When a coterie of rich white conservatives decided that a former actor could best represent their interests and serve as an antidote to Democratic Gov. Pat Brown, they figured to run him on a predictable platform: tax cuts and new blood. But as the personable Reagan began his first forays on the campaign trail through the agricultural heartland and the blue-collar suburbs of L.A., something unexpected happened. Ignoring pollsters, Reagan preferred to take the popular pulse himself. He soon noticed that in these small towns there were always a few questions about Berkeley, free speech, filthy speech, and the perceived coddling of student ingrates by Brown and university administrators. "Once early in the campaign we were up in the Central Valley," remembers Stuart Spencer, one of Reagan's top outside political consultants, "and he heard these questions. I said, 'Ron, this isn't even a blip on the screen.' He said, 'Yeah, well, I believe it will be.' He kept pounding at it, and three or four months later it showed up on the surveys."

According to Edmund Morris's book Dutch, Reagan homed in on what the candidate called "the morality gap at Berkeley." More than 20 years ahead of the national family values debate, the 55-year-old Republican had seized on a wedge issue and transformed it into a compelling platform plank. And 14 years before they became known as Reagan Democrats in a presidential race, thousands of working-class Golden State voters, traditionally the bedrock of the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy, liked what they heard from this plum-cheeked transplanted Midwesterner. "In all the sound and fury at Berkeley, one voice is missing," he thundered at a press conference in L.A. "And since it is the voice of those who built the university and pay the entire cost of its operation, I think it's time that voice was heard." Reagan defeated two-term Governor Brown by nearly a million votes. After he moved into the governor's chair, he memorialized his campaign-trail rhetoric by mounting a bronze plaque over his office door: "Observe the Rules or Get Out."

As governor, however, he was mostly pragmatic toward the dissident hotbeds of his sprawling state. Supporters say he was focused on helping the 95 percent of college students who didn't burn their draft cards or bras. "Clark Kerr [the UC chancellor] once told me that the UC system did a lot better with Reagan than it did with Jerry Brown [his successor as governor]," says Cannon. Reagan's detractors say he was blind to how his hard-right talk metamorphosed into policies that hurt the disadvantaged. "His tenure served havoc to this community and to the state of California," says Maudelle Shirek, now vice mayor of Berkeley and a community organizer in the '60s. "We were making progress [on the homeless, health care, and education] until Reagan became governor, and then it became much harder to come by."

Reagan's run for a second term in 1970 was still about the counterculture. Student radicalism had been garlanded by the 1967 Summer of Love, renewed by antidraft demos following the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, popularized by Woodstock in 1969. Berkeley activists had made the springtime battle over Peoples Park—a rundown area near campus—a metaphor for the generational clash. Reagan called in 2,500 National Guard troops to clear it. "Reagan basically got a job with the ruling class as henchman and executioner," says Michael Delacour, who helped lead some of the rallies. Ed Meese, on Reagan's staff from 1967-74 and later his attorney general, recalls the governor's one message: "These people are the most privileged and are getting an education at very low cost, and they're using their opportunity to tear down the colleges instead of trying to learn. He felt this was an outrage—and most people pretty much felt the way Ronald Reagan did."

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