Reagan's Revolution (4 page)
As far back as 1967, then-liberal Republicans George Gilder and Bruce Chapman had written in
The Party that Lost Its Head
,
As before the election, the party is most deeply and bitterly split in California, the nation’s largest state, where Republicanism takes its most exotic and colorful shapes. Here the far right has retained most of its former strength and most of its former illusions. Reality is to be shut out altogether as the GOP eschews the problematical and mentally taxing world of politics for the more glamorous, exhilarating, free-floating world of entertainment. This is the home of the pop-politician, ruggedly handsome, blond, alliterative, Ronald Reagan—the party’s hope to usurp reality with the fading world of the class-B movie. With his more moderate colleague George Murphy victorious before him both in show biz and pol-biz; with John Wayne eager to aid in the right-wing cause; with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans ready for one last right-wing roundup; and with Air Force Brigadier General James Stewart as Sky King—the Republican Party in California has become a Hollywood retirement home, where the stars of the past re-create in politics the fictitious glories of their antic youths.”
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Such criticisms continued throughout the course of Reagan’s political career.
At the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Connecticut Republican Senator Lowell P. Weicker Jr. told the
Washington Post
, “As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think what they’re doing in Kansas City represents the Republican Party. They’re not speaking for the party. They’re destroying it.” Added Glenn S. Gerstell, then president of the liberal Republican Ripon Society, conservatives had their “head in the sand” and would “push through their proposals regardless of the potential effect on the GOP’s fortunes with the electorate.”
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The fight had been ongoing for some time inside the party, and its outcome and the victor would become clear shortly after 1976.
Reagan’s Revolution; The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All
is the comprehensive history of how Ronald Reagan’s narrow and improbable loss to Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican Presidential nomination changed the conservative movement, the Republican Party, America, and eventually the world.
Today, the conservative movement is a vibrant, respected, and far flung enterprise, encompassing political organizations, think tanks, publications, newsletters, cable television networks, authors, columnists, publishing houses, talk radio hosts, a significant presence on the Internet, and a myriad of other concerns.
Today, all Republicans are “Reagan Republicans,” as Reagan’s definition of “maximum freedom consistent with law and order” has become the basis of the party’s philosophy. Furthermore, Reagan unleashed the most vigorous debates over the role of government in Americans’ daily lives since the founding of the Republic. These debates and the ensuing transformation of the Republican Party started with Reagan’s seemingly quixotic but most important campaign: his failed 1976 Presidential campaign.
Today, the Warsaw Pact no long exists. Today, the Soviet Union no longer exists. Today, millions of people across the globe live in freedom. Today, democratic capitalism is the accepted governing model the world over.
And much of this, if not most, is due to Ronald Reagan.
“Republicans are people too!”
B
y the late summer of 1974, the Republican Party was in its death throes. Bereft, bedraggled, unloved, and unwanted, it stood for nothing and antagonized everyone. If the GOP had been a stray cat, it would have been hauled away to the animal shelter and immediately euthanized—no one would have claimed it.
The many psychological problems of the Republican Party would have baffled a convention of psychiatrists—not that they would have wanted to cure the GOP anyway. It suffered from multiple personality disorder, an inferiority complex, delusions of persecution, and was committing slow suicide. The headquarters for this party of losers, the Republican National Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., had actually produced buttons that idiotically proclaimed, “Republicans Are People Too!” As if to remove all doubt about the Republicans’ insecurities and cowardice, the buttons were manufactured in a bright yellow.
Had there been a national referendum to institute a bounty on the heads of the few remaining Republican office holders, it probably would have passed overwhelmingly. In fact, one Republican who did have a bounty on his head at the time was mass murderer, Ted Bundy, the “Deliberate Stranger” who had once been a volunteer in several GOP campaigns in Washington State.
Laboring side by side in the bowels of the Republican National Committee were two junior staffers: Gary Bauer, who would go on to work for Ronald Reagan and later still become an important voice in the Christian Right, and Rita Carpenter who would go on to her own sort of fame by having sex with her husband, Democratic Congressman John Jenrette, on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and writing about it in a steamy memoir,
My Capitol Secrets.
After their marriage, Congressman Jenrette became ensnared in an FBI sting and went to jail. Mrs. Jenrette parlayed his misery into fifteen more minutes of fame. She also posed nude for
Playboy
(her own interpretation of “the body politic”), a stunt that would become a rite of passage for infamous women who were clinging and clamoring for attention. The Bauer/Jenrette dichotomy seemed to sum up the schizophrenic nature of the Republican Party.
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Talk was rampant among the burgeoning “New Right” that the Republican Party was through and what was needed was a new, third political party. Some of the “New Rightists” thought they had been badly treated by the country clubbers that made up the GOP, so a certain amount of payback was involved. Many conservatives had a chip on the shoulder when it came to the GOP.
Their desire to walk away made some sense. Conservatives had money, principles, energy, drive, organization, and—most important—ideas. The Republican Party had a humiliated ex-Vice President in seclusion, a President about to be driven from office, and the tattered remains of a once great party that included many liberals like Senator Jacob Javits of New York at one end and a few conservatives like Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina at the other. These two Senators had virtually nothing in common except maybe that they both enjoyed the Navy Bean Soup in the Senate Dining Room. As for conservatives, they were held in “minimum high regard” by moderates in the party or, as longtime journalist Ralph Hallow noted, “No one respected conservatives at the time.”
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Yet, “Movement conservatives [Bill] Rusher, [William F.] Buckley, [Richard] Viguerie, Reagan, et al. were getting the upper hand. In Nixon’s absence, especially, the initiatives of the early seventies were coming under attack,” wrote Herbert Parmet.
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After Nixon’s resignation, according to the Gallup organization, Republican Party identification continued to decline for the two years of Gerald Ford’s Presidency while the Democrats continued to build on their two-to-one lead.
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The Democrats also had their ideological extremes, but they did have one core philosophy that had held them together since the 1930s: the spoils system. Office holders and bureaucrats took part in handing out federal, state, and local largess—from milk subsidies to tobacco allotments to federal appointments to contracts to largess for the cities—to people of all ideologies, all races, all creeds, and all regions. Their organizing principle had evolved into a finely tuned machine fed by power and money that would stanch a lot of wounds inside the Democratic Party.
Patronage was the glue that had held the Democrats together. Despite their accused image of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” despite their quadrennial brawls, despite all their ideological, racial, cultural, and regional differences, the Democrats could always be counted on to circle the wagons in the end to protect the system that had enriched so many. They obediently followed the supposed advice of one of the less reputable popes, who upon ascension during the Dark Ages said, “Now that we have the Papacy, let us enjoy it.”
The Republicans had nothing to hold them together. Through Nixon’s criminal behavior and through his pursuit of liberal policies—including Keynesian economics, détente (which conservatives saw as Soviet appeasement), overtures to Communist China, abandoning Southeast Asia, cuts in defense spending, increasing social spending, appointing liberal jurists, instituting wage and price controls—the party had made a lot of enemies and alienated wouldbe friends.
Following Nixon’s resignation in August of 1974 and Gerald Ford’s pardon of the ex-President, the Republican Party was decimated in the fall elections. “In state after state after state, it was just wipeout time. It was a very depressing period,” recalled GOP ad man Doug Bailey.
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Watergate may not have bothered Lynyrd Skynyrd, but it did everybody else. Voters threw out dozens of Republican legislators in 1974. The GOP lost forty-three Representatives and four Senators in the off-year elections.
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By the spring of 1976, the Republican Party had only thirty-eight U.S. Senators who could not even mount an effective filibuster. In the House, they were outnumbered by better than two to one. Only thirteen of the nation’s fifty Governors were Republicans. The state legislatures were even worse. In the summer of 1976, the
New York Times
wrote an editorial that reflected the prevailing thought at the time:
There is one way, it seems to us, in which the Republicans could dig their own political grave for 1976 as surely as anything can be done in American politics. That is by capitulating to the far right wing of the party that forms the core support of Governor Reagan in his quest for the nomination. To put it in the crudest political terms, the far right of the G.O.P. has no place to go; yet the nomination of Governor Reagan for the Presidency (or, for that matter, even the Vice Presidency on a Ford ticket) would surely alienate the most important centrist and liberal segments of the Republican Party, without whose support it could not conceivably achieve national success.
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It was no wonder that many thought the GOP would go the way of the Whigs, and many conservatives wanted a new third party—one that could appeal to conservatives from both the Democrats and the Republicans. “We had commissioned Bob Teeter to do a poll for us after the 1974 off year elections,” Ladonna Lee recalled. Lee was an assistant to Eddie Mahe, the Executive Director of the RNC. “Teeter didn’t want to bring the results to Washington . . . too hot to handle. The results were devastating.”
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Republicans, it seemed, could only win the Presidency when Democrats screwed up, as in 1968 and 1972, or when they nominated a popular war hero like Eisenhower.
America, from the time of Franklin Roosevelt on, was ideologically a conservative majority country. But politically, it was a Democratic Party majority country. Democrats were much more unified than Republicans, generally favoring government as the solution to the problems that Americans faced. Republicans were more schizophrenic; some of the more moderate and liberal elements supported government activism, while the more conservative elements opposed government action and favored a smaller centralized government and more freedom for the individual.
FDR had made the Democratic Party, through the New Deal and World War II, secure in the belief that government was the solution. Republicans really offered no alternative or choice for the American people except a watered-down version of what their counterparts were telling voters. In fact, it was FDR’s political aide, Harry Hopkins, who had coined the phrase, when it came to the Democrats, “Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.” The Republican rejoinder appeared to be, “Tax less than the other guys, spend less than the other guys, and elect less than the other guys.”
Still, a small but growing chorus of conservatives within the GOP had expressed grave and growing concern over governmental power and its abuses. Historically, from Benjamin Disraeli to Ronald Reagan, conservatives came to their philosophy based on thousands of years of witnessing the abuses of concentrated, centralized power. From the pharaohs to Caesar to illicit popes in the Dark Ages to the English Monarchy to the Kremlin, conservatives had a well-founded suspicion about those who would have too much power; a healthy fear of the rule of men over the rule of law.
Since the late 1940s, the party had housed two competing personalities, with conservatives battling liberals in a pretty much perpetual state of equilibrium. In 1948, New York Governor Thomas Dewey, a moderate, won the Presidential nomination but lost the election to President Harry S. Truman. Truman was not a very good campaigner, but Dewey was even worse, offering nothing as an alternative to the “New Deal” and “Fair Deal” politics of the previous sixteen years. Truman also campaigned hard against the “do-nothing Congress” temporarily seized by Republicans in the 1946 off-year elections. Truman won convincingly over Dewey and ushered the Democrats back into control of Congress.
The debate between the two wings of the GOP picked up steam in the wake of the defeat. As historian Lewis Gould wrote,
After Dewey’s loss, the conservative and moderate wings of the party argued about the cause of the 1948 debacle in a debate that raged for another decade . . . Dewey himself contended in a speech that same month that the Republicans could not win national elections if they joined those “who honestly oppose farm price supports, unemployment insurance, old age benefits, slum clearance, and other social programs.” Should the Republicans come out against these measures, “you can bury the Republican party as the deadest pigeon in the country.” The Republicans allied with Dewey’s point of view made speeches while the conservatives and their supporters worked at the grass roots to reaffirm their dominance within the party. Liberal Republicanism in its twentieth-century form always had an air of electoral expediency rather than real conviction about it. As a result, that faction’s hold on the GOP was more tenuous than it seemed.
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