Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

He had challenged Ford for the nomination all the way through the convention, something unprecedented in the history of the Republican Party. Then, critics charged, he sat on his hands rather than seriously campaign for the ticket in the fall. If Ford had pulled in but 64,510 more votes in Texas and 7,232 more in Mississippi, he would

Even so, 70 percent of the electorate told pollsters they had no intention of voting in November at all. One of them, a rabbi, wrote a New York Times op-ed. “I

“I’m feeling good about America!” Ford’s jingle bouncily intoned, in commercials that signposted his un-flashy ordinariness.

presidential candidates were decent people had been “obvious until Watergate,” a historian of campaign advertising observed. “Only in 1976 can a claim that a candidate is honest, unselfish, hard-working and concerned about the country warrant the conclusion that he will be a great president.”

The next month, Carter was banned from speaking in a Catholic church. In Scranton, Pennsylvania, Secret Service officers had to hustle him away from an anti-abortion mob. But the issue went undiscussed at the debate; both candidates’ positions were virtually identical: personally opposed; leave the question to the states. Indeed, many of the most interesting issues went undiscussed. Questioning emphasized technical, bureaucratic concerns. The first exciting moments came when a producer

Until there arrived one of the most astonishing twenty-eight minutes in the history of TV. Elizabeth Drew of the New Yorker asked the evening’s final question, about Congress’s eye-opening 1975 investigations of abuses by America’s intelligence agencies, including assassinations of foreign leaders: “What do you think about trying to write in some new protections by getting new laws to govern these agencies?” The president, in his dullest Midwestern drone, insisted that his executive reorganizations and new wiretapping rules took care of the problem. “And I’m glad that we have a good director in George Bush, we have good executive orders, and the CIA, and the DIA, and NASA—I mean the NSA—are now doing a good job under proper supervision…” He pursed his lips. He sounded nervous. This

Ford, was amazed at the sight of these “two men who were seeking to hold the most powerful office in the world… speechless at their podia like waxworks dummies, afraid to open their mouths and take charge,” and observed that if one or the other had done so, they would have won the election right then and there. But the candidates had been trained by their handlers—trained within an inch of their lives—that one could only lose a televised debate, so they should not try anything,

Ford phoned Reagan, asking him angrily if he even cared about beating Jimmy Carter. The New York Times said the Reagans declined an invitation to spend the night at the White House. Ford’s running mate was asked if Reagan was snubbing them. “I don’t see any problem with Governor Reagan,” Bob Dole replied—but then Reagan’s longtime press secretary Lyn Nofziger, who was working that fall for Dole’s campaign, told the press, “It’s hard for a lot of

He flayed the Democrats’ promise of universal health insurance, said their platform’s energy plank would “economically cripple” the companies “that are the only hope we have for developing new sources and continuing to explore for oil,” the education plank extracting “more money from you but less control by you”—while the Republican platform, which was “not handed down by party leadership” but “created out of a free and frank and open debate among rank-and-file members,” understood “that your initiative and energy create jobs, our standard of living, and the underlying economic strength of the country,” and that “no nation can spend its way into prosperity; a nation can only spend its way into bankruptcy.” Then he

The subject turned to whether he’d ever discussed the possibility of assassination with his wife; Carter replied that he was not afraid to die, and that the reason was his religious faith; and whether liberal-minded Americans needed to fear the sort of judges a devout Southern Baptist president might appoint. This spurred a long, subtle theological discussion. There might never have been a document of a candidate’s thinking quite this rich in the history of American electioneering. And if it had appeared in, say, a newsmagazine, that might have been how the interview was received. Instead, it appeared in the soft-core pornography magazine Playboy—and all anyone could think about was sex. He was explaining why he wouldn’t be “running

Reverend Pat Robertson, the son of a senator, whose Johnny Carson–style Christian talk show The 700 Club reached 2.5 million viewers nationwide, said evangelicals were “making a serious reassessment of Carter.” After the complete Playboy issue came out—there was a spread on “Sex in Cinema 1976” featuring stills of carnal activity in no

)—and Ronald Reagan pronounced himself so disgusted leafing through it that he was too embarrassed to deposit it in a public garbage

cutting several commercials starring John Wayne. This was a historic development. It had been a remarkable innovation when Barry Goldwater toured the Deep South for Richard Nixon in 1960—wearing “a Confederate uniform,” Lyndon Johnson darkly joked—since no Republican had ever won electoral votes there. Then, in 1964, Goldwater won Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana. When Richard Nixon attempted to repeat

“We’ve been deeply wounded in the last eight years. We have been hit by hammer blows in the Nixon-Ford administration”—an unforced tactical error: media referees called a foul on Carter for implicitly tying Ford too closely to Watergate, an unacceptably low blow. He was foundering in big

gave Democratic congressional leaders the cold shoulder, didn’t pay respects to past Democratic presidential candidates, and was even said to hold his party’s royal family, the Kennedys, in contempt—and who ever heard of a Democrat doing that? Boston’s mayor called Carter “a very strange guy, and people out there sense it too.” Ford began gaining—until his campaign was rocked by a gaffe. It turned

Not likely now. Late in September a Rolling Stone dispatch related a conversation that took place aboard an airplane bearing pop star Sonny Bono, the squeaky-clean crooner Pat Boone, and a member of Ford’s cabinet to California after the Republican convention. “It seems to me that the Party of Abraham Lincoln could and should be able to attract more Black people,” Boone reflected. “Why can’t this be done?”

Ford dithered for several days, then, on October 3, he convened a press conference at which an ashen-faced Butz announced he was quitting, then left the room; then, Ford warmly praised him. A boost from Ronald Reagan sure would have helped about then. Dole traveled to Reagan’s home

Reagan agreed to only one, in New Haven (where, he said, he was visiting his son for the Yale homecoming game), and refused a spot as honorary campaign chairman. In a driveway press conference, he once more praised the Republican platform; then, asked if Ford should campaign beyond the White House, mocked him. (“Wellll he’s sure got the best-televised Rose Garden

The Carter campaign, busy reaching out to Democratic interest groups from feminists to homosexuals to union members—and Playboy readers—took the evangelical vote for granted. The crisis exposed a political Achilles’ heel: Carter’s success so far had been built on seeming to be all things to all constituencies—constituencies often at war with one another. Now, for the first time, a bill for this ideological profligacy came due—and the Ford campaign spied opportunity. AT FIRST THE PRESIDENT,

Then he and his colleagues met with the president in the cabinet room. Ford explained that his religion had “a tremendous subjective impact” on his decision-making, that he had “a deep concern about the rising tide of secularism,” and that he and Betty read the Bible each and every night. Impressed, Criswell invited the president to pray in his church.

Reasons included the spread of air-conditioning, the Sun Belt’s salubrious “business climate”—a term coined by General Electric executives in the 1950s to describe municipalities with low wages and weak unions—and the ballooning military-industrial complex, which appreciated a salubrious business climate, too: between 1950 and 1956, New York lost more than a third of its share of prime Defense Department contracts to the Sun Belt. Sun Belters were prickly about the Northeasterners who behaved as if the world still revolved around them—Texans most of all. So it was

The pair made their way down the aisle and out onto the church steps, where one of the waiting reporters asked if this meant the pastor was making a presidential endorsement. “Yes,” he said, fearing not for his church’s tax-exempt status. “I am for him. I am for him.”

was an astronomical 23 percent—and he did so sans the Golden State’s most prominent Republican, who cited a “prior commitment,” exactly the reason Reagan

lowest percentage of the voting-age population since 1948, 55.5 percent, turned out on Election Day. “The public has the feeling of being nibbled to death by ducks,

Mal MacDougall said, “If Reagan had been willing to really speak out for President Ford, really work for Ford, I feel convinced that we would have carried Texas. The same goes, of course, for Mississippi.” That would have covered sixty-six of the fifty-seven electoral college votes Ford required to win. Very few of the issues that would actually end up convulsing the nation over the next years had been substantively discussed. Another thing that found no representation in the media: that, at the same time the nation chose a Democratic president, conservatives were mobilizing with a passion, creativity, and energy never

They realized “there were some conservatives who probably might have liked Mr. Hatch if they had known who he was.” But none did. Probably because they got their news from the New York Times. Orrin Hatch had just been elected to the Senate from Utah and would go on to exert more influence on the course of American politics than anyone else elected in 1976 except—possibly—Jimmy Carter. But in the pages of the Newspaper of Record, a column making fun of his name was the most in-depth treatment he got. The election

Bob Dornan, who had once burned Jane Fonda in effigy; Harrison “Jack” Schmitt won New Mexico’s Senate seat after promising to privatize Social Security. None received much coverage—not even the colorful linguist S. I. Hayakawa (a Japanese American, he defended the wartime internment of Japanese citizens, and had become a right-wing hero fighting student antiwar activists in the 1960s as president of San Francisco State University), even though the new senator-elect would be representing

W. Cleon Skousen, whose book The Naked Communist printed what Skousen claimed was a leaked copy of the Communist Party’s secret plan to take over the United States. (Its components included “Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce,” “Gain control of all student newspapers,” and “Eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”) Skousen also liked the cut of Hatch’s jib, affording him access to Skousen’s extensive mailing list. Then Hatch scored another coup. At a gathering of Republicans

He got a frenzied ovation. He began repeating his endorsement everywhere he went—then finished in second at the state convention, qualifying for the runoff. He scrounged up enough money to retain the services of a high-end campaign consultant for a single day. The consultant advised him to call someone named Richard Viguerie, the godfather of a nascent political movement: the New Right. This proved his biggest bonanza yet.

explain what made the New Right new. He answered that they weren’t really conservatives. They were “radicals working to overturn the present power structure in this country.” The New Right’s discontinuities from the old one would be exaggerated in the years to come—not least by its self-mythologizing leaders. But there were some important differences. For one thing, they believed Barry Goldwater, in whose presidential campaign many had cut their political teeth, was by then too much a member of the establishment to retain their respect. That made the outsider Orrin Hatch a natural recruit. “I’m a non-politician,” he liked to say. “I’ve spent most of my professional life fighting the growing, oppressive federal bureaucracy, mostly for working people.” That notion—conservatism as an ideology for working people—was

New Rightists were obsessed with what were known as the “social issues”—crime, government intrusion into family life, sexual mores, the right to own a gun. Reagan’s establishmentarian presidential campaign manager John Sears dismissed them as the “emotional issues.” But the New Right reveled in emotion—particularly the emotion of resentment. The prototypical New Right crusade was a movement in 1974 of fundamentalist Christians in the union

The protests escalated to the point of dynamiting the school board building. The Heritage Foundation, the New Right’s new think tank, sent a lawyer to represent the alleged bombers, and introduced the Kanawha organizers to fellow anti-textbook crusaders around the country. “We

Jimmy Carter’s pollster Pat Caddell understood how dangerous all this could prove to the Democratic coalition: blue-collar voters were vulnerable to conservative appeals because they were “no longer solely motivated by economic concerns—which have traditionally made them Democrats.” Now that they feared “change in society” more than losing their place in the middle class, they were “one of the most vulnerable groups in the Democratic coalition.” The New Right social-issue strategy was

So the New Right searched for more tantalizing lures. As organizer Howard Phillips put it: “We organize discontent.” Organizing discontent meant foraging for whatever issues roused an otherwise apathetic citizenry to conservative political action. Presently, social issues were

claim there were twenty-five thousand. That was another secret to the New Right’s success: an eagerness to accept that their end—the survival of Western civilization—most decidedly justified nearly any means. In 1965, Viguerie went into business for himself, renting a

The legal vehicle known as the political action committee was not new; in 1943, after Congress prohibited campaign donations from labor unions, John Lewis and Sidney Hillman of the Congress of Industrial Organizations formed CIO-PAC to bundle individual contributions from members and route them to favored politicians. After the 1974 election,

resent others trying to force their will on me”; “Will a non-elected bureaucrat be able to force on us whatever he may wish?” Conservatives gathered enough signatures to get a proposition they called the Freedom from Compulsory Fluoridation and Medication Act on the November ballot, worded so vaguely that officials feared it might ban basic health measures like purifying drinking water with chlorine. The American Cancer Society complained that reports fluoride caused cancer were baseless; the anger did not abate. One citizen pointed out that most water went toward “washing, baths, watering the lawn, etc. Yet our wonderful bureaucrats want to spend millions of dollars, raise water rates, and [raise] taxes for a 97.5 percent waste. I am not opposed to fluoride but

phone call came from Stockholm announcing that he had won the Nobel Prize in Economics. His name was Milton Friedman. Stockholm’s choice signified an intellectual earthquake. Friedman was perhaps the most right-wing economist working at a top American university. His popular 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom argued, with breathtaking confidence, radical notions like that government should not regulate pharmaceuticals (unsafe

weeded out via the marketplace) and corporations must not make charitable contributions (their only legitimate function was making profit for shareholders). The next year, Friedman coauthored his academic magnum opus, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, which argued that government did not cure financial panics and depressions but caused them. Such ideas were so out of the mainstream that one economist compared him to a fencer attacking a battleship with a foil. But “the bald little professor with the elfin face and the tart tongue,” as a journalist described him, was also a relentless popularizer of those radical ideas.

On TV, five days after Milton Friedman’s prize was announced, Norman Lear, the producer of All in the Family, debuted a situation comedy called All’s Fair starring Richard Crenna as a conservative newspaper columnist and Bernadette Peters as his liberal girlfriend, with Irving Kristol as a consultant and a young conservative

The report was based on inaccurate Air Force intelligence claiming the Soviet Union possessed as many as a thousand intercontinental ballistic missiles when in fact they only had four, a reality that proved that the Soviets were not in fact pursuing global dominations. The hard-liners remained unchastened by their mistake—as they would be again and again following many more bias-driven

delegates greeted Senator-elect Hatch as a conquering hero. A conservative Democratic congressman lamented that his party had been taken over by “out and out socialists.” William Rusher said that Reagan “blew the chance” for a conservative victory in 1976 by sticking with the Republican Party. Phillips promised “a guerrilla battle at the grass-roots level,” suggested the creation of a national network of conservative newspapers, because “media is in the hand of the enemy,” and announced the Conservative Caucus’s intention to form a shadow cabinet. Congressman-elect Mickey Edwards noted the previous evening’s episode of All in the Family, in which the show’s resident reactionary gleefully predicted that Ronald Reagan would be elected president in 1980:

The meeting crackled with right-wing energy all the same. Senator Hugh Scott, the guest of honor, railed against the “rednecks of Georgia,” who “cannot long conceal their real views from the scrutiny of the media,” and mis-called the opposition the “Democrat” Party, a baiting right-wing slur associated with Joseph McCarthy—and Hugh Scott was known as

Thus did 1977 begin for the conservatives. Spiritual warriors; ex-Trotskyist bureaucratic guerrillas; Nobel Prize–winning economists and novelists; congressmen and senators armed with state-of-the art computers and a determination to make liberalism obsolete—objectively speaking, a promising emergent coalition. Even if, heading into Jimmy Carter’s first term, most people hardly knew it existed.

1970 was also the year in which John Lennon and Yoko Ono had erected billboards around the country reading “WAR IS OVER IF YOU WANT IT.” Subsequently, Richard Nixon worked to hound them out of the country as dangerous subversives. Now, however, here they were in Washington on Jimmy Carter’s day—“looking,” a reporter observed, for all the world “like a staid middle-aged married

The day broke crisp and clear, after weeks of record blizzards—just as on John F. Kennedy’s day. Other years, inaugural box seats had cost in the hundreds of dollars. This time they went for $25—and high officials had to pay for tickets, too. Carter

Then he spoke: “For myself, and for our nation, I want to thank my predecessor for all he has done to heal our land.” He reached down and shook Gerald Ford’s hand: a healing act in itself.

though even then the D.C. establishment criticized Carter for hiring “retreads.” They criticized Carter for everything. Came whispers that he might find a role in the administration for one of the most right-wing members of Gerald Ford’s cabinet, William Simon, and name the anti-busing mayor of Pittsburgh to a Justice Department

Carter then implored Americans to lower their thermostats to 65 degrees during the day, 55 at night. He concluded, “If we are a united nation, then I can be a good president. But I will need your help to do it. I will do my best. I know you will do yours.” With

Such stirrings from within a president’s own party during the hundred-day honeymoon presidents traditionally enjoyed were unprecedented. They came at a time when Carter needed Democratic senators’ help desperately. For, thanks