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Stuart K., a Republican strategist who took a failed movie actor named Ronald Reagan and helped make him governor of California and later president, helping to invent the modern political consulting business in the process.・Mr. Spencer passed away. He was 97 years old.
Spencer died Sunday, according to his daughter Karen.
Spencer once dreamed of coaching some of college football’s biggest names, but his blunt, salty style made it difficult for him to bark orders from the sideline or give tongue-in-cheek speeches in the locker room. It may have been very helpful. Instead, he offered unvarnished advice from the Oval Office and other powerful places.
When Ford’s re-election campaign failed in 1976, it was Spencer who discouraged a stumbling President Ford from venturing far from the Rose Garden by telling him, “If you like it, you’re a campaigner.” It was.
After the Soviet Union shot down a South Korean airliner in 1983, sending the chill of the Cold War across the world, President Ronald Reagan was asked to come down from the Santa Ynez Mountains while on vacation to make a statement – irreverently. -It was Spencer who demanded.
It was Spencer who flew from California to Washington in 1987 to persuade Reagan to publicly admit that the Reagan administration had sold arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages.
In a Republican Party that was moving sharply to the right and increasingly focused on fighting rather than compromise, Spencer was an old-fashioned self-proclaimed moderate who respected and even became friends with members of the opposition party and political press corps. As the decades passed, Spencer found himself increasingly estranged from the Party of Life.
He was no fan of Donald Trump and particularly resented those who tried to wrap him in the mantle of Reagan.
Spencer never voted for the real estate developer and reality TV star, voting for third-party candidates in 2016 and voting for Joe Biden in 2020. Spencer is the first Democrat to endorse a presidential candidate since Harry Truman in 1948. He voted for Mr. Kamara. Harris in 2024.
Mr. Spencer characterized Mr. Trump as a “provocateur and an opportunist” and suggested that Mr. Reagan would be tired of Mr. Trump’s outlandish behavior if he were alive. “The way he treats women,” Spencer said in a 2021 interview. “All the people he took money from.” (As a businessman, Trump was known for not paying his contractors.)
Spencer spent the last decades of her life as a kind of Cassandra, offering advice that many in the Republican Party chose not to listen to or to heed.
He warned of the risk of alienating the country’s growing Latino population with harsh rhetoric on immigration and affirmative action. In an open letter to Republican leaders in 1997, Mr. Spencer prophetically wrote, “Our choices will have a modest impact on California and this country for the next 10 to 20 years.” .
He combined his advice with hilarity and a scratchy, contagious laugh that softened some of the harshness of the sometimes unwelcome advice. And he was cautious to the end. Although he had many stories to share in private, he rejected lucrative offers to write any and all reports during the Reagan presidency, making him one of the few people close to the administration to turn down opportunities to make money.
Kiss and tell isn’t his style, Spencer said.
He was born Stuart Krieg Murphy in Phoenix on February 20, 1927, the son of an alcoholic father who abandoned his family when Stuart was an infant. He grew up in California and took the surname of his mother’s second husband, A. Kenneth Spencer. Spencer is a dentist and prominent Orange County Republican activist who helped Richard M. Nixon win his first Congressional election.
In 1944, Spencer enlisted in the Navy the day after graduating from high school. He was eager to serve at the age of 17. But after a few years of polishing his deck, he became convinced that college offered a better path forward. (He also came to regret the anchor tattoo on his forearm.)
Spencer graduated from California State University, Los Angeles in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and took a job as recreation director for the city of Alhambra. Despite his father-in-law’s activism, Spencer was not reflexively a Republican. In the early 1950s, when Spencer was recruiting members for the Junior Chamber of Commerce, an up-and-coming conservative, John Rousslow, made an offer.
Spencer soon entered politics. It was like a sport where there were clear winners and losers, and he liked it. After volunteering on a series of campaigns, he eventually took a job as an organizer for the Los Angeles County Republican Party. There, Spencer met Bill Roberts, who at one point made a living selling televisions. After working together for a year, the two left their party jobs and founded a political consulting firm. They turned over a quarter. Spencer made the heads call and won, making it Spencer vs. Roberts.
They worked for anyone who would hire them, from Rousslow to left-leaning Republican Sen. Tom Kuchel. It wasn’t until Spencer Roberts had more leeway that he became more selective with his clients.
The two pioneered a slick television-centric campaign that became the norm in California and eventually spread across the country.
“Bill Roberts and Stu Spencer are certainly the fathers of modern political consulting in California, making it a full-time profession and a respected one at the same time,” says the Sacramento-based company who followed them into the field. said Republican consultant Sal Russo. .
The two could play rough. Spencer gleefully told the story of how Reagan, running for public office for the first time, ended up hiring Spencer Roberts to manage his successful 1966 gubernatorial campaign. In the 1964 California Republican presidential primary, the two men, who had worked for New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, waged a fierce campaign against Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, but came close to an upset. I was defeated. About a year later, Goldwater told Reagan, “If I were to run in California, I would hire the sons of that bitch Spencer Roberts.”
“This shows the pragmatism of Ronald Reagan,” Spencer said with a laugh in a 2002 interview. “He knew what we did.”
Spencer was also a realist. Although he worked for a man who became a demigod to conservative admirers, he had important differences with Reagan, including his support for legalizing abortion, affirmative action, and certain gun laws. Spencer’s endorsement was included.
Spencer is a revisionist who has whitewashed parts of Reagan’s record, including raising taxes, expanding the size of the federal government, and signing legislation granting amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants in the United States, contradicting the Reagan myth. objected to. Many people “don’t really understand what he did,” Spencer said with characteristic candor in a separate interview on the eve of the 2011 presidential debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. spoke. “It’s just a matter of being obsessed with winning.”
Mr. Spencer, who despised Washington and refused to live there, began his consulting business (which he frankly described as an “influencer”) with clients including apartheid-era South Africa and dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega’s Panamanian government. I have had a bit of trouble getting involved in a controversy regarding peddlers. . However, Spencer did not apologize or show any remorse.
“Whatever I’ve done, I’ve done,” he said. “I met a lot of great people. I met a lot of people. [jerks]. I’ve seen a lot of the world. ”
But as Spencer neared the end of his life, he expressed disappointment with the direction of the Republican Party, many of whom were personally in thrall to Trump.
“I feel like I’ve wasted so many years. When you’re my age,” he was 94 at the time, “you hope things get better, not worse. But… The situation has deteriorated considerably.”
Spencer and his first wife, Joan Dyckman, divorced in 1987 after 37 years of marriage. In 1992, he married Barbara Callihan, who survives them with their two children, Karen; Karen then worked in the political consulting business. And Stephen. stepdaughter Debbie DeSilva; and six grandchildren.
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