The world of President Ronald Reagan’s colleagues and friends continues to suffer losses with the recent deaths of speechwriter Tony Dolan and national security adviser Richard V. Allen. Those men have received due tributes, but one figure who has not gotten the acknowledgment he deserved was Thomas C. Reed (1934-2024). Tom passed away a little over a year ago, and I knew him well and worked with him. Tom and his critically important roles in the history and life of Ronald Reagan remain largely unknown to the world and even to almost all Reagan historians. Consider this a belated farewell and tribute.
Reed told me he had jumped up from the hotel room’s couch, quickly envisioning that “Ronald Reagan should be president of the United States — forget Goldwater!”
I first met Tom via a phone call in 2012, as I was starting work on exploring Reagan’s first presidential campaign, in 1968. That campaign itself is often forgotten, written off as a last-minute waste of time by almost every other Reagan historian (most people think Reagan’s first presidential campaign was in 1976). Tom quickly assured me that, in fact, those historians were wrong. Tom’s generosity surfaced, as he shared the meticulous notes he had kept of the entire first presidential campaign, which began a scant nine days after he had won the governorship of California in 1966, and ended at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach the summer of 1968.
To review together all the early Reagan documents that Tom had kept for decades, and for me to share all the Reagan ’68 research I had found, my wife and I drove to Tom’s (and his wife Kay’s) hilltop home — set amongst his vineyards, as far as the eye could see — in California’s wine country. First we chatted, for over an hour, just about his non-political background.
A Man of Many Talents
Tom Reed was a true Renaissance man. His non-Reagan accolades were truly remarkable. They included graduating first in his class at Cornell University in mechanical engineering; serving as commander of the ROTC cadet corps; a master’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Southern California; working as project officer for both the USAF Minuteman re-entry system and for a nuclear-powered jet; designing the detonation mechanism for two thermonuclear devices at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which garnered praise from renowned physicist Edward Teller.
Reed was also the founder of a superconductor company; advance man for the 1964 Goldwater campaign; Assistant to Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger; Defense Department chief of Telecommunications, Command and Control; 11th Secretary of the Air Force; developer of Breckenridge Ski Resort; Director of the National Reconnaissance Office; helping Ukraine’s nuclear arsenal return to Russia; Cold War historian; wine country magnate; spy fiction writer; and even starting his own real estate firm.
As we talked in 2012, Reed interrupted his own oral autobiography as his eyes sparkled when recalling how he and Reagan both had shared a love of new technology as well as of Shakespeare. During the countless hours they had spent together during their shared 1968 campaign, Reagan and he had voiced their mutual admiration of Shakespeare’s Henry V, because Henry had beaten the French at the Battle of Agincourt with the new technologies of the long bow and the use of artillery. Reed told me that Henry V was Reagan’s favorite Shakespeare character. (Later I learned that at Eureka College, the young Reagan had performed The Taming of the Shrew, and decades later on June 14, 1983, during a presidential visit to Tennessee, he had quoted the “Tomorrow and tomorrow” speech from Macbeth.)
As he returned to his own background, Reed noted a pivotal moment for him in the mid-1960s. By this time, Reed had left the world of science and the military and was gaining hands-on experience in politics. He honed in on the critical life-altering event which had launched him to Reagan.
On October 27, 1964, Reed was in a hotel room in Pittsburgh, having been assigned two states (Pennsylvania and Rhode Island), which Goldwater knew he would lose. Knowing that actor Ronald Reagan would be delivering a speech for Goldwater, Reed — depressed by the election loss he knew was coming the next week — unenthusiastically turned on the television. As he watched Reagan deliver his now-famous “A Time for Choosing” speech, Reed said he was “hit by a bolt of lightning.” He saw in Reagan “an articulate spokesman for individual freedom who delivered a highly polished and professional speech.”
Reed told me he had jumped up from the hotel room’s couch, quickly envisioning that “Ronald Reagan should be president of the United States — forget Goldwater! — and I’m going to help him!”
Reed then reviewed his first decade with Governor Reagan: northern California manager for the 1966 gubernatorial campaign; Appointments Secretary; Traveling Secretary; campaign manager for Reagan’s first presidential run in 1968; head of telecommunications at the Miami Beach convention (wherein Reed and Lockheed Martin’s secret Skunkworks division had built a special high-tech Reagan communications van); and campaign manager for Reagan’s 1970 re-election campaign. Reed’s later years with President Reagan included, member of the Commission on Strategic Forces and Special Assistant for National Security Policy, where Reed’s leadership at the National Security Council had helped Reagan win the Cold War.
That afternoon, Tom and I adjourned to a large table so we could review my research documents and his campaign notes of the 1968 campaign — which would culminate in my Reagan’s 1968 Dress Rehearsal: Ike, RFK, and Reagan’s Emergence as a World Statesman (Figueroa Press, 2016). Impressed with all I had uncovered, Reed asked if I would be his chief researcher for the new memoir he was writing; I accepted on the spot.
Reagan and Robert F. Kennedy
Tom and I proceeded to evaluate the history of Ronald Reagan’s political fighting with Robert F. Kennedy in the 1960s. As attorney general, RFK had directed the SAG-MCA investigation against Reagan and arranged for 10 years of Reagan’s taxes to be audited by the IRS. In turn, Reagan blamed RFK for getting him fired as the host of General Electric Theater. Reed’s face brightened as he told me that until he and I had started chatting, he had no idea as to these personal reasons why Reagan had so despised Robert Kennedy during that first presidential campaign.
Reed had witnessed a number of key moments in the Reagan-RFK relationship: the only Reagan-RFK in-person meeting at the 1967 Gridiron Club dinner; their May 15, 1967 internationally televised Vietnam debate; and in March 1968, Reed with Reagan watched RFK announce he was running for president, with Reed telling me that he had never seen Reagan so angry.
The latter moment was pivotal for Reagan. Reagan’s furious reaction led to the reinvigoration of his own campaign by hiring a new speechwriter and starting a major new series of campaign visits. Reagan and Reed together completed five new white-paper speeches attacking the foreign policy and domestic failures of the Kennedy-Johnson administration, which Reagan delivered that spring.
Alas, Reed also witnessed Ronald Reagan’s poignant speeches on Robert Kennedy after his tragic assassination in June 1968. Reagan laid the blame for the deaths of both Kennedy brothers on international communism. He was very upset by the RFK killing.
Ronald Reagan’s First Public Call to Knock Down the Berlin Wall
Thomas C. Reed witnessed still much more. At the end of Ronald Reagan’s May 15, 1967 Vietnam debate with RFK, which was seen by millions of viewers on CBS television, the subject switched to how America should negotiate with communists. Reagan at that point made quite an historic statement. Twenty years before President Reagan would deliver his famous speech imploring Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, and also 20 years before Donald Trump would publish his The Art of the Deal, Reed watched as Reagan — the former president and master negotiator for the Screen Actors Guild — proclaimed that President Lyndon Johnson’s unilateral offer to give wheat to the USSR should have been negotiated to include an important reciprocal action by the Soviets: the Berlin Wall should be “knocked down” and “should disappear.”
It was Reagan’s first ever call to tear down the Berlin Wall. During subsequent presidential campaign visits with Reed to Florida in 1968, Reagan again called to tear down the wall.
Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower
Next in our Reagan discussion, Tom Reed and I turned to Dwight Eisenhower. I asked if he knew the origin of the friendship between Reagan and Ike, which is another subject that even many Reagan biographers are unaware of. Reed demurred but smiled, anticipating learning important new information. To me, Reed seemed the ideal professor, who took genuine interest in his students, listened attentively, and imparted critically important wisdom.
Reed was amazed, and completely unaware, of the early Eisenhower-Reagan interactions that my research had uncovered at the Eisenhower Presidential Library. For instance, I showed him a July 15, 1965 letter of detailed, specific political advice to Reagan as he was contemplating entering politics. I also detailed how the former president and World War II general had begun mentoring staunch anti-communist Reagan on world affairs and — over the next three years of letters, in-person meetings which Reed himself had attended, and phone calls — seeing him as a future president.
Reed now understood how Reagan’s gubernatorial campaign theme — “common sense” — had originated directly from Eisenhower, and how Ike’s June 2, 1966 letter urging Reagan to concentrate on northern and rural California resulted directly in Reed being hired by Reagan in the first place.
Reed discussed his recollections of the four in-person meetings between Eisenhower and Reagan. That included the first one at the Eisenhower farm in Gettysburg shortly after Reagan had won the CA GOP nomination for governor (see photo). Reed felt that the most important of these meetings was the multi-hour visit in March 1968, when issues of global importance were discussed between the former president and future president. In that meeting, Eisenhower went beyond his and Reagan’s prior discussions of military strategy and tactics of Korea and now Vietnam. Eisenhower, who played a pivotal role in defeating Nazi Germany and had stopped the fighting in Korea, looked ahead to how Reagan, as a possible future president in January 1969, could defeat communism via a strong American military and economy.
Dwight Eisenhower, Thomas C. Reed, and Ronald Reagan at Eisenhower’s Gettysburg office, June 15, 1966. Courtesy of Thomas C. Reed
Then Reed and I turned to the nuts and bolts of that first Reagan presidential campaign, detailed in my book, which partly emanated from this research. It documents how Reed was instrumental in arranging a number of remarkable firsts for Reagan, many of which became critically important for world history. One such example was missile defense.
The Origins of SDI: Reagan’s First Public Call for a Missile Defense Shield
On September 29, 1967, a Life magazine cover story showed how America was considering building an anti-ballistic missile shield. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (who served both JFK and LBJ) said that although the Soviets were building a missile shield to protect Moscow, the United States could not build such a shield because the USSR had too many missiles. All we could do was to try to protect ourselves against communist Chinese missiles. An infuriated Reagan thought this was rubbish.
Simultaneously, Senator Strom Thurmond’s biography (written by conservative luminary Lee Edwards) was being published, and in it, Thurmond had pushed strongly for America to develop a missile defense shield. He would only endorse a presidential candidate who agreed with this plan, and candidate Reagan met with Thurmond to seek his endorsement.
In Seattle on November 11, 1967, Reagan revealed that he had been reading all he could about missiles and the military uses of space. His musings led to Reed helping arrange a crucial visit to the site of technological planning for America’s nascent missile shield: Reed’s former workplace at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, headed by Reed’s old pal, Dr. Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb. Reagan visited for a full half day, spending much time seeing in-person the progress being made by Teller, and asked many thoughtful questions.
Six months later, on July 19, 1968, delivering a presidential campaign speech in Amarillo, which Reed and Reagan had worked on, Reagan would decry America signing the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty because it “would stop us from protecting our cities, as theirs are already protected by an anti-ballistic missile program.” Losing the 1968 GOP nomination forced Reagan to shelve his vision of an American missile defense shield. But later as president and with Reed and Reagan’s roadmap to win the Cold War firmly in place, Reagan resurrected his dormant 1968 plan, announcing it as his Strategic Defense Initiative on March 23, 1983. He did so with Dr. Teller at his side, and with Reed a guiding hand.
Particularly significant, Reagan had appointed Reed to direct National Security Decision Directive 32, which was released in April-May 1982. Reed and others (including Reagan historian and The American Spectator chief editor Paul Kengor) believe that NSDD-32 was the crucial directive in winning the Cold War.
There is so much more that could and should be said about that. For more, read my book or those of others, and especially Reed’s two memoirs, At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War or The Reagan Enigma.
Cold warrior Thomas C. Reed was a constant and long-serving force and intimate adviser in the political life of Ronald Reagan, possibly the single longest. He made sure that the promise he made to himself after watching Reagan make his “A Time for Choosing” speech in 1964 would be fulfilled. America and our world — a world free of Soviet communism and the Berlin Wall — must give a final salute of well-deserved gratitude to Thomas C. Reed.
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Gene Kopelson is author of Reagan’s 1968 Dress Rehearsal: Ike, RFK, and Reagan’s Emergence as a World Statesman (2016 Figueroa Press). He is also Reagan Roundtable Scholar for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Foundation’s Reagan Institute; vice president of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts; past president of the Florida Gulf Coast chapter of the International Churchill Society; and past national trustee of the Theodore Roosevelt Association. His website is www.genekopelson.com