on the same stage with “that son-of-a-bitch.” Kennedy was heard to ask immediately after the debate, “Who the f___ got me into this?”¹⁴

TEAR DOWN THAT WALL

While the debate was a win for Reagan, he had other (more routine) engagements that addressed the Cold War during this time. In a speech in Albany, Oregon on November 11, 1967, Reagan spoke of the USSR as the “totalitarian force in the world [that] has made plain its goal of world domination.” As always, he said this was a goal that had been reiterated by Khrushchev and all present Soviet rulers—“Each one has stated they will not retreat one inch from the Marxian concept of a one-world socialist state.” America needed to “fight” that enemy. “If we have the courage to face reality, peace is not so difficult to come by. We can have peace by morning if we do not mind the price.”

The price, however, was an impediment; Reagan questioned America’s will: “Why are we so reluctant to do this? Because there is a price we will not pay.” He pointed to the Soviet tanks that crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and the “echoes” of those who then cried: “People of the civilized world, in the name of liberty and solidarity, we are asking your help…. Listen to our cry.”¹⁵

Reagan’s words that day were revealing of his Cold War intentions. He continued: We cannot bring peace “by simply refusing to fight.” It was “the height of folly” to believe “that we can end the Cold War simply by convincing the enemy of our good intentions.” He asked: “How many nations have backed down the road of good intentions to end up against a wall of no retreat with the only choice to fight or surrender?” He recalled the “sorry” example of Neville Chamberlain. He insisted that America could not “safely rest the case of freedom with the United Nations.”¹⁶ No, that was America’s job.

These were strong words. It might have served Reagan well to make clear to his critics that choosing to “fight” did not mean that he favored armed aggression against the USSR. He did not make that clarification, probably because he felt it was unnecessary to do so; he did not want to nuke or invade the Soviet Union.

A few months later, in May and June 1968, Reagan made a number of historically important statements that likewise have somehow slipped through the cracks of history. In a May 21 speech in Miami, Reagan again, for the second time within a year, and nearly twenty years before his address at the Brandenburg Gate, talked about removing the Berlin Wall: “If Russia needs our wheat to satisfy the hunger of her people, it might be well to point out that wheat could be delivered easier if there were no Berlin Wall between us.”¹⁷ Here Reagan essentially suggested that the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, or an incoming administration, link U.S. wheat exports to a Soviet commitment to take down the wall. The very next day, in Cleveland, he again attacked the wall, denouncing “Khrushchev’s contemptuous raising of the wall around Berlin.”¹⁸

With his travels enabling him to speak to a variety of audiences, these stops around the country proved valuable to Reagan. Not only did they enhance his campaigning skills and political recognition, but they also provided him with a forum to air his passions. Though Reagan had been speaking on these issues for more than twenty years, he had never done so as a politician. Speaking to disparate groups of individuals gave him a certain confidence that he would rely upon during his national campaigns in later years.

COMMUNISM KILLS THE KENNEDYS

Most intriguing were unrelated (and likewise forgotten) remarks made by Reagan two weeks later, on June 5, 1968. On that day, Bobby Kennedy was again an item for Reagan, though this time in a dreadful way that the governor could not have imagined in their debate a year earlier: Kennedy had just been assassinated.

Reagan was invited to talk about the tragedy on entertainer Joey Bishop’s television show. A rare transcript of his appearance is today held by Bill Clark, who, as Governor Reagan’s chief of staff, grabbed a copy after the show. When Reagan appointed Clark a judge in San Luis Obispo County in 1970, Clark placed the transcript in a box, where it remains four decades later.¹⁹