'Would you believe,' asked Ronald Reagan, opening his campaign for Governor in 1966, 'that 15.1 per cent of the population of California is on welfare?' A pretty shocking figure, you might think, for the Golden State in the midst of the Vietnam War boom: no wonder Reagan's well-heeled backers were so righteously indignant about all their tax money going to all those layabouts. But we haven't answered the question: would you believe it? Well no, actually - the real figure was 5.1 per cent. Unfazed, Ronnie's backers simply redoubled their efforts and their campaign contributions. The expert handler put in to manage him discovered that 'he knew zero about California when we came in, I mean zero.' Instead, everything had to be reduced to little memorisable gobbets on 5 × 8-inch cards and, above all, Ron had to have a handler with him at every waking moment: 'goofproofing Reagan was a task that called for eternal vigilance.'

LRB 3 March 1988 | PDF Download