On May 12, 1966, Ronald Reagan—former Hollywood actor, one-time New Deal Democrat, experienced corporate pitchman, and now a rising star in the conservative GOP firmament—strode to the podium at a rally of California Republicans in San Francisco’s cavernous Cow Palace convention center. Introduced to the crowd by television’s Rifleman, Chuck Connors, Reagan stood with a floor-to-rafters American flag at his right. Bathed in the incandescent gaze of his wife, Nancy, he launched into what he would turn into the central theme of his gubernatorial campaign: the imperative to clean up “the mess in Berkeley.”
Reagan had announced his candidacy for governor of California four months earlier, on January 4. In a pre-taped speech broadcast statewide on fifteen television stations, he touched on many of the themes beloved of the Republican Party’s right wing: cutting taxes, having “faith in our free economy,” pushing back the rising tide of crime. But he introduced an element of culture war by alluding to the student protests that had erupted at Berkeley in support of civil rights and in opposition to the Vietnam War. The university administration’s efforts to drive the protests off campus had spawned the free speech movement, which intensified the atmosphere of outcry. “Will we allow a great university to be brought to its knees by a noisy dissident minority?” Reagan asked on the tape. “Will we meet their neurotic vulgarities with vacillation and weakness?”
Reagan expanded on that theme at the Cow Palace. Across the bay, he said, “a small minority of beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates have brought shame on a great university, so much so that applications for enrollment have dropped 21 percent and there’s evidence that they’ll continue to drop even more.” He cited a report published only days before by the state senate committee on un-American activities that labeled the anti-war protests a “rebellion” and called the campus “a rallying point for communists and a center for sexual misconduct.” He admitted that he had not read the report—“I only know what I’ve read in the paper about it”—but quoted almost verbatim its description of a dance sponsored by the campus anti-war Vietnam Day Committee on March 25. During the dance held in a campus gymnasium, Reagan told his audience,
three rock and roll bands were in the center of the gymnasium, playing simultaneously . . . and all during the dance movies were shown on two screens at the opposite ends of the gymnasium. They consisted of color sequences that gave the appearance of different colored liquids spreading across the screen, followed by shots of men and women, on occasion, shots [of] the men and women’s nude torsos, on occasion, and persons twisted and gyrated in provocative and sensual fashion. The young people were seen standing against the walls or lying on the floors and steps in a dazed condition with glazed eyes consistent with a condition of being under the influence of narcotics. Sexual misconduct was blatant. The smell of marijuana was prevalent all over the entire building.
Reagan ascribed this behavior to “a leadership gap and a morality and decency gap” at Berkeley. “The ringleaders should have been taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown out of the university, once and for all.”