The Real Nixon
RICHARD NIXON ALWAYS KNEW WHERE THE POLITICAL POWER WAS. IN 1960, he cut a deal with Nelson Rockefeller, the leader of the eastern liberal Republicans, to ensure his nomination for president. In 1968, he enlisted the support of prominent conservatives like Barry Goldwater, Strom Thurmond, and John Tower because the power of the GOP had shifted sharply to the right. As he remarked to a friend, “A Republican can’t win without the conservatives—1962 taught me that.” He was alluding to his defeat for governor of California after a debilitating primary battle with conservative challenger Joe Shell. But, added Nixon, a Republican “also can’t win with the conservatives alone—1964 showed that.” Nixon’s 1968 strategy was to “nail down” the conservatives and then move to the center. But Nixon’s center tilted to the right.1
Goldwater did not need any special persuading to endorse Nixon. In January 1965, the Arizona conservative told reporters that he would support Nixon for his party’s presidential nomination three years hence. His early, unqualified endorsement was based on Nixon’s enthusiastic campaigning for him in 1964 when other Republican leaders (like Rockefeller) were half-hearted at best in their efforts, and on Nixon’s strong anticommunist record and generally conservative position on domestic issues. Often heard in conservative circles was the rationalization, “Nixon’s conservative enough.”2
There was no viable conservative alternative. In the spring of 1968, Reagan had been governor of California for little more than a year and was still largely an unknown quantity, although that did not stop some commentators from speculating about a Reagan candidacy. And while some of his supporters encouraged him to run, Reagan truly believed that “the office seeks the man, the man doesn’t seek the office,” especially when the office was the highest in the land.3
At the same time, Reagan could not help noticing that for a newcomer, he was doing amazingly well in the national polls. A Harris survey in November 1967 disclosed that Reagan was favored over President Johnson by 46 percent to 41 percent, a remarkable showing for someone who had held public office for just ten months. Another Harris poll revealed that the American public, by four to one, thought Reagan was doing “a good job as governor.”4
And yet Reagan hesitated, as William Rusher has written, because of his feeling that an ex-actor with such limited experience in public office “might not be ready” for the presidency.5
Richard Nixon operated under no constraints. He began a systematic wooing of conservatives by hiring Patrick J. Buchanan in January 1966 to serve as a speechwriter and liaison with the conservative movement. As an editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Buchanan had been a fervent supporter of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Nixon also recruited Tom Charles Huston, the former national chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, as a personal assistant. And he later named Arizonan Richard G. Kleindienst, who had shared delegate hunting for Goldwater with Clif White, as his national director of field operations. Kleindienst was the most prominent of many Goldwater political operatives who wound up working for Nixon in 1968.
Next on Nixon’s agenda was a series of private meetings with leading conservatives during which views were exchanged and support for his candidacy was subtly invited. In the summer of 1966, Nixon met with about twenty conservative journalists in Washington, D.C., and then with about the same number of conservative youth leaders in Newport, Rhode Island. A set feature of these off-the-record sessions was an hour-long analysis of international affairs (without notes) by Nixon—a global tour d’horizon that was also, most attendees agreed, a tour de force.6
In January 1967, Nixon arranged a more extended meeting with National Review’s William F. Buckley and William Rusher in his New York City apartment. Nixon led a three-hour Sunday afternoon discussion of Washington, London, Moscow, Vietnam, and all points in between. When Reagan’s name came up in connection with 1968, Buckley reportedly said that it was “preposterous even to consider Reagan as an alternative…. [He’s] an ex-actor who has been in office now for less than a month.”7
Nixon disagreed, arguing that “anyone who is the governor of California is ex officio a candidate for President.”8 But Nixon must have been pleased with Buckley’s dismissal of the California conservative: If the GOP nomination came down to a choice between Nixon and Rockefeller, the politician conservatives loved to hate, National Review would surely support Nixon.
Rusher was not converted, but Buckley invited Nixon to appear on his television program, Firing Line, that September and arranged for a profile of Nixon in National Review. Rusher and senior editors Frank Meyer and William Rickenbacker were able to prevent a formal endorsement of Nixon, but Buckley did not try to hide his sympathy for Nixon’s candidacy in his public appearances. As a result, conservative opinion makers linked Nixon and National Review.9 The long Sunday afternoon had paid off handsomely.
Nixon also strengthened the conservative cast of his campaign by enlisting a team of conservative policy analysts to help him frame the issues. They included old-line conservatives like economists Paul McCracken and Arthur Burns and younger conservatives such as economist Martin Anderson of the Hoover Institution, foreign policy expert Richard V. Allen, economist Alan Greenspan, and speechwriter William Gavin. That fall, Anderson was placed in charge of all policy research, with Greenspan responsible for economic policy and Allen for foreign policy. Another conservative who played a small but critical role was William Casey, a New York lawyer, financier, and businessman.
Nixon took full advantage of the growing resources of the conservative movement. Without its fervent grassroots organization, seasoned political operatives, and articulate, persuasive popularizers, Nixon might have been denied the nomination and could have lost what turned out to be a very close election in November.
Nixon formally announced his candidacy for president in February and went on to win ten of eleven primaries, losing to Rockefeller only in Massachusetts. In his stump speech, Nixon took cognizance of what political scientists Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg later dubbed “The Social Issue,” which covered everything from crime, busing, drugs, quotas, and welfare to draft dodging, capital punishment, and even sexual orientation. Scammon and Wattenberg argued that these issues had gained in salience in the tumultuous year of 1968 and had become dominant in American politics.10
Ever sensitive to political trends, Nixon placed the social issue at the center of his campaign, declaring:
Working Americans have become the forgotten Americans. In a time when the national rostrums and forums are given over to shouters and protestors and demonstrators, they have become the silent Americans. Yet they have a legitimate grievance that should be rectified and a just cause that should prevail.11
Although Nixon had what appeared to be a lock on the nomination, the enthusiasm for him among delegates in the South and West was modest to meager. And then Reagan decided, on the eve of the convention, that he wanted to be a bona fide candidate, creating second thoughts about the all-important first ballot. If Nixon could be stopped short of a majority on the first ballot, reasoned Clif White and his fellow Reaganites, his total would shrink on succeeding ballots like “a scoop of ice cream in the sun.”12 The way would then be cleared for a battle between Reagan and Rockefeller, which conservatives were confident their man would win.
But they had not included in their calculations the man still known as “Mr. Conservative.” Barry Goldwater made the opening address to the convention and, as in 1960, appealed for party unity. His speech elicited what NBC’s David Brinkley called “the most spontaneous, emotional, enthusiastic Republican response of the entire convention.”13 When he returned to his hotel, Goldwater found a note to call Nixon, who, ever the politician, asked the 1964 presidential nominee to remain in Miami and talk to delegates on his behalf.
Goldwater agreed and over the next forty-eight hours met with hundreds of delegates and alternates who were being wooed from the right by Reagan and from the left by Rockefeller. Along with Senators Strom Thurmond and John Tower, Goldwater “shored the Southern dike against Reagan’s rising waters,”14 as Nixon later recalled, adding that the Arizonan’s support “made it possible for me to win on the first ballot.”15 At the same time, Nixon kept reassuring restless southern delegates that he opposed school busing, would appoint “strict constitutionalists” to the Supreme Court, and did not favor federal intervention in local school board affairs.
When Wisconsin put Nixon over the top, Reagan made his way to the rostrum to make the nomination unanimous. But Reagan and the conservatives saw to it that Nixon accepted a right-of-center platform; picked a vice presidential candidate, Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland, who quickly became a conservative favorite; and campaigned in the general election as the leader of the Silent Majority.
That fall, Nixon steered right on most issues. He stated that the United States should “seek a negotiated end to the war” but insisted that “the right of self-determination of the South Vietnamese people” had to be respected by all nations, including North Vietnam. He rejected the idea of strategic “parity” with the Soviet Union. And he described wage and price controls in peacetime as “an abdication of fiscal responsibility.”16
On a more philosophical note, Nixon declared, in one of several radio addresses, that it was time once again to have “an open administration … an administration of open doors, open eyes and open minds.” He proposed a commission on government reorganization that would be charged with “searching out every feasible means of decentralizing government” and transferring governmental functions to private enterprise and “the great, vital voluntary sector.”17
Speaking in Williamsburg, Virginia, Nixon discoursed on “The American Spirit,” pointing out that the next president might serve until 1976, the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of America. It would be his duty to lead the American people in a search for a new “spirit of ’76” that would bring about a future as glorious as the past.18
The New Spirit of ’76, Nixon proclaimed, would mean a shift “from federal rule to home rule,” from “faceless manipulation to personal participation…. If we fail to seize this moment,” he warned, “it may never come [again] in our lifetime.”19
How different the nation and the rest of the world would have been if Nixon had delivered on the limited government, anticommunist promises he made to the American electorate in the fall of 1968, and if he had indeed presided over “an administration of open doors, open eyes and open minds.” But instead, from almost his first day in office, Nixon offered a pseudo-New Deal at home and an accommodationist policy abroad. And he closed himself off from the conservatives who had nominated and elected him, preferring the counsel of big-government Democrats like former Texas governor John Connally and Harvard professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and practitioners of realpolitik like Henry Kissinger.
The final presidential tally was Nixon, 43.4 percent; Hubert Humphrey, 42.7 percent; and George Wallace, 13.5 percent. Nixon’s popular margin over Democrat Humphrey was a slim 510,000 votes. Saddled though he was with the Vietnam War and a fractured Democratic party, Humphrey nearly won because organized labor waged a massive campaign for the vice president, whom it considered a blood brother. Also, a strong majority of blacks, Jews, and big-city Catholics voted for Humphrey, suggesting there was still life in the old FDR coalition. But the coalition could not deliver a vital component, the South. Humphrey received only 31 percent of the vote in the once-solid South, less than either Nixon or Wallace.
A few analysts have suggested Humphrey would have won if Wallace had not run, but most agree with Scammon and Wattenberg that in a Nixon-Humphrey contest, the Wallace voters would have split about seventy to thirty for Nixon. The Wallace vote was essentially a social issue vote, not a racial issue vote, and the social issue was “trending to Nixon,” not Humphrey.20
One of Nixon’s campaign aides, Kevin Phillips, published a seminal work on his victory, titled The Emerging Republican Majority. Phillips had been a top assistant to Nixon’s campaign manager, John Mitchell, and in what one conservative has called “a dazzling display of erudition and statistics,” he showed that the old Democratic coalition was disintegrating and a new Republican coalition was emerging.21 He predicted that the new Republican majority would be based in the Midwest, the South, and California, while the Democratic minority would be limited to the Northeast and the Pacific Northwest. Rather than appeal to liberal groups in the inner cities and the traditional suburbs, argued Phillips, the GOP should take advantage of the “populist revolt of the American masses who have been elevated by prosperity to middle-class status and conservatism.”22
It was time, Phillips asserted, for Nixon to “build a new era on the immense middle-class impetus of Sun Belt and Suburbia.” His target, said the young Republican analyst, should be fast-growth states like California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida, leaving the Democrats to cope with decline and decay in the no-growth states of New England, as well as union states like Michigan and West Virginia.23
That would have meant implementing conservative policies and programs consistent with Nixon’s assertion in his inaugural address that “we are approaching the limits of what government alone can do.”24 But the president, faced with large Democratic majorities in both houses, proceeded in an increasingly liberal direction on domestic issues. Nixon approved a five-year extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, federal funding for a “war on cancer,” and greater government spending for medical training and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. He also signed Title IX, which banned sex discrimination in higher education.
Although he professed to be bored by environmental issues, Nixon nevertheless signed a slew of bills expanding government regulation of the environment, including landmark legislation like the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He approved the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act.
In sum, the president who had promised to shift power from the federal government to the states, the communities, and the people wound up giving far more power to federal bureaucrats through a network of government regulations that enveloped American business and ordinary citizens.
Forgotten was the New Spirit of ’76 with its liberating language about encouraging “the great vital voluntary sector.” In its stead was a so-called New Federalism that preserved effective federal control of state spending through bureaucratic oversight of billion-dollar grants. Governors happily took the money and kept the welfare state going.
Yet Nixon’s domestic program was not a total disappointment to conservatives. He liberalized international trade, ushered in the era of floating currency rates, ended the draft, and instituted the all-volunteer army. Nor was he a big spender. Indeed, at the end of his presidency, economist Herbert Stein wrote, the federal debt as a fraction of gross domestic product “was at [its] lowest point … since the beginning of World War II.”25
And conservatives cheered loudly when Vice President Spiro Agnew took on an institution they deemed an implacable adversary: the national news media. In November 1969, Agnew sharply criticized television network news. No other American institution, the vice president said, had “a more profound influence over public opinion.” And yet no other medium had “fewer checks” on its “vast power.” Although “the small group of men” who produced and directed the television network news seemed to be well informed, Agnew charged that their views “do not represent the views of America.”26
The vice president called on the “media men” to examine themselves and their operations and to take steps to improve “the quality and objectivity” of their news presentations.27 After an initial reflexive denial, the media elite, to their credit, began to include at least some conservative spokesmen on evening newscasts, op-ed pages, and speaking platforms. The year after the Agnew address, PBS’s weekly program The Advocates had a new advocate, William Rusher, who before long was writing a syndicated column for some one hundred newspapers. He was soon joined in the papers and on the air-waves by conservatives like Patrick J. Buchanan, M. Stanton Evans, and John F. Lofton, Jr. And book publishers, who had been largely unwilling to gamble on conservative authors (both Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative and Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice Not an Echo, two of the most influential political books of 1964, had been published privately), now began to sign up conservatives like Kevin Phillips and Stan Evans.
Although conservatives found much to like in Agnew, Nixon shocked them by instituting wage and price controls. For almost three years, starting in August 1971 and continuing through April 1974, the Nixon administration attempted to suppress the continuing rise in prices by imposing varying degrees of controls. First came a general freeze on prices and wages, followed by the creation of a Price Commission that was directed to disallow all price increases except those justified by rising costs, then by voluntary controls that worked so poorly that a second freeze was ordered, and finally by the imposition of more mandatory price controls.
Yet inflation only worsened. Even Herbert Stein, chairman of Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers, conceded that “the controls were a mistake.” Nixon, he explained, considered them to be a “political necessity” because a large part of the country, including congressional Republicans, wanted “some kind” of controls. But, although generally hailed at the time, Nixon’s centralizing tactics sparked further disaffection among leading conservatives in and out of Congress. Speaking for many, Milton Friedman called wage and price controls “deeply and inherently immoral” because they threatened “the very foundations of a free society.”28
Mounting conservative disappointment with Nixon erupted into anger and spilled across the political landscape when the president announced in the spring of 1971 that he was going to Peking. American support of the Republic of China on Taiwan and opposition to the People’s Republic of China had been an article of faith with conservatives since Mao Zedong seized control of the mainland in 1949. Public support for the conservative position had been strengthened by China’s active role in the Korean War and its subsequent and frequent denunciations of the United States, invariably described as an “imperialist aggressor” surrounded by “running dogs.”29
Yet from almost his first day in office, Nixon tried to build a bridge to mainland China, which meant dismantling, at least partially, the bridge to Taiwan. For two years, the president and national security adviser Henry Kissinger sent confidential messages to the Chinese communist government, usually through Pakistan and Rumania, on a number of subjects, ranging from U.S.-China trade to a possible Nixon trip to the Middle Kingdom. In mid-April 1971, Premier Chou En-lai sent an unmistakable signal when he publicly received an American Ping-Pong team in Peking.
Nixon responded by suggesting that Kissinger undertake a secret visit to China to arrange an agenda and begin a preliminary exchange of views. Following Kissinger’s return, Nixon surprised the world (and stunned conservatives) by announcing on national television in mid-July 1971 that he would visit China. A deeply disappointed Dr. Walter H. Judd, chairman of the Committee of One Million, quoted an old Asian friend: “The United States spends billions to go to the moon. Mao just waits—and the moon comes to him.”30
Nixon explained in his memoirs that he visited China so that future generations would have “a better chance to live in peace.”31 But the president had his eye on his reelection as well as his place in history. In mid-1971, neither was assured. At the time, the president trailed his chief Democratic opponent, Maine senator Edmund Muskie, by 47 to 39 percent.32 A presidential visit to China, with all its attendant publicity and television coverage, might lose Nixon some votes on the right but would gain him far more votes from the center. The president carefully calculated that a card-carrying anticommunist like himself could safely visit and do business with a communist country. Most Americans, the president assumed, would rely on the man who had put Alger Hiss in jail and stood up to Nikita Khrushchev in the “kitchen debate” not to give away anything important to the Chinese communists.
If Nixon thought that conservatives had no choice but to vote for him if he were opposed by a liberal Democrat like Muskie or McGovern, he was mistaken. Even before the expulsion of the Republic of China on Taiwan from the United Nations, twelve leading conservatives announced in the August 10, 1971, issue of National Review that they were suspending “support of the Administration.” What turned them off, literally, was not so much the administration’s domestic policy (although they cited “failures” like inflation, excessive taxation, and “inordinate welfarism”) but its foreign policy, including the “overtures to Red China” and the “deterioration” of the American military.33 Military spending by the Nixon administration had fallen in real dollars from $98 billion in fiscal year 1969 to just $70 billion four years later.
The twelve signers of the declaration were Jeffrey Bell, Capitol Hill director of the American Conservative Union (ACU); William F. Buckley, Jr., editor, National Review; James Burnham, senior editor, National Review; Anthony Harrigan, executive vice president, Southern States Industrial Council; John L. Jones, executive director, ACU; J. Daniel Mahoney, chairman, New York Conservative party; Neil McCaffrey, president, Conservative Book Club; Frank S. Meyer, senior editor, National Review; William A. Rusher, publisher, National Review; Allan H. Ryskind, associate editor, Human Events; Randal C. Teague, executive director, Young Americans for Freedom; and Thomas S. Winter, editor, Human Events. M. Stanton Evans, who had been asked to draw up the declaration, declined to sign the final version after Buckley rewrote it to exclude several of the domestic actions the Washington conservatives were most exercised about, like the Family Assistance Plan.
These men were, in a real sense, the executive committee of the American conservative movement, and their joint declaration could not be ignored, certainly not by a president who was running behind his principal Democratic opponent in the polls. The “Manhattan Twelve” (they had met and drafted their statement in New York City) guaranteed the White House’s attention by asserting that although they did not plan “at the moment” to encourage any formal primary opposition to Nixon, “we propose to keep all options open … in the next months.”34
The Nixon administration, as Buckley biographer John Judis recounts, “tried to nip the conservative rebellion in the bud.” Pat Buchanan was told to pacify the Washington conservatives while Kissinger invited Buckley to the White House for one of their frequent meetings. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Buckley made about twenty trips to Washington to see Kissinger and often talked with him on the telephone.35
Indeed, along with his national security duties, Kissinger was responsible for convincing conservative leaders Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan that whenever Nixon moved to the left, (a) he did not really mean it, (b) he was forced to by conditions beyond his control, and (c) he could be counted on to prevent any serious lasting damage to conservative principles or assets. Kissinger was usually successful in his apologias, but it was beyond even Kissinger’s considerable powers to persuade Buckley and the rest of the Manhattan Twelve to overlook Nixon’s institution of wage and price controls just one week after publication of the Manhattan Declaration; Kissinger’s announced visit to Peking; Nixon’s statement that he was going to Moscow to negotiate SALT I, the arms control agreement; and the United Nations’ double betrayal of admitting China and expelling Taiwan on the same day in late October 1971. A frustrated Rusher summed up the impact of the Manhattan Twelve’s get-togethers: “Ever since we’ve been having these meetings, it has been raining shit.”36
In early November, Human Events’ Allan Ryskind, who had enthusiastically supported Nixon in 1968, presented a list of demands from the Manhattan Twelve to White House aide Charles Colson. They included keeping Agnew on the 1972 ticket (Washington was awash with rumors that Treasury Secretary John Connally would replace Agnew—rumors that accurately reflected Nixon’s preference, as H. R. Haldeman’s White House diaries show); dumping the Family Assistance Plan (a guaranteed annual income program conceived by liberal Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan); fully supporting the U.S. defense treaty with Taiwan; and a “demonstration by action” that American foreign policy was not committed to the “illusion of détente.”37
Agnew aide David Keene has described Nixon as being “paranoid” about primary opposition. But Nixon, still struggling in the polls, was being more practical than paranoid about the Manhattan Twelve. He had needed the conservatives to win the presidential nomination in 1968, and he did not want to arouse their ire and their opposition, if at all possible, in 1972. He pledged (through Buchanan) that in return for the conservatives’ support, Agnew would again be his running mate; the Family Assistance Plan would be abandoned (an easy promise because it was tied up in the Senate Finance Committee); and the defense budget would be increased modestly.
But the president’s offer was too little, too late, and too obviously a bribe. Led by Rusher and Evans, the Manhattan Twelve endorsed the idea of running a conservative against the president in the Republican primaries. Buckley was concerned that a poor showing would harm the conservative movement he had worked so hard to build, but at last agreed. Buckley’s endorsement was essential; without it, the Manhattan Twelve would be eleven conservatives in search of a candidate. As it was, their options were extremely limited.
Just about the only sitting officeholder who would take on the president of the United States was Congressman John Ashbrook of Ohio, chairman of the ACU, an architect of the Draft Goldwater movement, and one of the most principled conservatives in Washington, with a 96 percent rating from the ACU.38 By mid-1971, the forty-three-year-old Ashbrook shared the growing discontent of many conservatives about Nixon. He had supported Nixon in 1968 because he thought the Republican nominee would turn the country away from the liberal Democratic policies of the Kennedy-Johnson years. He had been mistaken, and he felt betrayed.
As he told New Hampshire voters in February 1972, Americans “have not gotten the change” that President Nixon had promised. In California, Ashbrook argued that “Nixon has followed the policies of the Democrats and has carried us from disaster to disaster.”39 Ashbrook had always been a faithful Republican, but in his own words, he was “an American first, a conservative second, and a Republican third.”40 It was a formulation that Robert Taft could not have made—not only because there was no conservative movement in his time but because of his deep loyalty to the Republican party. But for John Ashbrook, conservative ideas were crucial to his political actions.
Nor did the feisty Ashbrook spare conservative leaders like Barry Goldwater who were insisting that any criticism of Nixon should be made privately, not publicly. The Ohio conservative rejected such a quiet, backroom approach; he wanted his objections out in the open where everyone, especially the president, could hear them. Ashbrook argued that because so many conservatives had nearly pledged they would not “jump ship even when the President engages in the most overt liberal initiatives,” Nixon was safe in assuming that he had the “conservatives in his pocket.” The supine performance of such conservatives, Ashbrook said bluntly, was responsible in a major way for “the leftward drift of the administration.”41
Ashbrook insisted that conservatives should stick firmly by their principles under both openly liberal administrations and nominally conservative administrations; otherwise, the political agenda would “continue to be defined by the Left.”42 There was ample precedent for such a principled stance.
Robert Taft had remarked, “If you permit appeals to unity to bring an end to criticism, we endanger not only the constitutional liberties of our country, but even its future existence.”43 And Goldwater had publicly censured the Eisenhower administration in 1957 for submitting the largest federal budget in peacetime. Just as he had opposed “waste, extravagance, high taxes, unbalanced budgets, and deficit spending” under a Democratic administration, Goldwater said he would battle “the same elements of fiscal irresponsibility” in a Republican administration.44
The Ashbrook campaign had a galvanizing impact on young conservatives. Ronald Pearson helped coordinate volunteer workers in New Hampshire, especially members of Young Americans for Freedom, which bused in hundreds of students from New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Neither President Nixon nor the liberal candidate, Congressman Pete McCloskey of California, was able to generate similar enthusiasm among students. Pearson would later become chief of staff for Ashbrook in his congressional office and then campaign manager for Jeffrey Bell when Bell ran for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey in 1978. Charles Black, barely out of his teens, was placed in charge of the Ashbrook campaign in Florida. He would go on to play a prominent role in Reagan’s 1976 and 1980 campaigns and is today a partner in one of Washington’s top lobbying and campaign management firms.
Almost all of the funds for Ashbrook’s cash-starved campaign came from direct mail fund raising, which was coordinated by the Richard A. Viguerie Company. From mid-January through mid-March, the Viguerie Company provided the Ashbrook for President Committee with a basic income of $5,000 a week, a meager sum even then. Viguerie lost an estimated $250,000 trying to raise funds for Ashbrook, but he substantially expanded the direct mail universe of conservative donors. More important for American conservatism, Viguerie resolved, as a result of the Ashbrook experience, to take a more active leadership role in the conservative movement. “I felt isolated and frustrated,” he later recalled. “I kept looking for people who could lead, who could make things happen. Finally, reluctantly, I began to call my own meetings.”45 The meetings between Viguerie and other frustrated Washington conservatives over the next two years led to the founding of what came to be called the New Right.
Most conservatives, however, chose to stifle their reservations about Nixon. From Sacramento, Governor Reagan declared that he was in “complete disagreement” with the Ashbrook camp and its sharp criticism of Nixon.46 One of the few members of Congress to endorse Ashbrook was Congressman John G. Schmitz of California, who would run for president in 1972 on the American party ticket, after George Wallace was shot in May; he would receive over one million votes.
In the eyes of most liberals, the Ashbrook challenge was, as Don Oberdorfer of the Washington Post wrote, “particularly feeble” and a “fizzle.”47 After all, in the three states in which he campaigned actively—New Hampshire, Florida, and California—Ashbrook received less than 10 percent of the vote. He did not win a single delegate.
But in the short term, the Ashbrook candidacy almost certainly led to the veto of the Child Development Act, helped keep Agnew on the ticket, and forced Nixon to address the explosive social issue of busing in the Florida primary. White House aides like Kissinger, Buchanan, and Colson were obliged to hold substantive meetings with conservative leaders. Vice President Agnew, the administration’s most conspicuous conservative, was ordered to New York City (before Ashbrook entered the race) to try to convince Buckley and Rusher to lay down their arms. The conservative movement experienced a new sense of political power.
In the long term, the Ashbrook campaign “preserved the conscience of the conservative movement” and ensured that there would be “a strong voice of conservative principle” within the Republican party.48 It demonstrated that conservatives within the Republican party could not be taken for granted. In the caustic words of the Richmond News Leader, “Responsible conservatives had not worked hard for Mr. Nixon in 1968 simply so they could eat in the White House dining room or hear André Kostelanetz play ‘Hail to the Chief.’”49
Like Barry Goldwater in 1964, John Ashbrook ran against President Nixon knowing he could not win. And also like Goldwater, Ashbrook offered a conservative choice to voters, examining aspects of national security and the welfare state that otherwise would have been ignored. Goldwater started a conservative counterrevolution with his stubborn, splendid candidacy. Ashbrook kept the counterrevolution alive—with few workers and little money—when many conservatives were content to go along with a president who, far from being “conservative enough,” had turned into an agreeable Keynesian and an avid détentist.
Nixon went on to crush the Democratic candidate, George McGovern, winning forty-nine states and just under 61 percent of the popular vote. His monumental win seemed to suggest all kinds of possibilities, such as a national political realignment. No one, including the Democrats, denied that the Democratic party had been dealt a devastating presidential defeat. Every one of the thirteen states of the formerly solidly Democratic South had supported Nixon, and by a sizable margin. But Democrats were nevertheless able to hold on to their majorities in the House and the Senate, prompting Senator Robert Dole, chairman of the Republican National Committee, to say that the president’s reelection was “a personal triumph … not a party triumph.”50
Still, Nixon was one of only four presidential candidates ever to take 60 percent or more of the popular vote. The others were Warren G. Harding in 1920, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. William Rusher argued that Nixon’s win was based on a “precarious but powerful antiliberal coalition of economic and social conservatives.” Nixon himself boasted that his landslide win had been made possible by the support of four previously Democratic groups: “manual workers, Catholics, members of labor union families, and people with only grade-school educations.”51 All were appalled and repelled by the most liberal candidate in their party’s history.
Another group of Democrats who began searching for a new political home at about this time were the men and women—urban, intellectual, liberal, mostly Jewish—who had supported Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey, and Henry (Scoop) Jackson, who believed that the nation, and the rest of the world, faced a clear and present danger in the Soviet Union, and who endorsed the New Deal but had serious doubts about the Great Society. Under the leadership of two brilliant, iconoclastic writers, Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, they would coalesce as the neoconservatives and make a signal intellectual contribution to the Reagan coalition.
The periphery of political history is the domain of runners-up, also-rans, and might-have-beens. Usually they merit only passing attention. But one thing almost happened in the wake of Nixon’s triumphant reelection that deserves attention: the reorganization of the House of Representatives by Republican and Democratic conservatives (with, perhaps, Louisiana Democrat Joe Waggonner as Speaker and senior Republicans as committee chairmen).
Historian Godfrey Hodgson provides an excellent description of the serious negotiations between some 40 Democrats and 192 Republicans following the November 1972 elections to run the House of Representatives. With 232 members (218 constituting a majority), the conservative coalition would have had a large enough margin to run the House. No such compromise was possible in the more individualistic Senate, where Democrats had a commanding 57-43 advantage.
The contemplated shift of the mostly southern congressmen was due not merely to the conservative-liberal division in the Democratic party but to the economic and political changes that were transforming the country. “Economic vitality, population, and political influence” were flowing from the traditional power centers of the East and the Midwest toward the Sun Belt—the new electoral giants of Florida, Texas, and California.52
As H. R. Haldeman’s White House diaries make clear, Nixon talked frequently in 1972 about building a “new” party—an “Independent Conservative Party”—based on a coalition of southern Democrats and conservative Republicans. The aim was to “get control of Congress without an election … and make a truly historic change in the entire American political structure.”53
But the realignment negotiations faltered as Watergate transmogrified from a third-rate burglary into a front-page scandal, and they stopped dead when the Senate Watergate Committee opened its hearings on May 17, 1973. The southerners had no intention of abandoning the Titanic for the Lusitania.
It is a measure of these tumultuous times that two new branches of conservatism came into being. Hardly anyone anticipated their emergence, paleo-conservative historian Paul Gottfried has pointed out, or that they would have so significant an influence on the presidency of Ronald Reagan.54 The New Right was a reaction to the attempted liberal takeover of the Republican party (epitomized after Nixon’s resignation by President Gerald Ford’s naming Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president) just as the neoconservatives responded to the liberal seizure of the Democratic party (represented by the nomination of McGovern and the succeeding New Politics). Like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s famous candle, both the New Right and the neoconservatives burned with an intense light that neither foe nor friend soon forgot.