Stewart Spencer dies: The strategist who launched Ronald Reagan’s political career

Stuart K. Spencer, the Republican strategist who helped make washed-up movie actor Ronald Reagan governor of California and later president, has died. Helping invent the modern political consulting business in the process. He is 97 years old.

Spencer died Sunday, according to his daughter Karen.

Spencer once dreamed of coaching a big-time college football team, and his blunt, acerbic style was perfect for calling the shots on the sidelines or delivering fiery speeches in the locker room. Instead, he offered forthright advice from the Oval Office and other institutions of power.

During his failed re-election bid in 1976, Spencer dissuaded the fall-prone President Ford from venturing too far from the Rose Garden, telling him, “As much as you love it, you are – a campaigner.”

After the Soviet Union shot down a South Korean airliner in 1983, sending chills to the Cold War around the world, Spencer used profanity to demand that a vacationing Reagan come down from the Santa Ynez Mountains to make a statement.

In 1987, Spencer flew from California to Washington to help convince Reagan to publicly acknowledge his administration’s arms sales to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages.

In a Republican Party that has moved sharply to the right and increasingly valued fighting over compromise, Spencer is a throwback, a self-described moderate who respects and even befriends members of the partisan opposition and the political press corps. As the decades passed, Spencer found himself increasingly alienated from his lifelong party.

He is no fan of Donald Trump and is particularly unhappy with those who try to wrap him up in Reagan’s mantle.

Spencer has never voted for the real estate developer and reality star, voting for a third-party candidate in 2016 and for Joe Biden in 2020 – the first time since Harry Truman in 1948 The first Democratic presidential candidate endorsed by Spencer.

Spencer considered Trump a “demagogue and opportunist” and said if Regan were still alive, he would be disgusted by Trump’s erratic behavior. “The way he treats women,” Spencer said in a 2021 interview. “He took all those people’s money.” (As a businessman, Trump was known for not paying contractors.)

In the last decades of his life, Spencer, like Cassandra, offered advice that many Republicans chose neither to listen to nor to heed.

He warned that harsh rhetoric about immigration and affirmative action could alienate the country’s growing Latino population. “The choices we make will easily impact California and the nation for the next 10 to 20 years,” Spencer predicted in a 1997 open letter to Republican leaders.

He delivered his advice with joy and a husky, infectious laugh that took some of the sting out of his sometimes unpopular advice. And he was cautious throughout. Although he had many stories he shared privately, he turned down a lucrative paycheck to write a comprehensive report on the Reagan presidency, making him one of the few people with close ties to the administration to turn down money-making opportunities.

Spencer said kissing and telling wasn’t his style.

He was born Stuart Krieg Murphy in Phoenix on February 20, 1927. His father was an alcoholic, and Stuart abandoned his family when he was a baby. He grew up in California and took the surname of his mother’s new husband, A. Kenneth Spencer. Republican activist who helped Richard M. Nixon win his first congressional race.

In 1944, Spencer joined the Navy the day after graduating from high school. He was 17 years old and eager to serve. But after a few years of scrubbing, he became increasingly convinced that college offered a better path forward. (He also came to regret the anchor tattooed on his forearm.)

Spencer graduated from Cal State Los Angeles in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and served as recreation director for the City of Alhambra. Despite his stepfather’s activism, Spencer was not an instinctive Republican. In the early 1950s, Spencer was recruiting for the Junior Chamber of Commerce when John Rousselot, a rising conservative star, made an offer: If Spencer joined the Republican Party, he would join the chamber.

Spencer immediately entered politics. It was like sports, with clear winners and losers, and he liked that. After volunteering for a series of campaigns, he eventually found work as a Los Angeles County Republican organizer. There, Spencer met Bill Roberts, who for a time made a living selling televisions. After a year of working together, the pair resigned from their party posts to start a political consultancy. They flipped a quarter. Spencer called and won, so that was it for Spencer-Roberts.

They work for anyone willing to hire them, from Rousselot to left-leaning Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Kuchel. It was only later, when they could afford it, that Spencer Roberts began to be more picky with his clients.

The two men helped pioneer the clever television-centric campaigns that became the norm in California and across the country.

“Bill Roberts and Stu Spencer are undoubtedly the fathers of modern political consulting in California, making it a full-time profession as well as a respected profession,” said a Sacramento Republican consultant who followed them into the field. Sal Russo said.

The two can play rough. Spencer loved the story of how Reagan, when he first ran for office, hired Spencer Roberts to manage his successful 1966 campaign for governor. In 1964, the two men worked for New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in the California Republican presidential primary, nearly losing in a tight race against Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater. About a year later, Goldwater told Reagan, “If I were running in California, I would hire those bastards Spencer Roberts.”

“It’s Ronald Reagan’s pragmatism,” Spencer said with a laugh in a 2002 interview. “He knew what we did.”

Spencer is also a pragmatist. Although he worked for a man who became a demi-god among conservative admirers, he and Reagan had significant differences, with Spencer supporting legalized abortion, affirmative action and some gun control.

Spencer took issue with revisionists who have obscured parts of Reagan’s record — raising taxes, expanding the size of the federal government, signing a law amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants in the U.S. — that defy the Reagan myth. . In a separate interview on the eve of the 2011 presidential debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Spencer said with characteristic bluntness that many people “don’t really understand what he did.” “It’s just a matter of attaching yourself to the winner.”

Spence, who despised Washington and refused to live there, had some minor controversy with his consulting work—what he frankly called “influence peddling”—with clients including apartheid-era South Africa and Panamanian dictator Manu Government of El Antonio Noriega. But Spencer made no apology or expression of regret.

“Everything I did, I did,” he said. “Met a lot of great people. Met a lot of [jerks]. I’ve seen a lot of the world.

However, as Spencer’s life came to a close, he expressed dismay at the direction the Republican Party had taken with so many people in Trump’s personal thrall.

“I feel like I wasted a lot of years. When you get to my age” — he was 94 at the time — “you hope things will get better, not worse. But things have gotten worse.

Spencer and his first wife, Joan Dikeman, divorced in 1987 after 37 years of marriage. In 1992 he married Barbara Callihan, who survives him and their two children, Karen; Entered the political consulting industry. and Steven; stepdaughter Debbie DeSilva; and six grandchildren.