Takeover (8 page)

When Agnew was forced out of the vice presidency, Watergate was already percolating strongly. Nixon looked to the establishment Republicans on Capitol Hill for help to save his presidency and chose House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford of Michigan as his new vice president.

Not only did this advance one of the Republican establishment’s
leading figures to the vice presidency, but Nixon undercut his own position by putting Ford next in line to the presidency.

When Ford was sworn in, the Capitol Hill Democrats’ favorite Republican was next in line for the Oval Office, and any remaining hesitation they had about forcing Nixon out was removed.

Ford served as vice president for only nine months; November 27, 1973, to August 9, 1974, when he became president after Nixon’s resignation. When Ford chose Nelson Rockefeller to be his vice president and Rockefeller was confirmed by Congress, it seemed that the craziest conspiracy theories on both the Right and the Left had been brought to fruition.

During the darkest days of Watergate, I hosted a dinner at the Capitol Hill Club, where around twenty-five conservative leaders, including ten to twelve members of Congress, met to try to figure out how to get conservatives out of the mess Nixon had gotten us into. While there was much agreement on the problem, no one offered a path forward; it became clear to me that a big problem, maybe the biggest problem, we conservatives were facing was lack of leadership.

When Rockefeller’s name was floated for vice president, I called together a group of about fourteen national conservative leaders for a dinner meeting at my then office at 7777 Route 7 in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, including Bill Rusher, Tom Winter, Stan Evans, Dick Obenshain, and others, who met to try to figure out how to derail Rockefeller’s nomination.

It quickly became apparent that we really didn’t have a strategy. The ideas kicked around included things like having conservative journalists attend Ford’s press conference, which of them was going to ask what question, and who would follow up with another question.

Clearly, asking a few questions at a press conference was not a strategy to defeat Rockefeller’s nomination. After the frustration of that four-hour meeting, I decided to play a more active and public leadership role and began to organize meetings, often at my home or office, to help develop and plan strategy.

In January 1977, a few weeks away from Rockefeller’s leaving the
office of vice president, an interviewer asked Rockefeller to reflect on his political life by noting that he had spent a lifetime preparing for the presidency, yet he had fallen short.

Why, the interviewer asked, did you fall short of achieving your goal, given your talent and practically unlimited resources? Rockefeller’s reply was yes, he had spent his adult life preparing for the presidency, but he had forgotten to prepare for the nomination.

Rockefeller’s somber introspection reminds me of the old Cajun recipe for rabbit stew—which begins, “To make rabbit stew, first catch a rabbit.”

His ambition to be president, he finally recognized, had been thwarted by his habit of gratuitously picking fights with conservatives. Too late he recognized that conservatives might not always be able to win the nomination, but they had become strong enough to claim veto rights over who would.

In the 1974 congressional elections, Republicans were again trounced, losing four seats in the Senate and forty-nine seats in the House. Democrats once again had a better than two to one advantage in the House and held sixty seats in the Senate. The only two bright spots for Republicans in the election were Paul Laxalt’s election as senator from Nevada and a young Bill Clinton’s defeat by Republican John P. Hammerschmidt in the campaign to represent Arkansas’s Third Congressional District.

Even if the Republican brand was practically destroyed by Watergate, the conservative brand was not.

Laxalt ran as an unabashed conservative; although his margin of victory was narrow, Laxalt showed that a principled conservative could win even under the trying circumstances of the 1974 election.

The stage was set for a conservative challenge to the establishment’s plan to field a Republican ticket with Ford as the presidential candidate and Nelson Rockefeller as the vice presidential nominee in 1976.

While it is difficult to put a specific date on the beginning of the rise of the New Right, I began to meet with a group of then-young
conservative political operatives and thinkers, such as Paul Weyrich, Morton Blackwell, Howard Phillips, Terry Dolan, Ed Feulner, Dick Obenshain, Bill Richardson, Lee Edwards and others, such as Tom Ellis, Joe Coors, Bob Walker (an early Reagan aide, not the congressman) as early as 1972 to strategize opposition to Nixon’s leftward turn and to try to figure out how we could turn the intellectual conservative movement into a practical political movement.

Although he opposed Nixon’s plan for a guaranteed wage, Reagan had mostly held his fire while Nixon was president, and even made a trip to Asia on Nixon’s behalf; however, once Nixon resigned, “Reagan no longer felt compelled to remain quiet in deference to the White House.”

Reagan “openly criticized the ABM treaty and the SALT I agreement, declaring that America was falling behind the Soviets in the arms race (an opinion shared in Moscow). He also rebuked the very notion of détente, saying, “Nothing proves the failure of Marxism more than the Soviet Union’s inability to produce weapons for its military ambitions and at the same time provide for their people’s everyday needs.”
¹⁷

This time there would be no coyness or write-in campaign; at sixty-four years of age, Reagan decided that if he wanted to actually be president, now was the time to do it.

Reagan didn’t pull any punches and launched his campaign with a direct frontal assault on the entire range of establishment Republican domestic policies pursued by Nixon and Ford, especially their economic policies and failure to deal with inflation, but he reserved his strongest and toughest attacks for Ford’s foreign policy.
¹⁸

Reagan gained much-needed momentum by attacking the whole idea of détente and the weakness of Ford’s foreign policy.

However, Ford attacked Reagan for being “too extreme” and used the powers of his incumbency to the fullest extent.

Essentially, Ford ran the old establishment Republican playbook from the 1964 “Stop Goldwater” campaign, and backed by the power of incumbency, and some missteps on Reagan’s part, it worked.

The battle seesawed back and forth during the primaries, with Ford winning New Hampshire and Florida, Reagan winning North Carolina, Indiana, and Texas, then Ford winning Oregon, Reagan winning California and Ford winning Ohio.

Reagan’s base was the conservative movement. By this point in the development of the conservative movement, all of the major movement organizations raised money, recruited members and subscribers, and educated voters through the alternative medium of direct mail; these included the
Conservative Digest
, Heritage Foundation,
Human Events
,
National Review
, American Conservative Union, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, and Jesse Helms’s Congressional Club, among others.

Unlike President Ford, whose base was the big donors of the Republican establishment; Reagan remained competitive because he had 250,000 small donors acquired through direct mail.

The new and alternative medium of direct mail played a key role in keeping the Reagan campaign alive, as Reagan would regularly send out an appeal for money to his small donors, and then use it to go on TV to make a pitch and raise more money.

Ford won sixteen of twenty-seven primaries and 53 percent of the total primary vote. In the caucus states, there was “hand-to-hand combat” for every delegate. Reagan ultimately won 56 percent of the caucus state delegates.
¹⁹

When the Republican National Convention opened in Kansas City, neither candidate had a majority of delegates. In a bid to attract moderate support, Reagan announced that if nominated, he would ask moderate senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania to serve as his running mate. Reagan’s attempt to unify the party seemed to backfire; liberals and the Republican establishment remained opposed to his candidacy, and many conservatives were irritated.

Senator Jesse Helms went so far as to encourage a “Draft Buckley” movement, to draft New York’s conservative senator James Buckley for president on the theory that Schweiker was too liberal to be one heartbeat away from the presidency.

Various conservative leaders were called upon to calm the waters. I got a call from Bill Buckley urging me to stay on the reservation, and others got similar calls from other leading conservatives who were close to Reagan.

Despite the dissention among conservatives over the Schweiker gambit, the nomination was still within Reagan’s grasp until Clarke Reed, the chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party, betrayed him and handed the Republican presidential nomination to Ford. Once again, the nomination slipped away from Reagan, as Ford won on the first ballot by a slim seventy-vote margin.
²⁰

Reagan’s analysis of the defects and shortcomings of Ford’s policies wasn’t disputed by a majority of Republican voters, and it wasn’t what defeated him—he was once again outmaneuvered by the establishment Republicans who controlled the machinery of the party at the Republican National Convention, and beaten by the power of the incumbency.

But Ronald Reagan made another error that contributed to his defeat—he thought that establishment Republicans actually wanted a unified party going into an election where the GOP was handicapped by Watergate, and he was prepared to add Schweiker to the ticket if that would unify the party.

The Republican establishment saw things quite differently.

Far from unifying the Republican Party, and bringing in new votes from the Right, in 1976 the Republican establishment refused to reach out to conservatives in any meaningful way.

Their answer to the conservative challenge to Nelson Rockefeller was to put Big Government Republican senator Bob Dole of Kansas on the ballot as the GOP vice presidential nominee. With Dole on the ticket, Rockefeller, the long time antagonist of conservatives, would be gone, but power would remain firmly in the hands of the GOP’s “dime store New Dealers” and Great Society–lite Capitol Hill establishment.

In 1976 Ronald Reagan may not have realized that he wasn’t merely competing for the Party’s presidential nomination; he was engaged in an all-out war for the soul of the GOP.

The Republican establishment understood the game, and just like in 1964, they had already decided they would rather lose than put a conservative in, or anywhere near, the Oval Office.

W
e had come tantalizingly close to getting a conservative candidate for president—Ronald Reagan—nominated in 1976.

When Ronald Reagan lost at the 1976 Republican National Convention, we conservatives understood that Reagan didn’t lose because the delegates rejected conservative ideas—he lost because once again conservatives were outfoxed and outgunned in Republican Convention politics.

Far from being out of favor or declining in political support, we knew conservative ideas, especially those advocated by what came to be known as the “New Right,” were gaining in political and cultural influence.

Reagan campaigned for President Ford in more than twenty states, but he also took $1 million of his remaining campaign funds and established an organization called Citizens for the Republic, “to speak out for Republicanism and how we had strayed from the visions of our founding fathers.”
¹

Ronald Reagan’s creation of Citizens for the Republic was very much in keeping with the spirit of the times, and the feeling among many conservatives that the old ways and old vehicles for transmitting
our ideas needed a serious update—as did the Republican Party.

There were many reasons for the rise of the New Right, but one of the most important (and one that gets little treatment in the popular history of the political forces that ultimately put Ronald Reagan in the White House) was conservative disillusionment with the leadership of the Old Right and the establishment Republican Party.

The rise of the New Right was as much a rebellion against the ineffectiveness and go-along-get-along policies of the Republican establishment, particularly on détente with the Soviet Union and social spending, as it was a fight against the Democrats. Our disillusionment with the Republican establishment ran deep, and was comparable to the disillusionment supporters of the Tea Party feel today with the failures of the establishment Republican Party.

In 1972 Lee Edwards invited me to lunch at the Mayflower Hotel to meet Morton Blackwell, who was then at the American Enterprise Institute. A week or so later Morton and I got back together for lunch at the Mayflower, and Morton later said I spoke “magic words” to him—I invited him to come to work for me at the Viguerie Company to help me build the conservative movement. Morton also later admitted that even though the job involved a small pay increase, he would have taken it with a pay cut.

Morton, and his wife, Helen, soon became close friends. Morton went on to found the Leadership Institute, train thousands of young conservatives in the art and science of politics, and is now one of the key players in the conservative movement. He has also been my friend, advisor, and wise counselor for over forty years. (See
appendix 3
for Morton Blackwell’s Laws of the Public Policy Process.)

After Morton had been in Washington for a year or two, he expressed his amazement and disappointment that Senators Goldwater, Thurmond, Tower, and the other conservatives on Capitol Hill didn’t meet every day, or every week, or every month, or even once a year to plan strategy and coordinate conservative action on issues.

What Morton and I saw was that the longtime conservative members of Congress would show up on Tuesday, get beat two to one, and say,
“When’s the next vote? Thursday? Okay, I’ll be back then.”