Takeover (7 page)

Conservatives were not yet seasoned enough in the ways of Convention politics to recognize that the admonition “to get there first’us with the most’us” applied to the political battlefield as well as the Civil War battlefield.

In contrast to the effort the progressive establishment had organized for Eisenhower to outmaneuver Senator Taft back in 1952, Reagan’s write-in effort started late and produced few votes. As the Republican primary election season progressed, the stage was set for Richard Nixon to become the Republican nominee for president.

Andrew Busch, writing for the Heritage Foundation, noted that Reagan’s main impediment to gaining the nomination was:

Reagan initially ran only as a favorite son, winning the California primary and securing the state’s large bloc of delegates. He received 10 percent or more of the vote in an additional three primaries without running an active campaign (21 percent in Nebraska, 20 percent in Oregon, and 10 percent in Wisconsin). At the end of the primary season, Reagan actually had accumulated more primary votes than any other Republican, leading Richard Nixon by nearly 17,000, though this advantage was due to his uncontested victory in California.
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After the passage of forty-six years, it is not easy to capture the mood of the American electorate in 1968.

The country was in chaos in many respects; the assassinations of
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, antiwar riots, race riots, and the public rejection of traditional values by the cultural elite in Hollywood and on college campuses made millions of voters wonder if the country wasn’t falling apart.

Yet, what appeared to be chaos had behind it a potent liberal political force; thousands of young people opposed to the war in Vietnam campaigned for “Clean Gene,” Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy. Even though President Johnson actually won the New Hampshire Democratic Primary, McCarthy’s close second-place finish convinced Johnson to drop out.

Four days after Johnson dropped out, Senator Bobby Kennedy, the fallen president’s charismatic younger brother, got in. Kennedy, a celebrity in his own right, also benefited from a unique coalition of Hollywood celebrities and African-American athletes who were attracted to his candidacy by his outspoken support for the civil rights movement.

Among the Hollywood and celebrity supporters working for Kennedy were: Warren Beatty, Bill Cosby, Tony Curtis, Bobby Darin, Henry Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Malina Mercouri, Jack Parr, David Suskind, Nancy Wilson, Gene Kelly, Gregory Peck, Rod Steiger, and Sammy Davis Jr.

McCarthy also had Hollywood on his side, but some of his early Hollywood supporters, such as Lauren Bacall, Kirk Douglas, Sammy Davis Jr., Candice Bergen, Rosemary Clooney, Andy Williams, and the rock ’n roll group Jefferson Airplane, jumped to Kennedy as soon as he got in the race.
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Kennedy’s assassination on the very night he won the California Democratic Primary sent the Democrats into a tailspin and appeared to make the remaining primaries a mano a mano contest between McCarthy and Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, the establishment Democrats’ choice.

A watershed moment in the rise of the conservative movement was lost to history due to the Kennedy assassination: the defeat of California’s liberal Republican US senator Tommy Kuchel, the
US Senate’s Republican minority whip, by the relatively unknown Max Rafferty.

Rafferty, California’s nonpartisan elected superintendent of public instruction had written several books attacking the radical liberal ideas and policies of the education establishment and wrote a well-regarded syndicated column on education. He chose my firm, and our expertise in the new and alternative media of direct mail, to get his conservative message out to California’s Republican primary voters.

We mailed some 6 million letters to national conservative donors to finance Max Rafferty’s California campaign. We then mailed twice to 2 million Republican households in California. I’m confident that the over 4 million letters that twice reached some 3.5 million registered Republican voters was the major reason a relatively unknown state superintendent of public education with little campaign money was able to beat one of California’s best-known and most powerful politicians by 67,000 votes.

In the November general election, Rafferty’s people decided they didn’t want a big direct-mail effort; they asked us to mail only to the approximately sixty thousand Rafferty contributors we had developed and used the money our letters raised mostly to buy TV ads. While that wasn’t the only reason Rafferty lost badly in November, I have no doubt it certainly was one of the principle reasons.

How the professional political class of Republican consultants loots the Party and runs campaigns into the ground—while getting paid millions of dollars—is such an important topic that I will cover it in more detail later in this book.

After Kennedy’s assassination, McCarthy’s antiwar base was split with the late entrance of Senator George McGovern of South Dakota just ahead of the Democratic National Convention. McGovern’s spoiler act set the stage for Vice President Humphrey to be the Democratic nominee. Despite winning the popular vote, McCarthy lost to Humphrey at a Chicago Democratic Convention marred by protests and riots.

The Democratic establishment got their preferred candidate in 1968; now the question was, what would Republicans do?

The Republican establishment’s preferred candidate, Romney, had imploded, but New York’s liberal Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller—the bête noire of conservatives—was still in the race.

According to Heritage senior scholar Dr. Lee Edwards:

[William F.] Buckley and
National Review
carefully considered the 1968 presidential campaign, focusing on a practical question: Who was the most viable conservative candidate? Barry Goldwater had already endorsed Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan had been governor of California for little more than a year. Nelson Rockefeller was an impossibility for any right-thinking conservative. That left Nixon, whom Buckley admired as the man who had stoutly defended Whittaker Chambers against the liberal establishment and ensured that Alger Hiss went to jail.
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Buckley and many other leading conservatives decided they could support Nixon as “an anti-Communist moderate open to conservative ideas and influence,” viewing him as a “competent, intelligent, experienced, professional politician” known for his “election-machine style of politics,” as the
National Review
’s endorsement put it.

Coming into the National Convention, Richard Nixon led but did not have the nomination sewn up. Not until the Convention opened did Reagan announce he was a full-fledged candidate. His chief immediate objective was to prevent Nixon from gaining a majority of delegates on the first ballot.

It was Reagan’s hope—and there was some reason for him to be hopeful—that many delegates who backed Nixon on the first ballot out of obligation would subsequently shift to him out of philosophical conviction.

Reagan’s 1968 effort was blunted by the fact that Nixon had already lined up a formidable group of conservative elected officials to support him, including Barry Goldwater, Texas senator John
Tower, and South Carolina’s senator Strom Thurmond, who had moved from the Democratic to the Republican Party in 1964 and worked hard for Goldwater in his unsuccessful bid for the presidency against Lyndon Johnson. On the first ballot, Nixon assembled a majority—with only twenty-five votes to spare. Reagan then released his delegates and urged the Convention to support Nixon unanimously.

Of course, no one will ever know whether or not Reagan could have defeated Nixon in 1968 if he had gone all out in the primaries, or if conservatives had been more seasoned in the ways of Republican Convention politics and mounted a more effective write-in campaign for him, or if conservative leaders hadn’t concluded that Nixon was “open to conservative ideas and influence” and accepted his candidacy without a real fight.

The day after the 1964 election, and Goldwater’s epic defeat, it looked to many in the media as if the new conservative movement was dead.

Four years later, to claim the nomination, Richard Nixon needed to campaign as a conservative to win.

Nixon shared none of Goldwater’s fire for individual liberty and a smaller government, and he was by no means a movement conservative on domestic policy, having silently gone along with Eisenhower’s New Deal Republicanism.

However, the media decided Nixon was a “conservative,” equating Nixon’s law-and-order campaign and anti-Communist rhetoric with conservatism, and that, along with the endorsements of leading conservatives, was probably enough to convince most delegates to the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami that Nixon was the right candidate for the nomination.

Boy, were they ever taken to the cleaners!

Nixon chose Maryland’s obscure governor, Spiro T. Agnew, as his running mate. Agnew was a Rockefeller supporter whose nomination was seconded by New York mayor John Lindsay, the new liberal Republican icon of the Eastern establishment.

Politically, Agnew was a nonentity with no national following, and that was exactly the point. Nixon was famously insecure, in much the same way as was George H. W. Bush. Just as Bush and his team knew that Indiana’s junior senator, Dan Quayle, would offer no criticism or pushback against their plans to dismantle Reaganism and eliminate any Reagan influence in the new Bush administration, Nixon knew Agnew would do what he was told and not bring anyone to Washington who might challenge his campaign team or his policy team.

And that included Senator Strom Thurmond, who was very instrumental in Nixon getting the nomination.

Thurmond and Bill Middendorf had an 8:00 a.m. breakfast meeting set with Nixon the morning following the election.

They entered the Pierre Hotel, where Nixon was staying, excited about the prospect of having a conservative administration and getting strong conservatives appointed to key positions in the new administration.

When they arrived at the Pierre at 7:50 a.m., coming out of Nixon’s suite were Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, and they recognized that conservatives had, once again, been beaten to the punch.

As Lee Edwards later wrote,

Nothing equals the anger of a woman scorned except, perhaps, the anger of a conservative who feels he has been betrayed. In 1971, Henry Kissinger’s secret trips to Communist China were revealed, and Nixon unveiled his New Economic Plan featuring wage and price controls. “We are all Keynesians now,” Nixon said in a bit of bombast sharply challenged by conservatives.
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Nixon’s strategies of détente, his version of “triangulation” with Red China, and his economic policies destroyed any pretense that Richard Nixon was a conservative.

In 1971 twelve leaders of the Right, with William F. Buckley
Jr. at the top of the list, announced that they were suspending “our support of the Administration.”

In December of that year, Congressman John Ashbrook, one of the leading conservatives on Capitol Hill, broke with the Nixon administration, criticizing “the presentation of liberal policies in the verbal trappings of conservatism.” He especially opposed the president’s budget deficits, wage and price controls, and recent rapprochement with China. New Deal policies, he claimed, “have not been changed but extended and refined” under the Nixon presidency.

Ashbrook soon announced his intention to oppose Nixon’s re-nomination in a number of Republican primaries. Justifying his candidacy, he denounced the Nixon administration for squandering an opportunity to build a conservative coalition to govern the country; “The result of such leadership could well have been a period of conservative and Republican ascendancy to match the Democratic era that followed upon the victory of Franklin Roosevelt. Instead, the net result of this administration may be to frustrate for years to come the emergence of the conservative majority.”

Boy was he ever right.

In December 1971, as Nixon moved left, Tom Winter, the longtime editor of the influential conservative weekly
Human Events
, called me on behalf of John Ashbrook and asked me to raise money for his presidential campaign, and I enthusiastically agreed, even though it ended up costing me a lot of money.

Ashbrook ran on the slogan “No Left Turn,” and called his campaign in New Hampshire “a small Paul Revere ride.” Although he received only 9.6 percent of the vote in the Republican primary in New Hampshire, he pushed on to Florida, where he got less than 9 percent. The campaign was chaotically run, and his 10 percent showing in California persuaded him to withdraw from the presidential contest.

John Ashbrook ended up supporting Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972 “with great reluctance” and I was frustrated with the lack of leadership in the conservative movement, and we were
something like $250,000 in the hole on the work we did for Ashbrook’s campaign.
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And then there was Watergate.

It is important to remember that Nixon’s opponents on the Left had little to complain about as far as policy went.

Nixon ended the war in Vietnam, he readily instituted wage and price controls, he followed a policy of détente with the Soviet Union and opened the door to Red China, he established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), supported the creation of the Legal Services Corporation, expanded welfare through his Family Assistance Plan welfare “reform,” signed the Occupational Health and Safety Act of 1970, and he signed an Emergency Employment Act creating government jobs to stimulate the economy—in short, he followed exactly the policies the Washington establishment supported at the time.

If Lyndon Johnson created the modern welfare state that conservatives despise by passing “the Great Society” programs, Richard Nixon funded it, and added a lot of government on his own.

Nixon’s opponents on the Left hated Nixon for being Nixon, not for his policies.

They resented his defeat of Eleanor Roosevelt’s friend, hard-Left Democrat Congresswoman Helen Gahagen Douglas, in the 1950 California Senate campaign. They hated him for giving credence to the idea that the establishment elite was infiltrated by Communists by helping to bring down Alger Hiss and defending Whittaker Chambers. Nixon obliged them in this hatred by abusing his power, engaging in the infamous Watergate cover-up, and being as bad or worse in reality than his opponents fanaticized he was.