The YVP: Structure and Strategy

In 1971, after taking his seat in the Senate, Brock went to Nixon to dispute claims that the Democrats could count on the youth vote. Brock recalled: “We had just won, we knew better.”^{Footnote 17} Arguing for an autonomous and well-funded effort, Brock claimed, “It is ridiculous to concede the youth vote.” He convinced Nixon that most young voters “have a whole different set of values.” As Brock promised, “They are the majority.”^{Footnote 18} Nixon invited Brock and his adviser Ken Rietz down to Key Biscayne for a private meeting with his “strong man” campaign manager, former Attorney General John Mitchell. Brock and Rietz made an offer they could not refuse. If Mitchell could cut them a million, they promised to deliver the youth vote, emphasizing how the archetypal stereotypes that defined all young people as both liberal and students thrived only due to the bias of the media, Nixon’s enemy.

Nixon appreciated young candidates like Brock who understood the GOP brand’s problems. As the president complained, “It [Republican Party] has the sound of big business, minority party, elitist old farts.”^{Footnote 19} RNC co-chairman Anne Armstrong admitted: “If the youth vote depends solely on party images, the Republican Party comes out second best.”^{Footnote 20} Unlike other Republicans, Nixon told Haldeman, “Brock gets it.”^{Footnote 21} Especially after Nixon suffered a setback in the 1970 election, he considered Brock’s victorious strategy, winning the youth vote two to one, to defeat the longtime incumbent Al Gore Sr. in 1970 as a potential blueprint for a Republican majority.

Nixon’s domestic affairs chief, John Ehrlichman, wrote a memo that decried, “We have loaded aboard a lot of bright, young, able people who can present the President and his program in an excellent light,” but “we are epitomized by the Vice President, the Attorney General, and Judge [G. Harrold] Carswell.”^{Footnote 22} CRP deputy director Jeb Magruder pointed out that there existed a counterpart to the silent majority, “MetroAmericans,” college-educated young professionals “who enjoy art, attend the symphony, and read The New York Times Book Review.” According to Magruder, “MetroAmericans” imagined Nixon’s typical voter as a “fat, racist suburbanite sitting at home in front of a television watching a football game and drinking a half-case of beer.”

Magruder suggested more publicity on the fact that “the President has surrounded himself with bright, young, well-educated men who care.” For example, Magruder argued, “Young Metroamerica won’t listen to Mel Laird, but they will to Marty Anderson . . . because he’s got more hair, a Ph.D., a sexy wife, drives a Thunderbird, and lives in a high-rise apartment.” Haldeman responded favorably, writing “excellent” twice on the memo (which Magruder called “some kind of an all-time high in praise”).^{Footnote 23} In a Look Magazine article about the White House’s young aides, “Nixon’s Youth Corps,” Haldeman and Ehrlichman described the “happy-byproduct” of having young people on staff as “the chance to keep in touch with the age group most associated with change, with dissent.”^{Footnote 24} Communicating with America’s youth required Nixon to include and recruit young people, increasing the need for dependable, young leaders to head the YVP.

Nixon’s reach for young voters had a history. When Nixon first campaigned for Congress in 1946 as a thirty-three-year-old attorney, his ability to satisfy party regulars and extend his appeal to “new blood” secured his nomination and eventual victory over the Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis in California’s twelfth district.^{Footnote 25} As vice president in the Eisenhower administration, a robust Youth for Ike–Nixon campaign increased its share of the youth vote from 49 percent in 1952 to 57 percent in 1956.^{Footnote 26} After accepting the Republican nomination in 1956, Eisenhower spoke: “Now, of special relevance, and to me particularly gratifying, is the fact that the country’s young people show a consistent preference for this Administration,” adding, “I shall never cease to hope that the several states will give them the voting privilege at a somewhat earlier age than is now generally the case.”^{Footnote 27} While Nixon may have shared Eisenhower’s enthusiasm for an expanded youth vote in 1956, the GOP struggled with young voters during the 1960s.

John F. Kennedy’s youthful image made Nixon’s reach for younger voters a challenge in 1960, and though Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign developed his Youth for Nixon (YFN), only half of the youth vote showed up at the polls, while 61 percent of the eligible Americans voted.^{Footnote 28} The Democratic candidate, Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.), won 47 percent of voters under thirty, while Nixon won thirty-eight. Worse, Nixon could not nail down the noncollege youth.^{Footnote 29} This election showed Nixon his personal problems with the youth vote, an especially pressing concern as momentum built behind legislation to lower the voting age.

As the chairman of the Young Voters for the President Congressional Advisory Committee, Bill Brock presided over the group’s first meeting in June 1971 and emphasized something besides the worn-out “wild in the streets” motif.^{Footnote 30} Conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick criticized this archetypal image of young people as “long-haired, beaded and bearded, anti-pollution, pro-pot, he despises Nixon and loves McGovern.” Popular films and television exaggerated the influence and popularity held by radical youth, Kilpatrick argued, mocking the stereotype that every youth “wants only to get out of college so he can live on food stamps, free love and father’s allowance.”^{Footnote 31} In contrast, Brock highlighted the majority of young, antiradical Americans who did not attend American colleges and universities.^{Footnote 32} As the YVP set its targets for new voters, this group offered the most likely prospects.

Courting the “sons and daughters of the silent majority,” Brock and the Advisory Board treated Nixon’s young supporters as a voting bloc, more than a symbolic window dressing. To oversee Nixon’s youth campaign, the Advisory Board selected Kenneth Rietz, Brock’s trusted campaign adviser during the senator’s 1970 victory, which included a majority of Tennessee’s youth vote. Rietz agreed to leave his position as senior partner in the advertising firm that he ran with Harry Treleavan, a key Nixon campaign aide in 1968, and assumed control on July 1. Immediately, Rietz set out to create a YVP office in each state, burdened with Brock’s prediction that he could recruit five hundred thousand first-time voters to volunteer for the Nixon campaign.

Ken Rietz perfectly fit the role of Nixon’s youth-vote coordinator. His background in public relations, advertising, and conservative politics propelled him onto the Washington, D.C., Republican Party radar. Only thirty years old (and he looked younger) when he took the position, Rietz’s experience as a public relations expert colored his overall view of the youth’s significance. In one memo outlining the project’s ultimate goal, Rietz claimed he could get youth actively involved “so the overall campaign takes on a young flavor.”^{Footnote 33} After all, youth politics in 1972 owed much of its popularity to the intermingling of politics and public relations. As Haldeman told Nixon, “The young voting bloc, that’s another media created thing.”^{Footnote 34} Despite the obvious connection between youth and image politics in 1972, Rietz stuck to the argument that young people would not simply change tune and buy Nixon. Thus, the task was not just to sell him. Rietz’s path to “peer group pressure” required a robust organization, as he rejected any strategy that simply used “an expenditure of millions of dollars on mass media.” Rietz argued: “That would have been a waste.”^{Footnote 35} This meant that young people, not superficial imagemakers, would create an effective campaign.

One month after becoming the director of the CRP Youth Division, Rietz spurned the November Group’s wait-and-see approach. By the fall of 1971, Rietz had wrestled the role of youth guru from the administration’s point man, Jamie McLane. After Rietz convened meetings and produced memos over the summer that impressed everyone, White House aide Gordon Strachan found that McLane’s unimpressive monthly report for September largely plagiarized Rietz’s recommendations, which “are specific with careful attention giving to timing, expenses and keys states.”^{Footnote 36} Rietz’s approach earned wide praise from the Campaign Strategy Group, eight of Nixon’s most trusted advisers who met throughout the fall of 1971 to map out the reelection campaign. While welcoming Rietz’s recommendation for “maximum involvement of youth as a means of gaining a fair share of their support,” something he would label “group pressure,” the Strategy Group warned that the campaign must avoid “the image of making an all-out effort toward youth and meeting failure,” clarifying the youth campaign’s goals as “high visibility of youth in the campaign organization, but low publicity on our efforts toward their votes.”^{Footnote 37} Fearing the polls would remind people that Nixon had a youth problem, Rietz’s superiors suggested the cautious approach.

Fundamental to this effort, the YVP structure carefully maintained a hierarchy that assured the CRP’s centralized control. As for the YVP national headquarters, the original twelve “professional political workers” occupied a quintessentially Nixonian operation run out of a posh office one block from the White House. First, the YVP office’s location on the third floor of the city’s “lush” First National Bank building, which was protected by a security man at the elevator and a receptionist who allowed entrance with a buzz lock system.^{Footnote 38} Second, as one reporter described the YVP workers with varying hair length, “Nobody needs a bath.” Third, it housed the most advanced technology, which produced computerized analysis of locations that attracted the elusive noncollege youth.^{Footnote 39}

Each state’s Young Voters chairman and executive director answered directly to that state’s Nixon chairman and met with Fieldmen, a select group of paid Nixon operatives who trained YVP volunteers and College Republicans leaders in Fieldmen Schools, to maintain a direct connection to the central office in Washington. Informing the YVP director in monthly meetings, a steering committee of preexisting youth organizations, such as the College Republicans and Teenage Republicans, joined by YVP directors and YVP regional chairmen. In addition, the state chairman appointed leaders for each of the eight divisions, including the Nixonettes, publicity, and registration.^{Footnote 40} Like any successful national franchise, each county or city with a YVP office emulated this same structure with McDonald’s-like precision. Still, the autonomy at the ground level allowed some flexibility as West Coast officers created desks for “Spanish Speaking Youth for Nixon” and “Oriental Youth for Nixon.”^{Footnote 41}

Within weeks, Rietz had established the model storefront YVP office in D.C. on 17th and Pennsylvania that quickly employed two young organizers, who recruited fifteen willing and able volunteers.^{Footnote 42} These offices felt young, with handmade, colorful, psychedelic posters pasted on the front windows; the slogans “Nixon Now” and “Right on Mr. President” seemed less Nixon, and more 70s. YVP offices performed multiple functions in the campaign. First, they helped YVP leaders recruit young people face to face. When the University of Tennessee YVP office first opened in September, converting the CR office into a Nixon shop on campus, National Chairman Pamela Powell visited forty volunteers who ran the headquarters and urged them to be “spokesmen” for the president, claiming, “We need a campaign based on personal relationships.” Second, the offices offered valuable manpower as the YVP at UT claimed eight hundred members after its first week in operation, pledging to focus on registration and “Bumper Sticker Days.”^{Footnote 43} These cosmetic efforts put young people to work for Nixon, but the opportunity to play meaningful leadership roles in the campaign motivated YVP members to take on the grunt work that campaigns traditionally assigned to young volunteers.

The relationship between the local election headquarters, the state youth director, and the national office showed the campaign’s organizational strength. Rietz accredited this setup, which he called “cooperatively autonomous,” for smooth operations with the White House and the November Group.^{Footnote 44} At the top of CRP’s organization stood John Mitchell, Nixon’s former attorney general. Mitchell, however, rarely contributed to the day-to-day operations and he resigned his post before the convention. This meant that CRP’s deputy director, Jeb Magruder, assumed control of Nixon’s in-house reelection effort. Reporting to Magruder, Fred Malek headed the campaign’s citizens group, which oversaw the targeted campaigns to voters such as ethnic groups, women, and youth. In addition, the White House maintained its control with its own children as Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Congressman Gerald Ford (R-Mich.) each had a kid involved in leadership roles within the YVP.

Out of more than twenty divisions of CRP, the YVP also received more funding from Nixon’s coffers and the Republican Party than the other efforts, including “Democrats for Nixon” and the various ethnic divisions. While the YVP organization enjoyed unique autonomy, its significance in the campaign did not exceed other important blocs such as women and labor. The CRP director of administration, Robert Odle, warned: “There was a deliberate effort to go after the young voters at the committee [CRP] and more generally in the administration,” but it would be wrong to treat YVP as “sui generis,” as he clarified, “that effort didn’t differ from other groups.”^{Footnote 45} While YVP did not achieve favorite status with Nixon or CRP leaders, the relative parity among these various groups shows that the Twenty-Sixth Amendment energized Nixon’s campaign for young voters and elevated youth politics from its previously marginal role. Rietz boasted, “This is no back-of-the-bus thing.”^{Footnote 46}

While the Nixon campaign’s national office held a tight grip on how it appeared on air, YVP volunteers often had autonomy on the ground. Even the name, Young Voters for the President, avoided a direct reference to Nixon and emphasized the organization over the candidate because Rietz requested that the YVP should have “separate headquarters where appropriate.”^{Footnote 47} In addition, as one YVP director said, “One of our campaign slogans is ‘Get Involved!’ That’s why we have a separate youth headquarters.”^{Footnote 48} Creating Youth Headquarters provided young people with the space to play different leadership roles and offered Nixon supporters access to political organization through the “campaign within a campaign.”^{Footnote 49} For example, the directors also contributed to the overall campaign since they each held a position on the state committee staff. Including the youth directors proved a masterstroke. It allowed the campaign to display its “youth atmosphere,” provide young supporters with valuable experience, and kept the young directors under CRP’s thumb. Though the YVP structure clearly took on a top-down model, it encouraged young people’s access to the political system and leadership roles.

Youth Politics and the Rise of Independents

To fill the YVP ranks, Nixon’s youth campaign searched any organization that fostered sympathy for the president and could offer young supporters to staff YVP offices. While traditional youth organizations such as the 4-H fostered a Nixon-friendly, “silent majority” sensibility, young conservatives and Republicans more focused on politics stood poised to take advantage of new opportunities in 1972. For example, the Young Americans for Freedom established in 1960 at William F. Buckley Jr.’s home in Sharon, Connecticut, gathered America’s young conservatives to counter “liberal educationism” on campuses, which turned “the college into an impersonal daycare for the offspring of all carnivorous animals . . . which primarily serve ideological purposes.”^{Footnote 50} In 1964, the YAF played an important role in the effort to draft the ideological purist, Barry Goldwater, as the Republican candidate for president.

While YAF leader Tom Huston spoke on Nixon’s behalf during the 1968 campaign, the president’s first term fell short of YAF members’ expectations in staffing and in policy. At the same time, YAF members “violently opposed” Nixon’s decision to institute wage and price controls. Nixon’s moderation did not resonate with this youth group. Even as Nixon’s aide Pat Buchanan, a former YAFer himself, wrote Nixon to “suggest strongly that before any youth organization is decided upon, you consult . . . Dave Keane and Tom Huston,” Nixon’s youth campaign leadership bypassed the YAF and its ideological purists.^{Footnote 51} Complaining about the president’s negative image in the September issue, a YAF member counted “a lead article attacking Nixon’s SALT agreements . . . three anti-Nixon editorials, three anti-Nixon cartoons and an advertisement for an anti-Nixon bumper sticker.” (“Vote Nixon: Republicans for a Socialist US”). This concerned reader feared the YAF would “fall from the ranks of the responsible right into the ridiculous right,” arguing, “It is time the YAF stopped waiting for the perfect candidate.”^{Footnote 52}

Even though Nixon could not rely on the YAF, another traditional source of young supporters for Republicans, the Young Republicans (YR), seized the opportunity. The 1972 Young Republican convention brought together one thousand members to celebrate Nixon’s presidency and America’s affluence. Laying out a central theme for the four-day conference, one morning’s workshop discussed “the administration’s plans for improved prosperity.” This appeal targeted the real “forgotten voter,” which Brock defined as “a 20 year-old breadwinner hard at work providing for his young wife and new baby.” “His vote will not be determined by party,” Brock claimed, “but by the hope for economic stability, job security and opportunity. . . . His is the voice of common sense.”^{Footnote 53} While YAF members protested the wage and price freeze Nixon announced in the summer of 1971, this move provided relief for young people’s growing concern about inflation. While one poll showed 64 percent of youth supporting the president’s economic plan, a Nixon official claimed that “we found that young people are more interested in the president since his wage-price freeze.”^{Footnote 54} Rietz argued that Nixon’s young supporters “will vote their pocketbooks instead of the war,” since, he claimed, blue-collar workers could support Nixon because “they are not as political party oriented as were their parents.”^{Footnote 55} The young people who supported Nixon varied, though they all shared the president’s faith in the American dream, or Nixon’s “New Prosperity.”

Lunch at the YR convention offered a suitably prosperous menu; beef shish kebab, filet of sole amandine, prime roast beef with Baked Alaska for dessert. That afternoon, Ken Rietz represented the afternoon panel’s “highlight” as he led an open discussion about the YVP. Mixing business with pleasure, the attendees adjourned to the Sheraton-Park Hotel for a “Cold Duck Dance” that featured “all the Cold Duck you can drink.” On the last night, YVP celebrities, including football star Bob Griese, actor Clint Eastwood, and former Miss America Mary Ann Mobley, joined the convention for dinner before the “European style casino and auction with prizes ranging from $100 worth of Coors beer to a special all-expense paid trip to Alaska.”^{Footnote 56} Couched in this setting, the YVP promoted Nixon to noncollege youth as an embodiment of political and economic opportunity. As the bland emphasis on prosperity smoothed over potential divisions between conservatives and moderates during the 1972 YR convention, the YVP presence further resolved those tensions as the campaign’s opportunities trumped the ideological differences. As Nixon told Chuck Colson, economic concerns separated his youth vote from his opponent’s: “The young interested in the economics, that’s the young we’re getting.”^{Footnote 57} Plus, as YVP college director George Gorton recalled, “We had speakers, money and possible future jobs.”^{Footnote 58}

Cultivating this cadre of future GOP organizers, the conference training provided Young Republican leaders with the skills and knowledge to win campaigns. While Senator Bob Packwood gave a slide presentation on “How to Run a Local Campaign,” other workshops offered strategies tailored to specific challenges ranging from winning urban areas to rural club building. A slew of advertising executives and public relations experts taught new political strategies. Murray Chotiner, a longtime Republican campaign manager whose tactics in Nixon’s California gubernatorial race helped to stigmatize him as “Tricky Dick,” held a “special, off the record session.” Next, former YAF member Richard A. Viguerie spoke about new innovations in direct-mail fund-raising that would eventually earn him the moniker, “the funding father” of modern conservatism.^{Footnote 59} This effort may have been too successful. YR voters soon became the dominant source of YVP volunteers to such an extreme that Rietz wrote to his California YVP director, “We are too heavily YR oriented.”^{Footnote 60} While YR support helped, YVP organizers would have to look to independents and students for young voters, intensifying Nixon’s campaign for voters outside the party.

Bill Brock’s original YVP strategy proposal stated bluntly, “Party labels have become increasingly meaningless” as a means of classifying young voters.^{Footnote 61} Chuck Colson issued a report to H. R. Haldeman on the causes, claiming that although the conventional wisdom that tied young people to their parents’ politics held true to a degree, this was “much less so than ever before.” “There is increasing independence and in many instances defiance and rebellion against parental behavior patterns.”^{Footnote 62} As the YVP campaign reached outside the party, the pursuit of young independents magnified Nixon’s young supporters’ effort to present the GOP as a political alternative. Thus, Brock, known as a “pragmatic Republican,” welcomed young voters’ desire for “some measure of independence.”^{Footnote 63}

To win over these young voters, Rietz suggested that the national convention for the largest vocational groups in the country provided the perfect forum. The Distributive Education Club of America (DECA) gathering would include seven thousand of the most organized “as well as patriotic” vocational education students “and should provide the most outstanding reception.”^{Footnote 64} Nixon’s White House point man on youth, Jamie McLane, agreed. “This group is important, explained McLane, “because these young people are the real working youth—mechanics, bricklayers, metal workers, etc.”^{Footnote 65} In addition, they shared a conservative loyalty to the free market, as DECA’s collegiate wing focused on “bachelor’s degrees to enable them to teach marketing in high schools and junior colleges.”^{Footnote 66} Not exactly branching out, this effort would lead to an increasingly aggressive effort to cull the segment of young voters most likely to support Nixon. These efforts paid off. Representing more than 1.5 million members, an unprecedented nine vocational organization presidents endorsed Nixon. Rietz credited the success to “high Nixon visibility in this group,” a validation of his emphasis on “peer group pressure.”^{Footnote 67} In addition, the YVP’s effort to reach new voters provided an extension of Nixon’s successful campaign for traditionally Democratic blue-collar workers.

Speaking to members of his Young Labor for Nixon at the White House, the president thanked them for understanding his policy in Vietnam “more clearly than some people in the media, some people in the universities.”^{Footnote 68} The audience clearly appreciated his announcement that, for the first time since 1965, no Americans had died in Vietnam the previous week. Still, Nixon laid down the patriotism especially thick for this crowd, suggesting that they should instead be called “Young Labor for America.” Campaigning against McGovern, without mentioning his opponent, Nixon explained that his young voters “know that strength in the hand of America is not a bad thing. It is a good thing. It is a necessary thing.”^{Footnote 69} Nixon’s campaign managers deemed the exercise worthy, as a poll George Gallup conducted for Newsweek showed that young people not attending school claimed to be conservative 6 percent more often than students who did, while they claimed radical or liberal sentiment half as often as those attending college.^{Footnote 70} Despite these publicized odds, the YVP leadership also relied on Nixon supporters on campus.

The YVP turned to student politics for several reasons. First, Democrats claimed that they owned the student vote. After one Newsweek poll in 1971 named the Democratic frontrunner, Senator Edmund Muskie (D-Maine), as the most popular candidate among students, one Nixon aide needled Rietz, “We haven’t forgotten you and your promises of youth.”^{Footnote 71} Second, campuses provided a rich resource of personnel. Voices in the administration suggested that any youth would do. As the youth-friendly counselor to the president, Robert Finch, reported: “In a controlled situation, long haired, mod-dressed youth in one precinct v. neatly-dressed youth in a like precinct, the candidate’s vote increased in both cases.”^{Footnote 72} Nixon’s campaign organizers understood the need to challenge the Democrats’ claim to the student vote.

New Hampshire and Student Politics

By December 1971, Rietz had staked out new territory for Nixon’s youth campaign; Brigham Young University, free of radicals, offered Nixon a visit and a “most positive reception on a campus held in great respect by those in the Southwest (and much of Middle America).” While he acknowledged that liberal college students would criticize Nixon for playing it safe, Rietz easily dismissed them, “Their views should not dictate our appealing to our kind of people.” Besides, Rietz argued: “We will not get the others’ vote anyway.”^{Footnote 73} Especially after four young people were killed by the Ohio National Guard during a Kent State antiwar demonstration, students became more opposed to the president; some polls showed Nixon’s approval rating as low as 31 percent on campuses.^{Footnote 74} Rietz emphasized caution and selectivity when entering campus politics.

Nixon’s effort for student voters underlined the symbolic role his youth campaign played in building his constituency. Nixon’s youth campaign stood for the “counterintuitive” and undermined the stodgy, ideological, and cold portrayal of Nixon that his critics projected. As one Nixon aide admitted, “Nixon isn’t going to carry the college vote,” though “the margin by which he loses it is important.”^{Footnote 75} Stressing the need to start organizing a year in advance, Rietz hired an up-and-coming campus vote organizer, George Gorton, in January 1971.

Gorton, in his young twenties himself, had earned his reputation as a youth guru in 1968 after he ran James Buckley’s unsuccessful campaign to unseat the liberal Republican incumbent, Senator Jacob Javits (R-N.Y.). Though the papers misspelled Gorton’s name, he got the credit for Buckley’s strong showing among disaffected conservatives, and Pete Wilson quickly hired him to run his campaign for mayor of San Diego.^{Footnote 76} After Wilson won in 1970, Jeb Magruder visited Gorton and offered him the job. Setting his sights on the New Hampshire primary, Gorton quickly showed why he deserved the position.

Nixon’s primary opposition came from Congressman Pete McCloskey (R-Calif.). McCloskey wanted to replace Nixon’s “war, pollution and deceit” with “peace, conservation and honesty.” His candidacy showed the potential problem Vietnam presented to Nixon’s reelection campaign, as one flyer harkened back to 1968, claiming that, “If thousands of young people register to vote for McCloskey, the same kind of pressure the McCarthy campaign applied to Johnson can be applied to President Nixon.”^{Footnote 77} Most troubling, a January poll at Iowa State University showed 53 percent of the students opposed Nixon’s election. Reporting on “the need for increased efforts in the youth area,” one aide explained, “This is a school in which we should do much better,” claiming that these students “feel he is too ‘political’ and they don’t trust him” as “they feel he isn’t getting US out of Vietnam fast enough.”^{Footnote 78} To counter this impression, the campaign needed a visible YVP presence to show the president’s popularity on campuses. As the YVP scrambled for young people, Gorton looked to students for an immediate injection of young volunteers and a show of support through carefully managed campus mock elections.

The YVP state action plan on mock elections encouraged local organizers to first develop a positive attitude: “Your campus contact will probably tell you that the President can’t win on his campus.” The key to success in mock elections, wrote Rietz, “is to be better organized. So much better organized that we can identify and deliver to the polls a high percentage of our supporters while the opposition is relatively inactive.”^{Footnote 79} First, a local organizer contacted a “supporter” in student government to approach the school’s student body president, as a “nonpartisan,” to sponsor an election. Ensuring YVP control, the “nonpartisan” Nixon supporter would then “offer to do the work and set it up.”^{Footnote 80}

YVP members quickly canvassed door to door in dorms and fraternities and positioned a YVP table to ensure that “every Nixon voter passing the poll will vote.” As Gorton explained, after the YVP convinced student leaders to hold mock elections, they sent “a good looking girl and guy” to hand out Nixon literature and make sure all the pro-Nixon kids voted.^{Footnote 81} While the YVP directors suggested that polls should be easy to locate, the election “must not be connected to regular student elections, the selling of football tickets, or anything else that will cause an unusually large voter turnout.”^{Footnote 82} After McCloskey ate in the Dartmouth student cafeteria three times leading up to the New Hampshire primary, CRP’s organizers feared that the “general student apathy that usually allows us to control a mock election does not now exist,” and cancelled it.^{Footnote 83} For this reason, high schools offered a special challenge, as Rietz reported, “There is, however, some difficulty in controlling these elections since voting is mandatory and we need exactly the right situation.”^{Footnote 84} In fact, Gorton admitted, “There was no way we could have won if voting was mandatory” on campuses. Because the Nixon’s supporters on campus made up a minority, Gorton gave credit to the organization: “We canvassed everyone. . . we got a large percentage of Nixon supporters on any given campus to do something.”^{Footnote 85} Thus, these first-time voters for the GOP exhibited Republicans’ powerful get-out-the-vote strategy. This ability fed into the “silent majority” mythos that shaped the GOP’s rise to the majority party through the 1980s.

As the campaign hit its stride, Rietz reiterated: “Organization will have a real impact and in the initial primary states it already has.”^{Footnote 86} This plan came to fruition, as Nixon’s campus victories piled up from smaller, controllable, and reliable schools such as St. John’s River Jr. College in Florida, where Nixon even managed to win that campus’ Democratic primary through write-in votes.^{Footnote 87} Combined with this success in campus mock elections, the YVP needed to make Nixon’s young supporters more visible and active before the first primary in early March 1972. In addition, the young campaign workers cost very little: YVP members rang more than ten thousand doorbells in one day, costing Nixon’s campaign “two kegs of beer and some Coke.”^{Footnote 88} YVP members’ performance in the primary gained attention from within and outside the campaign.

The YVP’s results made the campaign worth it, including “great public relations with locals,” while it “demoralized McCloskey headquarters,” “developed credibility for the idea that youth support the president” and “increased morale among local troops.”^{Footnote 89} In addition, CRP unveiled its new system for distributing sound clips to radio stations, as thirty-three stations in New Hampshire and the Boston stations played recordings from the rally.^{Footnote 90} Promising to “rebuild the responsive, progressive element of the Republican Party,” McCloskey fared poorly in the primary, carrying only 20 percent of the vote to Nixon’s 68.^{Footnote 91} This election, and the YVP contribution, effectively closed any opening for a youth-oriented challenger in the GOP.

John Mitchell rewarded Gorton’s ability to win campus mock elections, and the emphasis on students suddenly became central as Mitchell supplied the College Director with an “unlimited budget” and thirty-eight paid field people.^{Footnote 92} After New Hampshire, the CRP leadership reversed its strategy to avoid student voters as Gorton expanded the Nixon campaign on American campuses and fueled a more ambitious youth effort.

College students’ primary contribution to the Nixon effort, Fieldmen Schools, organized workshops to train young people in modern politics. The CR began the National Leadership Training School in 1968 to recruit members and create future Republican organizers, or Fieldmen. Pointing out the success of the National Leadership Training School in Washington, D.C., for seven hundred students, CR president Jack McDonald called for similar schools overseen by the CR Leadership Development Team in each of the nation’s eleven regions and eventually within each state.^{Footnote 93} Starting in 1971, CR leaders initiated thousands of Fieldmen Schools that offered training for “future ‘Youth for . . .’ Chairmen and full-time salaried youth campaign fieldmen.”^{Footnote 94} The schools averaged twenty-three attendees per seminar and offered “an exhaustive curriculum. . . . Voter registration, campus organization, press, literature, communication, the campus canvass—all the techniques needed for a well-run, successful collegiate election. During the weekend-long program, participants received a two-hundred-page “massive notebook of ‘how-to’ materials” and “the sacred texts of the CR organizers, such as Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man, and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.”

As the twenty-two-year-old CR executive director, Karl Rove oversaw the expansion of the controversial schools after 1971. As a college student, Rove proved his persuasive personality when he won the American Legion’s national oratorical competition and the title of Utah’s 1969 State Champion Orator.^{Footnote 95} Enrolling at the University of Utah in 1969, Rove joined the CR and quickly climbed within the ranks. After Rove gained considerable experience working for campaigns in 1968 and 1970, he strengthened his organizational ability to recruit voters and train leaders on campuses.

In July, the Maryland Federation of College Republicans conducted a workshop for “regional people for Youth for Nixon” at Towson State College. Hoping to attract College Republicans, a memo claimed that “well-meaning amateurs can help a campaign, but trained leaders are the ones that really get things done.”^{Footnote 96} And while the Maryland State Central Committee chairman and vice chairman hardly added star power, the memo concluded, “Carl Rove [sic] will travel down from the National Fieldman School in Pennsylvania to speak to us and give us an idea of some of the interesting activities going on there.”^{Footnote 97} Another flyer promoting the Towson State event mentioned that “CR leaders will be trained by professionals, (one of them is the infamous Karl Rove).”^{Footnote 98}

While Rove and his fellow CR members saw the Fieldmen Schools as organizational necessities, opponents saw him as a teacher of “dirty tricks.” Perhaps Rove earned the reputation since his colleague Bernie Robinson admitted that Rove did embellish “old war stories” to be “stimulating, interesting, entertaining.”^{Footnote 99} In a leaked tape of a Rove-led workshop, he can be heard describing how he sabotaged a Democratic rally by handing out fake invitations. Distributed to “vagrants, homeless and drifters,” the “faux invitation” read, “Free Beer, Free Food, Girls and A Good Time for Nothing.” Rove claimed this tape did not include the instructional context; this was not a “how-to” but a parable warning the audience “not to duplicate the stupid thing I did.” Still, it seemed to substantiate Rove’s nefarious reputation. After the tape surfaced and RNC chairman George Bush called him in for a few “congenial” questions, Rove was the subject of a Washington Post article titled, “GOP Probes Official as Teacher of ‘Tricks.’”^{Footnote 100} This cynical label missed the point that these schools operated outside the YVP. Connecting Rove’s underhanded tactics to Nixon’s, many in the incredulous press explained incorrectly that these future Republicans took their marching orders from the White House. Still, the opportunity to join Nixon’s campaign through the YVP proved highly desirable, as Rove himself worked for Ken Rietz.^{Footnote 101}

The CR’s Fieldmen Schools offered leaders and personnel but also influenced the Nixon campaign’s youth strategy. In late June, YVP organizers held a three-day National YVP Conference in rural Tennessee. This event duplicated the Fieldmen School formula, offering seminars on the YVP program for sixty representatives, or “fieldmen,” from each state’s YVP office.^{Footnote 102} Fieldmen extended the Republican Party’s laserlike focus on campaign discipline throughout the nation. If Nixon’s campaign offices in Washington functioned as CRP’s brain, the YVP Fieldmen who trained aspiring Republicans served as the brawn.^{Footnote 103} Nixon’s staffers still orchestrated the personnel and leadership training for YVP volunteers, but this approach encouraged local youth efforts that duplicated this approach.

Robert Odle described YVP as an “umbrella group under which can be gathered these groups plus thousands of young people heretofore unaffiliated.”^{Footnote 104} These CR schools and the YVP offered young people unprecedented access to new political roles. As the College Republican National Committee chairman, Joe Abate, wrote to perspective Fieldmen School attendees, “If you want to play a meaningful role in the 1972 campaign . . . then the Student Fieldmen School is for you.”^{Footnote 105} Building a sense of national unity, College Republicans developed a coherent vision of responsible Republicans in 1972 as way to legitimize their role in the 1968 generation. The Now Generation’s sense of alienation that motivated young liberals to get involved also pushed conservative and moderate youth to demand a more significant part in the process.

The University of Maryland’s CR president, Alan Virta, bragged: “We no longer serve solely as auxiliaries to be used by the regular party and campaign organizations in the outside areas. We now are the regular party and campaign organization.”^{Footnote 106} One College Republican paper editorialized, “The Nixon organization is concerned about getting the youth vote and has money and talent to back up these concerns.” Continuing, if students could increase their influence and usefulness, College Republicans could “move away from the kiddie politics that College Republicans often engage in.”^{Footnote 107} This growth benefited Nixon because he could boast by September that polls showed he had had tied McGovern for student votes at 48 percent.^{Footnote 108} While Nixon enjoyed the most success with students in the South and West, YVP set up offices in unexpected places such as Harvard’s traditionally liberal campus.^{Footnote 109} While organization made YVP successful with college voters, issues also helped Nixon with independent young voters over the summer of 1972.

Several of Nixon’s policies motivated young moderates to vote for him. Nixon’s efforts as president, whether ending the draft, passing environmental legislation, or holding youth conferences, also helped his cause. Most important to these young voters, Nixon appeared trustworthy.^{Footnote 110} Speaking with YVP leaders in the White House, Nixon urged them to hit two points: “the draft has ended” and “Vietnam has virtually ended.” “When we came in we had a war, an inevitable arms race with Russians” and “we are ending that in a way that does not destroy the respect Americans need among its allies.”^{Footnote 111} Perhaps the most popular move with young voters, going to China, enhanced Nixon’s presidential image after the summer, when his poll numbers showed his growing success. Certainly, youth were more pro-China than their Silent Majority parents. A campus opinion poll found that only one in twenty students looked at Nixon’s trip to China with disfavor.^{Footnote 112} Even as Nixon deflected accusations about the Watergate arrests, a poll in September showed that 57 percent of young voters claimed the president was “more sincere” and “believable.”^{Footnote 113} Discussing the youth vote with Haldeman, Nixon complained that people expected him to be “colorful” and “exciting” to win young voters, but would rather appeal to young people with his accomplishments, as Haldeman agreed, “Who else went to China?”^{Footnote 114}

While Nixon touted his achievements to win young voters’ trust, the reelection campaign’s reach beyond conservative youth limited Nixon’s attack on McGovern. Desperate to tie McGovern to antiwar radicals, Nixon continually pleaded for one hard-hitting advertisement about McGovern’s soft stance on draft dodgers that included amnesty. Although Nixon claimed that with this tough approach on amnesty, “You lose the Jewish young, that’s about all,” his aides and advertising staff urged restraint.^{Footnote 115} Mindful of young independents, one adviser argued with Nixon: “You start into these kids with amnesty, that’s when you could lose a portion of your youth vote.”^{Footnote 116} Nixon’s campaign understood the progress they made with young voters and wanted to play it safe. As Colson admitted: “Young people tend to identify with individuals much more than with political parties,” and that “all kids tend to identify with each other . . . it is almost impossible to attack one without attacking them all.”^{Footnote 117}

While the January 1972 data was a low point, an upward shift occurred after Nixon’s diplomatic trips to Moscow and China later that winter. And while Nixon’s personality earned him only fourth place, behind JFK, RFK and MLK Jr., in Newsweek’s poll of young Americans’ most admired men, Nixon’s staff found the silver lining: the president remained “the most admired living person.”^{Footnote 118} One young Nixon supporter, a twenty-one-year-old YR and advertising salesman in Orange County, pledged, “I trust Nixon as I’ve never trusted another politician,” while another claimed, “With McGovern, I just don’t know what to believe and what not to believe.”^{Footnote 119} Nixon’s successful appeal to young Americans on the trust issue surprised his own people. When one twenty-three-year-old Democrat defected, claiming that “McGovern’s credibility was one key thing,” he laughed that when he walked into the Republican headquarters to switch his allegiance, “You should have seen these little old ladies’ mouths open.”^{Footnote 120}