Stuart Spencer is dead: The strategist launched Ronald Reagan's political career

Stuart K. Spencer, the Republican strategist who took on movie star Ronald Reagan and helped make him governor of California and later, president — who helped found the modern political consulting business — has died. He was 97 years old.

Spencer died Sunday, according to his daughter, Karen.

Spencer once dreamed of coaching big-time college football and his blunt, salty style could have him barking orders on the sidelines or delivering tongue-in-cheek speeches in the locker room. Instead, he offered his unvarnished advice to the Oval Office and other powerful perches.

It was Spencer who dissuaded the tripping President Ford from going too far from the Rose Garden during his failed re-election campaign in 1976, telling him, “As much as you like it, you're like—a campaigner.”

It was Spencer who demanded — insultingly — that the vacationing Reagan descend from Mount Santa Ynez to make a statement after the Soviet Union shot down a Korean airliner in 1983, sending the Cold War around the world.

It was Spencer who traveled from California to Washington in 1987 to help Reagan publicly admit that his administration had sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages.

In a Republican party that has veered sharply to the right and where fighting has increasingly become more important than compromise, Spencer has been a throwback, a self-described moderate who respected and even befriended members of the opposition and the political press. As the decades passed, Spencer found herself estranged from the group of her life.

He was not a fan of Donald Trump, taking seriously those who tried to wrap him in the mantle of Reagan.

Spencer never voted for the real estate developer and TV star, voting third-party in 2016 and voting for Joe Biden in 2020 — the first Democrat Spencer has endorsed for president since Harry Truman in 1948. He voted for Kamala. Harris in 2024.

Spencer viewed Trump as a “wannabe and an opportunist” and suggested that if Reagan were alive he would be sickened by Trump's eccentric behavior. “The way he treated women,” Spencer said in a 2021 interview. “He robbed all those people of their money.” (As a businessman, Trump was known for not paying contractors.)

Spencer spent the last few decades of her life as a kind of Cassandra, offering advice that many in the Republican Party chose not to hear or listen to.

He warned of the danger of alienating the country's growing Latino population with harsh rhetoric on immigration and affirmative action. “The decisions we make will affect California and the country easily for the next 10 to 20 years,” Spencer wrote prophetically in a 1997 open letter to GOP leaders.

He mixed his advice with glee and a scratchy, infectious laugh that took the sting out of his sometimes unwelcome advice. And he was wise to the end. Although he had many stories, which he told privately, he turned down offers to write a warts-and-all account of the Reagan presidency, making him one of the few people close to the administration to turn down an opportunity for money.

It wasn't his style, Spencer said, to kiss and tell.

Stuart Krieg Murphy was born on Feb. 20, 1927, in Phoenix, the son of an alcoholic father who abandoned his family when Stuart was a baby. She grew up in California and took her new husband's last name, A. Kenneth Spencer, a dentist and prominent Orange County Republican activist who helped Richard M. Nixon win his first race for Congress.

In 1944, Spencer enlisted in 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 the decks, he became convinced that college offered a better way forward. (He also regretted the anchor that was drawn on his arm.)

Spencer graduated from Cal State Los Angeles in 1951 with a bachelor's degree in sociology and took a job as the recreation director for the city of Alhambra. Despite his stepfather's activism, Spencer was not a thinking Republican. In the early 1950s, Spencer was applying to the Junior Chamber of Commerce when John Rousselot, a newcomer, made an offer: He would join the chamber if Spencer joined the GOP.

Spencer entered politics immediately. It was like games, with clear winners and losers, and he loved that. After volunteering in a series of campaigns, he eventually took a job as an organizer for the Los Angeles County Republican Party. While there, Spencer met Bill Roberts, a former TV salesman. After working together for a year, both left party positions and started a political consulting firm. They flip a quarter. Spencer called heads and won, so it was Spencer-Roberts.

They worked for anyone who would hire them, from Rousselot to left-leaning US Senator Tom Kuchel. It was later, when they could afford it, that Spencer-Roberts became more selective about her clients.

The two men helped pioneer the clever, TV-focused campaigns that became commonplace in California, and eventually, across the country.

“Bill Roberts and Stu Spencer were really the fathers of modern political discussion in California and they made it a full-time job and a profession at the same time,” said Sal Russo, a Sacramento-based GOP consultant who followed them in the field. .

These two can play rough. Spencer enjoyed the story of how Reagan, first running for public office, eventually hired Spencer-Roberts to manage his successful 1966 gubernatorial campaign. Working for New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in the first Republican presidential primary in California in 1964, the two ran a campaign to fire Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, shy of anger. About a year later, Goldwater told Reagan, “If I ran for California, I would hire those bad boys Spencer-Roberts.”

“It shows the pragmatism of Ronald Reagan,” Spencer said, laughing during a 2002 interview. “He knew what we did.”

Spencer, too, was a pragmatist. Although he worked for a man who became a demigod to conservative worshipers, he and Reagan had significant differences, among them Spencer's support for legal abortion, affirmative action and some gun control.

Spencer argued against analysts who criticized parts of Reagan's record — raising taxes, increasing the size of the federal government, signing legislation granting amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants in the US — that violated the Reagan myth. A lot of people “don't really understand what he did,” Spencer said bluntly in an interview the night before the 2011 presidential debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. “It's just a matter of aligning yourself with the winner.”

Spencer, who despised Washington and refused to stay there, had several minor conflicts involving consulting work — “selling influence,” as he bluntly called it — for clients that included apartheid-era South Africa and the Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega. . But Spencer was neither apologetic nor remorseful.

“Whatever I've done, I've done,” he said. “I met a lot of great people. He met a lot [jerks]. I saw a lot of the world.”

As his life drew to a close, however, Spencer expressed disappointment in the way the Republican party had taken it, with so many in Trump's race.

“I feel like I have wasted many years. When you get to my age” – he was 94 at the time – “you hope things get better, not worse. But things got 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 his two children, Karen, who followed him into the political consulting business; and Steven; a stepdaughter, Debbie DeSilva; and six grandchildren.