New Bottle, Old Whine

Few establishments had ever seemed stronger than the Republican party’s in 1963, led by Dwight Eisenhower, a beloved, two-term ex-president just three years out of office, and a cadre of golden-boy governors, including George Romney of Michigan and William Scranton of Pennsylvania, the last a particular favorite of the war-hero president. Early on, this group had pegged Barry Goldwater as a possible menace, the head of a group of Western conservatives whom Theodore White, the great chronicler of modern presidential campaigns, referred to as “primitives,” seen as way too far to the right of the rest of the country and much too proactive in foreign affairs. But Goldwater was not the only contender the establishment planned to stop: They also feared New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, whom they considered too liberal and also quite certain to lose the election, having divorced his first wife to marry a much younger woman (who in the course of separating from her first husband had left four quite young children behind). Believing that neither could win, but that both could set off a fight that divided the party, they planned to hold out for a unity candidate, whom all sides could rally around. But when asked to come up with a number of options, Eisenhower mentioned his Treasury secretary (Robert Anderson), Generals Lucius Clay and Alfred Gruenther, and his own brother Milton (who had never held office)—a list that showed his distaste for career politicians. This was emblematic of a much larger flaw that would later prove fatal: Knowing his success was based in the belief that he was antipolitical, Eisenhower feared most of all being seen as conniving, which led him at times not to give an endorsement, or to withdraw one within hours of it having been made. As White would explain, “conversations with Eisenhower .  .  . were to baffle and confuse” his more moderate allies, as he would prod them to run but refuse to endorse them. And having gotten the word direct from the general, “the distinction between being ‘urged’ to run and the implicit promise of support was always obscure” to them. In November 1963, he urged Henry Cabot Lodge to come home and run for president on a “common sense” platform. (Lodge had lost his Senate seat in 1952 to John Kennedy, who as president appointed Lodge his ambassador to South Vietnam.) Eisenhower’s urging led people to think he had chosen his candidate—till just days later he made the same plea to Scranton, the patrician young governor. Through the winter and spring a plan evolved to let Goldwater and Rockefeller kill off one another, hinging on the critical primary in California, to be held on June 2. Rockefeller, who was then ahead in the polls, was expected to win, thus crippling Goldwater, and would head to the convention, where he would be blocked by the Goldwater forces, whose skills at delegate-hunting were strong. The deadlocked convention would then find itself in a quandary and turn, as a matter of course, to esteemed party leaders who would come forth with a man of their own.

As a result, the stop-Goldwater people mainly sat on their hands through the primary season, careful to offend or to irritate no one, in hopes that backers of both contestants would have no reason to go against them. Richard Nixon, who had lost the last election to Kennedy and who had hoped to emerge as a compromise candidate, said not a word. Neither did George Romney, nor did Scranton, who refused the plea of Pennsylvania senator Hugh Scott to endorse Rockefeller before California, as he hoped to meet two days after the primary with several other establishment leaders to plan their approach, once Rockefeller had won. The plan was inspired, the sole problem being that it would utterly fail to work out. On Friday, Rockefeller led in the polls by a margin of more than 10 points. On Saturday news arrived that his son, Nelson Jr., had been born in New York, forcing this then-dormant scandal back into the spotlight. The race was tied Monday. And on Tuesday, Goldwater won, 52-48, and headed toward the convention appearing unstoppable.

Instead of an impasse, and a plea from the party to step in and save it, the stop-Goldwater forces faced a scenario in which they would have to step in and oppose a proven frontrunner with impassioned support and a strong lead in delegates, for none of which they had planned. Providentially, the annual national governors’ conference was scheduled to open in Cleveland just days later, presenting them with a rare chance to meet and to make future plans. On a Saturday morning, Scranton met Eisenhower, who urged him to run, gave him his blessing, and promised to be on his side. Saturday evening, the news reached Cleveland, where 12 other governors rallied behind him. Sunday morning Scranton arrived to a hero’s reception, ready to go on Face the Nation to announce that he too would be running for president, and had the support of the beloved ex-president. But minutes before, he was called to the phone, where Eisenhower told him he did not have his blessing, that he feared he had made a mistake. He had not meant to say he would back Scranton for president. “The General wanted Bill to know that he could not be part of any ‘cabal’ to stop Barry,” White informs us. “Bill was on his own.”

Stunned, Scranton went on the program reeling with shock, wholly disoriented, and struggling to make sense of a new situation he had not had the time to absorb. “His arms folded, his eyes downcast .  .  . he stumbled through half an hour of awkward question-and-answer, taking refuge in ‘principle,’ ” as White writes. “He felt strongly about the traditional principles of the Republican Party, but he did not feel strongly about stopping Goldwater. He was ‘available’ for the nomination, but he would not fight for it. ‘I don’t plan to go out and try to defeat Senator Goldwater. I have no such intention,’ ” he said.

Two strange days followed in Cleveland, as the governors staggered about in a state of confusion, trying to scare up a stand-in for Scranton, as various prospects emerged, and then failed. Rockefeller was still divorced, still too liberal for most of the party, and still had lost California. Richard Nixon arrived, but had to wait for someone to ask him, which no one was doing. Several said they’d agree to a draft, but no one would start one. Romney had made a promise to the voters of Michigan not to run for president in his first term in office; he was afraid of the public’s reaction if he broke his pledge. Lodge was away, and Eisenhower remained an uncertain trumpet, whose calls came and went. Wholly embarrassed, the mortified governors skulked out of Cleveland, but the drama was not quite done. Also mortified, Eisenhower and Scranton, perhaps unnerved at the beating they had taken from the press, used Goldwater’s vote against the civil rights bill that was then before Congress as their excuse and/or reason to charge back into battle, sending Scranton into a quixotic campaign that would quickly go nowhere, and end five weeks later at the convention, where the establishment handed its sword to the renegade senator from Arizona, who would go on to lose 44 states. Even then, Eisenhower substantially weakened this final doomed effort when he went back on his promise to publicly back the campaign. “The principles that moved the great Republican chieftains to their behavior .  .  . are difficult enough to define, but the personalities involved seemed determined to confuse them still further,” as White reported, correctly. “The week before and the week after the California primary of June 2nd exposed all of them in the worst possible light.” Truer words never were written, and for the first time a party establishment composed of accomplished and tested professionals had collapsed in the face of internal rebellion. As time proved, it would not be the last.

At least the Republican establishment had recognized Goldwater as a threat to their interests as early as 1962, even if they weren’t able to do much to stop him when the time came to act. By contrast, it took Democrats until May 1972 to recognize the campaign waged by George S. McGovern—who was as far to the left as Goldwater had been to the right of the country, and as much of a threat to their settled world order—as the critical challenge it was. Standing at 3 percent in the polls in January 1972, he seemed a blip on the screen next to Edmund Muskie, the heir apparent who had been the vice presidential candidate in the last outing and the one man to emerge from that sordid election with his moral stature enhanced. Unfortunately, he ran the classic campaign of a frontrunner, long on inevitability and short on ideas, with a huge office (called the Taj Mahal) on K Street in Washington that seemed to eat money, an office and a staff for every niche interest, and boards of advisers with experience going back to the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Everyone who was anyone (or wanted to be) had lined up behind him, as White reported. “By January .  .  . the parade of endorsements from the established leadership of the party had become so crowded that one of the chief problems was sequencing their dates with enough separation to get maximum press impact.” Muskie’s ascent seemed, as Jeb Bush’s did later, a fait accompli. “He had solid financial backing, a large and experienced staff, the endorsement of the party’s leading figures, the advice of the party’s sages, the affirmation of the nation’s pollsters. But if Muskie was long at the bank, and on the letterhead, he was short, depressingly short, in ideas.” Unwilling to risk his large lead, he dealt in evasions and platitudes, relying on the theme “Trust Muskie” that had been so effective four years earlier. But what hit the right note against Nixon and Agnew had rather less punch in a primary contest, and, as the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and White himself noted, “People were willing to trust Muskie, but were asking .  .  . trust Muskie for what?” Weeks later, he indulged in a tirade in the snow of New Hampshire, where he seemed to shed tears, and his image and numbers would never recover. He still won the primary, but with 46 percent, 20 points down from his previous standing. McGovern was second, with a surprise 37 percent, which vaulted him into a position of top competitor. And from then on he did not look back.

What the establishment failed to see in McGovern was that he was not merely one man but the tip of a long spear of unfinished business, going back several years. The Democratic establishment in 1972 did not have the catastrophic dysfunction that the GOP had experienced eight years earlier, but what it did have was a willful blindness to the forces that whirled all around it and the currents that swirled round its feet. It did not understand the bitterness that remained from Hubert Humphrey having been awarded the nomination in 1968 by the powers that were without getting one vote in the primaries. It did not understand what it meant that McGovern had been the stand-in for the late Robert Kennedy at that convention, or that Gary Hart, McGovern’s campaign manager, had left his law firm in Denver to campaign for Kennedy in 1968, or that Gene Pokorny, one of his aides, had come out of four years of student activism at his university, having moved from the civil rights to the antiwar movement, and then to the Eugene McCarthy campaign.

“A whole generation of American youth leaders was moving at the same time in the same direction,” White notes. “The decade of the sixties moved its campus political heroes on into national politics by the scores and the hundreds, where they proceeded to act.” What they brought with them was an army of people willing to work on the ground in caucus and primary states and an openness to more modern forms of polling technology, of which the party leadership had remained ignorant, and with which it was not prepared to compete. It didn’t know that in 1971 Hart had worked out a primary schedule that focused on New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and California, or that in 1971 Pokorny was living full-time in Wisconsin and organizing the state so intensely that by March of the next year, each of the state’s 72 counties had a volunteer nucleus, paid organizers were staffing numerous storefronts, while “ten thousand unpaid volunteer workers were walking blocks and country roads, marking voters on precinct sheets .  .  . indicating the degree of pressure to be exerted to bring them out on primary day.” In California, the campaign’s operation was state of the art, “the most efficient technical apparatus ever fielded by any candidate in a primary,” with 283 storefront offices, 500 organizers from out of the state, precise polling that charted the movement of sentiment, and a system in which printouts of names, on which volunteers coded questions and answers, were shipped to centers where computers “spat out and mailed a personalized form letter from George McGovern to each numbered respondent, addressed to that voter’s central concern.” By contrast, the campaign of Humphrey, the last establishment figure left standing, looked back to a long-ago era in which candidates relied upon unions, leaders of ethnic blocs, and machines in big cities to turn out their clients. It was at this point, just before California, with McGovern leading in most polls by double digits, that the institutional Democrats awoke to the fact that the party of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy was about to nominate a man who, despite his heroic record as a bomber pilot in the Second World War, had supported Henry A. Wallace in 1948 and deeply believed American power was a malevolent force in the world.

At the instigation of organized labor, at that time an anti-Communist and socially conservative institution, Humphrey took on McGovern in three debates, and in the course of them managed to rip him to pieces, forcing him to defend his very high-priced plan for a guaranteed national income and for partial withdrawal from world conflicts. He managed to drive McGovern’s lead down from a 20-point spread to a 5-point margin, which served only as a tantalizing hint of what might have been had they wakened sooner to their plight. At the convention, it was another labor figure who came up with the idea of a rules change as the last chance to avert a catastrophe: “Why should McGovern claim all of California’s 271 votes when he had won only 44 percent of the vote in the primary? If Humphrey, Muskie, Jackson, the labor forces, the Southerners all joined in a coalition to challenge the California delegation, McGovern might yet be stopped.” McGovern’s “opponents surely recognized the high cost of such tactics in a procedure-conscious age and knew that any other nominee would not be regarded as legitimate by many voters and might face a third-party challenge,” as Michael Barone writes in Our Country. “But they believed that McGovern’s views on foreign policy were a genuine danger to freedom, and must be challenged and rebuked if at all possible. They could not yet be certain that he would lose to Nixon, and they were correct in thinking that he was genuinely different from their nominees of the past.”

As with Scranton eight years before, it was too little, too late in the process to resonate. “In China years ago,” wrote White (who had actually reported from China), “it was accepted that by the time the guerrilla forces surfaced in any province,” the time had gone by to stop them. Before the regular forces arrived to confront them, the battle already was lost.

“Too late” was also the problem for Republican regulars in 2016, when an aroused and energized large group of people rolled over a larger but diffuse and disorganized set of opponents, who had not seen their peril in time. Donald Trump’s unique ability to tame, master, and co-opt the media gave him the sort of leg up over his many opponents that their mastery of modern organizational tactics gave the McGovern campaign in 1972. But this year more closely resembles 1964, in that both egos and incredible errors of judgment by frequently sensible large personalities undercut, kneecapped, and shattered completely any chances to cohere around an opponent. In 1964, it was Eisenhower’s last-minute phone call withholding full support from Scranton that snapped the back of the anti-Goldwater movement, following the risky decision to rely on California primary voters to stop the renegade senator. In 2016, it was too many people staying in much too long and ripping the innards out of each other (instead of the threatening outsider), leaving the outsider to glide by unopposed. What made Jeb Bush, out of office nine years and out of touch with the new set of pertinent issues, decide that a large field filled with fresher, more plausible figures required his presence at all? The effect of his entry was to cripple a number of younger candidates and provide the ideal target for Trump to play off of, as the outdated and listless establishment figure against which to wield his wrecking ball for change.

Second to Bush in the damage-done sweepstakes would be John Kasich, who had no chance of winning anything outside of Ohio but was an all-purpose drag on all of the others. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio also suffered from self-inflicted injuries that sapped their vote-getting ability, Rubio having sponsored an immigration reform bill that enraged conservatives, and Cruz having stumbled in 2013 when he dragged his party into an ill-advised government shutdown. As a result, when he emerged as the last hope to stop Trump, most of his colleagues refused to support him, and he had trouble reaching people who were outside his own base. In the beginning, when Trump could have been stopped, the center-right ignored him, tearing each other to pieces, while Cruz played along with Trump at first in the hope that, as a fellow outsider, he could pick up Trump’s voters if and when Trump collapsed. But Trump didn’t collapse. Each step taken at each stage by the whole range of the entire not-Trump contingent ended up the wrong one, each guess mistaken, and every plan failed.

So what can we take from these sad little stories, as a guidebook to future campaigns? First, people do wait too long to recognize danger, and then are too often paralyzed by it. Second, it’s easier to be for something than simply against it, no matter how unappealing that something may be. Positive force is direct and ferocious, negative force is diffuse and meandering. The insurgent force has one thing in mind, its own elevation; the people against it bring diffuse and conflicting unrelated ambitions. Which brings us to point number three.

Political people are creatures of outsized ego, and none more so than the ones who see themselves as president. In their day jobs, they are surrounded by staff who function as courtiers. In their government jobs, they cooperate with one another; but a primary contest is entirely different, as the stakes are much higher, and only one among them can win. Each intends to be that one person. They do not want to work and to play well with others. They do not want to coalesce around others. They want others to coalesce around them. And so as it developed, each player in the 2015-16 primary field seemed to have a plot in his head in which Trump could be stopped by other people dropping out at just the right time and in just the right sequence for the votes and delegates to flow his way. They seemed very put out when things failed to work out in this fashion. And so they hung on, often beyond the point when any hope remained.

One does not even have to be an actual candidate to let self-interest screw up a race. The stop-Goldwater movement was stalled at all points by Eisenhower’s fear that if he were ever perceived by the public to have dabbled in politics, his pristine public image would cease to exist. Thus, having pushed Scranton out in a doomed frantic effort, he still refused to endorse him in public. An irate Nelson Rockefeller asked him what he was doing. “The former President,” White reported, “said he could not come out publicly, he had to preserve his influence.” This was the man who had planned the invasion of Normandy, with his reputation secure, and no future in politics. “Acidly, Rockefeller inquired: For what?”

In spite of all their resources, the establishment forces, both fifty years back and now in the present, were never as strong as they seemed. Their resources are real, but all but impossible to coordinate and deploy, out of fear, out of blindness, out of complacency, out of self-interest, and owing to the inability of ambitious people to wholly abandon their dreams. “Together, the thirteen anti-Goldwater governors governed some 58 million Americans in the name of the Republican Party,” as White wrote in his Making of the President, 1964. “The great cities, communities, and states they tended were of world-wide importance; their resources of talent and wisdom could shake the nation. Yet all of them, together, could find no way of shaping an alliance that might confront the legions .  .  . mobilized under the Goldwater flag.” That’s how it looked then from the outside, of course; from the inside it would be a whole other story. That’s how it was in 1964, in 1972, and now in this cycle. And so it may be at some future moment, if the threat ever arises again.

Noemie Emery, a Weekly Standard contributing editor, is author most recently of Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.