Takeover (5 page)

Goldwater may have looked like he was defeated in 1964, but as George F. Will observed, those whom his ideas brought into politics
believed he won; “it just took 16 years to count the votes.”
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Goldwater’s belated “victory” ultimately benefited a new actor in national politics—Ronald Reagan.

Reagan was not new to conservative or Republican politics. A staunch anti-Communist (although he was a Democrat at that time), he supported Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential race, and in 1961 he joined the board of advisors of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF).
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As executive secretary of YAF, I wrote a letter to Ronald Reagan in the spring of 1962, asking him to sign a fund-raising letter for us. After a month or so went by and I had received no response, I put the matter out of mind.

Then several months later I opened an envelope that had inside a letter with a child’s crayon scribbling on it. Since it was not unusual for us to receive our fund-raising letters back telling us to go jump in a lake (or worse), I threw it away, but something made me pull it out of the trash.

I quickly realized that it was my letter to Ronald Reagan with a handwritten note in the bottom left-hand corner, saying words to the effect of, “Dear Mr. Viguerie, I’m sorry, but I just found your letter in Ronnie’s toy chest. If you think my name will be of help, please feel free to use it.”

Reagan traveled the country on behalf of General Electric and as a dinner speaker. He had delivered a speech titled “A Time for Choosing” to business and political groups a number of times over the course of almost two years—it was a message he believed and knew well.

On October 27, just a week before the election, Reagan delivered a version of “A Time for Choosing” to a national TV audience on behalf of Senator Barry Goldwater’s faltering presidential campaign. You can find the full text of “A Time for Choosing” in
appendix 2
of this book.
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Goldwater’s inner circle initially opposed the idea of a national broadcast of “A Time for Choosing,” but Houston, Texas, banker Jimmy Lyons threatened to pay for it himself, as was legal in those days.

Eventually the controversy made its way up the food chain to Senator Goldwater, who watched the video and liked it, and Goldwater’s campaign staff reluctantly acquiesced to airing the ad, if for no other reason than to maintain control.

The title “A Time for Choosing” derives from a paragraph in the speech in which Reagan set before his audience a choice between self-reliance and the welfare state: “So we have come to a time for choosing. Either we accept the responsibility for our own destiny, or we abandon the American Revolution and confess that an intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”

Reagan also went straight at Goldwater’s name-calling detractors in both Democrat and establishment Republican circles by saying, “Those who deplore use of the terms
‘pink’
and
‘Leftist’
are themselves guilty of branding all who oppose their liberalism as right-wing extremists.”

But Reagan took the argument a step beyond party politics by asking, “How long can we afford the luxury of this family fight when we are at war with the most dangerous enemy ever known to man?”

Suddenly Reagan wasn’t just talking to Republicans or conservatives, he was talking to all Americans—and he was selling conservative ideas about the dangers of Communism and the loss of freedom that was sure to follow the growth of the welfare state.

In some sense, for the next twenty-five years Reagan never deviated from that script.

“The Speech,” as it came to be known, set forth a conservative manifesto that was certainly grounded in Goldwater’s analysis of the shortcomings and dangers of the welfare state and appeasement of the Soviet Union, but was somehow deeper and more appealing than mere criticism of Great Society liberalism and the establishment elite’s “softness” on Communism.

The broadcast of “A Time for Choosing,” up against
Pettycoat Junction
and
Peyton Place
, raised some $6 million for Goldwater; the ad ran multiple times, but it sparked little interest or comment in
the media at the time. Even in the
Los Angeles Times,
which leaned Republican in those days, Reagan’s speech only made Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood gossip column.
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A week out from what was to be an electoral defeat of epic proportions, what the media thought of that last-ditch ploy by the Goldwater campaign wasn’t really important. What was important was that in its content and in Reagan’s smooth and reassuring delivery, “the Speech” landed like a bombshell in the midst of the conservative movement.

T
he frustration many conservatives felt after the Republican defeats of 2006, 2008, and 2012 were nothing compared to how we felt after Goldwater’s 1964 defeat.

For me it was six months before I could go directly to the front section of the newspaper. The news was so bad I had to sort of sneak up on it, starting with the comics, then the sports section, the local news, and finally the front page and editorials.

The
New York Times
opined that the only way Republicans could win was through the establishment Republican me-tooism that Goldwater had campaigned against in the primaries and conservatives abhorred. Sound familiar?

Unlike the Republican National Committee’s whitewash of the Romney campaign’s failures, the “I told you so” postelection autopsy of Goldwater’s defeat was brutal.

The Republican establishment was on the warpath, and anyone who had been an outspoken conservative or Goldwater supporter was in danger of being scalped.

Republican governor George Romney—father of 2012 establishment Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney—after refusing to endorse Goldwater’s campaign and helping to lead a
preconvention “Stop Goldwater” movement, wrote him a scathing twelve-page letter criticizing his “extremism” in the wake of his loss.

Republicans had no ability to stop or even slow down the Democratic agenda. When President Johnson took the oath of office on January 20, 1965, Democrats had more than a two to one majority in the Senate (68 to 32) and a better than two to one majority in the House of Representatives (295 to 140).

The 1964 election brought Senator Ted Kennedy to his first full six-year term in a Senate inhabited by such hard-Left liberals as Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, and they were passing bills, creating new programs, and spending money with abandon.

Despite the prevailing gloom, some in the conservative movement, such as Ronald Reagan, found a reason to be optimistic: “Sure, we didn’t expect this … but take a look at the figure on our side and remember every one [vote] represents a conservative we didn’t have when we started out.”
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Reagan was right; some twenty-seven million voters had voted for Goldwater in the face of the overwhelming personal attacks against him from Democrats, their enablers in the media, and from the Republican establishment.

Reagan’s optimistic analysis was shared by many other conservatives who looked at Goldwater’s success in spreading the conservative message and concluded that, much as we loved and respected Senator Goldwater and his blunt manner of speaking, it wasn’t the message, but the messenger, that voters had rejected.

Conservatives resolved to continue the battle for control of the Republican Party that Cliff White, Neil McCaffrey of the Conservative Book Club, Stan Evans, and many others had begun to advance Goldwater’s candidacy. Just a month after Goldwater’s defeat, William F. Buckley Jr., William Rusher, Don Bruce, Tom Winter (the longtime editor of
Human Events
), Bob Bauman, John Ashbrook, and a few others launched the American Conservative Union, and they began to create other vehicles to advance their ideas.

And on January 3, 1965, I started my direct-mail company (an
enterprise that I had planned to start on January 2, but two feet of snow got in the way) with the idea that I could mobilize the hundreds of thousands of small donors who had supported Goldwater to support other conservative causes and candidates.

In 1964 if you were a candidate for president, you had to file a list of all of your fifty-dollar-plus donors with the clerk of the US House of Representatives. To me these individuals represented an invaluable potential source of support for the growing conservative movement—and there was no prohibition against copying and using those names and addresses.

While Goldwater’s campaign was floundering, I sat in the clerk’s office, copying Goldwater donor names and addresses and building a list of those who would oppose Johnson’s program when he was elected.

I soon realized that working by myself was getting me nowhere fast, and I hired six women, who produced 12,500 three-by-five index cards with the names and addresses of Goldwater donors. Eventually, I went around the country doing the same thing in state capitols where the rules were favorable.

My very first client was Young Americans for Freedom. Keeping the account of an organization run by a bunch of college kids dedicated as much to organizational intrigue as anything else soon proved to be a challenge—in fact, I was fired after just six weeks.

With a young wife and two babies to support, I had to hustle, but I never lacked for clients. My first political campaign client was H. L. “Bill” Richardson, a candidate for State Senate in a special election in California. Using the 12,500 Goldwater donors that I had acquired, we raised fifty thousand dollars for Bill’s winning campaign. He became the leader of conservatives in California, started Gun Owners of America and Gun Owners of California, and has made a huge difference for the country and the conservative movement—and he is still active today.

After the Richardson campaign I became ever more heavily involved in the marketing necessary to launch the new organizations and energize the supporters of the new conservative movement.

I helped in a small way to win Senator John Tower’s reelection in 1966. In 1968 we handled our first congressional client, a relatively unknown assistant district attorney from Poughkeepsie, New York, named G. Gordon Liddy. We handled the mail for Phil Crane’s special election to Congress in 1969 for the seat Donald Rumsfeld vacated to join President Nixon’s cabinet. In 1972 we worked on Senator Strom Thurmond’s campaign and John Ashbrook’s run against Nixon in the 1972 Republican primaries. In 1973 we helped Senator Jesse Helms retire his 1972 Senate race debt and launch his Congressional Club. In 1976 we helped a fiery California conservative named Bob Dornan win a tough primary and general election, and in 1975 to 1976 and again in 1978 we worked for a then-unknown baby doctor from Lake Jackson, Texas, named Ron Paul, and helped him win his first and second elections to Congress.

But I didn’t have a crystal ball—some good candidates that I helped were defeated. Others we helped to win, like a bright young attorney named Orrin Hatch, first in the Utah Republican state convention and then in the Senate general election of 1976, disappointed conservatives by joining Washington’s Big Government establishment.

In December 1976 Howard Phillips, under the auspices of the Conservative Caucus called a national meeting of conservatives to plan our activities in response to the election of Democrat Jimmy Carter. As I checked into the hotel, Jesse Helms—one of the principled giants of American politics and the conservative movement—was standing in front of me, and we began to talk. Orrin Hatch, who had just been elected to the Senate, approached.

At that moment I had the pleasure of introducing Orrin to Jesse Helms, with whom he would regularly clash in later years because while Hatch eventually abandoned the conservative movement to become part of the Republican establishment, and part of the problem in Washington, Helms, by contrast, stood fast to his conservative principles.

The point of these stories is that out of the ashes of Goldwater’s
defeat rose the people, the leaders, the organizations, and the tools needed to build the modern conservative movement and to elect a conservative president.

But who would that president be?

When the lights went down on the set where Ronald Reagan delivered “The Speech” on behalf of Senator Barry Goldwater’s losing 1964 presidential campaign, it was by no means clear that Reagan would inherit Goldwater’s mantle as the leader of the Republican conservatives.

In the immediate aftermath of Goldwater’s loss, Reagan did nothing to encourage such speculation. Reagan said shortly after the election that his experience with the Goldwater campaign had not whetted his appetite for public office.

Running as a Republican candidate, he said, “has never appealed to me.” When asked if he could spurn a strong Republican request to run, Reagan replied, “I hope I could turn it down.”
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In the wake of Goldwater’s defeat, it seemed as if all of the obvious candidates on the Republican side hailed from the same establishment Republican bloc that had tried to stop Goldwater and who had labeled conservatives as “extremists.”

Chief among the establishment Republicans vying to be the next Republican candidate for president were Michigan governor George Romney and New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller’s me-tooism and tangled personal life had killed his chances of defeating Goldwater for the nomination in 1964, but that did not quell his ambition to be president.

When the ultimate establishment Republican, Connecticut’s Senator Prescott Bush (father of President George Herbert Walker Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush and former Florida governor Jeb Bush), asked rhetorically, “Have we come to the point in our life as a nation where the governor of a great state—one who perhaps aspires to the nomination for president of the United States—can desert a good wife, mother of his grown children, divorce her, then persuade a young mother of four youngsters
to abandon her husband and their four children and marry the governor?” At that point, Rockefeller’s doom as a national candidate was sealed, but he wasn’t about to admit it.
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