Authors: Richard A. Viguerie
Ronald Reagan was elected president, not just by a whisker, but in a landslide, defeating incumbent President Jimmy Carter by over 8.4 million votes.
Conservatives, under the leadership of Terry Dolan’s National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), had targeted six liberal senators and defeated five of them: George McGovern of South Dakota, Birch Bayh of Indiana, Frank Church of Idaho, John Culver of Iowa, and Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin.
We had also defeated liberal Republican senator Jacob Javits of New York in the Republican primary.
Republicans gained twelve seats in the Senate, and for the
first time since the 1950s, Republicans controlled the Senate. In the House of Representatives, Democrats still held a substantial majority, but we defeated the Democratic House majority whip, John Brademas of Indiana, with a bright young conservative, John Hiler.
It was especially gratifying when Dan Rather was forced to retract an early call of the race for Brademas and announce the defeat of the House Democrats’ third-ranking leader on national TV.
In all, some thirty-five new Republicans were elected to the House in 1980, including conservatives like Vin Weber of Minnesota, and Hiler. Coupled with a block of Southern Democrats, known disparagingly as the “Boll Weevils,” it looked as though Reagan might have a conservative ideological, if not a partisan Republican, majority in the House for much of his agenda—particularly rebuilding our military and reining in the intrusiveness of the federal government.
Looking at the election results, conservatives went to bed Election Night believing that the success of the “Reagan Revolution” was a foregone conclusion.
Or was it?
Yes, we had elected a number of new conservatives to Congress, and we had a conservative president, but conservatives did not necessarily control the levers of power in the government.
Personnel is policy, and conservatives did not dominate the executive branch of the federal government or run Capitol Hill. These areas remained largely the province of liberals in the civil service and the “me-too,” Big Government progressives of the establishment Republican Party.
Vice President George H. W. Bush came to the White House with an extensive Rolodex of progressive establishment Republican friends and contacts whom he worked hard to place in key positions in the government—starting with his campaign manager and fellow Texan, James Baker, as chief of staff at the White House. With Jim Baker in that key role, it became that much harder to place movement conservatives in other policy-making positions in the government.
The new Republican majority in the Senate was run by Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, who had run against Reagan in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary before dropping his bid for president.
Senator Baker was known as “the Great Conciliator” and was well liked by progressive senators on both sides of the aisle for his ability to finesse compromises and get his fellow Republicans to support policies that grew government, not for his unswerving commitment to conservative principles—this was the same Baker who had called Reagan’s economic plan “a riverboat gamble” during the primaries and had no enthusiasm for cutting the programs he’d helped Democrats pass.
In the House, Reagan could expect little help from Republican minority leader Bob Michel of Illinois.
Michel, a World War II hero, was a longtime member of the House Appropriations Committee. Noted for his bipartisanship in striking bargains with the Democrats, while a good and honorable man, he was not one to fight for conservative principles, particularly on spending and other matters within the purview of the House appropriators.
On the Democratic side, even though conservative Democrats from the South and West might be in ideological sympathy with Reagan, and occasionally support him on national defense or on cutting back the growth of government, they paid a heavy price for not toeing the line Massachusetts liberal Speaker Tip O’Neill laid down.
Texas Democratic congressman Phil Gramm, a former economics professor at Texas A&M, for example, cosponsored the Gramm-Latta Budget, which increased military spending, cut domestic spending, and implemented Reagan’s tax cuts in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981. Shortly after his reelection in 1982, Gramm was removed from the House Budget Committee for supporting Reagan’s tax cuts. In response, Gramm resigned his House seat on January 5, 1983. He then ran as a Republican for his own vacancy in a special election held on February 12, 1983, won,
and returned to the House as a Republican—but other Democrats who might have been inclined to support Reagan got the message loud and clear.
Put simply, even though Ronald Reagan and his conservative allies had won the vote in the 1980 election, they hadn’t won control of the government—the day-to-day work of the government was being done by Big Government Washington insiders of both political parties.
The Republican leaders on Capitol Hill had opposed Reagan and his policies in the Republican primaries, and the Democrats, such as House Speaker Tip O’Neill, had fought him tooth and nail in the general election.
Things were not much better for conservatives over at the Republican National Committee.
Despite the fact that President Reagan’s confidant, Senator Paul Laxalt, and Reagan’s daughter Maureen Reagan had big titles at the RNC, the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee and its day-to-day operation remained firmly in the hands of Party insiders, not ideological conservatives.
The RNC chairmen during the Reagan years, Dick Richards and Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., were longtime Party men, not movement conservatives. Fahrenkopf was a Nixon supporter who went on to have a distinguished career in several of DC’s most powerful law and lobbying firms and to head the gambling industry’s national association.
Senator Baker, Congressman Michel, and the rest of the establishment Republicans in Washington weren’t necessarily bad people, but their lack of commitment to the conservative principles that Reagan ran on, and that grassroots conservatives expected the GOP to deliver on, meant that the debate that went on in the Republican primaries between Big Government Republicans and the Reaganites who wanted to shrink government never really ended.
Practically from day one of the new administration, Reagan had to fight the Washington insiders of his own party just as hard as he
had to fight the liberals and Democrats. In 1982, twenty to twenty-five national conservative leaders (both Old Right and New Right) met with the then RNC chairman, Dick Richards, to let him know we were unhappy with what was going on at the RNC—and at the Reagan White House. In hindsight, while we loved and respected Ronald Reagan the person, during the Reagan years the road to progress on our issues was often rocky.
However, we knew that even if a specific issue on the conservative agenda wasn’t getting the attention we thought it deserved, with Ronald Reagan it was never off the table, and our job was to bring it to the president’s attention—sometimes whether he wanted to hear it or not.
One night around 1983, after we’d had our Wednesday dinner meeting, everybody had left except Howard Phillips, Newt Gingrich, and me. In my living room Newt began to explain how he was going to run for president. More than ten years before becoming Speaker, he was thinking about how to get himself elected to the White House.
At every meeting we would have an easel with paper or a blackboard, and when we would come up with a problem, Gingrich would go to the board and write:
• Vision
• Goals
• Strategy
• Tactics/Projects
And an hour later, after we had filled in those four concepts, we would have a way forward.
Great leaders like Eisenhower and Churchill talk about how a plan is indispensable in preparing for a battle. However, the number
one benefit of writing the plan is not the plan—that’s important, but it is secondary. The number one benefit of writing the plan is the exercise of writing the plan, because it clarifies and helps crystallize your thinking.
Congressman David Stockman, whom President Reagan appointed to head the Office of Management and Budget, exemplified one of the problems we faced.
Stockman was criticizing Reagan’s proposed spending cuts and tax plan, and leaking uncomplimentary comments to the media before the ink was even dry on his White House commission.
Here was the guy who was supposed to be in charge of developing the economic justification of Ronald Reagan’s fiscal plan and selling it on Capitol Hill telling the press (and anyone else who would listen) that Reagan was wrong.
Stockman was one of the first on the Reagan team to clamor for a tax increase, long before the Reagan tax cuts had a chance to work. Reagan later wrote, “Many times when I suggested that we push Congress to cut spending on a certain program, his [Stockman’s] response was that it was hopeless—or in his words, ‘DOA’—on Capitol Hill.”
1
This pattern repeated itself throughout Reagan’s presidency.
Some of the early entries in Reagan’s diary for 1982 illustrate the problem:
Jan. 11
Republican House leaders came down to the W.H. Except for Jack Kemp they are h—l bent on new taxes and cutting the defense budget. Looks like a heavy year ahead
2
Feb. 23
Met this a.m. with our [Republican] Congressional leaders. They are really antsy about the deficit and seem determined that we must retreat on our program—taxes and defense spending. Yet they seem reluctant to go for the budget cutting we’ve asked for.
3
Reagan was under constant pressure to raise taxes. In 1982 the establishment Republican leaders in Congress urged Reagan to make a deal with the Democrats “to support a limited loophole-closing tax increase to raise more than $98.3 billion over three years in return for their agreement to cut spending by $280 billion during the same period.” Congress later reneged on the deal, and Reagan wrote ruefully in his biography that it was one of the greatest mistakes of his presidency because “we never got those cuts.”
4
Reagan’s battles with Congress over aid for the Contras in Nicaragua and rolling back Communist incursions in Central America were met with similar progressive Republican resistance on Capitol Hill.
Even though Republicans had captured control of the Senate and increased their numbers in the House, prohibitions or restrictions on aiding the Contra rebels—generally attached to bills like the Defense bill, which President Reagan could not veto—routinely passed Congress.
In 1986, Reagan’s request for aid to the Contras was made part of a pork-filled $1.7 billion supplemental spending bill that Republican stalwart Rep. Henry J. Hyde of Illinois characterized this way: “What you’re saying to Mr. Reagan is: ‘If you want the $100 million, it’s going to cost you $1.7 billion,”’ and White House spokesman Larry Speakes termed putting aid for the Contras in the supplemental bill as being “given the shaft” by opponents of Reagan’s Contra policy.
5
On one crucial vote, sixteen establishment Republicans in the House, including Ohio congressman Chalmers Wylie and future Big Government Republican governors Congressman Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and Congressman John Rowland of Connecticut, abandoned Reagan, while almost forty Democrats supported him.
The defection of the sixteen Republicans was enough to defeat Reagan’s plan and give a victory to Speaker O’Neill—and of course to Moscow. Within a few days of the vote, the Communist Sandinistas attacked the main Contra base well inside Honduras, forcing the
Hondurans to ask for emergency US assistance to repel the invasion.
Ultimately, what kept aid to the Contras alive were Reagan’s skills as a communicator and conservatives working outside the establishment Republican Party to bring pressure to bear on soft Republicans and persuadable Democrats.
When Congress finally passed a comprehensive aid package designed to end the Communist threat in Central America, it was once again due to conservatives acting as a “third force,” as much or more than it was to Capitol Hill Republicans who mostly acted as if restoring freedom in Nicaragua was an inconvenience and they just wanted the problem to go away.
President Reagan’s proposal for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) got much the same reaction from the Republican establishment.
Congressman Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and the same establishment Republicans who undercut Reagan by supporting a nuclear freeze and opposing aid to the Nicaraguan Contras undercut him again by saying Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative “left us with a serious defense problem.”
6
Ridge and others like him in the House, who wanted to restrict research and stifle funding for SDI, were joined by establishment Republican senators such as his fellow Pennsylvanian, Arlen Specter, and Nancy Landon Kassebaum, daughter of liberal Republican presidential candidate Alf Landon, who, incidentally, later married fellow establishment Republican Howard Baker.
Establishment Republicans, such as Senators Baker and Charles Percy of Illinois, even went so far as to trek down to the White House on the eve of a Reagan summit with the Soviets to harangue the president into abandoning the SDI initiative on the theory that it might lead to an arms race the Soviets would lose—thus upsetting the balance of power and the old Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) formula propounded by Nixon and Kissinger.
It was an article of faith among Baker, Percy, Kassebaum, Specter, Ridge, and other establishment Republicans that America must accept the existence of the Soviet Union and simply live with the
threat of international Communism and nuclear annihilation.
I was always amazed and saddened at those establishment Republicans and Democrats who talked about their compassion for those in need—the poor, the downtrodden, etc., but during the Cold War with the Soviet Union they supported—or at least refused to try to turn back—the enslavement of a billion people under Communism.
The establishment, including Republicans and Democrats, by encouraging détente, and thereby supporting continued Communist rule through trade deals and other economic means, subjected a billion children, men, and women to continued starvation, torture, political prisons, and death. Some compassion.