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still in the nascent stages. In 1960, the Young Americans for Freedom was founded. Richard Viguerie, just starting his direct mail company, wrote to Reagan asking him to sign fundraising letters for YAF. Weeks passed with no reply, and Viguerie forgot about it until one day when he opened his mail. Viguerie found a crumpled copy of his letter to Reagan with a note from Reagan saying he would be delighted to help out. Reagan then sheepishly explained that he had found the letter in his son’s toy box. 17
    These conservatives eschewed party labels and had wide and varying opinions on many issues. But on one issue, they were in firm agreement: all were staunch anti-Communists. This developing movement went largely unnoticed by the national media. When they did try to work with the Republican Party, they were treated like the hired help, as many of its established and influential organizations were decidedly liberal. Similar in influence to the Wednesday Club, the Ripon Society, the standard-bearing organization for liberals within the party, was flush with cash and oversaw many policy debates and decisions. Yet conservatives saw their influence grow steadily.
    Almost immediately after Goldwater’s loss, Nixon started plotting his comeback for 1968. He recounted the events following the 1964 election in his autobiography RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon :
    Goldwater took his defeat with grace, and Johnson resisted what must have been a great temptation to crow over his landslide. It was Nelson Rockefeller who tried to turn the disaster to his own advantage. The day after the election, he issued a statement aimed at reading Goldwater and his followers—and, by indirection, those like me who had supported Goldwater—out of the party. I had intended to make no comment on the results until after a “cooling-off ” period, but Rockefeller’s attack changed my mind.
    On November 5, I held a press conference. I complimented Goldwater saying he had fought courageously against great odds. I said that those who had divided the party in the past could now not expect to unite it in the future. At the end, I pulled out all the stops and said that Rockefeller was a spoilsport and a divider, and that there now was so much antipathy to him among Republicans throughout the country that he could no longer be regarded as a party leader anywhere outside New York. 18
    The Republican Party was changing dramatically beneath the surface during the mid-1960s. It was becoming more suburban and rural, more middle class, more blue-collar, and definitely more conservative. Nixon saw this trend before most others in the GOP.
    Anyone who underestimated the resiliency of Nixon did so at his peril. Nixon carefully observed and understood the changes that were going on inside the GOP at the time. In preparation for another try at the White House following Goldwater’s loss, Nixon had learned from two of his own losses: in 1960 to Kennedy and in 1962 to Pat Brown for Governor of California. In 1960, Kennedy got to his right on anti-Communism. In 1962, Nixon had faced a conservative primary opponent, Joe Shell, the Republican leader in the California State Assembly. Shell drew a surprising 36 percent of the vote and weakened Nixon for the fall election. Nixon knew if he were to win the nomination of an increasingly conservative party in 1968, he couldn’t let another candidate get to his right. And if he was going to win the general election in 1968, no one was going to get to his right in that battle either.
    In fact, Nixon had almost always been in good stead with the grassroots conservatives in the party. His aggressive pursuit of Alger Hiss and public comments about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, his work with the House Un-American Activities Committee, his defeat of Helen Gahagan Douglas—wife of leftist actor Melvin Douglas—for the U.S. Senate seat in California in 1950, and his famous “Kitchen Debate” with Nikita Khrushchev, had all earned him