The heart has reasons that the mind knows not.

—PASCAL

I had long held with the British statesman Edmund Burke that in politics you represent both the principles in which you believe, and the people whence you came, that one deploys the God-given weapons of the mind to defend the things of the heart.

While the press was obsessed with our Southern Strategy—they could only see it as rooted malevolently in race—they ignored our parallel Catholic strategy, which was for me a constant preoccupation.

This came from my upbringing. My father was a grandson and great-grandson of secessionist writers and Confederate soldiers from Mississippi, defiantly proud of his ancestry. His mother was of Irish Catholic immigrant stock. After being abandoned by his father, my father had been virtually adopted by the Jesuits at Washington’s Gonzaga High School. His seven sons and two daughters went to the same parish school and same high schools—Gonzaga for the boys, Visitation for the girls. All nine of us went through four years at a Catholic college or university. Both my older brothers had gone into the seminary. Hence I brought to the White House an orientation sympathetic to Catholicism and the South.

And while Catholics and southern Protestants inhabited separate worlds in the D.C. where I was raised, both had been reliably Democratic since the Civil War. But, by the 1950s, both had begun to drift away from a party that seemed diffident toward the dangers of communism. Both were conservative on issues like pornography and sexual morality and recoiled from the liberalism of Hollywood and Harvard. Both were skeptical of the intellectual elite of a party whose nominee in 1952 and 1956 had been Adlai Stevenson. They seemed more comfortable with Ike and anticommunists like Richard Nixon and JFK. Many Catholics had backed “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy, the former Marine who, in January 1954, four years into his anticommunist crusade, had a 50 percent approval rating in the Gallup poll, with only 29 percent opposed. While the church council Vatican II, 1962–65, and the encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968, affirming traditional doctrine on birth control, had split the church of Pius XII, most Catholics rejected the 1960s social revolution and the New Morality it had advanced.

Taken together, the numbers of northern Catholics and southern Protestants were huge. Catholics had for decades delivered the decisive margins to give Democrats control of the great cities of the North, and southern Democrats had given every electoral vote to Wilson and FDR every time they ran for president. Most of Stevenson’s electoral votes in 1952 and 1956 came from a still-segregated Deep South. In the 1950s, there was not one Republican senator from the eleven states of the old Confederacy, and only a few congressmen. But, by the mid-1960s, with the cultural and social revolution raging, Southerners and Catholics were “ready to move.”

Catholic Schools Left Behind

The four issues on which I felt Nixon could take Catholic votes away from the Democratic Party of the late 1960s were social conservatism, anticommunism—the antiwar left had captured the national Democratic Party—aid for their imperiled parochial schools, and right to life. But there was as much resistance to conservative stands on such issues inside the White House as outside. The commission on private schools that I had championed—parochial schools were closing at the rate of one a day and Nixon had made a commitment in 1968 to help—went nowhere. Moynihan, the domestic policy chief, was of no help. On February 24, 1970, I sent a final written plea to the President—on political grounds:

We are abandoning a political gold mine in giving up the idea of a presidential commission to study the plight of non-public schools….

This is a gut issue which splits Catholic Democrats from liberal Democrats right down the line. The New York Times would be adamantly opposed; while the New York Catholics, more than 700,000 of whose children are in Catholic schools, consider it a prime issue….We have got to have Catholics to become a majority party; there are no other available voters—and this is one Catholic issue closest to their hearts.

This issue is the Northern corollary of the Southern Strategy—it is what helped Cahill carry New Jersey [for the governorship]….

What are Humphrey and Muskie going to say—“I oppose a commission to study the problems of Catholic schools….”

Nixon was sympathetic and supportive, but not enough so. And with a few exceptions, like Henry Cashen and Chuck Colson, we had no support on the domestic side. I recall a breakfast in the White House mess where Pat Moynihan and I met with the president of Catholic University and Pat, in one of his witticisms, showed off his Ivy League pedigree. “What has Fordham ever produced,” Pat asked loftily, “but a long gray line of FBI agents?”

And so the Catholic schools that had served the ethnic communities of America since the nineteenth century, and which, in the 1950s, had 4.5 million students, continued to close.

The Catholic Strategy

In late September 1971, Ehrlichman’s people produced a paper, “The Catholic Vote and 1972.” It had gone to the President, and it was an analysis to induce near despair whether our West Wing would ever recognize the new majority out there. The thrust of the document was that Catholics don’t vote on “Catholic” issues like abortion and aid to parochial schools, and that any direct appeal to Catholics would only anger and alienate Protestants. We should appeal to black, Jewish, and Hispanic voters. My responding memo to Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and Colson, which they passed on to the President, began by describing this strategy as “remorseless nonsense.” It was as raw and intemperate as any memo I would write. My rebuttal listed fifteen specific and several general objections, the most salient being:

1. Nowhere does one see proper recognition of the hard political fact that while there are six million Jews in the country, 22,000,000 blacks—there are some 46,000,000 Catholics. Not only are the Catholics by far the hugest bloc of available Democratic votes to win for us—they are…the easiest to convert.

2. …If the President could raise himself from say 25 percent of the Catholic vote to 40 percent of the Catholic vote—that would be worth more in terms of absolute votes than if the President went from 0 percent of the Jewish vote to 100 percent….

When RN comes out for aid to parochial schools, this will drive a wedge right down the Middle of the Democratic Party. The same is true of abortion; the same is true of hard-line anti-pornography laws. For those most against aid to Catholic schools, most for abortion, and an end to all censorship are the New York Times Democrats. And those most violently for aid to Catholic schools and against abortion and dirty books are the Jim Buckley Catholic Democrats.

Rockefeller, in coming out for parochial aid, has recognized this. In 1970 he won over Catholic Democrats in greater numbers than ever—while his upstate Protestants grumbled about aid to Catholic schools, but they “had no place else to go.”

—

The Ehrlichman paper said that a Gallup poll in July 1968 showed that in the McCarthy-Humphrey battle, Catholics had not gone for McCarthy, proving that Catholics do not vote on Catholic issues. This, I wrote, “shows an utter lack of understanding of the Catholic Community”:

Of course, rank and file Catholics did not go for McCarthy. The reason has nothing to do with his religion—everything to do with his style. McCarthy is an upper middle class liberal, who hobnobs with radical kids, who writes poetry, a post–Vatican II peacenik, snobbish, ecumaniac who apes the Harvard Wasps. Your average lower and middle income Catholic cannot identify with McCarthy and the Beautiful People; they are not Gene McCarthy men, they are Dick Daley men. The fellows who join the K. of C., who make mass and communion every morning, who go on retreats, who join the Holy Name society, who fight against abortion in their legislatures, who send their kids to Catholic schools, who work on assembly lines and live in Polish, Irish, Italian and Catholic communities or who have headed to the suburbs—these are the majority of Catholics; they are where our votes are.

I had met and come to like Gene McCarthy, but felt the case had to be made as strongly as possible, even if done at his expense. Toward the close of this seven-page, single-spaced memo, I wrote:

There is a clear potential majority out there. The President could be a new Roosevelt, who put it together, or he could be the last of the liberal Presidents. But to put it together requires a “leap in the dark,” it means…telling [NBC’s] John Chancellor and the New York Times that, no, we have not done anything for the blacks this week, but we have named a Pole to the Cabinet and an Italian Catholic to the Supreme Court….

Chesterton once wrote of his faith, that it “cannot really be said that Christianity has failed; because it cannot really be said that Christianity has been tried.” The quote may be off; but is apposite. The new Republican Majority in this country is not a disproven myth; it has not seriously been tried.

I ended with this exasperated postscript:

We are not doing the President any favors by sending in to him, uncriticized, [a] memorandum on politics of the vapidity of the document that came to me. I know the affection for Kevin Phillips is well contained in the West Wing; but he is a genius of sorts; and the White House might well hire him for one week….

Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority had made the case for marrying the Nixon center-right coalition of 1968 to the 10 million northern Catholics and southern Protestants who had voted for Wallace in 1968, and the other 7 million Wallace voters who had not gone home to Humphrey until after October 1, 1968.

Phillips had not been refuted by the West Wing. But his thesis had been rejected. Why? Because the liberals and moderates on the staff recoiled at the idea of belonging to a Republican Party where leaders like Rockefeller, Javits, Lindsay, Hatfield, Romney, Percy, and Scranton had been displaced by the Goldwaters, Reagans, Thurmonds, and Agnews.

Bill Safire counseled Ehrlichman to have the White House steer clear of the Phillips thesis and persuade the President to embrace the “New Alignment,” a thesis concocted by Bill in a 1968 radio speech that he persuaded Nixon to deliver. The elements of Bill’s “New Alignment” were the GOP, the New Liberal, the New South, the Black Militant, and the Silent Center. His coalition was an absurdity. New York Times columnist James Reston called it a canvas painted by Jackson Pollock. Nelson Rockefeller scoffed that “incongruously pretending to merge new Southern leadership and the new black militants…is an exercise in political fantasy.”

What concerned me about Safire’s strategy of “reaching out for the poor, young and black” was that Nixon was down to 42 percent approval in 1971 and facing a possible campaign against a centrist Catholic, Muskie, who could unite his majority party. Yet we had people in the West Wing who did not understand that it was millions of working- and middle-class Catholics and southerners, whose families had voted for FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, and, yes, George Wallace, who were indispensable to our holding the White House in 1972.

In this effort, Chuck Colson was an invaluable ally. As he wrote in his memoir of conversion, Born Again:

Through 1971 the White House staff was divided over political strategy. Ehrlichman, Mitchell, speech-writer Ray Price and others argued for an appeal to traditional Republican suburbanites and to the liberal, uncommitted voters. An opposing group—speech-writer Pat Buchanan, Mike Balzano…and I—argued the case for capturing the Middle America–Wallace vote. The winds of social change sweeping across the country were, we felt, changing hearts and minds to our position.

Deeply loyal to Nixon, Mike Balzano, whom Colson brought aboard to help with outreach to ethnic groups and blue-collar workers, was known in the White House, from his earlier occupation, as “the Garbage Man.” And Mike took visible pride in his working-class roots.

Forgotten Minorities

That same September of 1971, those urging a Catholic strategy to complement our Southern Strategy received supporting fire from a surprising source. Michael Novak, an academic of the antiwar Catholic left, appeared in Harper’s with a rough, raw defense of the people whence he came, who had for decades endured the condescension and contempt of the WASP elite.

Titled “White Ethnic: The Anger of a Man Disinherited by the Authorized American Fantasy,” the Novak essay began, “Growing up in America has been an assault upon my sense of worthiness”:

I am born of PIGS—those Polish, Italian, Greeks, and Slavs, non-English-speaking immigrants, numbered so heavily among the workingmen of this nation. Not particularly liberal, nor radical, born into a history not white Anglo-Saxon and not Jewish—born outside what in America is considered the intellectual mainstream. And thus privy to neither power nor status nor intellectual voice.

The Harper’s article was a chapter from Novak’s forthcoming book, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics. The Slovak American Novak described the distance his people stood apart from the establishment of the party to which they belonged, and how they were listening to Spiro Agnew:

On a whole host of issues, my people have been, though largely Democratic, conservative: on censorship, on Communism, on abortion, on religious schools…Harvard and Yale meant “them” to us.

The language of Spiro Agnew, the language of George Wallace, excepting its idiom, awakens childhood memories in me of men arguing in the barbershop….

Novak was defining and describing the people, alienated from a Democratic Party where they once felt at home, to whom we should make our appeal.

Why do the educated classes find it so difficult to want to understand the man who drives a beer truck, or the fellow with a helmet working on a site across the street with plumbers and electricians, while their sensitivities race so easily to Mississippi or even Bedford Stuyvesant?

Sending the Novak essay to Nixon, I wrote a caustic accompanying memo:

This is a recent piece by a defecting Catholic liberal who, however, is working for the Democrats. Provides an excellent view of the thinking and attitudes of many millions of ethnic Catholics, who, I have long argued, are “where the ducks are,” so far as our party and the President is concerned. Our political types, working the Chicano precincts and the Ghettoes, and Navajo reservations for Republican converts, would do well to focus their attention upon the Holy Name Society, the Women’s Sodality, and the Polish-American Union.

Nixon underlined the entire last sentence and scribbled orders on my memo: “E & C & H. I totally agree….Let’s see what we can do to aim some of our domestic programs and our scheduling toward this group.” Nixon’s thoughts were put into a memo marked “Confidential” by a new staffer, Jon Huntsman, and sent to Ehrlichman, Colson, and Haldeman.

Even Democrats were awakening to their danger and our opportunity. Yet most of our policy and political people could not or would not see it. Bill Gavin, a fellow Catholic, phoned Novak, and we three had lunch in the White House mess to talk Catholic and ethnic politics.

If the fashionable minorities of the Democratic Party were too difficult to convert, why not convert the unfashionable minorities? These folks would soon make up a huge slice of the Nixon-Agnew forty-nine-state New Majority—and go on to become the “Reagan Democrats.”

Origins of the Pro-Life Movement

The White House battle over abortion mirrored that in the party and the nation. As a Catholic, I adhered to the beliefs of my upbringing and faith, and President Nixon was more than receptive. And in making the argument for an administration pro-life stand, we had allies in Colson, Cashen, and Anne Higgins, a pro-life activist who headed up the letters department in the Nixon and Reagan White Houses and devoted her life to the cause of the unborn.

Our most persuasive argument was cold politics. The Catholic vote was one-fourth of the electorate and up for grabs. Traditionally Democratic, Catholics had gone 4 to 1 for JFK. Nixon had raised his share to 33 percent against Humphrey and Wallace. In 1972, in electoral-vote-heavy states like New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, Catholics could be decisive, especially if Nixon were up against a Catholic like Muskie, the early front-runner for the Democratic nomination. The prospect that he might face Muskie made Nixon wide open to arguments about how to win the Catholic vote.

As Dean Kotlowski writes in Nixon’s Civil Rights: “[A]s his reelection neared, the president, guided by Colson and Buchanan, used the abortion issue to woo conservative Catholics. Pressed by New York’s Terence Cardinal Cooke, Nixon ordered military hospitals to respect local laws prohibiting abortions.” That statement of April 3, 1971, directing “that the policy on abortions at American military bases in the United States be made to correspond with the laws of the States where the bases were located,” was the President’s, but the language was mine:

From personal and religious beliefs I consider abortion an unacceptable form of population control. Further, unrestricted abortion policies, or abortion on demand, I cannot square with my personal belief in the sanctity of human life—including the life of the yet unborn. For, surely, the unborn have rights also, recognized in law, even in principles expounded by the United Nations.

Ours is a nation with a Judaeo-Christian heritage. It is also a nation with serious social problems—problems of malnutrition, of broken homes, of poverty, and of delinquency. But none of these problems justifies such a solution.

A good and generous people will not opt, in my view, for this kind of alternative to its social dilemmas. Rather, it will open its hearts and homes to the unwanted children of its own, as it has done for the unwanted millions of other lands.

To get the military to alter its policy on abortion to conform to state law, we had to get the President to direct Secretary of Defense Mel Laird to do so. There was resistance at the Pentagon. The President’s statement, however, was mailed by the Republican National Committee to every Catholic organization and diocese in America.

A year later, I suggested to Haldeman that President Nixon send a letter to Cardinal Cooke in New York commending the church’s campaign to work for repeal of the state’s liberalized abortion law. John Mitchell approved. The letter was sent. I signaled the Cardinal that we would have no objection to his releasing the President’s letter to the press.

Governor Rockefeller, however, who had taken a stand against repeal, was enraged, and the New York Times denounced “a President openly working through a particular church to influence the action of a state government.” On Election Day, 1972, Nixon would carry New York in a landslide.

Of that episode, Kotlowski wrote: “After appeasing the right, Nixon returned to the center. [Rita] Hauser sent Ehrlichman data showing a sizable majority of Americans, including Roman Catholics, now favoring liberal abortion laws. The president decided to leave this matter to the states….” Rita was a liberal New York lawyer and longtime adviser to Nixon.

These staff skirmishes in the Nixon White House were significant not only for how they affected policy and the approaching election of 1972. Like John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, they foretold a greater struggle that would redefine the Republican Party and affect national politics into the twenty-first century. Just months after the letter to Cardinal Cooke, the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade, with three of the Nixon justices concurring and Harry Blackmun writing the decision. The most divisive Supreme Court decision since Brown, and perhaps since Dred Scott in 1857, Roe declared abortion to be a constitutionally protected right of every American woman.

America’s political landscape began to change, as though the Great Flood had passed over. The WASP establishment accepted Roe and moved on. In California, Governor Reagan, who had signed an abortion law as liberal as Rockefeller’s, began moving to a pro-life stance that would prove crucial to his winning the Republican presidential nomination in 1980. Roe had ignited a backlash that caused traditionalist Catholics to sever ties to a Democratic Party that had begun to embrace feminism and abortion on demand. It caused evangelical Christian churches to become politically active. A Moral Majority that united pro-life Catholics, Christians, and traditionalists was formed. President Ford’s wife, Betty, may have marched for the Equal Rights Amendment at the Detroit convention of 1980. But by then, no pro-choice Republican could be nominated, and none would be through the next eight GOP conventions. My pro-life stand was that of a small minority in the White House staff and Nixon Cabinet, but it would soon become party orthodoxy, embedded by delegates’ demands in every future Republican platform.

Our Catholic strategy would succeed beyond our wildest expectations. The 22 percent of the Catholic vote Nixon received in 1960 against JFK, which rose to 33 percent against Humphrey and Wallace, soared to 55 percent against McGovern, the candidate of the counterculture. In nine presidential elections from 1980 through 2012, the Republican nominee would average 46 percent of the Catholic vote, which was increasingly Hispanic, but only 25 percent of the much smaller Jewish vote, and 9 percent of the black vote.

But Catholic schools never got the aid they had hoped for; Catholic parents never got the tuition tax credits; Roe v. Wade remains the law of the land; and the war against traditionalist Catholic beliefs and values has so altered America’s cultural landscape it would be unrecognizable to the parents who raised us. We never delivered what we promised. A journalist friend told me, decades later, that he had sent his six kids to parochial schools and Catholic high schools and could really have used those tuition tax credits we promised, but never produced.

In the 1960s, black Americans saw the enactment of every civil rights law for which they marched and voted. The Jewish community got all the military aid and political backing for Israel it demanded. And the Catholics, who far outnumbered both groups combined, and who delivered for Nixon and Reagan, got rhetoric.