Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (13 page)

On foreign policy, he was a realist rather than an ideologue. He did not end the Vietnam War quickly. He authorized the invasion of Cambodia, and he
continued to bomb North Vietnam. All of this infuriated the antiwar movement. But he slowly withdrew American troops—his “Vietnamization” policy—which seemed to satisfy middle-ground opinion. He also launched the opening with China and his détente policy with the Soviet Union. Both enraged the anticommunist right.

Yet following Buchanan’s lead, Nixon ran unabashedly in pursuit of George Wallace’s voters. He strongly opposed school busing to achieve integration; attacked student protesters who burned American flags; proclaimed himself the champion of the “silent majority” of his fellow citizens who devoted themselves to family and work; criticized the drug culture; and continued to push law and order. When Democrats turned left and nominated George McGovern in 1972, Nixon’s task became easier.
McGovern was tagged as the candidate of “acid [as in hard drugs], amnesty [for draft resisters] and abortion.” (
It came to light years later that the phrase was invented not by a Republican but by Democratic senator Thomas Eagleton in a conversation with conservative columnist Robert Novak. McGovern later chose Eagleton as his running mate, then dropped him after it emerged that Eagleton had undergone electroshock therapy. Novak did not reveal the source of the line until after Eagleton’s death.)

This eclectic mix was Nixonism. It was certainly coherent when it came to Nixon’s political needs and personal instincts, but it satisfied few who were in search of consistency as defined by either conservatives or liberals of the time.

The conservative ideologues, who had stood with Nixon early in his term, began to pull away. On August 10, 1971,
National Review
published an unusual “Declaration” signed by twelve prominent conservatives, including Buckley, Rusher, and Jeff Bell, in which they “resolved to suspend our support of the Administration.” It was a careful choice of words, signaling less than a clean break. The declaration was modestly critical of Nixon on domestic affairs (they accused him of continuing “excessive taxation and inordinate welfarism”).
But the conservative rebels hit him hard on foreign policy, including “his overtures to Red China done in the absence of any public concessions by Red China to American and Western causes,” and for presiding over a “deteriorated American military position.”

In late December,
Representative John Ashbrook of Ohio, one of the
early Draft Goldwater organizers, decided to take the cause of the Republican conservative dissidents to the voters—and received all of 9.7 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, less than half the vote won by Representative Paul “Pete” McCloskey, a California Republican who challenged Nixon from the left on the Vietnam war. Nixon, again the man in the middle, won 68 percent. By the summer, most conservatives, including Buckley, returned to the Nixon fold, but not Rusher.
He took to the op-ed pages of the
Los Angeles Times
to announce he would vote for neither Nixon nor McGovern. Nixon, he charged, “has not only traduced almost all of conservatism’s basic principles; he has, for the time being, largely silenced its leaders, confused or seduced a good part of its following and effectively paralyzed the whole conservative movement.” It was an eloquent complaint from a betrayed conservative—of a sort that would be heard again and again in the coming years.

Rusher took some satisfaction in including this lengthy polemic in his memoir, published a decade after Nixon’s departure, noting that “in the more genial light of hindsight . . . we know the grim price that America, the conservative movement, and the Republican Party would all shortly have to pay for their willingness to settle for Richard Nixon.”

It is hard to know what would have happened to Nixon’s “New Majority” absent the Watergate scandal. Despite Rusher’s frustration, he acknowledged that Nixon’s 1972 landslide certainly seemed like the realignment that conservatives had been waiting for and that he had foreseen years before in his “Crossroads” essay. After he left office, Nixon wrote that he had fully intended to build a durable new conservative electoral alliance.

Savoring in retrospect his moment of triumph before his fall, Nixon wrote in his 1978 memoir,
RN,
“I won a majority of every key population group identified by Gallup except the blacks and the Democrats. Four of these groups—manual workers, Catholics, members of labor union families and people with only grade school educations—had never before been in the Republican camp in all the years since Gallup had begun keeping these records.

“Now I planned to give expression to the more conservative values and beliefs of the New Majority throughout the country. . . . I intended to revitalize the Republican Party along New Majority lines.”

Nixon had seen the Promised Land but, because of Watergate, he wouldn’t enter.

Conservatives were in a state of raging ambivalence. They were certain that Nixon had been brought down by a liberal media that both he and they loathed. (“I never really cared for Nixon until Watergate,” quipped the conservative columnist and movement founder M. Stanton Evans.) They knew that a New Majority—
their
New Majority—had been foiled by the press’s connivance with congressional Democrats, liberal judges, and establishment Republicans who went soft and forced Nixon out. Nixon had not been out of office a year when Pat Buchanan published a book on this theme,
Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories
. Conservatives insisted that Nixon had been held to standards in Watergate far higher than those against which liberal heroes like FDR and JFK had been judged. Ronald Reagan, by then the governor of California, shrewdly gauged the temper of his party: he stuck with Nixon until the end was obvious. Like Nixon’s campaigning for Goldwater in 1964, Reagan’s loyalty to Nixon would stand him well.

And yet the right knew that Nixon was not one of them—or, as Buchanan suggested, that only half of him was. Many of the fervent anticommunists could not abide his foreign policy and were especially wary of the role Henry Kissinger played in pushing Nixon toward pragmatism and realism. There was an irony here, since liberals had long regarded Kissinger as a conservative. But he was a conservative of the old school of balance-of-power politics. Further, many conservatives knew that Nixon’s approach to economics was a long way from Milton Friedman’s or Friedrich von Hayek’s. And having railed against excesses of presidential power since the days of Roosevelt, a significant number of conservatives felt a need to be consistent with themselves in standing up to Nixon’s abuses. Thus was Barry Goldwater an early voice for Nixon’s resignation, which endeared the prime mover of the conservative insurgency to liberals for the rest of his life.

Instead of a New Majority, Nixon ushered in an internecine battle among conservatives of differing temperaments. It was fought out in 1976 between President Gerald Ford, the genial congressional Republican whom Nixon had chosen as his vice president in 1973 upon the resignation of Spiro Agnew, and Reagan himself. When he succeeded Nixon, Ford, a classic
midwestern conservative, had bowed to the GOP’s moderate wing by choosing Nelson Rockefeller, the scourge of Goldwaterism, as his vice president. It was a popular choice among liberals outside the party, but it enraged the right and undercut Ford’s legitimate conservative credentials.

The battle of 1976 was different from the fights of the 1960s, involving open contests between progressive and conservative Republicans. Buchanan shrewdly observed:
“The liberal wing of the Republican Party is a spectator now. It lacked the numbers to advance its own candidate, or the will to save its own champion, the Vice President. The civil war in the GOP is between conservatives—militant and moderate.”

Buchanan’s reflection is a reminder that the purge of progressive Republicans that began in 1964 continued right through the Nixon years and beyond. This is true even though liberal Republicans did well in the 1966 midterm elections, which provided the setting for Nixon’s vigorous campaigning.
Time
and
Newsweek
put the same six Republican winners on their postelection covers: Governors Rockefeller, Reagan, and Romney, and Senators-elect Mark Hatfield, Edward Brooke, and Charles Percy. All but Reagan were progressives.

It was a false dawn. Gradually, but with great determination, conservatives waged war on the party’s progressives—and after a while, many liberal Republicans gave up and switched parties, or retired from politics.

One of the earliest post-Goldwater victims was Senator Thomas Kuchel, a liberal Republican who had been appointed by California governor Earl Warren in 1953 to fill Richard Nixon’s seat. Kuchel lost his California primary in 1968 to the state’s conservative education superintendent, Max Rafferty, a very early critic of progressive education. Rafferty was a defender of phonics, a foe of sex education, and a champion of assigning old children’s classics in schools; his books included
What They Are Doing to Your Children.
There was no doubt about the ideological affinities of the “They.” Rafferty swept past Kuchel in the same conservative Southern California counties that two years earlier had allowed Reagan to defeat a moderate Republican and then seize the governorship from Democrat Pat Brown. Kuchel learned of his defeat on the same evening that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in
Los Angeles after claiming victory in the Democratic presidential primary. Rafferty, however, also gave Republicans an early lesson in the costs of nominating conservatives whom voters regarded as extreme. Democrat Alan Cranston defeated Rafferty and began a long Senate career. No Republican since Kuchel has won the seat.

A year later, New York City mayor John V. Lindsay, one of the most liberal Republicans in the country, lost his Republican mayoral primary to John Marchi, a conservative state senator who made himself the voice of Catholic ethnic outer-borough voters against the dashing former congressman from Manhattan’s silk stocking district. Lindsay won reelection on a third-party Liberal ticket, became a Democrat, and ran unsuccessfully for president in the 1972 primaries. Conservatives were happy to be rid of Lindsay, whom Bill Buckley had opposed from the right in a raucous 1965 campaign on the Conservative Party ticket. Buckley’s challenge kept conservatives in the national news following Goldwater’s defeat, led him to produce one of his most engaging books,
The Unmaking of a Mayor,
and indirectly led to the election of his brother Jim to the United States Senate in 1970.

Jim Buckley also ran on the Conservative Party line. Lindsay won in 1969 because the Democrats had nominated a conservative named Mario Procaccino, who split the right-of-center vote with Marchi. Buckley profited from a split vote on the left between Democratic congressman Richard Ottinger and Senator Charles Goodell, a liberal Republican (and the father of the future National Football League commissioner). The Nixon White House targeted Goodell—one of the few times Nixon supported a purge of a liberal in his own party. Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s always rhetorically creative vice president, referred to Goodell as the
“Christine Jorgensen of the Republican Party,” a reference to one of the first Americans to undergo a sex change operation. In an interview for this book, Buchanan, who was close to Agnew, explained that the administration feared that Ottinger would defeat Buckley and so the Nixon forces set out to boost Goodell among liberals by attacking him. The strategy succeeded brilliantly, drew votes away from Ottinger, and elected Buckley.

Party switching picked up speed in the 1970s. As southern Democrats switched to the Republican Party, northern Republicans responded in kind. Congressman Ogden Reid of the
Herald Tribune
family became a Democrat,
and so did Congressman Don Riegle of Michigan. First elected in the GOP class of 1966, he went on to become a Democratic U.S. senator. Primaries from the right ended the careers of two of the party’s most outspoken liberals: Clifford Case of New Jersey in 1978 (Buckley’s magazine called him “Hopeless Case” as far back as 1959) and Jacob Javits of New York in 1980.

The rise of Newt Gingrich and the Republican takeover of the House in 1994 led to a further rout of the progressive Republicans—this time at the hands of Democrats. Moderate and even liberal voters in the Northeast and Midwest, particularly in suburban districts, once proudly sent progressive Republicans to Washington. But the increasing dominance of southern conservatives in the party of Lincoln made such voters wary of electing Republicans of any stripe and handing control of Congress to a Republican Party dominated by the right. In the 1990s and 2000s, one middle-way Republican after another was defeated by a Democrat. The fallen included representatives such as Connie Morella in Maryland, Jim Leach in Iowa and Chris Shays in Connecticut, along with Senator Lincoln Chaffee in Rhode Island. These politicians lost not because their constituents stopped liking them—on the contrary, they maintained high approval ratings—but because their identity as Republicans turned them into enablers of right-wing congressional leaders.