Takeover (14 page)

I remember being on TV around 1985 with a
Time
magazine reporter who expressed concern that American (read: Ronald Reagan’s) foreign policy might lead to the fall of the Soviet Union. The reporter’s dismay that we might win the Cold War was far from the isolated opinion of one liberal crackpot; it was a common feeling among the liberal elite, the so-called best and brightest, who constituted America’s ruling class during much of the Cold War.

Reagan had a different idea; he saw Communism as an existential threat to America and the freedom of all mankind.

Reagan’s approach to dealing with the Soviets was simple, as my friend Dick Allen, who served as President Reagan’s first White House national security advisor, once explained.

One day at the golf course, Allen related to me how in 1977 he had contacted Reagan to let him know that he was exploring a run for governor of his home state of New Jersey, and if he decided to get in the race, he would have to bow out as Reagan’s campaign advisor on national security matters.

Reagan liked and relied on Allen and didn’t want to lose him, so he said, “Dick, do you want to know what my approach to dealing with the Soviets will be when we get to the White House?” Allen said he’d like to know, and Reagan replied, “I tell them, ‘We win, you lose.’”

Richard Allen passed on running for governor of New Jersey, staying with Reagan as his senior foreign policy advisor during the 1980 campaign, and eventually serving as President Reagan’s national security advisor to help see to it that the Soviets did in fact lose the Cold War.

However, establishment Republicans, such as Senator Baker, were too shortsighted and lacked the vision to recognize that SDI was an important part of Reagan’s strategy to draw the Soviets into a race they couldn’t win, on either the technology or the economic front.

What’s more, they just couldn’t grasp that Ronald Reagan passionately hated the very idea of a nuclear war that could destroy mankind and he actually believed that MAD was immoral, and that he meant it when he said of SDI: “Isn’t it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is.”

The liberal Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a leading critic of SDI, put out information that “exposes the inherent technical and strategic flaws” in the program. At the same time, organizers of two other separate opposition efforts by liberal scientists actually sought to limit “star wars” research.
⁷

But Reagan was sincere about the SDI program, both as a tool to bankrupt the Soviet Union and as a way to preserve mankind from the sure destruction a nuclear war would bring.

Martin Anderson has vividly described Reagan’s 1979 visit to the NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain complex, and how troubled he was by the powerlessness of a system that could detect impending annihilation but could do nothing to stop it. As a presidential candidate in 1980, Reagan was lobbied on missile defenses by Wyoming senator Malcolm Wallop.
⁸

Once again, it was conservatives working outside the establishment Republican Party who kept public support for the SDI program alive and the establishment’s feet to the fire on one of President Reagan’s most important defense initiatives.

One of the two times Ronald Reagan called me while he was
president was to thank me for what I was doing to help generate public support for SDI.

The real heavy lifting was done by General Dan Graham and the organization High Frontier, which he founded and that is still going today under the leadership of former ambassador Hank Cooper.

I first met General Graham at a dinner at Morton and Helen Blackwell’s home. Through High Frontier, Graham built public support for the program. As one of Ronald Reagan’s military advisers in his 1976 and 1980 campaigns, Graham had helped convince Reagan of the folly and culpable negligence of the establishment politicians who accepted leaving America totally undefended against incoming nuclear missiles.

Graham lobbied other public officials and opinion makers that it was sound political and military strategy; he assembled the scientists and engineers who proved it would work, and through High Frontier he raised the funds to do all of the above.

The Science and Engineering Committee for a Secure World and Dr. Kim Holmes, national-security analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation, also worked to educate Congress and the public that SDI was feasible.
⁹

Establishment Republicans on Capitol Hill once again went soft on the effort, cutting funding and leaving Reagan to plaintively appeal in his final State of the Union address, “Our funding request for our Strategic Defense Initiative is less than 2 percent of the total defense budget. SDI funding is money wisely appropriated and money well spent.”

Yes, on Election Night in 1980, it seemed as though all of our efforts to build the conservative movement and our long fight to nominate and elect a conservative presidential candidate had finally been rewarded.

But when push came to shove, the toughest opposition to Ronald Reagan’s most revolutionary ideas, such as defeating, not accommodating, Communism, cutting spending and regulation to spur economic growth, and freeing the world from the threat
of nuclear war, didn’t come from the Democrats and liberals; it came from the establishment Republicans who refought the arguments of the 1980 Republican primaries every time Reagan sent a proposal to Capitol Hill.

In the great hundred-year battle for the soul of the Republican Party, conservatives have faced three challenges: the first was to defeat the GOP establishment and nominate a conservative for president, which we did in 1964 by nominating Senator Barry Goldwater; the second was to nominate, and elect, a conservative president, which we did in 1980 with Ronald Reagan. Our next challenge will be to nominate and elect a conservative as president, and provide him or her with a conservative majority in Congress and the states so that he or she can actually
govern
as a conservative.

T
he passage of twenty-five years has largely obscured the fact that Vice President George H. W. Bush ran for president in 1988 as a conservative; or, like Mitt Romney in 2012, at least as much of a conservative as he could pretend to be. Although most conservatives did not trust Bush or regard him as Reagan’s logical heir, the proof that Ronald Reagan’s first decision as the Republican candidate for president was his worst decision—choosing Bush as his running mate—wasn’t made manifest until after Bush won the 1988 presidential campaign.

Going into the 1988 campaign, many conservatives allowed themselves to be convinced that Bush would continue to pursue and perhaps bring to fruition many—if not most—of the policies that Ronald Reagan ran on and pursued as president.

Most important, there was no conservative heir apparent to Reagan. The conservative movement and Ronald Reagan’s conservative coalition had no strong, obvious, clear alternative to the vice president the Republican establishment had urged upon President Reagan.

Every Republican on Capitol Hill with presidential ambitions claimed to be a supporter and friend of Ronald Reagan’s, even those
like Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, who had at best a spotty record of supporting Reagan’s policies.

The small cadre of principled conservatives in Congress who regularly fought for conservative principles (such as reducing taxes, reining in spending, and cutting welfare) was often frustrated when Reagan would make a deal with the Democrats that undercut what they were trying to do in order to pursue his primary policy goal of rebuilding America’s defenses and defeating the Soviets.

Congressman Jack Kemp, a favorite of movement conservatives, drew Reagan’s ire on a number of occasions. Reagan privately referred to Kemp as being “unreasonable” when he tried to hold the president’s feet to the fire on economic issues and to fan the flames of the revolution Reagan had lit.
¹

And let’s face it—Ronald Reagan’s outsized political skills, his commanding presence on the world stage, and the reverence in which he was held by grassroots Republicans made every other potential Republican candidate for president appear to be just another politician.

The bottom line was that going into the 1988 primaries, conservatives did not have control of the Republican Party infrastructure, nor did they have a clear leader.

Vice President George H. W. Bush’s strategy out on the stump in the primaries was to sell himself to skeptical grassroots conservative voters as Ronald Reagan’s loyal helpmate and the candidate to finish Reagan’s work.

Bush had the support of the Republican establishment, so he would get no criticism nor have those claims questioned by anyone in the Party organization. Plus, like Mitt Romney in 2012, Bush was willing to at least say the right things to conservatives, even when what he was saying contradicted his past statements and his record.

I had on occasion criticized Jack Kemp because it seemed to me he could only get a sense of outrage at fellow conservatives, not the Left. Like some of our other conservative friends who were strong supply-siders, Kemp was focused on growing the economy, but not
necessarily shrinking government and cutting spending, and this frustrated many conservatives who took seriously Reagan’s argument that the growth of government was undermining the Constitution and eroding liberty.

In 1985, my wife, Elaine, and I were at the Plaza Hotel in New York for the
National Review
’s thirtieth anniversary gala dinner. During conversation with Jack and Joanne Kemp, Jack looked at me with a smile and said, “Richard, just once would you say something nice about me?”

In 1987, Pat Buchanan gave serious consideration to running for president in 1988, and I was ready to help him, but he decided to defer to Kemp as the conservative standard-bearer. In 1987 Kemp asked me to take charge of his campaign’s direct mail, which I did strictly as a volunteer. This proved to be a very difficult job because, like all too many other conservative candidates who may be personally conservative, Jack Kemp had by then surrounded himself with a lot of Big Government Republicans.

Kemp was a favorite on the Republican Lincoln Day Dinner circuit. He drew large crowds wherever he went and was one of the most recognized Republican members of Congress. Despite all that, his campaign never really got off the ground organizationally.

One grassroots Republican operative, and Kemp supporter, described it as “more of a traveling policy seminar than a campaign,” with Congressman Kemp delivering great (and long-winded) speeches on economic opportunity, cutting taxes, and spending discipline in cities where he didn’t even have a campaign coordinator or a get-out-the-vote effort in place.

Rev. Pat Robertson’s campaign was better organized than Congressman Jack Kemp’s. Robertson’s
700 Club
program on Christian television made him a well-recognized figure on the Religious Right, and he had a prebuilt grassroots organization in charismatic churches across the country. Robertson came in second to Senator Bob Dole in Iowa. Robertson won the disputed Washington Republican caucuses, as well as caucuses in Alaska, Hawaii, and Nevada, but his appeal was
largely limited to voters of the Religious Right, and he never seemed to make any inroads with voters outside this core constituency.

Robertson was also attacked by the fearsome Bush smear machine, which went after him for allegedly inflating his Marine Corps record and using his father, Virginia’s late US senator Absalom Willis Robertson, to escape combat duty during the Korean War. When Robertson’s campaign stumbled in South Carolina in the face of the Bush assault and he failed to win any of the other Bible Belt states, he folded his campaign.

From the perspective of building the conservative movement, all was not lost in Robertson’s failed campaign; in fact, far from it. Out of that campaign came the Christian Coalition, which played a major role in the Republican congressional victory of 1994 and gave many Christian conservatives, especially young conservatives such as Ralph Reed and my longtime associate Ben Hart, valuable national leadership experience.

Sen. Bob Dole, who had a deep and abiding dislike of George H. W. Bush, ran against Bush for being a “wimp.” Dole’s charge was to some degree an indictment of Bush for abandoning his previous moderate principles (if there is such a thing), in favor of Reagan’s conservatism.

Dole camped out in Iowa “like he was running for county sheriff,” as one wag put it. Dole’s long service as Kansas’s senator made him an expert on the issues and concerns of voters in the Midwest, and his rise from poor farm boy to seriously wounded World War II hero to law school grad to United States senator, and then to Republican candidate for vice president in 1976, was a compelling story. When presented to voters out in the Farm Belt, it made for an especially appealing contrast with the privileged background of Vice President Bush.

Dole won the Iowa caucuses, despite a strong challenge from Rev. Pat Robertson, and had Bush on the ropes going into New Hampshire.

Dole’s challenge was brought to an abrupt end when the
Republican establishment pulled out all the stops for Bush and saved him from defeat in New Hampshire.

New Hampshire governor John Sununu crisscrossed the state with Bush—who would later reward him with the job of White House chief of staff—and busloads of Bush campaign volunteers were shipped to New Hampshire to knock on doors.

Bush’s New Hampshire comeback was made easier by Senator Dole’s meltdown at a press conference where he angrily accused Bush of “lying about his record” on taxes because Bush had run ads accusing Dole of not supporting what Bush called “the Reagan–Bush plans to cut taxes.”

Dole continued his campaign, but the damage was done. Dole ended up winning Iowa, his native Kansas, Minnesota, South Dakota, and a few other Farm Belt states in the upper Midwest, but that was it.

Vice President Bush’s nomination was probably assured when the Reverend Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority, gave his organization’s endorsement to Bush instead of endorsing the candidacy of fellow Christian conservative Rev. Pat Robertson or conservative congressman Jack Kemp, both of whom were running in the primaries as the conservative alternative to Bush.