Reagan's Revolution (6 page)

Almost immediately after Goldwater’s loss, Nixon started plotting his comeback for 1968. He recounted the events following the 1964 election in his autobiography
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
:

Goldwater took his defeat with grace, and Johnson resisted what must have been a great temptation to crow over his landslide. It was Nelson Rockefeller who tried to turn the disaster to his own advantage. The day after the election, he issued a statement aimed at reading Goldwater and his followers—and, by indirection, those like me who had supported Goldwater—out of the party. I had intended to make no comment on the results until after a “cooling-off ” period, but Rockefeller’s attack changed my mind.

On November 5, I held a press conference. I complimented Goldwater saying he had fought courageously against great odds. I said that those who had divided the party in the past could now not expect to unite it in the future. At the end, I pulled out all the stops and said that Rockefeller was a spoilsport and a divider, and that there now was so much antipathy to him among Republicans throughout the country that he could no longer be regarded as a party leader anywhere outside New York.
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The Republican Party was changing dramatically beneath the surface during the mid-1960s. It was becoming more suburban and rural, more middle class, more blue-collar, and definitely more conservative. Nixon saw this trend before most others in the GOP.

Anyone who underestimated the resiliency of Nixon did so at his peril. Nixon carefully observed and understood the changes that were going on inside the GOP at the time. In preparation for another try at the White House following Goldwater’s loss, Nixon had learned from two of his own losses: in 1960 to Kennedy and in 1962 to Pat Brown for Governor of California. In 1960, Kennedy got to his right on anti-Communism. In 1962, Nixon had faced a conservative primary opponent, Joe Shell, the Republican leader in the California State Assembly. Shell drew a surprising 36 percent of the vote and weakened Nixon for the fall election. Nixon knew if he were to win the nomination of an increasingly conservative party in 1968, he couldn’t let another candidate get to his right. And if he was going to win the general election in 1968, no one was going to get to his right in that battle either.

In fact, Nixon had almost always been in good stead with the grassroots conservatives in the party. His aggressive pursuit of Alger Hiss and public comments about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, his work with the House Un-American Activities Committee, his defeat of Helen Gahagan Douglas—wife of leftist actor Melvin Douglas—for the U.S. Senate seat in California in 1950, and his famous “Kitchen Debate” with Nikita Khrushchev, had all earned him the chops necessary to be acceptable to the American Right. And Nixon always talked a tough talk—bashing commies, liberals, and others whom he had once called members of the “Cowardly College of Communist Containment.” The conservatives who made up the base of the Republican Party in the 1950s and 1960s generally liked Dick Nixon. The same could not always be said about the leadership of various conservative groups.

Nixon undertook his spadework with the American Right beginning in 1965. He met with conservative groups, individuals, and writers. He also hired a young editorial writer from the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
named Patrick J. Buchanan. Buchanan was a committed conservative who possessed a stiletto for a pen and a bellicose public manner that was belied by a genuine private shyness and sincerity. Nixon also hired a talented young lawyer from Indiana, Tom Charles Huston, who shared his understanding of the importance of conservatism in the context of the Republican Party. Goldwater’s early endorsement of Nixon in 1965 for the 1968 nomination clearly helped Nixon’s cause with the Right.

Nixon continued to work assiduously for the 1968 GOP nomination. The “New Nixon” model, which was unveiled in 1966, contained one interesting and telling change. For virtually his entire political career, he was referred to in public and private as “Dick Nixon.” He even signed letters, “Dick Nixon.” But the repackaged product became known as “Richard M. Nixon.”

Roger Stone, a GOP consultant, had known Nixon for years and would later befriend the old President during his years of seclusion and derision. Stone helped with Nixon’s partially successful reemergence after Watergate and was once asked by an acquaintance to ask Nixon to autograph four magazines featuring Nixon on the cover. Stone complied and several weeks later returned the magazines to his friend. But much to his surprise, only two of the four were autographed. “What gives?” asked the friend. Stone replied, “The two he autographed were from his Presidency and the two he didn’t were from his Vice Presidency. Nixon totally blacked out that period in his life. He then thought of himself as ‘Dick Nixon, political hatchet man.’ But after that, it was ‘Richard M. Nixon, World Statesman.’ And only people who knew him from that period were allowed to call him ‘Dick’ and only to people from that era would he sign his name ‘Dick.’”
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By 1968, Nixon had both a new image and the lion’s share of conservative support heading into the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach.

Despite their ideological differences, Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan worked together to try to stop Nixon’s nomination. As fellow Governors of the two most populous states, they were actually good friends who could cooperate when it served their purposes. Rockefeller and Reagan disagreed with each other’s politics, and each thought his own ideology was best for the future of the GOP. But both men shared a deep concern about Nixon; they saw him as a deeply flawed man who had the capacity to wreck the party. While it was apparent that Nixon was on his way to a first ballot nomination, both men floated eleventh hour candidacies, if only to stop Nixon. “For a ‘rigid’ and ‘unimaginative’ ideologue, Reagan could be quite pragmatic and obviously ambitious when it suited his purposes,” said David Keene, a key aide in Reagan’s eventual 1976 bid.
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Although Reagan and Rockefeller both held out hope of a brokered convention and worked behind the scenes to stop Nixon on the first ballot, they did not succeed. Ultimately, Nixon won the blessings of the delegates. And when the Wisconsin delegation put Nixon over the top, Reagan went to the lectern at the convention and asked the delegates to make Nixon’s nomination unanimous. The California Governor’s 1968 attempt to win the Republican nomination was ill-conceived, ill-timed, and too little, too late. Conservatives from Bill Buckley to Strom Thurmond were already supporting Nixon.

The result was never really in doubt. Liberal columnists had trumpeted the sometimes panting, sometimes Hamlet-like Rockefeller, Governor George Romney of Michigan, and Pennsylvania’s Governor Bill Scranton. But all of them were, of course, liberals from the moderate Tom Dewey wing of the party. They were the essence of the “Me Too Republicans.” They were Republicans who never really had any quarrel with the size or growth of government or higher taxes and never worried too much about Soviet expansionism. They were often proponents of a larger role of the state in the affairs of Americans. They favored higher taxes as a means to pay for that bigger state and were more interested in promoting trade with the Soviets than worrying about Russian missiles pointed at their children’s and grandchildren’s heads. Their main argument was simply that they could manage government better than their Democratic counterparts.

Conservatives were disappointed that Nixon chose the little known, moderately conservative Governor of Maryland, Spiro Agnew, as his running mate. But Agnew fit the bill for Nixon. He was a border state Governor who would not cause Nixon to look over his shoulder. Nixon remembered the insults Eisenhower piled on him when he was Vice President, and he confided to a campaign insider at the 1968 convention that he wanted to run without a Vice President.
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He had nothing but funerals and presiding over the Senate in mind for his running mate. Nixon wanted someone who would mind his Ps and Qs and not cause him any concerns.

Nixon won the Presidency that fall by the narrowest of margins over Democratic nominee Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota and Alabama Governor George Wallace, who ran as an independent on the American Party ticket. John Mitchell, Nixon’s law partner, friend, and incoming Attorney General, famously told reporters, “watch what we do, not what we say.” Nervous conservative leaders, who had often been suspicious of the new President-elect over the years, planned on watching Richard Nixon too.

2
AWAKENING AMBITIONS

“No pale pastels.”

N
either Ronald Reagan nor his most passionate conservative supporters could simply will him into the Presidential campaign of 1976. A fateful path had to first be cleared through the wilderness.

Richard Nixon’s first term, beginning in 1969, was mostly a disaster for conservatives. His relations with the leadership of the conservative movement went from qualified support to grudging suspicion to outright hostility within the first three years of his Administration. The dam broke in 1971 when Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal Democrat and Nixon White House aide, proposed to Nixon a federally mandated, minimum guaranteed household income—the very essence of socialism. Nixon, always trying to curry the favor of the liberal intelligentsia, agreed to the proposal.

This was too much for conservatives. A group of them met in Manhattan at the townhouse of Bill Buckley, founder and editor of the fortnightly
National
Review
. The result of the meeting was a letter signed by what became known as the “Manhattan Twelve,” which included activist Jeff Bell, Tom Winter of
Human
Events
, Buckley, and others. They sent their letter to President Nixon and signaled the conservatives’ intention to break with him and suspend their support in his re-election campaign.
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But the cynical old politician knew he had “spoons” in his pocket with the grassroots right of the party to protect him against any primary challenge in 1972. The Manhattan Twelve wanted to make a point and launched the campaign of Congressman John Ashbrook of Ohio.

Ashbrook was a well-respected, solid conservative with the courage to challenge Nixon in the primaries. The effort was admirable but quixotic. Nixon administered a quick kill to the Ashbrook insurgency. Nonetheless, the campaign was important because it marked another struggle impelled by conservatives’ desire to reshape the Republican Party. If they failed, they were quite willing to leave it and form a new political party. But a third party was not a realistic option in 1972.

Despite the leftward movement of the Republican Party leadership, the Democrats were moving even faster to the left, as evidenced by their nomination of the ultra-liberal George McGovern of South Dakota. Their party’s platform in 1972 called for each American’s inheritance to be limited, with the vast balance going to the government for “redistribution.” The 1972 edition of the Democrats may have been the most pro-collectivism, anti-free enterprise political party since the American Socialist Party. McGovern’s odd collection of malcontents truly made them the party of “acid, amnesty, and abortion” as Republicans chided.

Nixon trounced McGovern in the November election. The embarrassment at the Democratic Convention over McGovern’s Vice Presidential choice of Senator Tom Eagleton of Missouri, who had failed to tell McGovern prior to coming aboard the ticket that he had been institutionalized in a mental hospital and undergone electro-shock therapy, paired with McGovern’s extremist views made it easy to see why President Nixon, campaigning on peace and prosperity, carried forty-nine states with the notable exception of Massachusetts.
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With the easy re-election of Nixon and Agnew, it looked in the early days of 1973 as if Ronald Reagan’s political career would end in Sacramento. Spiro Agnew was the man of the hour who made conservatives’ hearts go pitter-patter. While Reagan too was liked by conservatives nationally, it was Agnew who had taken it to the Eastern Establishment and the liberal media. “Agnew was more esteemed than Reagan in 1973. Reagan hadn’t pursued a national agenda at the time. And Agnew was hated by liberals,” said Bill Schulz, a conservative of long standing who later would help edit Gerald Ford’s autobiography while working as Washington Bureau Chief of
Reader’s Digest
.
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Agnew had already begun his move to the right while Governor of Maryland, partially because the race riots of the 1960s and because the militant leadership of the Democratic Party appalled him. Like Nixon before him, Agnew had done his homework on the evolution of the GOP and came to realize that as a conservative Vice President in a liberal Nixon Administration, he would be viewed as the Right’s oasis in the liberal desert of Washington.

In several speeches written for him by Pat Buchanan and William Safire, the Vice President lashed out against liberal editorial writers of the major newspapers, labeling them as an “effete corps of impudent snobs” and “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
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Agnew thus tapped into that raw nerve of “chip-on-the-shoulder-conservatives,” who deeply resented the intellectual Left.

Agnew met regularly with conservatives, soliciting their advice and listening to their complaints about Nixon. He knew that Nixon wanted him off the ticket in 1972 in favor of Treasury Secretary John Connally, who had recently switched parties. So it served Agnew’s ambitions to be the one defiantly conservative member of the Nixon Administration, as he knew conservatives would have gone ballistic had Nixon booted him off the ticket. Despite Nixon’s preference for Connally, as 1976 Reagan strategist Roger Stone said, “The Republicans are a ‘royalist party,’ and Agnew was next in line.”
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David Keene, an aide to Agnew at the time, said succinctly, “Agnew was the 800 pound gorilla. Nobody was going to stop Agnew from getting the nomination. No one, that is, except himself.”
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But neither Agnew nor Reagan nor their supporters could predict the political “perfect storm” that was about to envelop Washington and the Republican Party over the next two years. Unforeseen events were about to change the entire country’s political landscape and alter for good or ill the political fortunes of men and women everywhere, especially Ronald Reagan.