Stuart K. Spencer, a Republican strategist who took a washed-up movie actor named Ronald Reagan and helped make him California governor and, later, president — helping invent the modern political consulting business along the way — has died. He was 97.
Spencer died Sunday, according to his daughter, Karen.
Spencer once dreamed of coaching big-time college football and his blunt, salty style could have served him well barking orders from the sideline or delivering a tongue-lashing locker-room speech. Instead, he offered his unvarnished advice in the Oval Office and other perches of the powerful.
It was Spencer who dissuaded a stumble-prone President Ford from venturing too far from the Rose Garden during his unsuccessful 1976 reelection campaign, telling him, “As much as you love it, you’re a s— campaigner.”
It was Spencer who demanded — profanely — that the vacationing Reagan descend from the Santa Ynez Mountains to make a statement after the Soviet Union shot down a Korean passenger plane in 1983, sending Cold War shudders across the globe.
It was Spencer who flew from California to Washington in 1987 to help persuade Reagan to publicly admit his administration sold arms to Iran in exchange for freeing American hostages.
In a Republican Party that turned sharply rightward and increasingly valued combat over compromise, Spencer was a throwback, a self-described moderate who respected and even befriended members of the partisan opposition and political press corps. As the decades passed, Spencer found himself increasingly estranged from his lifelong party.
He was no fan of Donald Trump, taking particular umbrage at those who tried wrapping him in the Reagan mantle.
Spencer never voted for the real estate developer and reality TV star, casting his ballot for a third-party candidate in 2016 and voting for Joe Biden in 2020 — the first Democrat whom Spencer supported for president since Harry Truman in 1948. He voted for Kamala Harris in 2024.
Spencer considered Trump “a demagogue and opportunist” and suggested if Reagan were alive he’d be sickened by Trump’s outlandish behavior. “The way he treated women,” Spencer said in a 2021 interview. “All those people he robbed of money.” (As a businessman, Trump was known for not paying contractors.)
Spencer spent the last several decades of his life as a kind of Cassandra, offering advice many in the Republican Party chose to neither hear nor heed.
He warned about the danger of alienating the country’s growing Latino population with harsh rhetoric on immigration and affirmative action. “The choices we make will impact California and the country for easily the next 10 to 20 years,” Spencer wrote prophetically in a 1997 open letter to GOP leaders.
He coupled his counsel with joviality and a scratchy, infectious laugh that took some of the sting out of his sometimes-unwelcome advice. And he was discreet to the end. Although he had plenty of stories, which he shared in private, he refused lucrative offers to write a warts-and-all account of the Reagan presidency, making him one of the few people close to the administration to decline the opportunity to cash in.
It was not his style, Spencer said, to kiss and tell.
He was born Stuart Krieg Murphy on Feb. 20, 1927, in Phoenix, 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 new husband, 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 and eager to serve. But after a few years scrubbing decks, he grew convinced that college offered a better path forward. (He also came to regret the anchor tattooed on his forearm.)
Spencer graduated from Cal State 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 stepfather’s activism, Spencer was not a reflexive Republican. In the early 1950s, Spencer was recruiting for the Junior Chamber of Commerce when an arch-conservative up-and-comer, John Rousselot, made an offer: He would join the chamber if Spencer would join the GOP.
Spencer took to politics immediately. It was like sports, with obvious winners and losers, and he liked 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, who for a time made his living selling TV sets. After working a year together, the two left their party positions and started a political consulting firm. They flipped a quarter. Spencer called heads and won, so Spencer-Roberts it was.
They worked for anyone who would hire them, from Rousselot to the left-leaning Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Kuchel. It was only later, when they could afford it, that Spencer-Roberts became more selective in its clientele.
The two men helped pioneer the slick, TV-centric campaigns that became the norm in California and, eventually, nationwide.
“Bill Roberts and Stu Spencer were certainly the fathers of modern political consulting in California and made it a full-time profession and a respected profession at the same time,” said Sal Russo, a Sacramento-based GOP consultant who followed them into the field.
The two could play rough. Spencer relished the story of how Reagan, making his first run for public office, ended up hiring Spencer-Roberts to manage his successful 1966 campaign for governor. Working for New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in California’s 1964 Republican presidential primary, the pair ran a searing campaign against Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, falling just shy of an upset. About a year later, Goldwater told Reagan, “If I ran in California, I’d hire those sons of bitches 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 legalized abortion, affirmative action and certain gun controls.
Spencer took issue with revisionists who glossed over parts of Reagan’s record — raising taxes, increasing the size of the federal government, signing a law that gave amnesty to millions of immigrants in the U.S. illegally — that contravened the Reagan myth. A lot of people “don’t really understand what he did,” Spencer said with characteristic bluntness in another interview on the eve of a 2011 presidential debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. “It’s just a matter of attaching themselves to a winner.”
Spencer, who disdained Washington and refused to live there, had a few small brushes with controversy involving consulting work — “influence peddling,” as he candidly called it — for clients including apartheid-era South Africa and the Panamanian government of dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega. But Spencer made no apologies and offered no regrets.
“Anything I did, I did,” he said. “Met a lot of great people. Met a lot of [jerks]. I saw a lot of the world.”
As his life neared its end, however, Spencer expressed disappointment at the direction the Republican Party had taken, with so many in Trump’s personal thrall.
“I feel like I wasted a lot of years. When you get to my age” — he was 94 at the time — “you hope thing are getting better, not worse. But things have gotten a lot 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 along with his two children, Karen, who followed him into the political consulting business; and Steven; a stepdaughter, Debbie DeSilva; and six grandchildren.
