Nixon's Secret (46 page)

Nancy Reagan was furious and thought they had stampeded Reagan into a rash announcement that would embarrass her husband. Nancy Reagan held a grudge against Nofziger for years. His slovenly appearance—Nofziger looked like a wax pear that sat on the radiator too long—didn’t endear him to stylish First Lady, either.

In his official autobiography, Reagan claimed he hadn’t been a candidate in 1968. He maintained that he made no effort for the nomination and he never maneuvered for the nomination. In fact, Reagan visited thirteen states to woo party sachems and potential delegates, concentrating on the South with trips to Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Florida. Reagan addressed a caucus of every Southern delegation and specifically urged the Mississippi and Florida delegations to break their “unit rule” to pry loose votes for the Gipper. In the end, it would be too late.

Nixon’s 1960 choice of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge for vice president still rankled party conservatives. Reagan’s pitch for the nomination stoked widespread conservative concern that Nixon would choose another liberal Republican, like New York City Mayor John Lindsay or Illinois Senator Charles “Chuck” Percy, for Vice President. Reagan and his band of operatives did everything they could to exploit this fear.

Reagan’s first opening in Miami came when the
New York Times
ran a story speculating that, if nominated, Nixon would choose one of three men as his running mate: New York’s Rockefeller, Mayor Lindsay, or Sen. Percy. All represented the party’s liberal wing. This story caused a near revolt in the Southern delegations pledged to Nixon.
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The slogan of Reagan supporters was “The double cross is on.” James Gardner, the ultraconservative and ambitious chairman of the North Carolina delegation, began spreading the word that he was supporting Reagan. On the convention floor, the Nixon forces could feel slippage. Columnist Rowland Evans reported that Ohio’s Gov. Rhodes said, “It’s a new ball game,” after Reagan’s announcement, and that Rhodes planned to throw Ohio’s support to Reagan with Rhodes to become his running mate.

Reagan worked to raid the Southern delegations only to find the venerable Strom Thurmond working as a “fire brigade” to extinguish any insurgency Reagan got going. Thurmond insisted again and again that Nixon would select no running mate who would “split this party.” A struggle for the Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina delegates ensued.

Thurmond later claimed he had no “veto power” over Nixon’s choice for vice president. As “First Bid” reveals, Thurmond actually slipped Nixon a note that said, “Acceptable—Agnew, Volpe; unacceptable—Lindsay, Percy, Hatfield.” With that note, Strom Thurmond laid the groundwork for a vice presidential resignation, two un-elected vice presidents (Ford and Rockefeller), an unelected president (Ford), and the election of a peanut farmer.

When Reagan inroads were reported in Georgia, Congressman Bo Calloway introduced Thurmond to their caucus. He told them, “We have no choice, if we want to win, except to vote for Nixon. We must quit using our hearts and start using our heads. I love Reagan, but Nixon’s the one.” Thurmond showed up after Reagan addressed each delegation to argue why staying with Dick Nixon was the right thing to do.

Later that Tuesday, before meeting with the South Carolina delegation, Reagan met privately with Thurmond in the senator’s hotel room. Reagan asked a Thurmond aide to leave so the two men could be alone. Asked a few minutes after the meeting what he told the California governor, Thurmond said, “I told him I would support him next time.” Reagan could not move “Ol’ Strom.”

When slippage from Nixon was reported in the Florida delegation, Thurmond rushed to meet with them at the Doral County Club, holding a majority for Nixon in a delegation that voted by unit rule. Elsewhere, he worked to shore up weak spots and to recruit uncommitted delegates.
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Thurmond’s role in stopping Reagan wasn’t unassisted. Although he visited the Mississippi delegation, so did Barry Goldwater. Mississippi Republican Chairman Clarke Reed said that Goldwater (who won 87 percent of the Mississippi vote in 1964) meant more than in holding that state’s delegates for Nixon over Reagan.

Reagan’s second convention opportunity came when delegates streaming into the Miami Beach Convention Center saw newsboys hawking a “bulldog” edition of the next morning’s
Miami Herald
with a banner headline that Oregon Sen. Mark Hatfield would be the vice presidential nominee: “HATFIELD VEEP PICK.”
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The story sparked pandemonium again among the Southern delegations. Harry Dent, Thurmond’s aide, raced from delegation to delegation, insisting the story was false. At one point he spotted Don Oberdorfer, who wrote the
Herald
story, as the reporter was walking in front of the Louisiana and Georgia delegations.
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Dent cornered him and offered him a $300 bet that his story was wrong. Oberdorfer saw Dent jumping up and down and heard something about $300 that he didn’t understand. “I thought it was a joke,” Oberdorfer said. “I wouldn’t bet $300 on anything.”
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Dent yelled through a megaphone to the delegates that Oberdorfer wouldn’t bet on Hatfield. He played on their suspicion of Yankee journalists to calm the delegates. Nixon’s floor leader at the convention, Maryland Congressman Rogers Morton, stayed busy that evening scurrying with Thurmond from one Southern delegation to another.

Thurmond was not alone in fighting this final Reagan surge, either. Bill Buckley’s role as a Nixon supporter and key support from Barry Goldwater, Senator John Tower, and Congressman Bill Brock also helped Thurmond repulse Reagan’s attempts to stampede the Southern delegates committed to Nixon or held in place by the unit rule.

Even more crucial than Senator Strom Thurman to Nixon’s renomination was 1964 standard-bearer Barry Goldwater. As a party man, Goldwater’s relationship with the vice president was good, although he and party conservatives were outraged in the run-up of the 1960 convention, when Nixon hopped a secret late-night flight to New York and met with Governor Nelson Rockefeller, ceding changes in the 1960 Republican national platform. Ironically, Rockefeller was demanding planks supporting increases in defense spending, as well as a more pro-civil rights plank. The media called the “Treaty of Fifth Avenue,” although Goldwater called it the “Munich of the Republican Party,” a reference to Neville Chamberlin’s concessions to Hitler in 1938.

Conservative anger with Nixon, would translate itself into a last-minute plan by delegates from South Carolina, Arizona, Louisiana, and Texas to put Goldwater’s name before the 1960 convention as a rival to Nixon.

In the act that made Goldwater a national public figure, the Arizona senator would allow them to go forward only to ask for the floor so that he might withdraw his name and ask his delegates to vote for Nixon. It was a seminal moment in the founding of the conservative movement that would ultimately triumph in the election of Ronald Reagan.

Goldwater thundered to a packed house in Chicago’s International Amphitheatre. “We are conservatives,” he continued. “This great Republican Party is our historical house. This is our home.” Goldwater also preached reasonable pragmatism saying, “Now some of us don’t agree with every statement in the official platform of our party, but I might remind you that this is always true in every platform of an American political party.” Goldwater slashed the Democrats. “We can be absolutely sure of one thing. In spite of the individual points of difference, the Republican platform deserves the support of every American over the blueprint for socialism presented by the Democrats!”

“Let’s grow up, conservatives. If we want to take this party back, and I think some day we can. Let’s get to work.”
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“I believe, for this task, Richard M. Nixon is the most intelligent, dedicated, and experienced leader in the Nation. He is our candidate—he is the only man who can lead us to a November victory.”

Goldwater would be critical of Nixon’s 1960 campaign, as will be revealed later. Goldwater would become peeved in 1964 when Nixon got frustrated trying to secretly engineer a “Stop Goldwater” drive without his fingerprints in the hopes that once stalled, the Goldwater and Rockefeller forces struggling over control of the party would turn to Nixon as a compromise. Nixon would blow his cover at the June Republican governor’s conference where Nixon would issue a broadside against the frontrunner from Arizona.

Goldwater himself remembered:

Despite the tribulations on the road to San Francisco the convention, we still hoped, would be a happy triumph. Instead, it was a bloody Republican civil war. Nixon, Rocky, Scranton, and Romney united in a Stop Goldwater movement. They launched the most savage attack that I had witnessed in my political career.

Reversing the conservative image he had projected in the two previous months, Nixon attacked just about everything I had said and done since announcing my candidacy. He concluded, “Looking to the future of the party, it would be a tragedy if Senator Goldwater’s views, as previously stated, were not challenged—and repudiated.”
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Nixon spun on a dime to back Goldwater. Nixon’s hard stumping for Goldwater in 1964 melted whatever reservations the Arizonan had about Nixon and seemed to bury the memories of Nixon’s late efforts to block Goldwater’s nomination.

From this point on Goldwater would function as Nixon’s agent to repeatedly push Ronald Reagan not to launch a premature bid for the 1968 nomination. With Goldwater, Buckley, Thurmond, Tower, Carl Curtis, Everett Dirksen, and the key Goldwater legions locked up, Reagan would have nowhere to go in 1968.

Goldwater would be largely a critic of the progressive drift of Nixon’s first term but would break with Nixon only after release of the so-called Smoking Gun tape. “He’s a two fisted liar,” Goldwater would bellow. Goldwater would lead a delegation of US senators calling on Nixon to resign in August 1974.

Sure enough, with the support of all the GOP’s separate factions in place, Nixon won the GOP nomination on the first ballot. In his speech to the convention, polished up since arriving from Montauk, he appealed to the “silent majority” of Americans. It was a theme he revisited throughout the general election.

Nineteen sixty-eight began a bitter rift between Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan that festered when Barry backed Nixon, grew worse when Goldwater supported Ford over Reagan in 1976, and become so bad Goldwater said Reagan was “just an actor” in 1987, long after Reagan’s eight years in the governor’s office. Goldwater later loudly told columnist James Jackson Kilpatrick that Reagan’s record is “a lot of shit” when President George H. W. Bush bestowed a Medal of Freedom on Reagan in 1993.

Even with Nixon’s consolidation of the party’s right wing, his renomination margin was, in fact, quite narrow. But for a swing of eight delegate votes, America would have endured no Watergate, neither would Spiro Agnew, Nelson Rockefeller nor Gerald Ford have been vice president. Ford would not have been president and neither would Jimmy Carter. George H. W. Bush would likely never have been president, either, and therefore neither would his son, George W. Bush. The Vietnam War might have had a different outcome. Cuba might be free.

A swing of just eight votes at the 1968 Republican Convention would have nominated Ronald Reagan for president, ended the comeback bid of Richard Nixon, and the trajectory of history would have been changed.

Had Nixon been denied the Republican presidential nomination, there would be no vice president Agnew, thus no Agnew resignation and no elevation to the vice presidency for Gerald Ford. No Nixon resignation, so no President Ford and thus no Vice President Rockefeller, who was appointed by Ford to fill the vacancy caused by his own promotion. Jimmy Carter’s election was based almost completely on the country’s reaction to Watergate, which would not have happened.

Nixon’s spade work on the right paid off but Reagan’s late drive for the nomination after eighteen months of playing coy came closer to snatching the presidential nomination from the former vice president than had been recognized. It came very close to happening, although nearly everyone involved would later re-write history regarding Governor Ronald W. Reagan’s intense, well-funded, carefully orchestrated effort to seize the 1968 Republican nomination. Reagan would not win the presidency for another twelve years.

Of course, Reagan would have had a hard slog against Hubert Humphrey in the general election. Reagan was inexperienced, just two years into his governorship. And while Nixon had positioned himself to sound as if he had a plan to end the war to attract dovish general election votes, Reagan’s hard line support for the war in Vietnam would have cost him dearly—just like the anti-war fervor had driven LBJ from the race.

At about the time Nixon was gearing up in New Hampshire, things continued to get worse for President Johnson. Throughout February 1968, the news from Vietnam would grow increasingly gruesome. A new Gallup Poll showed only 50 percent of the American public approved of Johnson’s handling of the war and by the end of the month, Walter Cronkite had also questioned the Vietnam War. The respected television newsman asked in a special CBS report whether or not the war was winnable. Johnson, after watching Cronkite’s editorial, reportedly said to an aide that if he had lost Cronkite, then he had “lost Middle America.”
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The open warfare and deep division in the Democratic Party also played to Nixon’s advantage. Although President Lyndon Johnson had abandoned his previous status as a segregationist who blocked every civil rights bill from 1937 to 1957, his escalation of Vietnam and the threat of the military draft created deep division among the party rank and file. While Johnson held tight the Democratic Party reins and knew how to manipulate federal patronage to keep the state and big city Democratic organizations on board, party liberals urged Senator Robert F. Kennedy, General James Gavin and Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy to challenge Johnson.