In the Fall of 1974, after the dust from Watergate had begun to settle, renowned broadcast journalist Dan Rather sent in an article to the Harvard Political Review, forecasting the future of the GOP. His predictions are telling of the mood at the time: fraught with conflict and confusion after a betrayal by their party’s leader, Republicans reach out for a viable option going forward. Can Ford and his new VP Rockefeller handle the task?
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Political Washington in general is working on the assumption that Gerald Ford will be the next Republican presidential candidate. Some of Ford’s best friends, however, are saying: “Don’t be surprised if he decides not to run in 1976.” At present they are not the majority of those who know him best. But the fact that anyone who knows Ford well would suggest this may be worth noting and considering. Nevertheless, for the forseeable future, the chances of a Ford campaign and of his being elected still seem reasonably good, despite his pardon of Richard Nixon and his troubles with the economy.
This appraisal is based in part on the Coolidge precedent. In 1923, Republican Vice President Calvin Coolidge succeeded Republican President Warren Harding, just as the Teapot Dome Scandal was bursting. Before Watergate, of course, Teapot Dome was the worst American political scandal of this century and one of the worst ever. But just a year later, in 1924, Coolidge not only was elected to a full term on his own, he won by a landslide.
Whether Ford will be elected to a full term in 1976, by a landslide or at all, is far from certain today. But a case can be made that Watergate may have as little to do with what happens to the Republican ticket in 1976 as Teapot Dome in 1924.
None of this suggests that Republicans aren’t likely to be clobbered this November. Before the Nixon pardon, Republicans had reason to believe that a kind of amnesty for the GOP was setting in. Many Democrats agreed. In the first weeks of the Ford administration, there was wide agreement among pols in both parties that any taint that Richard Nixon might have brought to Republicans running this year had been largely washed away. Their belief was that whatever the country finally decided regarding amnesty for draft-dodgers or former Presidents, there would be amnesty for Republicans this November.
No one-least of all Republicans-can be sure. Ford may have helped himself, his own long-range chances and, indeed, the long-range chances of his party. (This under the theory that whatever the cost, better to pardon than to have Nixon and his various cases in court through at least late 1975.) But not even the President himself can believe Republicans were helped in the short run. In fact, Democratic gains in November figure to be sizeable: perhaps not as large as seemed likely with Nixon in office, but, big, nonetheless, and probably larger than if President Ford had not pardoned Nixon when he did.
Take the case of Colorado’s Senator Peter Dominick. A conservative Republican, Dominick had taken no position one way or another on impeachment, but figured to be harried mercilessly on the question in his fall’s campaign. After the resignation, Dominick was elated, relieved, he thought, of the burden of having to take a stand on the contested removal of a Republican President. With the pardon, Dominick plunged back into concern if not outright gloom. His race against race against reform Democrat Gary Hart (former McGovern national campaign leader) now will be tougher than ever. If Dominick should lose, Ford and the pardon will come in for a massive share of the blame. Another example: Richard Lugar, Republican mayor of Indianapolis, challenger against incumbent Democrat Birch Bayh for Senator. After Nixon’s resignation, Lugar figured he had Bayh beaten; anti gun-control feelings and Indiana’s traditional Republican strength were in his favor, besides Lugar’s own image as a personable young comer with Presidential potential. Lugar still has a good chance to win, but the odds on him have slipped and the Bayh forces’ morale is up, because of the pardon.
It should be remembered that the economy, not the pardon, is considered by most professionals as Republican candidates’ chief burden this fall. Moreover there is the filing deadline arithmetic. “We won like bandits at the filing deadlines,” said one Democratic National Committee official soon after August 9. His reference was to a long list of Democratic incumbent left without serious Republican opponents, GOP veterans who retired rather than fight what seemed to be uphill fights for re-election, and strong Republican candidates who elected to make their bid for higher office another year.
Of the 20 Senate seats at stake this year and currently held by Democrats, the majority are now considered out of reach by insiders in both parties. Among Democratic incumbents who have comparatively soft touches this year when stronger opponents might have been available are Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, Alan Cranston of California, Warren Magnuson of Washington and Adlai Stevenson III of Illinois. True, each of these might have been favored even today over opponents who failed to file, but a party picks up seats by getting its best candidates to file despite the other party’s strength. This year, few Republicans chose to gamble. That will hurt in November. Morover, if the economy doesn’t do a dramatic turnaround, the results could be a major factor in whether Ford chooses to run in ‘76, and, if he does, whether he wins.
Consider first one tiny possible straw in the wind. A Texas friend called the other day. Small town businessman, Rotarian, true-blue conservative, Nixon voter for life-until this summer. The lat Nixon Watergate revelations had him cursing himself and Nixon, but he was ecstatic about Ford in the beginning. After the pardon, though, he telephoned to say, “That rips it. Ford’s no good either.”
Consider also the building gloom on the Republican Right in general. “Amnesty, Cuba, Rhodesian chrome, 10 cents more on a gallon of gas, black caucus, women’s rights, ROCKEFELLER … let me tell you, it has been a tough couple of weeks down home.” (Down home was a deep South state.) the speaker, executive director of his Republican State Committee, was one of perhaps 20 Republican state committee officials from the South who met in Washington the last week in August. Summoned by Clarke Reed of Mississippi, Chairman of the Southern Republican State Chairmen’s Association, most were fairly circumspect in their public comment on their party’s new President. The even met for more than an hour with Vice President Designate Rockefeller-cracking enough jokes to fill the corridors outside the closed room with the kind of laughter not often exchanged between blood enemies.
Let there be no mistake about it. Aside from the gentlemen from Arkansas-where brother Winthrop made Rockefeller a respected name-and Kentucky, whose party chairman is a rare Southern moderate, there was little real joy among these senior Republicans of Dixie over the choice of Rockefeller. Some are less distressed than others. But none are taking the word of New York Times and Newsweek that Rockefeller is now a conservative. One bloodbath at Attica and a line in every speech about welfare cheats cannot make anyone a conservative with what Reed calls “the patriots” of the hard right.
If there is anyone who represents to hard-right conservatives what they entered party politics to fight, it is Rockefeller. They formed their own party in New York hoping to destroy him there, and at every Republican convention since 1960, the principal confrontation has been Them versus Him. In 1960, as the price of his support for Richard Nixon, Rockefeller prodded Nixon into platform concessions which had conservatives ready to bolt until Barry Goldwater talked them out of it. In 1964, he was the man they had to beat to nominate Goldwater, the man who took the microphone in San Francisco to denounce extremists of the right and was himself hooted down by them. In 1968 once again they had to beat Rockefeller in order to nominate their own man, who that time was Nixon. In 1972 it was Rockefeller who, after lurking behind the scenes, eventually stepped out front as leader of the forces trying to change the party rules in favor of the big states that tend to favor moderates like Rockefeller. Once again, in the only roll call of the convention, it was Them against him, and by a 2 to 1 majority They won.
When Mississippi’s Reed tells columnist Bob Novak that he would not do six back flips into the Mississippi if Ford nominates Rockefeller, and Florida Chairman Tommy Thomas, after the deed is done, jokes amiably with Rockefeller about putting grits, it should not be assumed that Republican conservatives have given up their old habit of abhorring Nelson Rockefeller. Especially Gerald Ford, whose own conservative credentials have not before been questioned, starts taking positions that the far right regards as instant Moscow.
Human Events, which is to conservatives everything that the New York Times, CBS and the Washington Post are supposed to be to the Eastern Liberal Establishment, recently posed the question right under its masthead: “GOP Survival in Doubt.”
Human Events quotes a “disenchanted Ford Follower” who remembers how Republicans used to call George McGovern soft on “Acid, Amnesty and Abortion.” Now that Ford has proposed amnesty and chosen Rockefeller—a liberal on abortion—for Vice President, says the Disenchanted Ford Follower, “all Ford needs to do is come out for legalized pot, and the McGovern platform will have been implemented.”
Hard right conservatives are not a major element in the national electorate. They do not even predominate among people who tend to vote Republican. They attach a lot of weight to issues like Rhodesian chrome which few Americans of any party know exist. And even on Capitol Hill they are a relative minority among Republicans compared to those conservatives who like to add the qualification, “pragmatic.”
In one respect, however, non-pragmatic conservatives have a proven record of performance. Like the non-pragmatic, left-leaning liberals of the Democratic Party, they excel at electing delegates to their party’s national conventions. They do this because they work at presidential politics with a concentration not shared by the less severely ideological people in their party. Most care little about electing Republicans to city halls, state houses or legislatures. Only occasionally do they get aroused by a Congressional race.
By focusing on presidential politics on a permanent, not merely an every four year basis, hard core Republican conservatives get a big leg up when that fourth year rolls around. Their big breakthrough in the national party came in 1964 when they took title to the entire party apparatus in the South and created a steamroller which in every succeeding national convention has easily picked up the remaining votes from other regions needed for control.
The conservative purity of San Francisco could not, however, quite be maintained. In 1968 the “pragmatic” wing of the conservatives argued that a pure conservative like Goldwater or that year’s model, Ronald Reagan, would lose the election, and better a half-loaf conservative like Richard Nixon than Hubert Humphrey. It was a rare example of such pragmatic thinking (found mostly in the writings of syndicated columnists) prevailing at a national convention of either party, and it worked. The half-loaf conservative was nominated and elected.
For hard-core conservatives, however, nothing has done more to give pragmatism a bad name. From Nixon they got recognition of Red China, wage and price controls, legal services for the poor, a national health insurance proposal and a family assistance plan, detente with Russia and support of the United Nations ban on Rhodesian chrome. And, finally, they got Watergate. In the minds of Americans not educated in the finer points of the conservative creed, Richard Nixon has remained to the end a conservative. And as Nixon resigned his office in disgrace, conservatives long fed up with him on issues found to their increasing horror that to many of their countrymen Nixon was perceived as one of Them.
What exactly can they do about it? Well the true-blue conservative whom most conservatives six years ago rejected in favor of Richard Nixon is still around. While Republican moderates and liberal Democrats alike in Washington were rejoicing in what may be soon called (in the great tradition of Roosevelt’s New Deal, Kennedy’s New Frontier and Nixon’s New Revolution) the New Likeability, just across the Bay in Easton, Maryland, Ronald Reagan was summoning conservative to duty at a rally for Republican Congressman Robert Bauman. To Washington Star-News reporter Jim Dickenson, Reagan spoke freely to a third party: “I hope this administration will be so successful that I won’t have to run-or we’ll all be in trouble. A third party would be the result of the Ford administration turning clear around on the (conservative) mandate (of 1972).
A Reaganite independent candidacy in 1976 should not be dismissed as an idle threat. It would very likely bring the Democratic party back into strong contention for Southern electoral votes-from which it has been almost entirely shut out since 1964. Depending on what George Wallace chose to do it might actually win some electoral votes for itself. It would certainly get the 5% of the national vote which would qualify it in future years for public financing under the Campaign Finance Act expected to be passed this year. It is hard to write a scenario for Reagan’s becoming President but it is very easy to see his candidacy making big problems for a Ford Rockefeller Republican ticket in 1976. Reagan’s mischief-making potential in the Republican party is certainly not less than that of George Wallace in the Democratic.
A more likely scenario, however, would involve a conservative attempt at the next convention to flex its muscles on the floor over issues short of a nomination fight with the incumbent President. This would undoubtedly include a re-run for higher stakes of the 1972 experience in which conservative fire-eaters on the platform committee ran over Committee Chairman John Rhodes and produced a documentary so militantly anti-labor (among other things) that John Ehrlichman had to be dispatched by the White House to get the document toned down. It could also include a serious attempt to dump Rockafeller from the ticket.
All this, of course, supposed a Ford-Rockefeller trend to the party’s left. On this the pragmatic conservatives like Mississippi’s Reed keep pointing hopefully to Ford’s deeply-conservative voting record, during a quarter century representing Grand Rapids County, Michigan in Congress. Aside from the positions taken by the President during his first weeks in office, they are uneasy, to say the least, at the prominence among Mr. Ford’s advisers of such moderates and even liberals as William Scranton, Donald Rumsfeld and Charles Goodell. But they take heart from the conservative way such top Ford aides as John Marsh and Robert Hartmann cut their jib. “Hell, that Hartmann,” says Reed, “is as conservative as me.”
Note: Mr. Rather thanks Martin Plissner of CBS News for his invaluable assistance in the preparation of this article.