Takeover (4 page)

Despite rumblings from conservatives, by the time the Republican Convention opened, Nixon had no opponents for the nomination.

Nixon’s reputation with conservatives, such as it was, rested entirely on his staunch anti-Communism. On domestic policy Nixon had accepted the establishment’s New Deal Republicanism as the price of admission to the Eisenhower ticket in 1952. Nixon believed that the greatest threat to the party came not from defections of conservative voters on the Right, but from loss of support of
progressives on the Left.

This led Nixon to get into his limo one summer evening in 1960 and drive over to sit down with New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, the leading progressive Republican, at Rockefeller’s Fifth Avenue apartment, where he agreed to change the Republican Party platform to win progressive Republican support.

Conservatives were outraged, and began to refer to it as “the sellout on Fifth Avenue” or in Goldwater’s words, the “Munich of the Republican Party.”
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For conservatives, the highlight of the 1960 Republican National Convention was the speech by Senator Goldwater taking himself out of the race for the nomination, but calling upon conservatives to take back the Republican Party.

Even after he officially bowed out of the presidential sweepstakes, the delegates to the 1960 Republican National Convention gave Goldwater ten votes on the first ballot—the power and popularity of Goldwater’s new brand of conservatism were beginning to show.

Goldwater, like Taft, opposed the New Deal and the welfare state.

But Taft represented the anti-interventionist “traditional foreign policy” brand of conservatism that opposed a large military establishment and found its intellectual roots in Washington’s Farewell Address with its admonition against foreign entanglements.

Goldwater saw Communism and the Soviet Union as existential threats to the United States and Western civilization. To Goldwater, such threats required an aggressive foreign policy and a large and forward-leaning nuclear-armed military.

The old, anti-interventionist conservatives of Senator Taft’s generation were fading away. Many younger conservative leaders and thinkers, such as William F. Buckley, Jr. and M. Stanton Evans, saw things much the same way as Goldwater did. The courtship that eventually led to the marriage of anti-Communist “national defense conservatives” and economic conservatives had begun. This led to a redefinition of conservatism and to a generational shift in the Republican Party.

Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960. While some Republicans and Nixon partisans still allege the Kennedy–Johnson ticket won through election fraud, the bottom line is that the election was close because Nixon and Kennedy were largely campaigning on the same platform.

In a campaign where the candidates were similar on the issues, Kennedy’s photogenic and telegenic image and support from the liberal establishment press were difficult advantages for Nixon to overcome.

In contrast to Nixon’s “me-too-ism” during the 1960 presidential campaign, Goldwater was traveling around the country as chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, selling his new brand of conservatism.

In 1960, with the help of L. Brent Bozell, Jr., Goldwater published the groundbreaking
The Conscience of a Conservative.
The book was intended, Senator Goldwater said, “to awaken the American people to a realization of how far we had moved from the old constitutional concepts toward the new welfare state.” The book quickly went through twenty printings and sold 3.5 million copies, and it is still in print.
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First published by Clarence Manion’s Victor Publishing,
The Conscience of a Conservative
“was our new testament,” Pat Buchanan later said. “It contained the core beliefs of our political faith, it told us why we had failed, what we must do. We read it, memorized it, quoted it. … For those of us wandering in the arid desert of Eisenhower Republicanism, it hit like a rifle shot.”
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The book’s strong statement of the dangers of, and opposition to, world Communism helped define the conservative movement as the natural political home of first- and second-generation Eastern Europeans, Cubans, and Asians who had fled Communist revolutions in their homelands, and solidified Barry Goldwater as the premier spokesman for rolling back the Communist tide.

During the 1960 campaign, Goldwater visited almost every state and appeared at dozens of party conventions and smaller gatherings.
That experience put him in contact with grassroots Republicans all over the country. After Nixon’s defeat, and more than two years before the 1964 election, “Draft Goldwater for President committees” were formed.
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In the haze the liberal establishment media has created in their celebration of the election of John F. Kennedy as the beginning of “Camelot,” it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the election of Kennedy coincided with the rise of a new conservative movement in the United States and in the Republican Party.

• In 1960, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) was founded, as we have noted.

• In 1960, Senator Barry Goldwater published
The Conscience of a Conservative
.

• In 1961, conservative Republican John Tower was elected in a special election to fill Lyndon Johnson’s vacant Senate seat; he was the first Republican to win a Senate election in the Old South since the Reconstruction Era.

• In 1962 the New York Conservative Party was formed.

• On March 7, 1962, while I served as executive secretary of Young Americans for Freedom, YAF held a huge rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

The Madison Square Garden Rally would be my nomination for the day the modern-day conservative movement had its public debut. The rally was put on by youngsters: Don Shaftoe and David Franke were in their early twenties; I was the old man at twenty-eight. Marvin Liebman, whose small PR firm housed YAF, was the adult supervision.

“A Conservative Rally for World Liberation from Communism” drew a sellout crowd of 18,500 mostly young people to liberalism’s East coast citadel, and gave national exposure to its featured speakers, L. Brent Bozell Jr., conservative Republican senators Barry
Goldwater, Strom Thurmond, and John Tower, and to honorees “for contributions to conservatism and the nation,” such as Sen. Thomas J. Dodd (D-Conn.), novelist John Dos Passos, Herbert Hoover, Prof. Richard M. Weaver, actor John Wayne, columnist David Lawrence, newspaper publisher Eugene C. Pulliam, and editor M. Stanton Evans.
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Before that day what we were doing was largely out of the public eye, but when thousands were lined up around Madison Square Garden and the speeches and sellout crowd were front-page, “above the fold” news the next day in the
New York Times
, the conservative movement leapt onto the national political stage.

Far from being intimidated by the media’s love affair with Kennedy, or swept away in the glamour and liberal celebrity worship surrounding “Camelot,” conservatives were an energized and growing force rallying for the ideals of freedom, liberty, and limited government.

Goldwater was enthusiastic about the prospects of running against President John F. Kennedy and drawing a sharp contrast to Kennedy’s policies. What’s more, Goldwater understood that the problem was as much the establishment Republican Party leadership as it was the Democrats.

In 1961, F. Clifton White organized a movement to nominate a Republican conservative for president. Traveling around the country, White exhorted conservatives to seize control of their local Republican Party organizations and elect conservative delegates to the Republican National Convention.

The movement he orchestrated gave conservatives more influence over the inner workings of the Republican Party than they had had during Taft’s 1952 defeat and helped persuade Goldwater to run for president.
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In the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, Goldwater briefly considered dropping his campaign, but he was persuaded to continue by this grassroots support and a desire to wrest control of the Republican Party away from the establishment’s Eastern liberals,
and for what Bill Middendorf called the “noble reason” of building the conservative movement.
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This scared the devil out of the progressive-dominated Republican establishment, who had long embraced me-tooism and ceded the national agenda to the Democrats.

The establishment launched a desperate “Stop Goldwater” campaign in the face of which Goldwater’s support began to wane, especially in those states where the progressive establishment held sway. He lost in New Hampshire to Henry Cabot Lodge, then US ambassador to Vietnam, who won as a write-in candidate, and he lost in Oregon to New York governor Nelson Rockefeller.

Goldwater won Illinois, Indiana, and Nebraska, but the pounding he was taking from the progressive Republican establishment was having some effect. However, Goldwater roared back and upset Rockefeller, who had been the favorite, in the California Republican primary, and Rockefeller dropped out of the race.

Pennsylvania’s Governor William Scranton was the last-ditch hope of the “Stop Goldwater” forces, but his campaign, which launched only weeks before the Republican Convention, never really got off the ground. Goldwater won the nomination on the first ballot with 883 delegates to Scranton’s 214.

One of Goldwater’s key supporters and confidants in the presidential campaign, Bill Middendorf, put it this way: Goldwater “changed American politics” by bringing about “a marked shift in Republican philosophy and geography, from liberal to conservative, and from the Northeast to the South and West.”
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Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco has become a classic of American political thought, but its most memorable line, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” would be used against him.
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Liberal Republicans claimed to be shocked. The party they had controlled for so long had fallen into the hands of “extremists.”
Political commentators were equally taken aback. After hearing the speech, one reporter expressed their collective opprobrium: “My God, he’s going to run as Barry Goldwater.”
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Goldwater’s credo played into the hands of establishment Republicans eager to thwart the conservative takeover of the GOP, and Democrats eager to hold on to power in Washington, by allowing them to continue the drumbeat of criticism of him as an “extremist” that began during the Republican primaries.

After Goldwater won the nomination, the progressive Republican establishment did precious little to help him and much to hurt him—unlike Senator Bob Taft, who actually campaigned for Eisenhower, even after he lost the nomination in what was arguably the dirtiest Republican Convention ever.

The pattern set in the Eisenhower and Goldwater campaigns still holds true today. When a conservative loses, he is expected to campaign for the establishment Republican winner, as Taft did. When a conservative wins, the losing establishment candidate routinely undermines the conservative, as Rockefeller, Scranton, and Romney did to Goldwater in 1964 and Virginia’s establishment Republican Lt. Governor Bill Bolling did to conservative Ken Cuccinelli in 2013.

Rockefeller, Lodge, and Scranton made no real attempt to debate Goldwater on domestic policy or national defense or refute his criticism of establishment Republican me-tooism. Instead, he was attacked on a personal level as an “extremist,” a “kook,” and a “crackpot” who had no hope of winning the general election.

Progressive establishment Republicans also labeled Goldwater as a racist for opposing, on principled constitutional grounds, much of President Johnson’s civil rights legislation, and labeled him a warmonger for advocating a military build-up to not just counter, but to roll back the Soviets. Goldwater’s blunt and often profane, off-the-cuff comments seemed to confirm such charges when he joked that he would “lob” missiles “into the men’s room at the Kremlin.”
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And the Democrats took up the attacks where establishment Republicans left off.

Conservatives, to the extent they had seized control of Republican organizations, were still political neophytes. Goldwater’s criticisms of the Democrats and progressive Republican me-tooism were appealing and perceptive, but he had no real positive program to sell.

Like many conservative candidates and intellectuals since, Senator Goldwater and his inner circle seemed to believe that all they had to do was expose Americans to conservative ideas and the election would be won.

They subscribed to what Morton Blackwell, president and founder of the Leadership Institute and Virginia’s long-serving Republican national committeeman, calls the “Sir Galahad Theory of Politics”: “I will win because my heart is pure.”

Goldwater’s supporters seemed to believe that being right, in the sense of being correct, would be sufficient to win, and that if we conservatives could logically demonstrate that our candidate was of higher character and that his policies would be better for our country, somehow victory would fall into our deserving hands like a ripe fruit from a tree.

Goldwater ended up vaporized in a 486 to 52 Electoral College wipeout that saw President Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Democrats garner over fifteen million more votes than did Goldwater and the Republicans.

Senator Goldwater undertook his campaign knowing he would not be president. Goldwater thought it was unlikely that the American people would accept three presidents in the space of fourteen months, but he felt his campaign could help launch the conservative movement.
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And in that sense he was right—the Goldwater campaign did turn out around twenty-seven million conservative voters, and it trained thousands of grassroots volunteers in the techniques of political organizing. It proved that there was a vast market for conservative ideas and conservative candidates—if they were presented correctly.