The rise of the Republican Right in the 1960s reshaped not only the politics of the Republican Party, but ultimately that of the country as well. What had started as an improbable movement to draft Goldwater for president, and had drawn upon an emerging grassroots conservative movement in the country, matured amid the political and social turmoil of the decade into a dominant force within the Republican Party. By 1968, if not 1966, the Right's influence within the Republican Party was, as scholars have aptly reported, undeniable.Footnote 1 But what has not received as much attention is the important role that the national Republican Party leadership and the emphasis it placed on party organizational renewal rather than reform played in the Right's political ascendance. While much of the research done on the Right in the 1960s has focused on the issues, ideas, and often colorful personalities that animated the conservative movement at the time, its rise within the party was facilitated in no small measure by the less glamorous effort to rebuild the GOP after the Goldwater defeat. Indeed, an analysis of the Right's power within the Republican Party in the 1960s, along with its subsequent influence on the party, is incomplete without an appreciation for how the position of party conservatives was strengthened following the 1964 election by a policy of national party renewal.
The rise of the Right during but particularly after the 1964 election had compounded a deepening ideological divide within the Republican Party between competing conservative and more moderate party factions. Following the Goldwater defeat, the scope of which stunned many Republicans, there were calls for a wholesale purging of conservatives from the party leadership. Party liberals, led most prominently by the Republican Governors Association, were particularly incensed by the loss. The party had been led to defeat, they contended, by the misguided policies of the Goldwater campaign and its supporters in the party's right wing. Dean Burch, the recently appointed national party chair, whose ouster would soon follow, became the principal target of their fury.Footnote 2 Conservatives, however, did not take the defeat lying down, and vowed, in the words of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, that if moderates (whom he described as “radical leftists”) did retake control of the party, “then some other party would have to arise.”Footnote 3 Indeed, some kind of party split, most likely along ideological lines, seemed imminent.Footnote 4
Hoping to avert a deepening crisis, the national party leadership largely ignored calls for a purging or reform of the party politically, favoring instead a strategy of party “renewal” that sought to unify the party by focusing on the professional goal of party competitiveness and developing the organizational strength necessary to achieve it. It was to this end that a group of party officials at the Republican National Committee (RNC), led by the new party chair, Ray Bliss, sought to reorganize the party around a more service-oriented national committee structure. The service party concept, scholars explain, which first emerged in the postwar period amid the rise of a more candidate-centered politics in the country, hinges on the transformation of political parties into “repositories” of specialized campaign skills, funds, and other resources.Footnote 5 For Bliss and the RNC leadership, the service party approach offered a means of both stitching the badly wounded party back to together, while also strengthening its electoral competitiveness. In contrast to the heated, and often accusatory tone that characterized most leadership debates following the election, Bliss and his staff hoped to refocus the party's energy on what he fondly referred to as the “dirty, ditch-digging job” of rebuilding the party organizationally.Footnote 6 Bliss was “a win-oriented” party leader, as he described it, and he would concentrate on building a party apparatus capable of running a “candidate for every office—down to coroner.”Footnote 7 The Democrats would also experience a period of factional conflict after their defeat in the 1968 presidential election. Unlike the Republicans, however, Democratic leaders embraced a policy of party reform that emphasized procedural and political changes rather than organizational renewal as a means of rebounding from the defeat.
The Democratic reforms, which have been thoroughly examined, were thought to signal the emergence of a more open, representative, and liberal politics within the Democratic Party.Footnote 8 However, the Republicans' organizational approach to party rebuilding has not received the same scholarly attention.Footnote 9 In particular, how the Republican's service party approach and the emphasis it placed on party organization and unity after the 1964 election may have impacted the party politically, and potentially contributed to the rise of the Right, has not been carefully scrutinized. Instead, the study of the post-Goldwater Republican Party has often focused on either the growth of the Right itself, particularly its grassroots organizational prowess or, alternatively, the array of cultural and political changes taking place in the country at the time that buttressed the conservative critique of Democratic rule and liberal social policy in general.Footnote 10
Underlying the Right's ascendancy, however, was the party's less well-analyzed effort, following the Goldwater loss, to embrace party organizational renewal and the service party concept while eschewing any effort at party-wide political reform. Indeed, the rise of the Republican Right in the 1960s was in important ways as much an organizational as it was a political phenomenon, which sheds new light on the important role ideology continued to play within the more professionally oriented service party concept. The growing strength of the Republican Right in the 1960s was, to be sure, facilitated by the skill and determination of conservative activists as well as the shifting cultural and political mores of the period, by forces, in other words, which were partly external to the party. But the Right's strength was also, to a significant degree, the result of factors clearly internal to the party itself, notably an emerging consensus among an otherwise divided party leadership that party-building efforts after the Goldwater loss should largely forego policy reform in favor of developing a national, service-centered infrastructure around which the party could be both unified as well as strengthened electorally. The path to recovery, and party unity, in other words, was primarily organizational, and not political, and thus would not require reforming or otherwise altering the party's emergent conservatism.
The strength of the service party model came from its ability to facilitate party unity through a programmatic emphasis on the “professional” goal of making the party more electorally competitive, primarily through the provision of key “services” to candidates.Footnote 11 While the service concept would also shape much of the rapid party building that took place during Bill Brock's tenure as RNC chair in the years leading up to Reagan's 1980 victory, it was under the direction of Ray Bliss, in the tumultuous years following Goldwater's sweeping 1964 loss that its broad contours first took shape.Footnote 12 By stressing the importance of organizational renewal, and downplaying the need for a fundamental change in policy, the RNC's service approach was able to successfully deescalate the Republican infighting that followed the 1964 Goldwater loss, and ultimately align key dissident groups, particularly on the Right, with the party's broader electoral goals. The service approach, in other words, helped facilitate party unity. But it also reshaped how the party developed politically over the course of the next decade by tacitly endorsing the party's prevailing conservative ideology. By incorporating much of the resurgent Right without any major reconsideration of party policy, the service model enabled conservatives to largely avoid scrutiny for the Goldwater loss, while simultaneously consolidating their dominant influence within the party.
This article looks at how the service party and a commitment to party renewal rather than political reform not only helped unify the Republican Party after the 1964 Goldwater loss, but also led to the development of a more conservative party during the second half of the 1960s. Scholars have studied the rise of the post-Goldwater Republican Right as well as the “service party” and the largely organizational response that Republican leaders had to the 1964 loss. But they have not closely examined how the two trends may have interacted with and ultimately shaped each other. In particular, they have not considered how a minimizing of policy debate in favor of organizational renewal in the service party model may have influenced a party's political or ideological development. Interestingly, scholars have examined how the organizational and bureaucratic activities of such things as government agencies can alter, intentionally, the terms of political debate, inside and outside of government, but they have generally neglected to consider how organizational structures, particularly within political parties, may implicitly or indirectly impact their political development.Footnote 13 It is my aim here to examine how vital the renewal orientation of the post-Goldwater Republican service party was to the Right's expanded influence within the party following the 1964 election. I begin by assessing the limitations of prevailing accounts of the rise of the Right as an entry point into a broader discussion of the impact the service party approach had on the subsequent growth of the Republican Right amid the factional conflict that beset the party after the 1964 election. To do so I look both at the role a new party policy committee, the Republican Coordinating Committee (RCC), played in ending the infighting among Republican leaders, as well as how the RNC itself responded to two challenges to party unity during Bliss's tenure: conservative attempts to seize control of the Young Republicans and the National Federation of Republican Women. In each case an emphasis among Republican leaders on organizational renewal and the importance of developing a more centralized, national service party structure resulted in a more unified, but also more conservative, Republican Party.
THE REPUBLICAN RESURGENCE
Among the variables thought to have contributed to the Republican resurgence following the defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, few have been as closely studied as the strength of the party's conservative grassroots. Despite the devastating loss of an avowed conservative candidate, the Right's power and influence within the Republican Party seemed only to grow after the 1964 election. Indeed, it has become reflexive for scholars of the Republican Party to describe the period following Goldwater's loss as being characterized by “the conservative capture” of the party or by the “rise of the Republican Right.”Footnote 14 Mary Brennan asserts in her book, Turning Right in the Sixties, for example, that a right wing that had been “disorganized and divided in 1960, [and] defeated spectacularly in 1964 . . .” remerged after the Goldwater loss as “a complex, organized and effective political force that dominated the GOP by 1968 and eventually secured the election of a staunch conservative as president in 1980.”Footnote 15 Leading conservative organizations, scholars explain, among them the American Conservative Union and Young Americans for Freedom, the Free Society Association, the National Review and Human Events, together with the Young Republicans and National Federation of Republican Women, expended little time or energy rehashing the reasons for defeat in 1964.Footnote 16 Their focus instead was on the midterm 1966 congressional election and the 1968 presidential election. And, “when the Republican Party roared back in 1966,” asserts David Reinhard, “the Republican Right roared back with it.”Footnote 17 While the Republicans would pick up forty-seven seats in the House and three in Senate overall, in 1966 only 35 percent of the “candidates endorsed by the liberal Ripon Society were elected,” notes Brennan. This compared, she reports, to the election of a full 86 percent of those supported by the American Conservative Union.Footnote 18 However, it was the 1968 presidential election, when Nixon actively courted party conservatives, particularly in the South, and Ronald Reagan mounted an unexpectedly strong bid for the Republican nomination, despite his lack of experience, that many scholars point to as evidence of the Right's growing strength within the Republican Party.Footnote 19
As such research highlights, there is, to be sure, little doubt about the prominent role played by conservatives in the rebuilding of the Republican Party after the 1964 election. But on its own, the growth of the Republican Right can explain neither the speed nor the scope of the party's post-Goldwater recovery. Something else was afoot, and though scholars researching the rise of the Right have hinted at it, they have not closely examined it, namely, the support the Right received from a national party leadership more committed to unity and electoral competitiveness than policy reform following the Goldwater debacle.
Scholars have noted, for instance, that despite the acrimony and division that resulted from the Goldwater nomination and loss between liberal and conservative Republicans, the Right for the most part continued to work with, and within the Republican Party.Footnote 20 A key factor in the success of the post-Goldwater conservative movement, argues Sara Diamond, was the “movement's strategy of working . . . within the Republican Party.”Footnote 21 But what Diamond and others often fail to note is that the Right's strategy worked in large part because much of the national party leadership, notably the RNC, had made a similar decision to work with, rather than attempt to purge or reform, the party's burgeoning right wing. In the months following Goldwater's defeat there was a purging of some high-profile Goldwater supporters from the party, including the party chair, Dean Burch. When scholars examine the party's response to the 1964 defeat they often focus on the purging. Immediately “following the 1964 election,” writes Donald Critchlow, “GOP moderates moved to replace Goldwaterites in the Chairmanship and staff of the Republican National Committee (RNC).”Footnote 22 But, what Critchlow and others ignore is that, other than the removal of Burch, the purging that did occur was short lived, and did not entail a broad-based effort to politically reform the party. Instead, the national party leadership, on the whole, despite itself being divided by the deepening liberal and conservative schism within the party, chose party unity over continued internal ideological warfare.
What is missing, then, from most of the prevailing accounts of the rise of Republican Right in the late 1960s is a proper understanding for the unique organizational context within which the Right's influence took hold after the Goldwater loss. Specifically, scholars have for the most part neglected to consider the impact the leadership's support of the “service party” concept, and the importance it placed on party organizational renewal instead of reform had on the Right's post-Goldwater ascent within the Republican Party. In his study of out-party national committees, for example, Philip Klinkner does discuss how the Republican Party's “organizational response” to the Goldwater loss effected the party politically. But he focuses primarily on how it impaired the functioning of the party's chief policy committee at the time, the RCC, as well as how it adversely affected party liberals, and does not systematically analyze whether or not a focus on party unity, or the service party approach, contributed to the Right's steadily growing power within the party.Footnote 23 It is only by considering the impact the party's renewal strategy had on the party politically amid the bitter factional infighting that consumed the GOP after the 1964 election that we get a fuller sense of how the service party concept helped the Right consolidate its ascendant position within the party in the latter half of the 1960s. To do that, we need to examine the effort by party leaders to promote unity within a divided party in the post-Goldwater period by emphasizing the need for organizational renewal, or rebuilding over political reform.
THE MISCHIEF OF FACTION
Factions are, by all accounts, comparatively rare in U.S. politics.Footnote 24 Yet the “Goldwater phenomenon,” as Aaron Wildavsky described it, exposed a deep and growing divide within the Republican Party between party liberals and conservatives that exhibited many of the features of organized political factions.Footnote 25 To begin, the divisions that formed cut across, and involved essentially every level of the party, drawing in not just party leaders, but party members and voters. They were also generally well organized, forming or taking control of specific subparty organizations, as well as sympathetic interest groups. Moreover, they drew upon both older regional as well as deepening ideological divisions within the Republican Party, which were now being thrust to the fore. Though regional differences within the Republican Party were less clear than the well-known North-South divide within the postwar Democratic Party, the Republican Party was witness in the late 1950s and early 1960s to an increasingly sharp internal divide between more moderate and more conservative party elements.Footnote 26
The factional divisions began, as Howard Reiter contended in his study of the Republican Party in the 1960s (though he hesitated to use the word factions), when a realigning hard Right began to peel away from the dominant conservative “Old Guard” in the years leading up to the 1964 Goldwater nomination.Footnote 27 What resulted was a party divided by both clear ideological differences, as well as by what Nicol Rae and others have described as cross-cutting stylistic differences between party elements that were more professionally oriented and those that were more ideologically purist. “The sub-divisions within the two main ideological tendencies [were] based on style and attitude toward politics in general,” Rae writes, and not simply “ideological considerations.”Footnote 28 In particular, he identifies conservative Republicans as either Fundamentalists, who were more purist, or Stalwarts, who were more professional and liberal Republicans as either Progressives or Moderates, again based on their stylistic preferences.Footnote 29
Though both major U.S. parties experienced periods of sustained intraparty conflict in the 1960s, they responded very differently to the infighting. The parties' divergent responses partly reflected the differing tendencies within the dominant Republican and Democratic factions themselves. Although factions in both parties were concerned with policy, Republican factions were more likely than Democratic factions to share a commitment to strengthening the party organizationally as well as the professional goal of making the party more electorally competitive. Democratic factions, on the other hand, tended to be more focused on the “amateur” or “purist” objectives of reforming the party's rules and policies. As Green and Guth discovered in their study of factions among Republican and Democratic Party activists in the 1970s and 1980s, the “factionalism of the Democrats [was] characterized by support for policy positions and amateur style,” while the Republican “factionalism was characterized by extensive organizational support, found across all factions.”Footnote 30
However, the parties' differing responses to intraparty conflict also reflected the distinct visions of party building held by Republican and Democratic leaders in the 1960s and 1970s, which would have a long-term effect on each party's development.Footnote 31 While Democratic leaders responded to the fissures exposed by the 1968 election by embracing broad-based policy reforms, the Republican leadership, led by the RNC, reacted to the infighting that followed the party's 1964 loss with calls for party organizational “renewal.” The Democratic reforms, which were a product of a series of specially appointed party commissions, beginning with the McGovern-Fraser Commission in 1968, effectively institutionalized, as scholars note, the demands of liberal party reformers.Footnote 32 At the same time, the Republican renewal process facilitated a dramatic reorganization of the national Republican Party, beginning with the introduction of Bliss's professionally oriented service organization in the mid-1960s. The concept of party renewal, institutionally codified by Bliss's service party model, was “primarily concerned with the party's organizational capacity,” writes Paul Herrnson, rather than policy reform.Footnote 33 Both in terms of its organizational focus and concern with competitiveness, party renewal strategies differ from party reform, where the primary goal is not necessarily electoral competitiveness, but how representative the party is, as an organization and a policy instrument, of its own core philosophy.Footnote 34
THE REPUBLICAN SERVICE PARTY
The principal mechanism for party renewal within the Republican Party in the period following Goldwater's 1964 loss was the introduction of a more “service-oriented” national committee structure. In its most basic form, the “service” party concept, scholars explain, rests on the idea of a party developing the organizational and financial resources necessary to ensure its candidates are able to compete amid an ever-changing electoral environment.Footnote 35 Propelling this change, scholars note, were dynamic, broad-based changes in how political campaigns were being organized and won in the postwar United States. Traditionally, parties had exercised a considerable degree of control over candidates, primarily through their control of the nomination process.Footnote 36 The party “held an effective monopoly on the resources—the capital, the labor, and the flow of information—that were necessary to run an effective campaign for local, state, or national office,” Aldrich explains.Footnote 37 This began to change with the spread of state primaries in the 1960s, as well as the advent of television and other forms of mass media technology, which provided candidates a means of competing for elected office without the endorsement or the logistical support of a party. The role of the party in the nation's politics began to change, but as some party leaders began to recognize, this did not mean the party had become irrelevant. On the contrary, as campaigns became more candidate-centered, technologically sophisticated, and expensive, the need for the type of resources that parties had traditionally provided only increased. “The increased needs of candidates for greater access to technical expertise, political information, and money created opportunities,” Herrnson argues, “for national and some state party organizations to become repositories of these resources.”Footnote 38 The party had “lost its … monopoly” over the nomination process, Aldrich notes, but found a new role in the 1960s as a provider of critical “services” for candidates, notably expertise in organizing, communications, and fund-raising.Footnote 39 In the process, argues Price, the parties began to “carve . . . out a secure niche for themselves by virtue of their fundraising and campaign-services capabilities.”Footnote 40
Nowhere in the 1960s did the service model take form more clearly than at the RNC under Ray Bliss's leadership following the 1964 Goldwater presidential defeat. Bliss's service organization stressed, above all else, organizational renewal and electoral competitiveness. It was an approach he had first experimented with at the state level in Ohio in the 1950s.Footnote 41 As Bliss had outlined in an article he wrote on the functioning of state party chairs in 1960, “the primary role of a [party] chairman,” in his view, “is to build a party organization . . . dedicated to . . . victory at the polls.”Footnote 42 In politics, he explained, organization “is the driving force, which gives politics mobility, the bridge which spans the gap between the candidates and voters, the source of motivation which binds together all phases of a campaign, the nourishment which keeps a party alive and healthy.”Footnote 43 He also saw “party image,” as he described it, and policy issues as critical to a party's success. But his emphasis was on the need to “elect . . . competent candidates” by erecting a permanent “headquarters service” staffed “by an experienced staff which is responsible for public relations, speakers, research and coordination of continuous auxiliary activities.”Footnote 44
At the RNC this translated into the creation of a national service party structure capable, as Bliss explained it, of “seeking qualified candidates for every office that will come up . . . backing them up with a sound organization, [and] raising and providing for them . . . adequate financing.”Footnote 45 Again, developing the right message and having “sound positions on the issue of the day” were stressed, but overall policy debates were subordinated to the goal of rebuilding and unifying the national party around a more centralized service apparatus. The goal of the national service party was to develop the resources both tactical and financial needed to ensure that party nominees were able to run competitive campaigns at any level, anywhere in the country.
It was a goal that could only be achieved, in the thinking of party officials, through a broad retooling and expansion of the national committee's divisional structure, notably the Education and Training, Research, Public Relations, and Finance divisions, which would be primarily responsible for delivering the campaign services and resources needed by party workers and nominees.Footnote 46 The work of these divisions included, among other activities, running campaign schools and trainings throughout the country, strengthening the party's research and data collection and distribution functions, enhancing its public relations capacities, and diversifying its fund-raising activities and base. In Bliss's analysis, “one of the critical problems facing party organizations has been the need for trained campaign managers.” “Politics,” he continued, had “become more complex . . . requiring a vast amount of technical skill.”Footnote 47 To be successful a “political leader must run the gamut of modern campaign methods . . . from the use of complicated electronic data processing systems to the measurement and impact of information media.”Footnote 48 To develop these skills, the Education and Training Division, led by Ray Humphrey, organized “regional trainings for staff of state, district, and county organizations in the important new developments and general political procedures” nationwide.Footnote 49 The trainings offered participants instruction in such things as how to gather “statistical and factual data on voting,” how to use “data processing [on] voter lists,” and how to successfully employ emerging public relations techniques.Footnote 50
At the RNC itself, Bliss oversaw, with the assistance of Arthur Peterson and Robert McCormick from the Research Division, and Fred Morrison, the director of Public Relations, the development of a more integrated national research and communication system. The “responsibilities” of the Research Division, Peterson explained, were “to serve as a reference bureau for [the] entire party organization; and . . . to engage in research which is of immediate or long-range value to our candidates and party leaders.”Footnote 51 Party research was used, in particular, to support the work of a newly expanded public relations infrastructure at the RNC, which included the launch of a national “Republican Wire” service, a “weekly radio report,” and a new monthly print publication known as the Republican Record. These activities were in turn tied together by the development of a new Telex-Teltex computer network that “linked the National Committee both with State Headquarters and with leading news outlets throughout the country.”Footnote 52 Bliss and RNC leaders would also engineer a similar integration of most of the party's national fund-raising operations. Although party fund-raising had become deeply fragmented since the 1964 loss, the Goldwater forces had not only briefly unified all national fund-raising activities, but had also greatly expanded the party's new grassroots, direct-mail “sustaining membership” program.Footnote 53 Bliss revived both initiatives, and once again sought to create “a single source of fundraising” nationally that would draw upon not only traditional high-end donors, but also a growing list of small annual contributors.Footnote 54 Doing so was critical, in Bliss's view, to ensuring the party had the resources it needed to support the type of broad-based expansion of party programs and services that he and the RNC leadership envisioned.
As scholars have noted, the success of the Republicans' service-centered renewal strategy in unifying the party after the Goldwater loss, especially in contrast to the more protracted, and contested, nature of “reform” efforts to unify the Democratic Party after 1968, suggests certain advantages to an organizational rather than a rules-based approach to the problem of factions, as well as to party-building in general.Footnote 55 What have been largely ignored are the political implications of the Republicans' service approach to party unity, which under Bliss led to the party becoming more conservative. Despite its emphasis on organization, the service model had a clear and lasting effect on the Republican Party politically.
THE SERVICE PARTY AND THE POLITICS OF PARTY RENEWAL
The Republican service approach to party renewal proved to be remarkably successful in mitigating the effects of the factional infighting that beset the party after the Goldwater loss. But unity came at the cost of any possible change in direction from the rightward policy course set by the 1964 election. In fact, by stressing the importance of party unity, organizational development, and electoral competitiveness, while deemphasizing the need for substantive changes in party policy, the RNC's service approach effectively embraced, by leaving unchanged, the party's prevailing conservative political orientation.
There were, as we discussed, calls to reassess the direction of party policy, and perhaps even to purge it of prominent Goldwater supporters after the 1964 defeat.Footnote 56 By emphasizing the service concept, however, the RNC leadership not only subordinated talk of purges or policy change to the organizational imperatives of party unity and competitiveness, but implicitly sanctioned the Right's dominant influence on the direction of party policy. Unity essentially demanded such a posture on the part of the RNC leadership. But more significantly, a service model encouraged it. By seeking to rebuild and unify the party by winning support across disparate groups and interests for the development of a national service organization, that is, by pursuing unity primarily on organizational grounds, the leadership not only abandoned the possibility of political reform, but also embraced as-is the party's prevailing ideological conservatism.
This became clear from the RNC's management and expectations of the newly formed leadership policy forum, the RCC, which had been proposed just prior to Bliss's arrival. But it became particularly evident as opposition emerged within the party to the service approach, notably from conservatives in the Young Republicans and the National Federation of Republican Women. Rather than seek to reform either group, Bliss and the RNC leadership responded to these factional conflicts by seeking to organizationally reorient the groups' activities. Specifically, they pushed each group to focus their efforts on party building and electoral preparation regardless of their ideology. But, by doing so, the party leadership essentially left unchecked the growing strength of the conservative Right in both organizations. In the end, party leaders were able to bring both groups on board with the renewal goals of the national service party structure, but they were reunited with the party largely unreformed. As such, both incidents highlight the organizational strength of the service concept, but also the manner in which an emphasis on organizational renewal following the Goldwater loss resulted in a more conservative Republican Party.
Scholars have studied each event, from the policy actions of the RCC to the RNC's response to the upheaval among the Young Republicans and the National Federation of Republican Women, but they have rarely examined the impact that a commitment to the service party concept among party leaders had on their handling of each situation.Footnote 57 Scholars have, as a result, never been able to fully account for the fact that the Right was ultimately strengthened, rather than weakened, in each conflict. To delve deeper into this dynamic, it is useful to look first at the impact a commitment to party unity and the national service model within the RCC had on the consolidation of the Right's position within the party.
REPUBLICAN COORDINATING COMMITTEE
The idea of a high-level policy committee to address the postelection leadership crisis had originally been proposed at the Republican governors' meeting in December 1964. But it was Republican leaders in Congress who, eager to retain their control over the formulation of party policy (and to counter their rivals in the Governor's Association), would ultimately oversee the creation of a “Republican Coordinating Committee” in early 1965.Footnote 58
In theory, the RCC's core function was to provide the party with what Philip Klinkner describes as “a policy council that would allow it to reestablish a more moderate image than was created by the 1964 platform.”Footnote 59 But in reality, its principal function, as Klinkner and other scholars acknowledge, was to mitigate the party's otherwise deepening factional divisions. The Committee served as “an internal forum for achieving consensus among various factions,” writes Klinkner.Footnote 60 Writing just two years after the RCC's creation, Broder and Hess aptly noted that the most “important effect of the awkward Coordinating Committee was to bank the fires of ideology that almost consumed the Republican Party in 1964.”Footnote 61 And, it is generally believed that the RCC achieved what it was designed to do. What scholars have not fully recognized is that by opting for unity over substantive policy change, the RCC, like the RNC service model itself, enabled the Republican Right to retain, and ultimately expand, its power within the party.
Preoccupied with the need for party unity, Bliss enthusiastically supported the RCC as the new party chair. In Bliss's view, the Committee offered precisely the sort of forum for intraparty unity and rebuilding that he believed the party needed. He eagerly sat in on the first RCC meeting held in early March 1965, more than two weeks before he officially took over. Speaking to the gathering by phone from his home in Palm Desert, California, Eisenhower applauded the RCC as a “healthy and progressive step” for the Republican Party. It was critical, the former president asserted, that the party present compelling policy alternatives to the Democratic administration. In the areas of national defense and foreign policy, and even the value of currency, the Democrats were on the wrong track, Eisenhower contended. Most ominously, he continued, the “Democratic Party has apparently adopted the doctrine that the role of the Federal government—and its costs—are unlimited and without boundaries.” It was therefore incumbent upon the Republicans, Eisenhower concluded, to offer the American public another way.Footnote 62
The RCC was also, in the words of the Washington Post, an immediate “social success.” “All of the big names in the Party seemed to have rediscovered each other,” explained one party insider. At the meetings, once intractable foes chatted casually with each other. “It was like “‘Ike this,’ and ‘Dick, that’ and Barry, how are you?'” recalled a Republican source, referring to such disparate, and once feuding Republican personalities as Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Barry Goldwater.Footnote 63 The value of such interactions for the overall organizational health of the party was not lost on party leaders. “This group knows . . . that on a quarterly basis the national chairmen will be getting them together and they're going to eat breakfast together, they're going to eat lunch together, and they're going to talk together,” Bliss explained. And, “you know full well from your own experience that you don't say anything very nasty,” he continued, “at least not publicly, about someone you're going to have dinner with tonight.” Bliss understood that factions often depend on divisions among the party leadership. As such, he reasoned that the party might check further infighting if the leaders associated with the feuding liberal and conservative groups could be discouraged from attacking one another, at least in public. “Party splits tend to develop around name leaders,” he explained. Thus, “if you can keep your name leaders working together that congeals your party workers.”Footnote 64
But the Committee's leadership on policy matters partywide never fully materialized. Confronted from the start by conservatives critical of what they perceived to be efforts by party liberals to use the RCC to repudiate Goldwater and the rightward shift in party policy, the RCC would quickly abandon any real effort at policy leadership. The conservative push back began almost immediately in the summer of 1965 with a demand for greater southern representation on the Committee. Leading the charge was Tom Stagg, a National Committee member from Louisiana. Stagg, along with other conservative delegates, objected to the RCC's very first policy statement, which expressed support for federal involvement in enforcing civil rights legislation in the South. At the time, Stagg was hoping to win one of four vice-chair seats on the RNC and thus a place on the RCC with the idea that more southern representation would ensure the policy group would not veer in a liberal direction. But the conservative counter-offensive did not stop there. As the committee prepared for its final meeting in 1965, Senator Morton, with the support of Idaho Governor Robert Smylie, among others, announced his intention to pass a resolution denouncing the Far Right John Birch Society. The group had reportedly been actively infiltrating state and local party organizations throughout the country since the election.Footnote 65 Alarmed by this development, Morton wanted to make a public statement against the group. As word of Morton's initiative spread, however, conservatives threatened to respond with their own resolution calling for an investigation of those who did and did not support Goldwater in 1964. Though Bliss had already issued a statement calling Birch Society founder Robert Welch an “irresponsible radical,” a showdown at the RCC was averted only after Morton buckled to conservative pressure and agreed to endorse a general statement against “extremist” groups.Footnote 66
Senator Morton's resolution, however tentative, was one of the few overt attempts made by the RCC leadership to counter the Right's growing influence within the party. During its two remaining years in operation prior to Nixon's nomination in 1968, the RCC generally avoided commenting on divisive or contentious issues, as scholars have noted, and issued what were by most accounts “bland” policy statements.Footnote 67 While this helped promote the goal of unity, it effectively foreclosed on the possibility that any significant reform of party policy would take place at the national level prior to the 1968 election. Instead, the RCC, in keeping with the RNC's overall service approach, focused its energy on party unity and fence mending among the party's various factions and consequently neglected to challenge the growing power of the conservative Right within the party.
A similar approach would characterize the party's response to persistent factional conflicts within the Young Republicans and the National Federation of Republican Women. Party leaders regarded the infighting between competing conservative and liberal factions within both of these auxiliaries to be a serious threat to party unity. As constituencies, both women and youth were seen as vital to the party's recovery. But rather than try to reform or moderate the politics of either group, party leaders sought to win the support of both organizations for the renewal goals of the party's broader service organization. The party's message to the groups was primarily organizational; the emphasis was on the goal of making the party more competitive, and had few ideological or purist undertones. It was a message that, once made, was generally well received.
At the same time, the party's outreach to dissident groups did often involve direct, and occasionally coercive, measures on behalf of party leaders to subsume factional elements under the party's overall service organization. And some factional groups did resist subordinating ideological concerns to the organizational imperatives of the service approach. Nonetheless, the goal of the party outreach was never political reform, but merely organizational renewal and unity, regardless of ideology. Moreover, the party's outreach efforts did favor some Republican leaders over others, as would be the case with both the Young Republicans and the Women's Federation. But more often than not, such divisions concerned disagreements over strategy rather than ideology, and largely pitted conservatives who were receptive to the professional orientation and organizational goals of party's national service organization against conservatives who were not. It was a process that unfolded first in the Young Republicans.
SYNDICATES, RAT FINKS, AND GANG BUSTERS: THE YOUNG REPUBLICAN REVOLT
As Republican leaders looked ahead to the 1966 election and beyond, the importance of expanding the party's reach among young voters was difficult to ignore. According to the party's own research, 12.4 million young people would come of voting age between 1964 and 1968. And, by the end of the decade, nearly 100 million Americans would be twenty-five years old or younger.Footnote 68 For Republican leaders, the numbers spoke for themselves. The country was “rapidly becoming a nation of young voters,” Bliss explained.Footnote 69 What these new voters represented was “the first wave of a leadership generation which will determine the destiny of our nation for decades to come,” he continued.Footnote 70 A 1966 Gallup poll found that the Democrats enjoyed a nearly ten-point advantage over Republicans among young voters. Yet, in Bliss's analysis, their loyalties were still somewhat in play. The same poll found that roughly 39 percent of college students identified as “independent.”Footnote 71 Thus, if Republicans were “bold enough and brave enough,” Bliss believed, they might have a chance of reducing the Democrats' advantage by 1968.Footnote 72
At first glance, it appeared as though the Republican Party had few problems organizing young people. The party's chief “youth” auxiliary organization, the Young Republican National Federation, had grown in both size and influence within the party for more than a decade. By the time Bliss took over in 1965, the Young Republicans had roughly 400,000 dues-paying members and an annual budget of nearly $100,000. The group's growth, however, was inextricably linked to the rise of the conservative right wing of the party. Indeed, nowhere was the strength and organizational skill of party conservatives more evident than among the Young Republicans, particularly the national YR leadership. The organization had played a leading role in the “Draft Goldwater” movement, for example, that culminated in the senator's 1964 nomination.Footnote 73 But conservative rumblings among the Young Republicans could be heard as early as 1957, when the organization adopted a platform punctuated by conservative policy positions including, as M. Stanton Evans recalls, opposition to “federal aid to education, cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union . . . and trade with the Communist nations.”Footnote 74 By 1959, the conservative faction, or “Syndicate” as it was commonly known, had become strong enough to install Ned Cushing, a Nixon supporter, over a candidate hand-picked by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Things came to a head in 1963, however, when conservative delegates at the Young Republican convention in San Francisco, facing off with federation chair, and moderate Republican, Len Nadasdy, forcefully seized control of the organization by storming the podium after pandemonium broke out on the convention floor.Footnote 75
Much of the maneuvering of conservatives within the Young Republicans had come at the behest of a group of former YR leaders, led by F. Clifford White and Bill Rusher, along with Bill Brock and John Ashbrook. Each had gotten their start in the Republican Party as conservative Young Republicans; White as New York state chair in the 1950s, with Rusher as his down-state protégé and Ashbrook as the conservative national chair ushered in with the hard-line 1957 platform. And though they had stayed in touch, they did not coalesce into a group until after the 1960 Nixon defeat when they realized the influence the Young Republicans and its alumni might have in shaping the political future of the national party. Their original plan was to put the Young Republicans at the leading edge of an effort to circumvent the liberal “Eastern Establishment” and elect a duly nominated conservative president in 1964. It was with such a plan in mind that conservatives ambushed Nadasdy in 1963 and elected D.C. Chair Donald “Buzz” Lukens to head the organization. After Goldwater's avalanche defeat in 1964, the YR leadership set its sights on 1966 and 1968. In June 1965, Tom Van Sickle, White's deputy on the Goldwater campaign, was elected to replace Lukens.Footnote 76
Despite an affinity for White's organizational skill and a shared desire to aggressively recruit young people to the party, Bliss and the RNC leadership had serious misgivings with the divisive nature of the Young Republican leadership's style and rhetoric. Again, most party leaders appeared little concerned with the group's ideology. But if the group remained internally divided, and unresponsive to the party's broader renewal effort, the GOP risked entering the 1968 election cycle as fractured as it had been in 1964. Fearing this, Bliss urged the group at its 1965 summer convention in Miami, just months after he become party chair, to be more “inclusive and tolerant of the deeply held views of others.” Victory in 1968 would depend on reaching out to “more young Americans from every creed, every color and every economic level,” he asserted.Footnote 77 In other words, “convention histrionics . . . don't win elections,” as one exasperated state chair complained to Bliss about the Young Republicans. Rather, it would take recruitment, fund-raising, and long-term strategy. Bliss's remarks were greeted with muted hostility.Footnote 78
By the fall of 1965 concerns about the YR leadership had mostly subsided. In spite of their rhetoric, they appeared to embrace the party's broader service organizing model. They welcomed the assistance of the RNC in the fall, for instance, with the planning of the Young Republican's “Countdown-365” dinner program that launched on November 8, exactly one year before the 1966 midterm election.Footnote 79 But just as the Young Republicans began campaigning for the 1966 election, a scandal erupted that threatened to undermine the party's delicate unity strategy. In late January 1966, allegations surfaced that a particular hard Right faction of the New Jersey YR chapter, known as the “Rat Finks,” had circulated explicitly racist sheet music at the previous national YR convention in Miami. Other songs targeted prominent liberal Republican leaders, including Senator Clifford Chase (R-NJ), a favorite “Rat Fink” antagonist, as well as governors William Scranton and Rockefeller.Footnote 80
The story created a firestorm of criticism of the conservative “Syndicate,” of which the “Rat Finks” were essentially an appendage. New Jersey Young Republican Chair Clark Allen, for example, himself a former “Rat Fink,” immediately denounced the group, as did Van Sickle. Bliss was unnerved by the incident. It was precisely the type of scandal, reminiscent of the party's segregationist embrace of the deep South in 1964, that Republicans were hoping to avoid as they prepared for the 1966 and 1968 elections.Footnote 81 The leadership's reaction was swift: The RNC ordered New Jersey State Chair Webster Todd and Van Sickle to immediately launch a full-scale investigation of the incident. When the investigation did little more than unearth exactly how splintered the party was in the Garden State, Bliss, under pressure from the state chairs and several leading Republicans, went one step further and presented Van Sickle with a series of changes to the YR bylaws.Footnote 82
Scholars have tended to characterize the RNC's response to the YR crisis as being politically motivated; specifically, as another attempt by party moderates to punish conservatives following the Goldwater defeat.Footnote 83 However, what the party's response reflected more than anything else was the overly administrative and organizational nature of the party's service approach. Rather than try to moderate or reform the group's political ideology, the party sought instead to realign its priorities with the national party's renewal goals. What Bliss called for was placing two permanent RNC members on the YR executive board, a lowering of the maximum YR age limit from forty to thirty-four, and that the naming of each new YR executive director be subject to the “advice and consent” of the national party chair.Footnote 84 Although in the short-term it was implicitly understood by officials at the RNC that these bylaw changes would limit the Syndicate's influence over the organization, the long-term goal was less to politically reform the group than to ensure its organizational focus was on party building, regardless of its politics.Footnote 85 Similar efforts to corral the Young Republicans had been made before, as early as the late 1950s, but this time Bliss was able to couch the proposals within the broader goal of building a more competitive and unified national service organization.
Hoping to alleviate some of the concerns with the changes, Bliss brokered the deal directly through Van Sickle and appointed Don Ross, a Midwest conservative, and Lisa Harrower, a Northeast liberal, as interim advisors to the Young Republicans. Nonetheless, several prominent YR conservatives saw the proposed bylaw changes as nothing more than a challenge to the Syndicate's control of the organization. The first signs of discontent came at the Young Republican's annual “leadership” training in Washington in February 1967. Van Sickle had reported favorably on the plan at the RNC meeting a month earlier.Footnote 86 But his remarks belied a seething hostility to the “senior” organization, which was more accurately captured in Harrower's assessment that “a majority of the Executive Committee of the YRNF are not favorable to any of the changes suggested by Mr. Van Sickle.”Footnote 87 This was more than apparent at the Washington training, where several leading Syndicate members, notably Terry Gautier of the Mississippi Young Republicans, publicly denounced Bliss and what Gautier saw as Bliss's efforts to reel in the group. At the training, Bliss lectured the group to “stop beating each other over the head,” or the Republicans risked losing in 1968.Footnote 88 Conservatives responded by withholding their harshest criticisms for the national YR convention, held that June in Omaha, Nebraska. Ross had worked closely with YR officials throughout the spring at Bliss's behest to limit opposition to the plan. But, once the gavel dropped in Omaha, the Syndicate, led by Van Sickle, swiftly repudiated Bliss by rejecting each of his proposals, and electing an avowed conservative, Jack McDonald of Nashville Tennessee, the next YR national chair.Footnote 89
Though Omaha was a route for the RNC's unity efforts, the party leadership did have a number of staunch supporters within the Young Republicans, most of whom belonged to a faction known as the “Gang Busters.” The faction even had a candidate in the race for YR chair: former Ohio State basketball star James Betts. Betts's defeat, together with the hostile tone of the convention, surprised the RNC leadership, but neither factor altered, or even necessarily disrupted, the plan of aligning the goals of the Young Republicans more closely with those of the RNC. In fact, at a closed-door meeting of McDonald, Bliss, and Ross in Washington on August 22, 1967, that is just what happened. At Bliss and Ross's urging, McDonald consented in writing to eleven new “guidelines” for the organization. The guidelines included provisions stipulating that all YR employees, publications, events, and funds would heretofore be “subject to the approval” of the RNC.
In the end, then, the group's activities were more formally wed to the national party. But, contrary to what has been generally asserted by scholars, this had little effect on the group's prevailing right-wing ideology, which in many ways became more pronounced.Footnote 90 Despite the mandated changes, for instance, McDonald still instructed disgruntled state chairs, including in New Jersey, to “make peace” with YR's more militant, and even insubordinate, elements.Footnote 91 Indeed, none of the conditions imposed by the RNC on the Young Republicans required a shift in policy. The conservative elected leadership remained, and the RNC was silent on its policy choices. Rather, the goal and the outcome of the RNC's involvement was simply to redirect the organizational focus, though not necessarily the ideology of the organization. Some party leaders had wanted the RNC to “take drastic action” against the Young Republicans, as Bliss described it. But, in the interest of party unity and competitiveness, Bliss rebuffed the idea. “I think we should bear in mind that when you are a minority party, you don't become a majority by splitting up the minority,” he stated. Instead, “you need to add on,” he explained, “and that is the goal we are both mutually trying to achieve.”Footnote 92
The YR episode provided the RNC leadership with another glimpse of the organizational strength of party conservatives. But it would not be the last. Indeed, just one month prior to the June 1967 YR convention in Omaha, the party found itself embroiled in a fight with another key party auxiliary, the National Federation of Republican Women.
NATIONAL FEDERATION OF REPUBLICAN WOMEN
In the mid-1960s, the National Federation of Republican Women (NFRW) was one of the largest and most visible auxiliary organizations of the Republican Party. Its national membership exceeded 500,000, with states like Michigan, Illinois, and California recording nearly 50,000 members each. Though it exercised little formal power within the party, the group's influence, especially given its grassroots organizational strength, was considerable. The NFRW, like the YR, was one of the GOP's principal instruments for mobilizing party workers and voters. The NFRW in particular provided many of the party's workers at the local level. Goldwater himself had once remarked at a 1958 campaign stop that, “if it were not for the National Federation of Republican Women, there would not be a Republican Party.”Footnote 93 Characteristic of most male political leaders at the time, Bliss regarded women, more than any other group, as the workhorses of the American party system. Although women did play a role at the leadership level, the party rank and file was nonetheless dominated by unpaid women volunteers.Footnote 94 As Bliss had noted in his 1961 “Report of Committee on Big City Politics,” “there's nothing more effective, more decisive or that will do more good in the way of getting votes, delivering them to the polls, and convincing people, than a sound and effective women's organization.”Footnote 95 It was for this reason that the turmoil that unfolded in the NFRW in the spring of 1967 so worried Republican leaders. The party could not afford to lose control of one its most reliable auxiliary organizations so close to a national election.
This time the conflict arose from a disputed election, and again the clash centered on party conservatives. As it had earlier, the RNC responded to the dispute with a variety of administrative mechanisms designed less to reform the group politically than to link its activities with the renewal goals and orientation of the national service party. And, again, the result was not only to bring the group on board with the service strategy, but to do so in a way that preserved its deepening ideological conservatism.
In early March 1967, a nominating committee of the NFRW meeting in Chicago announced Gladys O'Donnell, NFRW program chair, as the nominee to replace outgoing Federation president Dorothy Elston. On the face of it, nothing about the announcement was out of the ordinary. Special committees of the NFRW had long been assigned the task of identifying successor candidates to be voted on at the group's bi-annual summer convention. That is, until the mid-1950s, when it became customary to offer the position to NFRW vice chairs who were “interested and willing” to take over the organization. Just such a situation presented itself in early 1967. As the O'Donnell candidacy was being announced, there was, waiting in the wings, an “interested and willing” NFRW vice chair, Phyllis Schlafly. Schlafly was a well-known and outspoken conservative ideologue. She was also a very popular figure among the NFRW rank and file. O'Donnell was herself a leading conservative, who had publicly stated her preference for her fellow Californian, Ronald Reagan, for president in 1968.Footnote 96 Both Schlafly and O'Donnell had also supported Goldwater's failed 1964 presidential campaign. But Schlafly's status as a hardened partisan, contemptuous of party liberals, had been firmly established by the publication of her book A Choice, Not an Echo in 1964. The book was celebrated at the time by conservatives who blamed the Republican Party's misfortunes on the political timidity of party liberals who dominated the party's so-called “Eastern Establishment.”Footnote 97
For most scholars, O'Donnell's nomination was, as Schlafly and her supporters believed, a clear attempt to block the latter's rightful ascension to the NFRW presidency and part of a larger effort to “purge” the organization of anyone who supported Goldwater.Footnote 98 “Having taken control of the Republican National Committee,” and contained the Young Republicans, “the moderate-liberal-pragmatic wing” of the party, writes Critchlow, now set its sights on blocking Schlafly's election as NFRW president.Footnote 99 There was, to be sure, considerable consternation among party liberals over the prospect of a Schlafly presidency. What party moderates “feared,” explained Thomas Foley in the Los Angeles Times, “was that a victory by . . . Schlafly would be interpreted nationally that at least one segment of the party organization had not learned a lesson from the GOP's landslide election defeat in 1964.”Footnote 100 But such concerns did not develop into a partywide effort to reform the women's organization. Instead, party leaders sought, as they had with the Young Republicans, to gain the NFRW's support for the broader service party concept.
A delegation of Republican women did go to see Bliss in the summer of 1966 to express their misgivings with the idea that Schlafly, as the group's first vice president, was in line for the NFRW presidency. Heading the group was Michigan Republican state chair, and former RNC assistant chair, Elly Peterson. But the party leadership was unwilling to openly support an alternative candidate. Instead, they preferred, as it had been the case with the Young Republicans, to avoid an open battle over the group's politics, and to focus on redirecting the NFRW's energies to the task of electing more Republicans. In this way, the RNC's handling of the NFRW dispute mirrored its response to the turmoil within the Young Republicans. Rather than reform the group, or somehow hold it accountable for the Goldwater defeat, the leadership worked instead to fold it under the organizational umbrella of the national service party. And, again, the outcome, politically, was the same. Such maneuvering would favor, as it had with the Young Republicans, one group of conservatives over another within the NFRW leadership. But, again, this was less a consequence of any hard and fast ideological differences between NFRW leaders, than the willingness of one group, in this case the conservatives led by O'Donnell, to support the renewal goals of the national service party. Bliss would not play a direct role in the subsequent maneuvering, other than to consent to two proposed administrative changes to the NFRW's planned biannual convention: 1) the changing of the convention date from 1966 to 1967, and 2) the shifting of the site of the convention from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. Indirectly, both actions were intended to help the O'Donnell campaign, and thus the interests of conservative NFRW leaders who were open to working with the national party.
Schlafly declared her candidacy on April 5, 1967. The announcement began what would be a brief, but bitter campaign that saw both sides attempt to smear the other. Schlafly, of course, was labeled an “extremist,” and much was made of a remark by John Birch Society founder, John Welch, identifying her as “a very loyal member” of the organization. O'Donnell, the other hand, was cast as a moderate who supported Earl Warren over Robert Taft for the 1952 Republican nomination. Both, in fact, were partisan conservatives, which became clear during their only face-to-face debate held just days before the NFRW convention in early May 1967. Amidst a colorful exchange before the Women's Press Club in Washington, D.C., O'Donnell and Schlafly presented largely complementary visions of the future of the Republican Party. One of the few points of disagreement concerned the Far Right John Birch Society, and its place in the party. Schlafly denied that she belonged to the group, despite Welch's assertions to the contrary. But she would not go so far as to repudiate the group, disagreeing only with its top-down organizing tactics, and its claim that the nature of the Communist threat was primarily internal rather than external. O'Donnell would tolerate no such equivocation. For her, the Society, and its belief that vast portions of the federal government were under the direct control of Communists, including, in his day, President Dwight Eisenhower, was simply beyond the scope of respectable Republicanism.Footnote 101
The convention itself, held on May 5 and 6, 1967, was quite contentious. Schlafly lost the election by a 416-vote margin, after being nominated from the floor, but not before there were floor and credentials challenges back and forth.Footnote 102 Schlafly held her composure throughout the weekend convention, but in a letter sent to Bliss just days later she condemned the proceedings “as a controlled and rigged election that constituted election fraud.”Footnote 103 Roughly 100 delegates sympathetic to her candidacy were barred from voting, she explained, while hundreds of delegates who had failed to pay federation dues were allowed to cast ballots. She also accused Bliss of complicity in the sham election. Despite Bliss's claims to the contrary, “I know that your office was not neutral before or during the Convention,” Schlafly asserted.Footnote 104 She ended the letter by calling for an “impartial committee” to review the election results as well as to disclose how much RNC money was spent in support of O'Donnell's candidacy. Bliss summarily denied both requests.Footnote 105
Although RNC leaders did look unfavorably on the prospects of an Schlafly victory, there is no evidence that Bliss or anyone else attempted either to directly manipulate the vote or to steer the group in any particular direction politically. What party leadership did do was push the group to change its priorities from a preoccupation with ideology to an interest in party-building by supporting conservatives within the NFRW who endorsed the national service party initiative. And such a shift in priorities, rather than politics, followed after O'Donnell's election. Under her leadership, the role of the Federation, she told the RNC, would be “exactly the same as the role of every Republican group in its right mind and I like to think all Republican groups are. It's to win.”Footnote 106 The NFRW was, by most accounts, “wounded,” as Critchlow asserts, by the 1967 election fight.Footnote 107 But this was not the result, as he and other scholars maintain, of the group being targeted by party moderates and somehow reformed politically. Indeed, despite the misgivings of Schlafly and many of her conservative supporters, a percentage of which left the Federation, the effect of O'Donnell's election was to leave the organization firmly in the control of party conservatives.
Overall, then, O'Donnell's victory represented another triumph of the party's renewal-based service approach to party unity. But, again, the price of unity was an implicit endorsement by Republican leaders of the Right's dominant role within the party.
RISE OF THE RIGHT REVISITED
The factional infighting that consumed the Young Republicans and the National Federation of Republican Women represented the two most significant challenges to Republican Party unity in the immediate post-Goldwater years. The disputes within both groups paralleled the broader ideological divisions that bisected the party in 1964. But rather than attempt to politically reform either organization, the party sought instead to unify the groups with the party by gaining their support for the renewal goal of building a service-centered national party organization.
While many on the Right were initially suspicious of Bliss and the service party concept, the idea of organizationally rebuilding the party resonated with and ultimately benefited party conservatives. Indeed, for many scholars, the rise of the Right was in large part facilitated by the decision of conservatives not to turn away from the Republican Party after the Goldwater loss, but to continue to work within the party to expand their newfound influence. Though few leaders on the Right were willing to make any real political concessions after the loss, they nonetheless recognized the long-term importance of rebuilding the party. “Conservatism was still their creed,” writes David Reinhard, but the “debacle of 1964 had taught and had changed right-wing Republicans.”Footnote 108 To a greater extent, they now “understood that the continuation of Rightwing control of the GOP required a flexible attitude, a willingness to work with all factions of the party, and a sharp eye to all usurpers,” explains Mary Brennan.Footnote 109 They recognized, in other words, as a leading conservative explained at the time, that the party “was the proper vehicle for the continuation of [conservatism].”Footnote 110
But, to a degree that has never been fully appreciated, it was the RNC's service approach, first introduced nationally by Ray Bliss after the Goldwater defeat, that made it possible for party conservatives to not only remain active within the party, but to actually consolidate their power. By resting the party's recovery on a renewal of its core organizational functions rather than a reform of its policies, the service model opened the way for the Right to retain their dominant influence on party affairs. The strength of the party's renewal strategy was to bring the party together on organizational, rather than political grounds. This helped unify the party, but also implied, and in practice entailed, a tacit acceptance of the party's prevailing conservative ideology. Organizational renewal and the goal of building a national service party organization worked to bring the party's disparate, factional groups together, but only by implicitly embracing the Right's predominant position within the party. In this way, party unity came at the price of a new or more moderate direction in Republican Party policy. Even the RCC, which was conceived as a policy forum, functioned more as a common meeting ground for once feuding Republican leaders than as a policy instrument. The result, as the party's handling of the revolts within the YR and NFRW groups attest, was a nearly seamless return to conservative rule within the Republican Party after the Goldwater loss.
CONCLUSION
The Right's rise to prominence within the Republican Party in the wake of Goldwater's historic 1964 loss has been well documented. Determined that, as partisan Goldwater supporters declared after the election, “26 million Americans cannot be wrong,” the Right learned from the loss, scholars assert, and redoubled its efforts to ensure that the future of the Republican Party was a conservative one.Footnote 111 Indeed, the main goal of party conservatives after the election, scholars explain, was to keep the Republican Party conservative, and not to, as Ronald Reagan warned at the time, “turn the high command over to leaders who were traitors during the battle just ended.”Footnote 112 What is often missing from this narrative, however, is an appreciation for the significant role a “service” approach to party building within the RNC had on the “conservative capture” of the GOP after the Goldwater loss. We have a clear sense, from the research done on the topic, of the swiftness with which the Right expanded its influence within the Republican Party in the 1960s. We also have an understanding, though much less has been written on it, of the service party concept advocated by then RNC chair Ray Bliss and the party building that paralleled the rise of the Right within the Republican Party in the 1960s. What has not been closely analyzed is how these two trends within the post-Goldwater Republican Party interacted and informed each other. Specifically, we lack a clear view of how the service party concept, and the emphasis it placed on party renewal rather than reform, helped an otherwise defeated Republican Right not only retain, but consolidate, its ascendant position within the party.
The 1960s were a turbulent period for the American party system. Over the course of the decade, both the Republican and Democratic parties experienced bitter factional conflicts, beginning with the Republicans in 1964, and followed four years later by the Democrats in 1968. In both parties, the infighting was primarily ideological in nature, but nonetheless elicited very different responses from the party leadership. While the Democrats pursued a series of procedural reforms in response to conflicts between party reformers and party “regulars,” the Republicans hoped to bridge a growing schism between party liberals and conservatives by winning support within the party for the development of a national service-based party organization.
The results were similarly varied. As we know from a number of studies of the Democratic Party reforms, the changes sought by liberal reformers resulted in a prolonged and at times contentious process of political reform. However, neither the manner with which the service party approach facilitated unity within the Republican Party nor how it impacted the party politically are as well understood. Considerable attention has been paid to the growth of the Republican Right during and after the Goldwater defeat in 1964. But the role the service party model played in the Right's ability to retain its influence despite the 1964 loss has not been fully explored. It has not previously been recognized that the Right's continued dominance within the party after the 1964 election was in fact facilitated, rather than weakened by the party leadership's shift in emphasis following the Goldwater loss to party renewal and the goal of building a more professionally oriented national service party organization. The service approach, and the work of rebuilding the party organizationally, did not entail a departure from ideology, but merely an implicit, and often unstated embrace of its prevailing ideology. By pushing for party renewal and unity purely on organizational grounds, without the need for political reform, Bliss's service party model effectively endorsed, in the interest of unity, the party's deepening political conservatism.
To be sure, the service approach did help the Republican Party address the infighting that consumed the party after the Goldwater loss. But, as developments within both the Young Republican and National Federation of Republican Women illustrate, promoting unity through organizational renewal without a similarly deliberate attempt to politically reform the party amounted to an acceptance of and acquiescence to the power and influence of the party's resurgent right wing. Indeed, the national party's renewal strategy worked with both the Young and Women Republicans largely because it eschewed talk of reform, and essentially acceded to the hard right direction in which both groups had drifted over the course of the 1960s. By emphasizing organizational renewal, then, Bliss and the National Committee leadership were able to unify an otherwise deeply divided and fractured party, but were unable to curtail the growing influence of the Republican Right. On the contrary, the service approach was able to unify the party because it abandoned any pretense at political or policy reform and tacitly embraced the Right's newfound strength within the party. Indeed, even when Bliss and the RNC leadership did engage ideas or policy after the Goldwater loss, as they did with the creation of RCC, their focus remained squarely on the challenge of unifying and rebuilding the party rather than any proposed change in party policy. The result was the emergence of a more unified, but also a more conservative national Republican Party in the aftermath of the Goldwater defeat.
