Currently relevant nostalgia

This is a nostalgia column. When you’re 83, you’re allowed some nostalgia, provided you can remember what you’re nostalgic about. And that it has some relevance to the current moment. (See conclusion.)

I’ve been thinking about the late Bob Ray, Governor of Iowa from 1969 to 1983. He was the state’s most popular political figure of the 20th Century, winning each of the last three of his five gubernatorial elections with 58 percent of the vote and earning the approval of 82 percent of Iowa residents by the late 1970s.

I first met Ray in 1964 when he was the 35-year-old chair of the Republican Party. I was a 23-year-old college student working for the summer at state Republican headquarters in Des Moines. I was impressed with his calm demeanor, his leadership presence, and his friendly personality.

The Republican national party that summer nominated conservative Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona as its presidential candidate, and Ray, a committed moderate, had favored a more moderate candidate, as had I. Democrat Lyndon Johnson overwhelmed Goldwater in the November general election, and the Democratic surge extended to Iowa. It was not an auspicious time for the young chair of the state’s Republican Party.

But Ray went to work with state party officials to tighten party control of its candidates’ election procedures and to recruit candidates for the 1966 elections. They succeeded in regaining an impressive number of offices for the Republican Party despite the fact that Democrat Harold Hughes was serving as Governor.

When Hughes then moved on the U.S. Senate, Ray ran for Governor in the 1968 election, one of three candidates in the Republican primary. The other two were both more conservative than Ray: Bob Beck, the respected publisher of the Centerville Iowegian newspaper, and Don Johnson, national commander of the American Legion.

By then I had returned from graduate school to join my dad Fred Morain at the Jefferson Bee and Herald. Dad, Greene County Republican finance chair, had developed an admiration for Ray, and I heartily agreed with him after my summer under Ray’s leadership at state headquarters in 1964.

As it turned out, nearly all newspaper publishers who were Republicans supported their colleague Bob Beck in the primary. To my knowledge, and Ray’s, the Jefferson newspapers were the only ones in the state to support Ray. Dad and I held a reception for him at the state newspaper convention to give him an opportunity to visit informally with publishers.

Beck and Johnson split the conservative vote in the June primary election, and Ray won the nomination with a minority of the Republican vote. He went on to win the November 1968 general election with 54 percent of the total vote.

Ray had a knack, and a desire, to find pragmatic solutions to help move Iowa forward. He named several conservative Republicans to his staff and his inner advisory circle. While more moderate than most GOP legislators, he was able to work with them, and with Democrats as well, on bills that strengthened the state and assisted its people:

—The bottle bill to help clean up the environment.

—Collective bargaining for public employees.

—Shifting some school taxes from property to income to relieve the property tax burden, to give the state a greater role in public education, and to equalize resources so that students received the same financial support regardless of what public school they attended.

—Removal of the state sales tax from food and prescription drugs.

—Reorganization of a number of state government agencies to streamline delivery of public services.

When a position on the Republican State Central Committee, for which I had worked at state party headquarters in 1964, opened up in 1975 in the Fifth Congressional District (which included Greene County back then), some state party leaders asked me to run for the position.

It was an opportunity to work for the party with Bob Ray at its helm. With the support of most of the district’s county chairs and co-chairs I was elected, and was privileged to serve for the next four years on the committee, a period when moderate “Bob Ray Republicans” controlled the state party machinery.

When I left the state central committee, Ray asked me more than once to interview for the staff position of his press secretary. I chose not to do so because of my commitment to the Bee and Herald.

Those four years were also the years when Ray brought Tai Dam refugees (in 1975) and Cambodian “boat people” refugees (in 1979) to make their new homes in Iowa following the end of the Vietnam War. Ray didn’t have to do that, and his efforts were not without opposition across the state. He was the only Governor in the United States to take that initiative. But he did so because he thought it was the right thing to do, and as a result several thousand lives were saved and Iowa was enriched by their arrival.

One of Ray’s initiatives as Governor was to hold press conferences on a daily basis early in his 14-year stint, then later to do so three times a week. His strategy was to get ahead of the story on important issues of the day, and the press corps appreciated his openness. He played offense rather than defense with the press, and it worked to his advantage with his administration’s coverage, and as a result with the people of Iowa.

After announcing he would not be a candidate for Governor for a sixth term in 1982, Ray went on to lead a pair of large Iowa insurance companies, Drake University as its President, and the city of Des Moines as its Mayor when asked to do so, before completely retiring from public service. He passed away in 2019 at the age of 90.

In those later years he also developed the state’s “Character Counts” initiative for students, impressing on them the importance of personal discipline and civility. The program continues today in many Iowa schools.

Ray’s pragmatism, inclusion of opposition leaders in his administration, and development of programs, along with his friendly approach toward everyone, discouraged the kind of bitterness that infuses politics today, both in Iowa and across the nation. For me, the Ray years offer the gold standard of how politics and government should operate. I hope that someday Iowa will return to that standard.