Takeover (6 page)

Michigan governor George Romney was a much more appealing standard-bearer for establishment Republicans, and Romney emerged as the front-runner in the race to be the Republican nominee in 1968.

After Republicans did well in the 1966 off-year election, the Republican establishment had some cause to believe that the old order would be restored. Republicans picked up three Senate seats in 1966, and the winning Republican candidates; Charles H. Percy of Illinois, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, and Howard Baker of Tennessee, were all establishment-type Republicans.

Republicans also picked up forty-seven House seats. However, almost half of those seats were in the South and West and were won by candidates who, if not fire-breathing Goldwater conservatives, were at least a lot more conservative than their classmate, George H. W. Bush, of Texas House District 7.

Eight new Republican governors were also elected, many of them in the South and West as well, including the new governor of California, Ronald Reagan.

While the recruitment of Ronald Reagan to run for governor of California, and who did what to convince him to run, has entered the realm of myth, there are several key points that bear on the situation in which conservatives find themselves in the aftermath of the 2012 election.

The men who recruited Reagan were all men of the New West; they had no ties to the old Republican establishment.

Robert Tuttle, Reagan’s director of White House personnel and son of Reagan “kitchen cabinet” member Holmes Tuttle, recalled that his father, Henry Salvatori, and A. C. (Cy) Rubel “were all self-made. … What I admired about them, especially that early group, was they didn’t really want anything. … They all just wanted better government. And they wanted smaller government. They were all
concerned about the size of government. In those days, in the ’50s right after the war, the tax rate was 90 percent.”

As Robert Tuttle later said, “they were concerned about the size of taxes. They saw how Communism was a real threat, a real menace, and they were concerned about that, and how we were responding to it. They loved their country and they’d all been fantastically successful. … It was interesting because these guys were all about ten to fifteen years older than Ronald Reagan, but he was a real hero to them. What they loved about Reagan was that he could articulate what they felt and articulate it so well.”
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Tuttle, Salvatori, and Rubel were later joined by other successful entrepreneurs, such as Justin Dart and Joe Coors, who all recognized that to win, Republicans didn’t need to become more like Democrats; what Republicans needed was someone to articulate the conservative beliefs they held, and articulate them well.

Some New Right conservatives, including me, wanted Joe Coors to put himself forward to be secretary of commerce. Coors’s response was that if Reagan wanted him to serve, he knew how to get in touch with him—he wasn’t looking for a job.

Joe Coors and the other early Reagan kitchen cabinet were selfless men, only interested in their country.

I will expand on this later, but these successful entrepreneurs looked at Reagan, and probably without really ever saying it, applied the same analysis they would apply if they were evaluating a new product or business idea, what I call “Viguerie’s Four Horsemen of Marketing”:

• Position (a hole in the marketplace)

• Differentiation

• Benefit

• Brand (it’s what makes you singular or unique)

Reagan’s position was that he filled the “hole” of being the national conservative leader that was left in the marketplace by Goldwater’s epic defeat; he was a fresh face, different from the Old Right conservatives. Probably his greatest benefit when compared to other potential candidates was his skill as a communicator, which made him electable; and his position, differentiation, and benefit established his brand, and his days on TV and in the movies had made it trusted.

In other words, conservatives needed a salesman, and Ronald Reagan, his skills honed in Hollywood, television, and on the dinner circuit, was the best salesman for conservative ideas the self-made entrepreneurs of his early “kitchen cabinet” ever saw.

Today, the number one problem conservatives have is that we have no one leader who has all four of my four horsemen, although we have six to eight young conservative governors and members of Congress who in the next few years could easily qualify.

The notion that conservatives needed to sell their ideas marked a huge mental shift for the conservative movement. Many who supported Goldwater and who were early adherents of the movement tended to think the truth of conservative criticism of liberalism was self-evident, as illustrated with that great quote by Morton Blackwell about the “Sir Galahad Theory of Politics,” Morton has often gently criticized many of our fellow conservatives who think it is sufficient to be right (as in correct) and then victory will come our way.

Aren’t we conservatives in much the same position today?

Establishment Republicans today are making the same mistake of embracing me-tooism that they did back in the 1960s.

When over 60 percent of Americans think Big Government is the greatest threat to freedom, it is clear that our conservative ideas resonate with millions of voters, but the establishment Republican Party and its leaders do a terrible job of selling those ideas, or worse yet, simply run away from them.

Goldwater’s defeat caused a complete reassessment of how conservatives framed the debate at that time, and Reagan’s well-aimed
critiques of liberal influence on government and culture, coupled with his optimistic belief that America’s best days were ahead if only the shackles of government could be thrown off, showed them a way forward.

Reagan polled nearly one million more votes in the general election than his Democratic opponent, incumbent Democratic governor Pat Brown did, and he did it without the support of liberal Republicans.

Two of their groups, Republicans for Progress and the Ripon Society, pointedly refused to endorse Reagan’s race for California governor even as they quite publicly enthused over the GOP moderates, such as Governors Nelson and Winthrop Rockefeller, Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, Governor George Romney of Michigan, and Howard Baker running for senator in Tennessee.
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Just four years earlier, former vice president Richard Nixon had been defeated by about 300,000 votes for the office Reagan had just won. The former vice president had been savaged by the establishment media and in an angry outburst declared that he was holding his “last press conference” after his defeat, saying, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

Nixon had not abandoned politics or his presidential aspirations. Even though he was widely distrusted by conservatives for selling out to Rockefeller in the 1960 Convention fight over the Republican platform, Nixon had worked hard for Goldwater in 1964, even making a speech at the San Francisco convention, admonishing the Senator’s establishment detractors by telling them:

Before this convention we were Goldwater Republicans, Rockefeller Republicans, Scranton Republicans, Lodge Republicans, but now that this convention has met and made its decision, we are Republicans, period, working for Barry Goldwater. … And to those few, if there are some, who say that they are going to sit it out or take a walk, or even go on a boat ride, I have an answer in the words of Barry Goldwater in 1960—Let’s grow up, Republicans, let’s go to work—and we shall win in November!
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Nixon was no conservative, but he knew better than anyone how the Republican establishment worked, and he was prepared to help Goldwater on the theory that the favor would be repaid.

He was right. On January 22, 1965, just two days after Lyndon Johnson was sworn in for his full term as president, Goldwater and Nixon attended a meeting of the Republican National Committee.

Goldwater turned to Nixon during his remarks and to express his gratitude for the extraordinary effort Nixon made on his behalf, told him: “Dick, I will never forget it.” He then added, “If there ever comes a time, I am going to do all I can.”
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In 1966, while Reagan campaigned for governor of California, Nixon traveled the country, stumping for Republican candidates, hammering Johnson on foreign policy, and reestablishing his credibility with the leaders of the Republican Party. Nixon’s political resurrection began to take shape.

In his 1966 run for governor, Reagan defeated Brown with a campaign that emphasized law and order, wasteful government, welfare, overtaxation, and dealing with student disturbances at the University of California.
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Having defeated Brown by almost a million votes, Reagan proved the power of what, broadly speaking, became the Republican message on the national domestic policy front from the mid-1960s through the 1970s.

Going into the 1968 presidential primary campaign season, Governor Reagan was probably the hottest political “property” on the national scene.

Reagan was the charismatic standard-bearer for the new conservative movement, and he was the spokesman for millions of Americans who were beginning to see the Democrats as the party of wasteful government, welfare, overtaxation, and the coddling of criminals and student protesters. Ronald Reagan was a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, even if he hadn’t officially announced.

As “hot” and charismatic as Reagan was in 1968, the inability of conservatives to unite to control the inner workings of the
Republican Party would launch Richard Nixon into the White House first, and ultimately place political power and control of the Republican Party firmly back into the hands of the “me-too” Republican establishment.

If going into the 1966 campaign cycle it seemed that the only logical Republican candidates for president were progressive “me-too” Republicans, like Rockefeller and Romney, coming out of the 1966 Republican victories, the somewhat unanticipated resurrection of Richard Nixon suddenly put a new player on the field.

Nixon didn’t fit neatly into the political landscape created by the fight between the mostly Eastern progressive Republicans and the new movement conservatives who had supported Barry Goldwater.

And that’s the way Nixon wanted it.

When Nixon was running in 1967, he made a point of meeting with conservatives in DC. As introductions were made and came around to Neil McCaffery, the head of the Conservative Book Club, Nixon said he didn’t know “we” had a book club.

Establishment Republicans saw Nixon as a known quantity, and they knew that even if they didn’t like him, they could do business with him; the question was, would they even have to if Governor Romney continued to be the leading contender for the nomination?

Those on the inside of the conservative movement viewed Nixon with skepticism as the architect of the “Fifth Avenue Sellout” to Nelson Rockefeller on the 1960 Republican platform, and as Eisenhower’s silent partner in the growth of government and the continuation of the New Deal during Ike’s presidency. But to many grassroots Republicans, Nixon’s strong anti-Communism, his support for Goldwater, and his tough talk on law and order made him look and sound like a conservative.

There was also a strong feeling among many Republicans that the media had conspired to defeat Nixon and that Nixon had been cheated out of the presidency in 1960 due to Democratic election fraud. These Republicans felt that somehow Nixon was owed another shot at the White House; it was, they felt, “his turn.”

In one of those seemingly innocuous word choices that can change the dynamics of a political campaign—and history—on September 4, 1967, Governor Romney told Detroit television newsman Lou Gordon that he had been “brainwashed” by American generals and diplomats into supporting the Vietnam War while touring Southeast Asia in 1965.
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Gordon made sure the wire services got the story, and the
New York Times
and other major newspapers around the country carried the unflattering coverage. Democratic candidate Eugene McCarthy quipped that attempting to brainwash Romney might be overkill. “A light rinse would have been sufficient,” he said.
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Romney’s support dropped like a stone. The next Harris poll showed him losing sixteen points, and he went from the presumptive front-runner for the Republican nomination, with 34 percent supporting him in February 1967, to just 14 percent in November.

Suddenly, it appeared Nixon had the field by himself, or did he?

Even though the bottom fell out of George Romney’s campaign, he did not withdraw from the race right away, and the Republican establishment was not about to give up the fight.

Despite all of the marks against him, when Romney dropped out of the race in February 1968, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller jumped in, and he promptly won the Massachusetts Republican primary.

Were Rockefeller to continue his winning streak in the Northeast and command the large New York delegation, he would be a formidable force at the Republican National Convention.

Conservatives began to urge Governor Reagan to run to provide Republican primary voters with a clear conservative choice in the primaries.

Ronald Reagan obliged them, in part because he “had strong views on Vietnam that distinguished him [even] from Richard Nixon. Reagan’s opinion of Nixon seemed to vary depending on the circumstance. He had supported Nixon in Nixon’s 1960 presidential run and again in his ill-fated 1962 governor’s race in
California. But as Nixon geared up to run against Johnson in 1968, Reagan was clearly doubtful about his fellow Republican’s ability. They disagreed about Vietnam, where Nixon believed “economic détente” would lead Moscow to broker a deal to end the war. The divide was so great that it was one of the factors that motivated Reagan’s 1968 presidential run.
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While Ronald Reagan gained votes as a write-in candidate, he wasn’t officially campaigning for the nomination or drawing a clear contrast between his conservative positions and the positions of Richard Nixon.