Though I admired President Johnson’s important role in the civil rights battle, that was about as far as I went in supporting his legislative programs. A self-described Roosevelt New Dealer, he wanted the initials “LBJ” to be remembered as fondly as FDR’s in the history books, and promptly proposed a host of big government programs under the rubrics of the War on Poverty and the Great Society. I thought most of his initiatives, which promised more power for bureaucrats in Washington, were not well considered. But Republicans did not have large enough numbers in Congress to slow even marginally the rush of Great Society legislation.
Moving into the presidential election less than a year after John Kennedy’s assassination, LBJ was on a quest for his own validation, an electoral triumph that he hoped would shatter all records. The year 1964 was my first reelection campaign and the first presidential campaign I was involved in as an elected official. As it turned out, I had a front-row ticket to a Titanic-sized defeat.
The Democrats knew it would be hard for a still-grieving country to turn its back on the man who had been John F. Kennedy’s handpicked vice president, and they made the most of their advantage. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, the slogan emblazoned across the stage wasn’t exactly subtle. Playing off of a line in Kennedy’s well-known inaugural address—“Let us begin”—the Johnson convention theme was: “Let us continue.” LBJ’s acceptance speech referenced his predecessor six times. Notably the word that would be his eventual undoing—“Vietnam”—did not merit a single mention, despite the 23,300 American troops there on the ground.
If it seemed like voting against LBJ would be a vote against John F. Kennedy, Johnson apparently was fine with that. The Republicans, in effect, were battling two presidents at once: one martyred and one sitting. That meant the GOP needed to run a pitch-perfect campaign. What we got was quite the opposite.
The Republicans did not have many outstanding widely known contenders in 1964. The man who once had seemed likely to be the front-runner, Richard Nixon, had suffered an embarrassing defeat in his race for governor of California two years earlier. By all accounts, including his own, he was through with politics. After losing his bruising gubernatorial bid, Nixon bitterly told the assembled press corps, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”17 He seemed to reiterate the sentiment in the congratulatory note he sent to me (and, I assume, to other victorious Republican candidates) that year. “As I leave the political arena,” Nixon wrote, “I am greatly heartened by the fact that you will be in there fighting for our cause.”18
Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, was making his second run for the presidency but was considered too liberal to win the nomination. Governor Bill Scranton of Pennsylvania, a former member of Congress and a fine public servant, started too late to make a viable run. That left Senator Barry M. Goldwater, who locked up the delegates needed to win the nomination after a long, well-organized effort.
I didn’t know Barry Goldwater at the time, though I had been uncomfortable with his opposition to the 1964 civil rights legislation. Goldwater believed that moral issues were not the business of the legislative branch. I saw his point but thought that if we sat back and waited for good intentions to kick in on civil rights, we might be waiting a long time. I generally agreed with him, however, on economic issues and on national security. I had no doubt in my mind that his administration would have been considerably better for our country than a rerun of President Johnson’s.
Goldwater had a reputation for being outspoken, which I found refreshing in a politician. But in Goldwater’s case, it occasionally meant trouble for him. He would make comments like, “Sometimes I think this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.”19 His humorous line played well in the west and with conservative audiences but wasn’t helpful for a man who needed to win over some Easterners to get elected.
For his running mate, the Arizonan picked one of my colleagues in Congress, Representative William Miller of New York. Miller was a good man, diligent and serious. But that’s not why he was chosen. Goldwater selected Miller, he blurted out one day, because “he drives Lyndon Johnson nuts.”20 It was a less than presidential rationale for selecting a vice presidential nominee.
The Johnson campaign’s strategy soon became clear—to exploit Goldwater’s outspokenness and try to depict him as a dangerous crackpot who would take America into a nuclear war. Subtlety was not a Johnson strong suit. The infamous “Daisy” ad on television that the Johnson campaign aired—showing a little girl counting daisy petals as a nuclear bomb, presumably launched by Goldwater, went off behind her—was undoubtedly the most cynical campaign ad ever aired by an incumbent president. It also was among the most effective. Though it was only shown as a paid ad once, the controversy it stirred up ensured that it was aired over and over again by news organizations and became etched in voters’ minds. The Johnson campaign didn’t stop there. They ran ads showing someone tearing up a Social Security card, implying Barry Goldwater intended to abolish Social Security. Capitalizing on his vote against civil rights, they also prepared a commercial showing a Ku Klux Klansman saying, “I like Barry Goldwater. He needs our help.” Even the media started to criticize the Johnson campaign’s vicious tone.21
Goldwater didn’t help himself. After being characterized as a right-wing extremist for months, he decided to challenge the premise of the criticism. At the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, I watched Goldwater deliver his now well-known acceptance speech, in which he declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice…. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”22 Goldwater, true to form, stubbornly refused to distance himself from those remarks—which his opponents suggested were an admission of his extremism—while the Johnson team reveled in their good fortune.
Though LBJ had not mentioned the words “Vietnam” or “communism” once in his convention address, Goldwater went after both in his usual frank manner. “Make no bones of this,” he warned his audience. “Don’t try to sweep this under the rug. We are at war in Vietnam.” He accused LBJ of failing to define a strategy for victory in the conflict.23 And he cautioned the country about the expansive aims of the Soviets. The substance of his remarks was lost in the furor over the charge against him of extremism.
It soon began to look like Goldwater might lose so badly that many otherwise safe Republican House and Senate seats were in jeopardy. At that moment, in fact, I was being attacked by my Democratic opponent, who was trying to paint me as even more right-wing than Goldwater.* To avoid giving my opponent any ammunition, a supporter suggested I come up with some plausible excuse to stay clear of appearing with Goldwater. But Goldwater was our party’s nominee, and though I didn’t see eye to eye with him on civil rights, I certainly intended to vote for him. I thought it would be disrespectful and misleading not to show up when he came to my district to give a speech in Evanston, Illinois.
When I arrived at the meeting, it was clear that the Goldwater supporters were pleased that their local congressman was showing his support. After experiencing months of criticism of their presidential candidate, including from many Republicans, someone, at least, was on their side. When Goldwater arrived I greeted him warmly, knowing the photo of our appearance together would likely appear in my opponent’s next brochure. I made sure to smile.
As the Senator began speaking, he turned to introduce the state and local officials gathered on the platform. Then he turned toward me. Goldwater glanced at his notes and said, “And I’d like to thank your fine congressman, Don Rums-field.” No doubt some people on Goldwater’s staff winced at the mispronunciation. Not I. Goldwater had just proved to the press that he really didn’t know me very well.
With nothing seeming to go right for the Goldwater campaign—he was down by double digits in nearly every national opinion poll—I still held on to the slender hope that we might win a few more seats in the House and Senate for voters who
wanted a check on the excesses of the Johnson administration. Instead, the Republicans ended the election in considerably worse shape. Thirty-six Republicans in the House were defeated, and our minority hit a low of 140 seats out of 435. We were outnumbered by the Democrats by more than two to one. I was one of the fortunate ones able to hang on, winning by what must have looked like a comparably comfortable margin of 57 to 43 percent. That turned out to be the closest of my four elections to Congress.
My fellow Republicans and I were a dwindling, lonely group in the House of Representatives. Though Democrats long had outnumbered Republicans in Congress, after the 1964 election there were so many Democrats in the majority that when all the members were in attendance, the Democrat side spilled over across the aisle into the Republican side of the chamber. The press suggested the Republican Party was on a course toward permanent minority status. The entrenched GOP leadership appeared to regard this state of affairs as a fact to be accepted rather than a problem to be solved. I saw the situation differently.
CHAPTER 6
Young Turks
After the Goldwater defeat, a small group of like-minded Republicans in Congress began considering what to do next. Some thought we needed a fresh approach in the House Republican leadership. We had made a start with the election of Congressman Gerald Ford as the Republican conference’s chairman in 1963. Now we could either accept the status quo or keep working for change.
The first call I placed the day after the elections was to a veteran in our party, Congressman Tom Curtis of Missouri. Curtis had been a mentor of sorts to me since I first came to the House. He was a sober, scholarly type who would become interested in an important issue, consult the leading national experts on the subject, develop a conviction, and then pursue his position aggressively. I liked that approach. He had a tenacity that sometimes grated on opponents, but he also had in abundance the best qualities of a legislator—he was principled, studious, honest, and courageous. Just elected to his eighth term, Congressman Curtis shared my concerns about our party’s situation. We agreed to meet in Washington with a few other members to talk about what might be done next.1
The legend surrounding those days—among those who followed it—was that those of us who met in the aftermath of the 1964 elections had mutiny on our minds from the beginning. But my recollection is that no one at our early meetings was talking about trying to oust the House Republican leadership. After talking with a few congressmen, including Bob Griffin, Charles Goodell, and Bob Ellsworth, we decided to encourage adoption of a reform agenda that would pose a more aggressive challenge to the Democratic majority and provide Republicans with a sharper contrast in the next congressional elections.
The Republican leader, Charlie Halleck, and his number two, Minority Whip Arends, both resisted the idea. Halleck was a decent man, a staunch conservative, and a supporter of civil rights. But he had been elected to Congress in 1934 and was a symbol of a different era. Arends continued to resent my defiance of his authority as the chairman of the Illinois delegation. Both remembered that Griffin, Goodell, and I had been involved in the earlier effort to unseat another member of the leadership in favor of Gerald R. Ford.
As chairman of the Republican conference, Ford was wary of opposing his fellow members of the leadership. But when evidence of substantial support of the reform agenda emerged among rank-and-file Republicans, Ford signed on. The groundswell of GOP enthusiasm for a new, invigorated agenda didn’t seem to move Halleck. He didn’t take the substance of our proposals seriously. Rather than participating in the reform effort, he spent his time trying to ensure he had enough votes to keep his job.2 Appearing with Ford at a press briefing, one reporter noted that Halleck “seemed nervous and apprehensive, constantly deferred to Ford, and literally kept looking over his shoulder.”3
Halleck’s actions won him few if any fans among the reform minded. If Halleck had enthusiastically embraced our idea and worked to incorporate the concerns of the “Young Turks,” perhaps his fate would have been different. He acted like the entrenched, inflexible member of the old guard—exactly what we did not need.
“Halleck has played his cards wrong,” reported the columnists Bob Novak and Rowland Evans.4 Indeed, I didn’t see how he could have played them any worse. Ironically, Halleck’s paranoia about a leadership challenge led him to act in ways that made a challenge all but inevitable. Along with several other members of the House, I concluded that it was time for Halleck to go. Once again the Young Turks turned to the man we thought had the best hope of beating Charlie Halleck in a leadership contest. And once again our candidate was reluctant to seek the post.
Gerald Ford, by his own admission, was not a bomb thrower, nor was he anyone’s image of a political revolutionary. We had to work hard to convince him that running for the post of Republican leader was in the party’s best interests. Due to Ford’s pronounced reluctance, not everyone in our group was enthusiastic about the idea of a Ford candidacy. Tom Curtis, for one, thought he was not resolute enough. But despite the qualms expressed by some in our group, it finally came down to one hard fact. Ford was the only one who had a reasonable chance of defeating Halleck. So several of us pressed Ford hard to run, until he finally agreed.
At a press conference announcing his candidacy, Ford made it clear that the upcoming battle was not personal. “It is a question of having new, dynamic, bold, innovating leadership,” he explained. “It is a question of using all the talent that we have available among Republicans in the House.”5 I had strong reason to agree with Ford’s remarks—I had helped to draft them.
I had not worked closely with Ford during my first term in Congress, but intense political contests have a way of forging friendships. Throughout the Ford-Halleck contest, I came to appreciate Ford’s strengths that were sometimes overlooked. Once he made up his mind to run, Ford proved to be a smart and tenacious campaigner. He was also unfailingly likable, even by his opponents. That meant that when members looked for someone to blame for the GOP revolt, they turned not to the genial Ford but to those of us considered to be running things behind the scenes. I quickly received attention as one of the primary agitators. One Democratic congressman put it somewhat facetiously, “Rumsfeld held the dagger that Ford plunged into Halleck’s back.”6
For the next month the Ford and Halleck forces battled. Halleck was saying we needed to stay the course, he had the experience to help us win a majority, the Goldwater disaster was a fluke, and other comments he felt might appeal to specific members of the Republican conference. The Ford message, by contrast, was as effective as it was simple: It was time for a change.
I kept our group’s daily tabulation of where we believed each of the 140 Republicans stood on the Ford-Halleck race. Every morning we made assignments for our “whips” to talk to the members, to try to find out what they seemed to be thinking at the moment, where they stood, where they thought others stood, and to revise and adjust our latest head count. At the end of each day I would log in their reports as “for Ford,” “leaning Ford,” “undecided,” “unknown,” “leaning Halleck,” or “for Halleck.” The race was so close, and so many members were noncommittal, that we could never be certain of the exact count. It seemed that it could come down to a vote or two.7
Though we were a reform-minded group, the Ford campaign team was not above playing old-school politics. This was the United States Congress, after all. We crafted a strategy for the vote-rich Ohio delegation that would have made Charlie Halleck proud. Among the Buckeye State’s GOP delegation were a number of old-timers who initially favored Halleck. But we had an advantage Halleck didn’t. Gerald Ford was the ranking minority member on the House Appropriations Committee, which had significant power over determining how and where tax dollars were spent. We pointed out to the large Ohio delegation that if Ford became the Republican leader, by tradition he would step off of the committees on which he served. Once he vacated his senior position on the appropriations committee, the next in line for that pow
erful position was Representative Frank Bow, from the great state of…Ohio. It was a strong incentive for the Ohio members to vote for Ford.
With the January conference approaching, we thought we might still be behind by a few votes. At that point, one bloc of uncommitted votes was in the Kansas delegation. And it just so happened that my next door neighbor in the Cannon House Office Building was a friend of mine from Kansas named Robert Dole. A World War II veteran who lost the use of his right arm in combat, Dole was a hardworking legislator and a wonderfully witty man. He and I would often walk together from our offices over to the House floor when a vote was called. We both often worked on Saturdays if we were not back in our congressional districts, and sometimes brought our children to the office with us. Dole and I were fiscal conservatives concerned about waste in the federal government and occasionally worked together to highlight the spending excesses of Congress. After I turned to Dole for his help in the leadership race, he invited Ford to speak to the Kansas delegation to help swing a few precious votes our way.
Gerald Ford was on the verge of an upset, but we couldn’t celebrate just yet. As the vote approached, I became concerned that some members—in an abundance of caution—might be leading both sides to believe they would be with them. So on the day of the balloting, I made a point of sitting right next to a key congressman from Ohio to try to make sure we kept his delegation in our camp.
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