One of the nation’s first campaign consultants for hire, he advised leading Republicans, including President Gerald Ford, but Reagan was his prized candidate.
Stuart K. Spencer, who as one of the nation’s first political consultants for hire took a so-called B-list actor named Ronald Reagan and helped him become governor of California and later president of the United States, died on Sunday at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 97.
His wife, Barbara Spencer, confirmed his death. “He was vibrant up to the last six months of his life or less, and then time caught him,” she said.
Mr. Spencer worked for many of the leading Republicans of his time, including President Gerald R. Ford and Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, but he was most remembered as one of the prime architects of Mr. Reagan’s unlikely rise from Hollywood to the White House.
Where others saw in Mr. Reagan a lightweight right-winger, Mr. Spencer deemed him a political natural who articulated strong principles and connected with voters across the partisan fence. “Ronald Reagan was extremely articulate, the most articulate maybe that America has ever seen,” he wrote in a self-published memoir in 2013.
A gruff, profane chain-smoker who once used an expletive in the Oval Office to tell President Ford that he was a poor campaigner, Mr. Spencer personified a rough-and-tumble era of politics before the advent of cable television and social media. Politics was a serious business, he believed, but it could also be rollicking fun, and he relished telling war stories.