Republicans, at the national level, were slow to grasp the exponentially growing power of the conservative movement. For example, in 1977, conservatives mounted an effective, though ultimately losing, effort, to stop Jimmy Carter’s Panama Canal Treaties. Ford was supporting the treaties, and although the conservatives inside the party were routing the liberals, they were not gone. The treaties only passed the Senate by one vote, but became a litmus test for Republicans and conservatives everywhere.
Reagan had been approached and had agreed to sign direct mail fundraising letters for the Republican National Committee. But when he asked for some of the money to be used to organize a “Panama Canal Truth Squad” to travel the nation to organize grassroots opposition to the treaties, he was rebuffed by the new National Chairman of the RNC, Bill Brock, a former Senator from Tennessee. In one memorable moment, Reagan was speaking to Brock via speakerphone at the offices of Senator Paul Laxalt. Terry Wade, a journalist with the
Las
Vegas Journal,
was seated in the lobby outside of Laxalt’s offices, overhead one side of the conversation, and described Reagan’s mood as “quite heated.” Reagan debated Bill Buckley on PBS, in a most friendly fashion, over the treaties. Reagan’s able second in the debate was Admiral John McCain II (ret.).
In 1978, three “New Right” Senate candidates won in New Hampshire, Iowa, and Colorado. The candidates—Gordon Humphrey in New Hampshire, Roger Jepsen in Iowa, and Bill Armstrong in Colorado—had been largely shunned by establishment Republicans, and their wins were purely the result of the efforts of the conservative movement. Walter Cronkite reported on CBS that these “kamikaze” candidates, who normally lost, were winning that evening.
A handful of conservatives also won in the House in the late 1970s. In 1977, conservative Bob Livingston won a House seat in Louisiana that Republicans had not held since Reconstruction, again due to the efforts of the “New Right.” Reagan campaigned extensively for GOP nominees in 1978, but did not endorse primary candidates, save one: George W. Bush’s opponent in the congressional primary for a race in Midland, Texas. Ambassador Bush was decidedly unhappy and called Reagan in California and gave him hell for supporting his son’s opponent.
In 1979, the conservatives stopped Jimmy Carter’s SALT II treaty dead in its tracks. A movement that five years earlier could do nothing to stop the confirmation of Nelson Rockefeller had blocked a major initative by the Carter Administration from ratification by the Senate. It was a signal moment for conservatives.
Conservative think tanks began to flex their muscles—from the Heritage Foundation, led by Ed Feulner, to the libertarian Cato Institute and many others, including new state-based policy think tanks. A veritable flood of new ideas and white papers cascaded out of each institution, dealing with economic, social, political, and national defense matters. Elected officials eagerly read these papers. Their authors, in speeches in Washington and around the country, often addressed overflow crowds. Books too, like Milton Friedman’s
Free to Choose
and George Gilder’s
Wealth and Poverty
, became important contributions to the shaping of conservative thought.
The early conservatives relied upon a few publications for information. These included
Human Events
and
National Review
.
Human Events
was founded in 1946, and Tom Winter and Allan Ryskind acquired the publication by the early 1960s. Reagan had been a loyal subscriber since 1961 and would occasionally write notes to Winter and Ryskind or call them. After he became President, Reagan wrote that he was reading
Human Events
more but enjoying it less. Once, when Reagan called Ryskind at home, his daughter answered the phone, and Ryskind—thinking it was his friend Bill Schulz playing a joke—picked up the phone and said, “Hello Ronnie Baby.”
But now other conservative publications, including
Conservative Digest
, were springing forth. And the number of conservative columnists was growing exponentially as well. The original unholy four of George Will, Pat Buchanan, William Safire, and William F. Buckley—hired by the mainstream media to give conservatives some sort of voice on the editorial pages of the leading newspapers— would soon be joined by Bob Tyrrell and others.
By 1981, even Harvard was paying attention to the conservative movement. Richard Viguerie, Howard Phillips, Morton Blackwell, Paul Weyrich, and others were invited to conduct nine seminars for the students there. The conservative movement had arrived.
Still, the conservatives needed a leader to bring it all together. Would Reagan, at age sixty-nine by 1980, try one more time? Although some conservatives flirted with other Presidential campaigns beginning in 1978, for the larger majority of the Right, Ronald Reagan was still their man.
Reagan too, like the conservatives, was evolving in his thinking and beliefs, constantly reading and meeting with scholars and intellectuals of the Right. Hannaford wrote that in September of 1976, he met with Reagan to discuss some ideas for columns and radio commentaries. One of those presented to Reagan was Jude Wanniski’s and Art Laffer’s “supply side concept” which had manifested itself in a jobs creation bill, introduced by Congressman Jack Kemp of New York. Reagan immediately embraced the idea. He wrote a column and recorded a commentary touting the revolutionary concept.
At the invitation of Jerry Falwell, Reagan journeyed to Dallas to address thousands of religious leaders who would form the core of the Moral Majority. Reagan told his audience, “I know you can’t endorse me, but I endorse you.”
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With that simple line, Reagan was assembling the third leg of his new party.
Larry Kudlow credited Reagan with taking the GOP from Wall Street to Main Street, explaining that Reagan’s message “was a call to arms for conservatives.” He “redefined modern Republicanism. But Wall Street never cared for Reagan, even after he became President.” But what we’ve learned, through his writings, is that Reagan was a one man think tank.”
3
Some people wrote to Reagan and urged that he become the Chairman of the Republican Party, but he had bigger things on his mind. He was frankly assessing the role of John Sears in a future campaign, writing one supporter in 1979, “We are very much aware that there were shortcomings and criticism, particularly of John Sears, as a result of the last campaign. On the other hand, we feel that he does have talents and something to offer. . . . Our organization was hastily put together . . . John went off on his own many times, and, in so doing, upset a number of people. That will not be true this time.”
4
Before parting company in Kansas City, Sears told Reagan, with eyes brimming with tears, “I wish I had done better for you, Governor.” Later he said, “History is made while you’re doing things. And I was trying to win. We felt we changed things for the better.”
5
Paul Laxalt reflected and said,
Had Reagan not come on the scene at the ’76 convention, I don’t know where we’d be right now. It emboldened the conservatives and allowed them to run the party—and Reagan’s departure [at the convention] was unbelievable. Though we lost we really won.
After ’76 was over and the Reagans felt their time was past, I went to see Jimmy Carter to discuss water regulation with thirty or forty Senators. . . . And he plainly didn’t know his ass from first base and thought we were somewhat of a nuisance. I could hardly wait to get back to the office to call Ron. And I called and told him that I had just met with a one-term President.
6
Marty Anderson remembered the flight back to Los Angeles from Kansas City after the narrow loss. “On the plane after the convention, he was one of the few who wasn’t down . . . and within a few days, he’s written fifteen of his commentaries and was back on the radio.”
7
As always, Reagan was not looking backwards but forward.
One month after the convention, Ronald Reagan hosted a lunch in Los Angeles with many of his former staff and conservative friends. Over sandwiches, he made it pretty clear that he was not ruling out running again in 1980. But in the meantime, he had directed the remaining $1.5 million dollars left over from Citizens for Reagan go to create a new organization to help conservative candidates running for office around the country. Reagan could have pocketed the money as allowed under the laws of the Federal Election Commission, but this never, ever crossed his mind. It would be used to advance the cause of conservative candidates on Reagan’s behalf.
Lyn Nofziger was placed in charge of the organization, which was named “Citizens for the Republic.” There was some initial consternation over the acronym, “CFR,” as it was the same as the acronym of the hated Council on Foreign Relations, an international organization of industrialists, philanthropists, academics and scholars. The organization was decidedly liberal and thus clearly in the enemy camp. So Reagan’s new entity would become known as “CFTR.”
Reagan was also honing his message, sharpening it, and proving that an old dog can learn new tricks. “Reagan invariably gravitated toward the aspects of American conservatism that were optimistic not cynical, populist not elitist, egalitarian not hierarchical, moral not relativistic—in short, what is distinctively American in American conservatism,” Jeff Bell wrote years later for the
Weekly
Standard.
8
Four years later, conservatives, led by Reagan, took over the GOP. And all the gathering energy, all the gathering wisdom, all the gathering ideas, all the camaraderie, all of the devotion to their ideology would combine to produce the revolutionary election of Ronald Reagan as the fortieth President of the United States in November of 1980. The effects of this election are still being felt a generation later. As Ed Meese said, “We came to change the government and ended up changing the world.”
9
“Saying you are a Reagan Republican is redundant. Nobody says they are a ‘Nixon Republican,’” said longtime scribe Ralph Hallow to me years later. To which this author replied to his old friend, “We’re all Reaganites now.”
10
“The last great lion of the twentieth century.”
I
t should come as no surprise that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan are the last two American Presidents who could go to college campuses across the country and speak without fear of massive protests or reprisals. After all, both were young at heart, and both spoke to the hearts of young people. Both exuded a hope, a message, and a challenge for the future to the young men and women of America. Indeed, in his landside re-election in 1984, Reagan received his highest level of support from voters under thirty years of age.
Reagan was always mindful of the young citizens of his country, as evidenced by a note he sent the Schweikers’ daughter, Lani, shortly after the convention. “Lani, we didn’t achieve our goal but the race was worth the effort. We influenced the platform, we are listened to more than we were before and I’m sure we have caused the people to think about issues and problems more than they did before. . . . Regards from all of us to your parents and brothers and sisters. We hope we’ll see you again soon. Sincerely, Ronald Reagan”
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A wise man once said that a leader has a “physical, moral and intellectual presence.” These public qualities certainly applied to JFK and RWR. An old friend of mine, Paul Corbin, who had worked for Kennedy, told me that when he walked into a room, electricity flowed through the setting and the people there. Kennedy’s very presence changed the room and the individuals in it. Having been in the same room with Reagan many times, I know exactly what he meant.
A favorite pastime in politics is speculating on “What would have happened if?” or “If only such and such had happened” or “If we had the money at the time.” As baseball fans forever debate the merits of Babe Ruth versus Barry Bonds or the 1961 Yankees versus the 1998 Yankees or Mark McGwire versus Roger Maris, so too do politicos and journalists like to debate the merits of various political campaigns and candidates. Probably no political Presidential contest in recent memory invites more speculation and “what ifs” than the titanic struggle between Gerald Rudolph Ford and Ronald Wilson Reagan in 1975 and 1976 for the Republican Party’s Presidential nomination.
“What if Reagan had won New Hampshire?” or “What if Ford had won North Carolina?” or “What would have happened had the Reagan campaign filed enough delegate slates in Ohio or New York or New Jersey?” or “What did the surprise selection of Schweiker do to help or hurt Reagan?” or “Would Reagan have run had Ford not selected Nelson Rockefeller?” or “If the Ford people had only treated Reagan better . . .” The questions and speculations will continue endlessly.
Of course, there is no answer to any of these questions except that had Reagan received the nomination instead of Ford, he would not have run the type of campaign that he ran in 1980. In fact, Reagan was “somewhat incomplete” in 1976, according to Paul Weyrich, an astute observer of national political trends and a longtime leader in the conservative movement.
“Reagan had introduced the new paradigm of defeating Soviet Communism, but had not yet acquired fully the hopeful message of supply side economics or the social message that was so important in the creation of the ‘Reagan Democrat’; the urban and suburban Catholic and socially conservative voter who would become part of his eventual winning coalition. True, he did well in crossover states in 1976 with these types of voters, but it is unclear whether his appeal would have worked with them in the fall election of 1976,” Weyrich said.
2
Chris Matthews echoed this sentiment: “Had Reagan won the nomination in 1976, he would have campaigned as a traditional balance-the-budget conservative. Had he won the election, he would have governed that way. Running in 1980, Reagan adopted the supply-side, tax cutting doctrine of Jack Kemp.”
3