THE BLUNDER OF 1968
Rusher, William A.
~t :;~ ~ives could have had Ronaid Reagan as t.he GOP presidential candidate 38 years ~" ~ I~:h~l .l~on was ~ ' f ~ ' J~ ~ conservahve enough_ qF 43~t.LLIAM A. RUSHEP~ liE I.,~'~DSI.II)E...
...At ii ~';'~:~:~;~the Bohemian Grove in the summer of 1967 i...
...But his successor Gerald Ford, facing a Democratic Congress that simply refused all further military aid to South Vietnam, helplessly watched as the North repudiated its agreement and overran the South, pushing the Communist-dominated sector of the globe even deeper into Southeast Asia...
...In 1968 Reagan was only 57, in the prime of his life...
...Goldwater as con.~rvatism~ premier m, lional Slx)kesman...
...His imposition of wage and price controls triggered an economic slowdown that continued straight through the Ford and Carter administrations, ultimately resulting in the phenomenon of "stagflation," which Reagan and Paul Volcker were only able to subdue at the cost of a recession in the early 1980s...
...TUALLY IT BECAME CLEAR that a Reagan victodepended on holding Nixon below an alute majority on the first ballot...
...and a threefold Soviet advantage in megatonnage of total missile payload-advantages that were not overcome until Ronald Reagan vastly increased defense spending ten years later...
...After all, it was even conceivable that Reagan, if nominated, might lose in November--though George Wallace, who persuaded many voters that there wasn't "a dime's worth of difference" between Nixon and Humphrey, would not have dared to make that argument against Reagan, and would probably have decided against running at all...
...Last but far from least, Barry Goldwater (temporarily out of the Senate but still deeply influential among the conservatives there) had worked hard and effectively for Nixon...
...and they showed no sign of being tired of the pr~L'ess...
...At last the battle came down to a tense struggle for the 34-member Florida delegation...
...Under the SALT I treaty, Nixon agreed to an increase of 40 percent (from 1,000 to 1,408) in Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles...
...In fairness it must be added that New York governor Nelson Rockefeller was also in Miami Beach, and regarded himself as a candidate...
...White, the mastermind of the Goldwater draft and nomination, was now ensconced in the Deauville Hotel, directing the Reagan operation...
...But signs were not long in c()nling that this vision of the future might be c'c)ntested...
...TILL, THE DOOR seemed worth keeping open...
...Even so, as three British reporters covering the convention later noted in a book on the subject, Nixon's margin was "almost insultingly small...
...And so it went...
...One should not be too hard on certain of the conservatives who gave the Republican nomination to Nixon in 1968...
...And on August 5, as his plane landed in Miami shortly before the convention opened, he officially declared his candidacy for the nomination...
...It would be two decades before America could feel that the damage-most of i t - h a d been repaired...
...The conservative organizations on hand were as divided in their counsels as the delegates...
...A compelling indictment of how the cultural left, in a fit of narcissistic self-regard and self-referentiality, abandoned all politics and purpose in the i98os and i99os, thereby leaving open the way for free-market triumphalism and the neoliberal ethic to dominate public discourse...
...Seven years later Jimmy Carter completed the transition Nixon had initiated, by "de-recognizing" Taiwan and opening formal diplomatic relations with the Chinese Communists...
...Moreover, unlike New Yorkers, Californians were not used to having their governor automatically regarded as a presidential possibility, and might not welcome the necessary frequent absences from Sacramento that a presidential campaign would require...
...Reagan thoroughly understood the case for doing so, but was unsure that voters would consider two years in the governorship of California a sufficient presidential qualification for a man who had spent his entire life theretofore in motion pictures...
...but Reagan confidants disagreed...
...Thurmond was especially influential in the South, where much of Reagan's strength would normally be found...
...A major contribution to the regeneration of critical theory...
...The media were sure such an operation was under way, and all but tore Sacramento apart trying to discover its location, but overlooked San Francisco and New York...
...Together, the two politicos began putting together the framework of a (still hypothetical) Reagan campaign...
...Nonetheless...
...On March 16 Attorney General Robert Kennedy entered the race for the Democratic nomination, and on March 31 President Johnson announced he would not run for re-election...
...William A. Rusher, the former publisher of National Review, is a distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute...
...In any case, in Connecticut that fall, where Reagan was spending several days as a guest and speaker at Yale, the governor met confidentially with E Clifton White, the master political tactician who had engineered the draft and nomination of Goldwater in 1964...
...To cooperate with White (who was based in New York), Tom Reed, the Republican national committeeman for California, moved into an anonymous office at 47 Kearny Street in San Francisco...
...Those are the ones who, as noted, had committed themselves to support Nixon when Reagan was still deciding whether to run...
...All of this was, however, unknown to the great majority of conservative Republican convention delegates who would cheerfully have supported Reagan over Nixon if they had thought he was running...
...This presented conservative delegates, who dominated the convention, with a serious dilemma...
...nd ~,t oncc~ replaced Barry...
...Now, abandoning that fiction in all but name, he hit the road, openly seeking delegates...
...That seemed, very likely, to be all it would take...
...As Dwight Eisenhower's vice president, Nixon had claimed the nomination in 1960, but was narrowly defeated by John Kennedy...
...the I~el)uhlican c~,ndidate fi)r president in I(X)8 sr likely t . be 6 ,r ,,PR,L 2OO6 Richard Nixon...
...iTH THE SOVIET UNION, Nixon and Henry Kissinger--apparently convinced that it was unbeatable--diligently sought "d6tente," whatever that meant, while the Brezhnev regime briskly advanced the cause of Communism all over the globe...
...But the month of March 1968 produced two surprises that radically altered the picture...
...The delegation voted narrowly for Nixon, and under the unit rule all 34 of its votes went to him...
...Not surprisingly, therefore, many of them succumbed to the importunities of the Nixon forces...
...In many st;,tt.~ the b.'lt tie fi)r (;oldwater had given them control of the imrty machinery at district, county, and even state levels, and they were in no mood to relinquish it...
...The Washington tabloid Human Events had endorsed Nixon...
...C 0 L U M B I A, Refer to us columbia.edu/cu/cup Wars of" Position The Cultural Politics of Left and Right Timothy Brennan A bold and assertive new work explores the stifling of intellectual dissent in American life...
...Snarling to reporters that "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore," Nixon had then seemed to end his political career, moving to New York and commencing a lucrative practice as a Wall Street lawyer...
...They would, most of them agreed, at least vote for Nixon on the first ballot...
...nd at the c(mvention in &m F~,ncig'o...
...But Nixon was now the Republican nominee, and in November, in another close race (Nixon 43.4 percent, Hubert Humphrey 42.7 percent, and George Wallace 13.5 percent), he at last became president of the United States...
...And certainly the New York Times would not have had occasion to exult editorially, as it did in February 1972 (referring to Nixon), that "Seldom in Western politics.., has a national leader so completely turned his back on a lifetime of beliefs to adopt those of his political opponents...
...from 710 to 960 in submarine-launched ballistic missiles...
...Reagan authorized White to make quiet contact with political leaders in various states around the country, just in case a candidacy began to seem inviting...
...Moreover, the consequences of supporting Nixon extended far beyond the six years it took him to turn his presidency into a disaster...
...But the presidential bug is a durable one, and Nixon drew from his 1962 loss to Brown and Goldwater's 1964 thrashing by Johnson a lesson he later confided to a friend: "A Republican can't win without the conservatives, but he can't win with the conservatives alone...
...The battle was close, and hard fought...
...Reagan, who thought Kennedy would win the nomination and sincerely believed his election would be a disaster, promptly changed his mind about his own course...
...M~st imlxJrtant of all.just two years after the di.~u~ter of 1964 an outslx)kenly c~m.~rvative and highly att~lctive newcomer to ix)litics, Honald Re;zgan...
...He seemed to think he had succeeded, eliciting a promise that Reagan would not run "unless Nixon stumbled...
...For as Santayana observed, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it...
...The board of directors of Young Americans for Freedom voted I9 to 2 to support Reagan...
...from 44 to 62 in missile-launching submarines...
...The conservative movement, though bhxKlied, s,L~.med remark;,hly unix)wed...
...they had learned how ix)lit ical wars are conducted in America...
...Such were the consequences of conservatives turning away, at the Republican convention of 1968, from the firmly principled conservatism of Ronald Reagan to the double-jointed opportunism of the candidate who was conservative "enough...
...The Repuhlican Party, it was widely assumed, would revert to control by its long-donlinant and relatively liberal Eastern Establishment, now led by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, and America~ future would resume I~,ing disputed I~,tween this version of the GOP and a Democratic Party well to its left...
...His strategy was to be conservative enough to win the support of Republican conservatives, but to seek support from centrists and moderate liberals-in and out of the party-as well...
...Hitherto he had been California's purely nominal "favorite son...
...The blunder of 1968 wasn't the last time that conservative Republicans have failed to recognize their own strength and insist on solid adherence to conservative principles, but it was surely one of the most fateful, and it is essential that it be remembered...
...Seeking to reestablish himself, he had run for governor of California in 1962, only to lose to the Democrat, Brown...
...The Goldwater candidacy had energized many t hot,.,~mds of Americ;,ns who had not previously considered participat ion in the c()untry~ politi~ worth their time...
...The Washington tabloid Human Events had endorsed Nixon...
...Most important APRIL 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 17 THE BLUNDER OF 1968 of all, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina became convinced that Nixon was "conservative enough," and Thurmond was supporting Nixon with all his might...
...Prominent individual conservatives could be found in both camps...
...And there went the hope of keeping Nixon below 50 percent on the first ballot...
...National Review and the American Conservative Union were both internally divided on the question, and equivocated...
...On a second, his support would collapse, as all those conservatives who had prematurely agreed to vote for him on the first ballot were liberated to vote for their real preference...
...With the encouragement of Goldwater, who in January 1965 openly endorsed him for the 1968 nomination, Nixon resumed his battle for the presidency...
...In the Republican primaries...
...But the presidential bug is a durable one, and Nixon drew from his 1962 loss to Brown and Goldwater's 1964 thrashing by Johnson a lesson he later confided to a friend...
...Barry Goldwater tried to close it, conferring with Reagan and urging him not to run...
...In Vietnam Nixon pursued, and at first seemed to have achieved in the Paris Accords, agreement with the North Vietnamese to settle for the status quo...
...And many others were members of delegations bound by the unit rule, under which a proNixon majority could deliver the votes of the proReagan minority to Nixon...
...It was under a unit rule, and Republican state chairman Bill Murfin had thus far managed to hold it for Nixon...
...David Harvey, author of Spaces of Capitah Towards a Critical Geography APRIL 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 19...
...But Peter O'Donnell, the rangy Texan who had served as national chairman of the Draft Goldwater Committee, was sporting a saucersized Nixon pin...
...t :;~ ~ives could have had Ronaid Reagan as t.he GOP presidential candidate 38 years ~" ~ I~:h~l .l~on was ~ ' f ~ ' J~ ~ conservahve enough_ qF 43~t.LLIAM A. RUSHEP~ liE I.,~'~DSI.II)E I)EI.'F~.~T ()F BAKKY (;()I.DWATFIi hy L y l l d o l l John.,~)n in 1964 appeared, at first, to put an end to the conservative movenlent's dream of becoming a major force in American IXditics...
...It is impossible, in any case, not to realize what the Nixon conservatives condemned America to when they made their fateful choice...
...But he never commanded a serious fraction of the support that was evident for Nixon and Reagan, and played only a minor role in events...
...It thereupon turned out that several female members of the delegation couldn't bear to see a man cry...
...The conservative organizations on hand were as divided in their counsels as the delegates...
...But Nixon, with the help of Pat Buchanan, whom he had hired as his conservative contact, did an effective job of convincing many more that, however attractive the untried Reagan might be, Nixon was conservative enough...
...At last the tension became too great for Muffin, and he wept briefly...
...But White had 14 or 15 solid votes in the delegation, plus hints of possible support from several others...
...Meanwhile the pressures began to mount on Reagan to run for the nomination in 1968 against Nixon as an unabashed conservative...
...There would have been no wage and price controls, no SALT I, no humble pilgrimage to Beijing, no Watergate, no threat of impeachment, no presidential resignation...
...His "opening to China," 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2006 WILLIAM A. RUSHER which has been hailed by liberals ever since as a masterstroke of diplomacy, involved wholly unnecessary concessions to the Communist regime (notably in regard to Taiwan) which caused Bill Buckley, who had joined the press corps accompanying Nixon to Beijing, to mourn that "We have l o s t - i r r e t r i e v a b l y - any remaining sense of moral mission in the world...
...defeated the re-ek~.'tion bid ofincumlx.nt I)enu)cn,tic governor Pat Brmvn bya million votes in America~ largest st:,te...
...Many were bound by earlier commitments to vote for Nixon on the first ballot...
Vol. 39 • April 2006 • No. 3
