The 1948 election also saw the victory of Gerald Ford for a House seat in Grand Rapids, Michigan, after he defeated an incumbent conservative Republican in the primary. Ford had been a football star at Michigan, a Yale law graduate, a war hero, and was married to an attractive former fashion model.
At the 1952 Republican National Convention, moderate Dwight D. Eisenhower defeated conservative darling Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, “Mr. Republican,” who ironically had been tagged by the “can’t win” label by two-time loser Dewey. Eisenhower won the nomination by successfully challenging Taft delegates’ credentials, and he knew he needed to unify the party. So he chose the thirty-nine-year-old “Red-baiting” Senator from California, Richard M. Nixon— known to his friends as “Dick” and to his enemies as “Tricky Dick.”
Republicans swept into office and took control of the White House and both houses of Congress for the first time in decades. Democratic Massachusetts Congressman John F. Kennedy had successfully fought the rising Eisenhower tide and defeated liberal Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who was running for reelection. Kennedy’s uphill win in the Republican state of Massachusetts put him on the national stage and began what would be his successful drive for the White House in 1960.
Republicans’ success at gaining control of the Congress in 1952 was an anomaly. Two years later, Republicans would lose control of Congress and not regain it for forty years. The GOP won because of Ike’s popularity, because of voters’ dismay over the Korean War, because of President Truman’s low standing with the American people and because the Democrats nominated a liberal egghead from Illinois, Governor Adlai Stevenson, as their candidate. Stevenson made his con- tempt known for the little people in various ways. Once while campaigning, a woman exclaimed to Stevenson, “All the intelligent people are voting for you!” To which he replied, “Yes ma’am, but I need a majority.” His supporters also derided Ike by saying that he could not read if his lips were chapped.
By 1960, the sometime conservative Nixon, now the nominee of the Republican Party, picked Lodge as his running mate, after being prodded by Nelson Rockefeller into doing so—a curious choice because Lodge was the one man whom John Kennedy had defeated in political combat.
The best example of the problems of the Republican Party by 1960 were illustrated by one simple fact: at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, the party selected as a featured speaker former President Herbert Hoover, who had been run out of town on a rail twenty-eight years earlier and whose Presidency signaled the end of the era of Republican dominance in American politics. The GOP was the party of the past, the “eat your spinach” party. The Democrats were more fun, more intellectual, more relevant, more popular, and more interesting.
Also adding to conservatives’ angst, around the time of the convention, Richard Nixon, the Vice President of the United States, the presumptive Presidential nominee of the Republican Party met in New York with Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Together, they produced the “Compact of Fifth Avenue” which steered the party and its nominee leftward in exchange for Rockefeller’s support of the ticket. Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who never needed a map to find the jugular vein, said that if the compact became part of the GOP platform it “will live in history as the Munich of the Republican Party.”
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Rockefeller symbolized everything that grassroots Republicans, becoming increasingly conservative, despised about the other wing of the party. Gould wrote,
The problem was that Rockefeller seemed to think that his money and celebrity appeal entitled him to leadership and he made little secret of his disdain for the opinions of rank-and-file Republicans. Dominant in New York where his money and a divided Democratic Party helped him, Rockefeller was not a very good national politician. Along with indecision went a tin ear for Republican attitudes, and his casual approach to his wedding vows compounded his problems. But through an array of publicists and sympathetic journalists, he could make noise about Republican issues whenever he chose.
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The concession to Rockefeller angered both Eisenhower and Goldwater. Given their opposing views of Republicanism, this was no small feat. At the convention, Goldwater’s name was placed in nomination for Vice President, and he took the podium to decline the opportunity to be considered as a candidate. But he did initiate a sensational and prophetic moment in the history of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Said Goldwater, “This great Republican Party is our historic house. This is our home.”
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And addressing those who had placed his name in nomination, the Arizonan said, “Let’s grow up, conservatives. If we want to take this party back, and I think we can some day, let’s go to work.”
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Four years later, Goldwater and his grassroots legions would do precisely that, much to the dismay of the “Eastern Elite” wing of the Republican Party.
In the 1960 general election campaign, John Kennedy saw a high-hanging fastball and hit it out of the park. Kennedy successfully tapped into the vein in the American electorate that was gravely concerned about the Soviet threat. He positioned himself to Nixon’s right on the issue of anti-Communism, scorching his former House and Senate colleague over the rise of Fidel Castro, defending Quemoy and Matsu, and the “missile gap” where Kennedy accused the Eisenhower Administration of allowing the United States to fall behind the Soviet Union. Continuing the tradition of the Democratic Party as the party of the future and the party of “Happy Days Are Here Again,” Kennedy also zapped Nixon as he urged the need “to get this country moving again.”
In 1964, Kennedy’s unlikely friend, Barry Goldwater, began the slow process of redefining the Republican Party—and hence the Democratic Party as well. Goldwater eschewed the traditional “ticket balancing” act embraced by Nixon and Eisenhower and picked a little known but equally conservative Congressman and Chairman of the Republican National Committee from Upstate New York, Bill Miller. In choosing Miller, Goldwater gave moderates and liberals little reason to stay in the party and a mass exodus occurred. Goldwater lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson. But he also began to attract conservative Democrats to the GOP, thus upsetting its equilibrium between conservatives and liberals.
Liberals like New York Mayor John Lindsay would eventually become Democrats, while Democrats, like South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond and former Texas Governor John Connally, would become Republicans. Thereafter, Democrats would only nominate tickets that were either left of center or slightly left of center while Republicans would only nominate tickets that were either right of center or slightly right of center. It is instructive to remember that Ronald Reagan, perhaps seeing the handwriting on the wall, switched parties before Goldwater was nominated.
When asked later why he chose Miller, Goldwater said, “because he bugs Johnson.” But someone who bugged conservatives more than Lyndon Johnson was Rockefeller. For years conservatives in the party had gagged on nominees like Wendell Wilkie, Tom Dewey, and, to a lesser extent, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Now, when conservatives actually won the Presidential nomination for one of their own, they had expected the moderates to “suck it up” and support their side as they had supported the other side. But they had no such luck in 1964. Rockefeller, New York Senator Jacob Javits, Pennsylvania Governor Bill Scranton, and other moderate-to-liberal Republicans took a walk on Goldwater. Conservatives would never forget nor forgive the traitorous Rockefeller. Bill Schulz, a founding member of the Young Americans for Freedom said, “Conservatives had always been good sports, rallying behind Eisenhower. Here was a situation where major figures of the party were not supporting the nominee.”
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One major Republican figure did emerge unscathed from the 1964 Goldwater debacle: Reagan. He had given a nationally televised speech on behalf of the Republican nominee, and this introduced him to the American people as a conservative spokesman. Goldwater had initially opposed Reagan’s giving the half-hour appeal. The Goldwater campaign wanted to bring in an outsider to make pitches for their candidate in California. But Holmes Tuttle—a California auto dealer, Goldwater supporter, and later a member of the now famous “Reagan Kitchen Cabinet”—resisted, telling the campaign he “had someone in California who could make those speeches.” Tuttle’s support for Reagan meant the campaign required him to provide the money for the speech.
The address Reagan delivered was billed as “A Time for Choosing,” and a later record album of the address was called “Rendezvous with Destiny.” As far as history is concerned, it is now simply known as “The Speech.” Reagan’s address raised millions for the Goldwater campaign and was described by many political scribes as the one bright spot in an otherwise bleak campaign.
In his own peculiar show of gratitude, Goldwater returned the favor years later when he endorsed Gerald Ford over Reagan in the 1976 GOP Presidential primaries. In fact, some years after Reagan left the Presidency and Goldwater had retired from the Senate, a documentary producer went to Arizona to interview Goldwater about Reagan’s legacy. Goldwater answered just about every question by starting out, “Well you know he was just an actor . . .”
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Although Nixon tried to pull strings behind the scenes at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco to wrest the Presidential nomination away from Goldwater, the Arizonan had the delegates’ hearts, minds, and votes. But Nixon did hit the trail for Goldwater and probably campaigned harder than any other national Republican figure in 1964, save Goldwater himself. Goldwater took note and would not forget his sometime friend’s efforts. He had gotten over his animosity toward Nixon and was deeply appreciative of Nixon’s tireless work after many moderate and liberal Republicans had abandoned him.
Despite Goldwater’s triumph at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1964, his nomination did not immediately herald a new era for the GOP—especially in Washington. For many years before and after 1964, liberal and moderate Republican Senators met on Capitol Hill each week for lunch at what was called “The Wednesday Club.” In 1967, following the GOP’s midterm comeback, a large number of newly elected Senators joined with the incumbent Republican Senators to propose new government programs and controls while denouncing conservatives in the party as a “minority of a minority.” Senators attending included Hugh Scott and Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, Chuck Percy of Illinois, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, Ed Brooke of Massachusetts, Jacob Javits of New York, Charles Mathias of Maryland, Clifford Case of New Jersey, and Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, among others. In the 1960s and into the mid-seventies, the Wednesday Club was considered by many to be an important incubator for GOP progressive thought. Today, The Wednesday Club no longer exists. Without Reagan’s 1976 challenge of the incumbent but unelected Ford, the Republican Party would most likely have continued its leftward drift.
Goldwater lost in a landslide due to the harshness of rhetoric, but also because of Lyndon Johnson’s dirty campaign and the memory of a martyred President. Still, conservatives knew the Goldwater effort wasn’t meaningless. The effort, for the first time, introduced real, conservative solutions to the problems faced by Americans.
The Republican National Committee, which previously had a direct mail house file of only 40,000 names, had over 600,000 direct mail contributors by the time of Goldwater’s loss. Yet the elected leadership of the GOP was moving to the center, and GOP candidates running in 1966 did not run as the children of Goldwater. By and large, they ran as traditional Republicans who were defenders of the status quo. The one notable exception was the new Governor elected in California.
Reagan had won in a landslide primary over his liberal opponent, San Francisco Mayor George Christopher, and defeated incumbent Democrat Edmund G. “Pat” Brown in the general election by over a million votes. Brown had handily defeated Richard Nixon four years earlier, nearly destroying Nixon’s political fortunes.
In both the primary and general election, Reagan continued to hammer at the existing order and hone the same message he had used in campaigning for Goldwater two years earlier. 1966 was a comeback year for the GOP, but not because of ideology or because the party was moving in a new direction. Instead, it was somewhat of a backlash year against then President Johnson. More importantly, GOP voters who had voted for Johnson in 1964 or did not participate in that election returned to the fold, voting in their natural and normal patterns for an off-year election.
Brown’s campaign, misunderstanding Reagan’s appeal, ran half-hour commercials of Brown, which included the Governor’s telling a group of assembled schoolchildren, “and don’t forget, it was an actor who shot Lincoln.”
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California voters were appalled, including Dan Blocker, who played Hoss Cartwright on the popular show
Bonanza
. Blocker renounced his endorsement of Brown, and Lyn Nofziger of the Reagan campaign did everything he could to exacerbate Brown’s impolitic predicament with the media.
Separate from the Republican Party, an intellectual and political “conservative movement” was developing, though still in the nascent stages. In 1960, the Young Americans for Freedom was founded. Richard Viguerie, just starting his direct mail company, wrote to Reagan asking him to sign fundraising letters for YAF. Weeks passed with no reply, and Viguerie forgot about it until one day when he opened his mail. Viguerie found a crumpled copy of his letter to Reagan with a note from Reagan saying he would be delighted to help out. Reagan then sheepishly explained that he had found the letter in his son’s toy box.
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These conservatives eschewed party labels and had wide and varying opinions on many issues. But on one issue, they were in firm agreement: all were staunch anti-Communists. This developing movement went largely unnoticed by the national media. When they did try to work with the Republican Party, they were treated like the hired help, as many of its established and influential organizations were decidedly liberal. Similar in influence to the Wednesday Club, the Ripon Society, the standard-bearing organization for liberals within the party, was flush with cash and oversaw many policy debates and decisions. Yet conservatives saw their influence grow steadily.