Nixon's Secret (44 page)

Watching the New York governor flirt with the primaries, then back away, Nixon knew Rockefeller wasn’t going away. Nixon also knew he had the resources and the access to launch a formidable drive for the 1968 nomination. But he also knew the party had shifted beneath Rockefeller’s feet—and Dick Nixon had shifted with it.

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Nixon and Campaign Manager John Mitchell understood his weakness on the right in a second ballot and always knew it was Reagan, not Rockefeller, who might pose problems the second time around and win the nomination on the third. That’s why Nixon had worked so hard to recruit key party conservatives. This was made particularly difficult by Reagan himself, who wouldn’t let on he was running at all.

It is important to examine the seriousness of Ronald Reagan’s first, furtive, and well-funded attempt to snatch the Republic presidential nomination from Richard Nixon. Reagan would go to great lengths to later deny his all-out quest for nomination in 1968. In fact, the first meeting Ronald Reagan held to discuss his 1968 bid for president was held at Reagan’s home in Pacific Palisades the day after he was elected governor in 1966.
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Nationally known newspaper columnist Robert Novak told me of interviewing Reagan after the 1980 election but before the inaugural and said, “Well, Governor, the third time is the charm.” Reagan looked at Novak quizzically until he said, “You know, ‘68, ‘76, and now this time.”
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Reagan said, “Well, Bob, you know I never really did run in 1968. Some people tried to get me into the campaign, but I never endorsed it or participated.”
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If you consider the delegates from outside California he hot-boxed in a small trailer just outside the Miami Beach Convention center, then Reagan told a white lie. Reagan traveled thousands of miles, gave dozens of speeches, and even reached out to arch-foe Liberal Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller in a bid to stop Nixon and turn the 1968 convention in his favor.

Reagan gave an Academy Award performance with his denials, but Reagan and his aides ran a furtive bid for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination presaging his challenge to Ford in 1976 and his triumph over Carter in 1980.

Ronald Reagan’s official biography says he ran for president in 1976, 1980, and 1984. Later in his a career, Reagan would cling to the fiction that he was only a favorite son for California at the 1968 convention and didn’t run for president in 1968. His friend William F. Buckley who was both an opponent and sympathizer in Reagan’s furtive ‘68 bid covered for the Gipper in his own book of remembrances. Yet Buckley was well aware that
National Review
publisher Bill Rusher was a key player in Reagan’s bid.

In fact, less than two years after being elected governor, Reagan launched a stealth, well-funded, tenacious, and hard-fought bid to snatch the Presidential nomination from former Vice President Richard Nixon. He used Governor Nelson Rockefeller as a pawn to try to deadlock the convention so delegates would turn to Ronnie Reagan.

Meeting at the Bohemian Grove in California, Nixon had actually tried to trick Reagan into make a pledge during the actor’s 1966 governor’s race that he would not run for president in 1968 to remove an issue that had hurt Nixon in his own governor’s race in 1962. Indeed, voters thought Nixon was using the governor’s office as a stepping stone to another White House bid. But Reagan saw Nixon’s ploy and declined.
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Reagan, funded by a cabal of millionaire backers, led by two wealthy oilmen, the architect of the 1964 Goldwater nomination and anxious aides, maneuvered energetically for the 1968 Republican nomination. In fact, Reagan’s manager would coordinate closely but secretly with Rockefeller’s campaign manager, Len Hall, while the two governors schemed to block Nixon.

Not all those around Reagan were for this early presidential bid. Reagan Press Secretary Lyn Nofziger and political aide Tom Reed were chief among the “presidentialists,” while Reagan Chief of Staff William P. Clark and Reagan legal counsel Ed Meese opposed a campaign for the presidency after less than two years in the governor’s office.
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Casper Weinberger, who would serve Nixon as OMB Director and serve Reagan as secretary of defense, had been a latecomer to the Reagan team. Weinberger had been a liberal Republican assemblyman from Northern California who would serve as California Republican State Party chairman when Nixon ran for governor in 1962. Weinberger would initially support former San Francisco Mayor George Christopher against Reagan in the California primary for governor. In his own memoir
In The Arena
, Weinberger remembered the situation around Reagan:

By 1968, a group of Reagan loyalists was pushing the governor hard to run for president. I was not in favor because I thought he should finish his gubernatorial term. I’m not sure that the governor himself ever really authorized a campaign. It was only at the Republican convention that year that he reluctantly allowed his name to be presented as a candidate. But he was a realist, and though he received quite a few votes, he quickly told backers to support Richard Nixon, which they did—though the Nixon people continued to harbor a distrust of the Reagan people.
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Reagan Kitchen Cabinet members Henry Salvatori, a millionaire oil man, and fellow millionaire, auto dealer Holmes Tuttle wanted Reagan to be president as early as 1968 and generated the money for Reagan’s surreptitious bid for the nomination. J. D. “Stets” Coleman of Virginia was a funder, as was theme park owner Walter Knott of Knott’s Berry Farm (Salvatori would actually abandon Reagan in 1976 when the governor challenged President Gerald Ford.).

Legendary political strategist F. Clifton White, who I worked for in New York in the 1970’s, was paid handsomely by the Reagan Kitchen Cabinet to engineer a Reagan nomination. White had run the draft-Goldwater campaign that earned the senator the party nomination in 1964, so his conservative connections were unsurpassed.

White engineered the Reagan effort with a small band of draft-Goldwater veterans, including Rusher, Montana publisher Frank Whetstone, Kansas State Senator Tom Van Sickle, and New Mexico rancher Andy Carter, who had run a strong race for the US Senate against veteran Senator Joseph Montoya (D-NM).

The money underwrote the cost of Reagan’s travel to thirteen states in search of delegates, fees for White, TV and radio for a write-in campaign in Nebraska, and a draft campaign for Oregon. There, Reagan took a stunning 23 percent of the vote without being a candidate.

Many conservatives distrusted Nixon and thought his 1960 campaign hadn’t really drawn the differences with liberal John F. Kennedy required to defeat him. “Nixon ran a ‘me too’ campaign,”
National Review
publisher William Rusher said. Yet conservatives generally found him acceptable and preferable to the hated Rockefeller, whose big-government, big-spending, Eastern liberalism and failure to endorse the Goldwater ticket made him a “party wrecker” in the eyes of the conservatives who had swept to power at the 1964 convention.

Nixon skillfully exploited the fact that Rockefeller was anathema to the right. To do it, he had to earn the right’s respect. According to Nicole Hemmer of the Associated Press, some modern-day Republicans could learn a thing or two from the old man:

“Like Romney, Nixon faced a skeptical right-wing media that lambasted him as a ‘political weathervane’ and a ‘dedicated phony.’” Tough words, but Nixon couldn’t simply write off the conservative broadcasters who said them. As his speechwriter Pat Buchanan explained, Nixon understood that to win in 1968 “he had to make his peace with the Goldwater wing of the party.”

Many from the Goldwater drive were co-opted by White and campaign chairman John Mitchell. Goldwater’s chief lieutenant Richard Kleindienst, Mississippian Fred LaRue, Alabama’s John Greneir, Texas Senator John Tower, and Texas GOP Chair Peter O’Donnell had all joined the Nixon comeback crew.

Nixon methodically picked off the Goldwaterites one by one. Through conservative stalwart Pat Buchanan, he skillfully recruited the support of conservative writer William F. Buckley Jr., who Reagan, pondering his own late bid, had been sweet-talking. But Buckley was a Nixon doubter since his first run for president.

“[I]n 1960, the once-popular Nixon found right-wing media particularly hostile territory. At
National Review
, William F. Buckley Jr. was persuaded Nixon would prove ‘an unreliable auxiliary of the right.’ Clarence Manion, host of the ‘The Manion Forum’ radio program, agreed. ‘Like you,’ he wrote Buckley, ‘my first 1960 objective is to beat Nixon. He is an unpredictable, supremely self-interested trimmer and has never been anything else.’”

Buchanan reported that Rusher, Buckley’s
National Review
colleague, was among those finagling for a late Reagan candidacy. Nixon started wooing Buckley by having Buchanan send speech drafts to Buckley for comment. Nixon had Buchanan call the young editor frequently for advice and spoke to him occasionally himself in the courtship. Nixon even dropped by Buckley’s maissonette in Midtown Manhattan “for a drink.” Nixon knew Rusher was among those privately pushing Reagan to launch a formal 1968 presidential bid. Buckley polished off an entire bottle of red wine in the hour they were together. Nixon had a gin martini made by the statuesque Pat Buckley, who later told friends he was “odd.”

Aides knew one martini was Nixon’s limit. After two, Nixon got loquacious; after three he got loud and mean. Regardless, Nixon left with Buckley’s support. According to Nicole Hemmer, Buckley may have been in his corner earlier:

In January 1967 [Nixon] invited Buckley, Bill Rusher (publisher of
National Review
), and other members of the conservative media to his sprawling Fifth Avenue apartment. There he exhibited his virtuosic command of foreign and domestic policy. Rusher remained unmoved—Rusher would always remain unmoved when it came to Nixon—but Buckley? There was no surer way to Buckley’s heart than a vigorous display of intellect and insight. As Neal Freeman, Buckley’s personal aide, recalled: ’I knew when we went down the elevator, early in the evening, that Bill Buckley was going to find some reason to support Richard Nixon.’ True, Nixon was no conservative, but the heart wants what it wants. And a smart, experienced, electable Republican was exactly what Buckley wanted in a 1968 candidate. More than a year before the election, he was recommending Nixon as the “wisest Republican choice.”
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National Review
would follow suit with a weak but crucial endorsement. Buckley would end up powerless to help his friend Ronald Reagan when, to his surprise, Reagan dropped the façade of being “favorite son” candidate and announced a formal bid for the nomination. Still, Reagan faced an uphill battle in the South, where Nixon had recruited a powerful ally.

Eyeing the ideological shift of the party, Nixon was able to secure vitally important Southern conservative support thanks to an influential Southern politician who, like George Wallace, had run a pro-segregation campaign for president in 1948. South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond had served as both governor and US senator as a Democrat but had bolted to the GOP when Barry Goldwater challenged Lyndon Johnson. Thurmond was a leading anti-Communist in the US Senate and was quite well known across the South as an early segregationist. Importantly, he was also every bit as well-known and revered in the South as Wallace.

The esteemed senator first came around to Nixon in May 1968, during Nixon’s sessions with Southern Republican Party chairmen in Atlanta.
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Texas GOP Chairman Peter O’Donnell presided over the Atlanta meetings, and Senator Thurmond was one of the most important participants. He flew into Atlanta for the second and last day’s sessions, and after attending said, “I’ve been highly pleased with the statements the former Vice-President made today. I think he’s a great man, a great American, and I think he would be a great president.”
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Nixon always said that the main issues he discussed in those meetings were national defense, protections against textile imports (the textile industry was very important in South Carolina), and civil rights. He pointed out that Thurmond knew he supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act and would not compromise this position. His only promise on desegregation was not to make the South “a whipping boy.”
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Nixon told me he later sat in a private meeting with “Ole Strom” where the blunt senator, who spoke with a thick Carolina low country accent in a loud staccato, barked questions at the former vice president about the Supreme Court, segregation, states rights, defense policy, and law and order. The exchange satisfied Thurmond that Nixon would be a friend to the South, meaning the South would be treated like every other state. Nixon said he wouldn’t pursue policies that were punitive to the South. Thurmond never asked directly about the desegregation of the schools, because by that time the senator concluded that the Supreme Court ruling requiring desegregation would be ultimately carried out. By 1968, Thurmond was resigned to a “go slow policy.”

Nixon left that meeting with an historic commitment from Thurmond. The senator’s top aide, Harry Dent, drove Nixon to the airport with Pat Buchanan. Dent outlined for Nixon how Thurmond could be the answer to the “Wallace problem”: the fear that Wallace would drain conservative general election votes from Nixon in the South, allowing Humphrey to win with votes of blacks and poor whites, the remnants of the once solid Democratic South (Indeed, the Nixon campaign would later deploy the senator and his aide as their Southern front in the general election.).

On June 22, Strom Thurmond endorsed Nixon and announced that all of South Carolina’s twenty-two delegate votes would be cast for him. He said he stood with Nixon on issues including domestic lawlessness, Vietnam, the rise in the cost of living, Supreme Court overreach, and the need for the nation to maintain its military strength. Thurmond said “he did not agree with Nixon on every single issue,” but added, “[h]e is the most acceptable and electable candidate.”
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Thurmond said he had “no harsh words” for Wallace, but he knew the Alabama governor had little chance of being elected president.
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