Some people leave an immensely greater mark on a nation’s history than the bulk of the public ever recognizes. Bill Brock, the former U.S. representative, senator, Cabinet member, and Republican National Committee chairman who died on March 25 at age 90, was certainly in that elite category.
By the standards of the 1970s, when his influence was greatest, Brock was a centrist conservative, acceptable but not entirely part of either camp of the Republican divide between short-term president Gerald Ford and California ex-Gov. Ronald Reagan. When Ford was considering various people to serve as his vice president, Reagan sent word that Brock was among a short list acceptable to him. Yet, later, Reagan and Brock would be at loggerheads as Brock essentially opposed Reagan’s four-year drive for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination.
Still, it was in those four years that Brock arguably did more than anyone but Reagan himself to make the Republican Party viable again after the embarrassment of Watergate and Ford’s loss of the presidency to Jimmy Carter. Despite his quarrels with Reagan, Brock, as RNC chairman, was an absolute tour de force, resurrecting a moribund party with great skill in multiple ways. Brock professionalized RNC operations and greatly expanded its fundraising base in the conservative grassroots rather than relying on a smaller coterie of big donors — a move that built RNC coffers from just $19 million in 1976 to $45 million in 1980.
He also worked to coordinate winning messages built around a focus on well-chosen issues appealing to a broad swath of the electorate. Chief among these issues was the across-the-board income tax cut championed by Rep. Jack Kemp of Buffalo (along with Senate sponsor William Roth of Delaware). These days, it is hard to remember that tax cuts were hardly Republican orthodoxy at the time, with the Ford wing opposed and with future president George H.W. Bush ready to dismiss the idea as “voodoo economics.” Yet, by early 1978, as described by Reagan biographer Craig Shirley, “Bill Brock saw the potency of the tax-cutting issue, and with the full support of the RNC, the Kemp-Roth tax cut plan took off.” At Brock’s urging, Republican candidates for Congress nationwide pushed the idea, which clearly was of great assistance as the GOP gained three Senate seats and 15 House seats in that fall’s elections.
Brock also inaugurated an RNC journal called Common Sense that made not just a political case, but an intellectual one, for the whole panoply of Republican issues, in most cases solidly conservative. And he insisted that Republicans broaden their outreach to blue-collar workers, black Americans, young voters, women, and the less wealthy.
In all these ways, Brock played a seminal role in building the Republican coalition that would dominate national politics in the 1980s (and in some ways beyond). Later, despite the earlier differences, Reagan named him as U.S. trade representative and then as secretary of Labor. In the latter role, Brock sometimes crossed conservatives, but his effective outreach to the AFL-CIO’s Lane Kirkland played a role in cementing organized labor’s intermittent support for Reagan’s efforts to roll back Soviet Communism.
Brock may never have been a household name, and his tiffs with Reagan and others through the years ensured that he’ll never be prominent in any conservative movement hall of fame. Still, he proved that practical politics married to an openness to new ideas can help change the world for the better. It is a fitting epitaph to say that he served this nation long and well.
