How come we choose from just two people to run for president and fifty for Miss America?
—Author unknown
IN 1968, ANTIWAR ELEMENTS OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, INCLUDING many who were supporters of Bobby Kennedy prior to his assassination, rallied around Eugene McCarthy; Democratic Party leaders supported Hubert Humphrey. This left Democrats deeply divided as they approached their national convention in Chicago. It was a convention that resembled a train wreck. When antiwar protesters descended on Chicago, they were met by the Chicago Police Department commanded by the legendary “boss,” Mayor Richard Daley, who supported the Vietnam War and had little patience with demonstrators.
Daley ordered the police to keep the protesters away from the convention site. The confrontation that followed caused hundreds of injuries, and thousands of protesters were arrested. Ultimately, Humphrey won the party’s nomination, even as those outside the convention center and hundreds of liberal antiwar delegates inside screamed in opposition. Humphrey felt obligated to support Johnson’s Vietnam policies, but finally did criticize the war during the final weeks of the campaign. It was too late, and Humphrey narrowly lost the election to Richard Nixon. Party regulars blamed the antiwar left for Humphrey’s defeat, while liberal Democratic activists ignored the regulars and began a campaign to seize control of the party.
Nixon’s the One
In 1968, Kevin Phillips, a Republican political consultant and author of the seminal political book The Emerging Republican Majority, was a Nixon campaign strategist. Phillips argued that the FDR/JFK coalition of Southern Democrats and ethnic blue-collar Catholics in the industrial cities of the North was now fertile ground for Republicans. Nixon’s call for “law and order” exploited the racial and cultural fears of these voters, who saw lawbreaking and disorder play out on the nightly news and more ominously in their own neighborhoods. They wanted order restored and believed the campaign slogan, “Nixon’s the One.”
It worked. Nixon won the presidency, but he faced a Democratic Congress and a liberal press corps that interpreted the race as a Humphrey loss, not a Nixon victory. Nixon did his best to win them over. Many of Nixon’s domestic programs were liberal, but he talked conservative, and for most Republicans, that was enough. It was Richard Nixon, for example, who became the first president to propose a minimum income for all Americans of working age, employed or not. Suspicion of Nixon ran so deep among liberals in Congress and the press (both of which had wanted a minimum income program) that Nixon’s proposal was defeated.
Nixon did other unconservative things. He expanded welfare benefits, created the Environmental Protection Agency, and nominated Harry Blackmun and Warren Burger to the Supreme Court. The “Minnesota Twins,” as they were called (because both came from Minnesota), voted as part of the 7–2 majority in Roe v. Wade, which ushered in legal abortion nationally.
On Vietnam, Nixon was determined (like Lyndon Johnson before him) not to be the first president to lose a war. To blunt domestic opposition to the war, he instituted new regulations that put fewer young men at risk of being drafted after college. Notwithstanding the new draft rules, the antiwar movement and particularly the counterculture movement continued to grow. When these young protesters reached voting age, they overwhelmingly registered Democrat.
After repeated confrontations, Nixon abandoned any pretense of trying to get along with the Washington establishment. In the 1970 midterm election, he adopted a polarizing strategy of dividing Democrats along the demographic fault lines Kevin Phillips had outlined in 1968. Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew (Nixon’s vice president and a former governor of Maryland) crisscrossed the country denouncing liberals and calling the press, in Agnew’s immortal phrase (written by William Safire), “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
A growing number of Southern Democrats and Northern blue-collar workers began to vote Republican for the first time. Conservatives in the Republican Party welcomed the new recruits, with good reason. There had been an ongoing struggle between moderate and conservative forces within the GOP that had been brewing since Dwight Eisenhower’s second term (the roots of the struggle went back to Teddy Roosevelt’s campaign against William Taft). The new Southern recruits, however, would ultimately tip the balance for party supremacy in the conservatives’ direction. Moreover, this new conservative supremacy seemed to be permanent.
The Liberals’ Revenge
By 1972 the antiwar movement had spread well beyond college campuses, providing liberals with enough votes to elect a majority of delegates to the Democratic Party Convention in Miami. This time, party regulars were on the outside looking in, as antiwar senator George McGovern of South Dakota won the nomination. The Democratic Party was in disarray, and Nixon was reelected in a landslide. The Republican Party, expecting long coattails in Nixon’s forty-nine-state romp, got none. In the Senate, the GOP actually lost seats. Voters split their ballots in every region of the country, opting to continue divided government and maintain the status quo of checks and balances between the White House and Congress. With the country so divided, voters were reluctant to put their trust in one party, a voting pattern that would repeat itself in future elections.
Watergate
The Democrats’ gloom was quickly overtaken by an emerging scandal that had been almost overlooked during the tumultuous 1972 campaign. That June, the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee was the scene of a break-in. Enough has been written about the Watergate scandal and the subsequent resignation of Richard Nixon that we will give it only a passing mention here. Nixon resigned the presidency on August 9, 1974, and Gerald Ford was sworn in as the thirty-eighth president. In his first address as president, Ford said, “Our long national nightmare is over.” As it turned out, it wasn’t quite over.
It would take the Republican Party several years to recover from Watergate. President Ford was left with a stagnant economy, the withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam, and a number of other challenges and problems not of his making. One problem that was of Ford’s making was his decision to pardon Richard Nixon. On September 8, 1974, Gerald Ford signed an unconditional pardon of Richard Nixon, which meant Nixon would never have to face trial for a range of potential charges emanating from Watergate.
The reaction to the pardon was quick, negative, and huge. It wasn’t that voters wanted to see Nixon handcuffed and sent to prison (although a few Democrats would not have shed tears), but at a minimum they wanted him to be subjected to the judicial system in some way. People vented their rage in the only way they could, by voting in historic numbers for Democrats in congressional races across the country. Seventy-five new Democrats were elected to the House, making the Democratic majority 290 to the Republicans’ 145. It was the Democrats’ largest margin since 1932. In the Senate, Democrats gained four additional seats to add to their already solid majority. The combined House/Senate Democratic majority was the largest since 1936.
The Presidential Campaign of 1976
Prior to Watergate, Republicans (at least at the presidential level) had been starting to draw a new electoral map. The traditional Republican states in the Rocky Mountain West and the lower Midwest and Plain states were now anchored by a solid base in the South. The central question going into the 1976 race was whether the voters had finished venting their anger over Watergate.
President Ford had other problems. In July 1975 Ronald Reagan, the newly retired governor of California, authorized his supporters to establish a campaign committee. In November, Reagan officially declared he would challenge Ford for the Republican presidential nomination. Reagan had been governor of California for eight years. He came from a state the size of a midsize country. His tenure and the size of California were assets in the minds of Republican voters who preferred a president with experience. Reagan had once been an FDR Democrat, who left the party to support Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for president. He liked to say, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.”
Reagan trailed Ford by substantial margins in the polls. Washington insiders and political experts considered him a lightweight. But Reagan’s candidacy kept the nomination a cliffhanger all the way to the convention. Ford won virtually all the early primaries and caucuses, most in the North and East. But when the nominating process turned south, Reagan caught fire. What the political experts missed was that the Reagan campaign had become the rallying point for the fast-growing conservative movement within the Republican Party.
Ford did secure the nomination, but the coming of Reagan and the conservatives ensured that future Republican nominees would no longer be moderates like Jerry Ford.