Joe Shell - Reservations About Reagan

Reservations About Reagan

Shell planned to run again for governor in 1966. Max Rafferty, a native of Louisiana, also considered running that year but instead successfully sought his second and final term as superintendent of public instruction, a nonpartisan position. In his 1998 work Triumph of the Right: The Rise of the California Conservative Movement, Kurt Schuparra called Shell "embittered" because the former Assemblyman believed that he should have the support of the conservative base that he had served so long and faithfully. Vernon Cristina, a Shell loyalist from 1962, tried to talk his friend out of running and instead to support Ronald Reagan. "You don't have the ingredients to win," said Cristina. Goldwater asked Rus Walton, who had been Shell's 1962 campaign manager, to convince Shell to defer to Reagan, but Walton declined to deliver the message to his old friend.

Ultimately, Reagan sealed up conservative support. Shell hesistated to support Reagan: he questioned Reagan's late conversion to the party and some of the leftist associations that Reagan maintained during the 1950s, when he had nevertheless supported Eisenhower for President. Reagan went on to secure the nomination by defeating former San Francisco Mayor George Christopher, a Greek American who had been Nixon's lieutenant governor running mate in 1962. Shell claimed that Reagan had earlier promised to support him for governor, an assertion that Reagan denied. Reagan financial backer Holmes Tuttle pleaded with Shell to support Reagan and offered him a leading role in the campaign, but Shell demurred.

Shell said that his reservations about Reagan were vindicated as early as 1967, when the newly-inaugurated governor's appointment list reflected none of the conservatives recommended by Shell, but were instead mostly individuals who had backed Rockefeller over Goldwater in 1964. One of the appointees was Caspar Weinberger of San Francisco, whose career would culminate as the United States Secretary of Defense under President Reagan. Shell opposed Nixon's selection of Weinberger as state party chairman in 1962. In his 2001 memoir In the Arena, Weinberger said that Nixon had been "substantially weakened" because of Shell's challenge: He was a former football player at USC, which in Southern California was practically a passport to political advancement. . . . Nixon won the primary, but he did so without generating much GOP enthusiasm." Over the years, most conservatives considered Weinberger, originally a liberal Republican, to have become one of their own. Another such appointment was Houston I. Flournoy, who in 1974 would carry the GOP banner in an unsuccessful bid to succeed Reagan as governor, having been defeated by Brown's son, Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown, Jr.

Shell attended the 1968 convention in Miami Beach which nominated his old rival Nixon on the first ballot with relatively little opposition coming from Governors Rockefeller and Reagan. Shell said that later events proved Nixon unfit for the presidency: "I felt then that Nixon was bad for the party, and Watergate and the subsequent stain he left proved me right."