Read Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America for Free Online

skillful delegate hunter in the spring and summer of 1976. Baker had done more than anyone in the Ford operation to secure Ford's nomination, thwarting Reagan. Reagan objected, saying that Baker would be unacceptable to Sun Belt conservatives. The meeting was inconclusive—except for the fact that when the old curmudgeon of the Republican Party, Mr. Sun Belt himself, Barry Goldwater, caught wind of the meeting, he pitched a fit for not having been invited, said it was an “insult,” and vowed never to raise money for the party again. 30 By then, however, Ronald Reagan had eclipsed Goldwater as the conservative leader in America.

    In mid-January, the GOP's state chairmen and national committee members gathered to vote for a new national chairman. It was the first time anyone could recall an RNC chairman being chosen in such a fashion. Prior, the chairman was either handpicked by an incumbent Republican president or chosen by party elders. Ford pushed Baker, perhaps too overtly, as it caused a number of the more conservative Republican committee members to support former Tennessee senator William Brock or Reagan's choice, the little-known Dick Richards of Utah. Baker quickly dropped out of contention and Richards did not engender much enthusiasm. Brock won on the third secret ballot. 31

    Brock was the Republicans' “third way”: choosing him provided neither Reagan nor Ford with bragging rights. The choice was vitally important for the party, as Brock, despite his distaste for Reagan, would become one of the most effective chairmen in the GOP's history, credited with bringing it into the modern political world.

    Such modernization was crucial for the fate of the Republican Party, for at that point the party's very survival was in doubt. “Back in the 19th century,” the Washington Post noted in 1976, “a Minnesota legislator described a mule as a creaturethat has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity. The legislator was talking about the Democratic Party of his day, but his definition would fully apply to the Republican Party.” 32 The mule is, of course, the hybrid offspring of a donkey and a horse. Sterile at birth, it cannot create a breed of its own, so it literally has no past and no future. Much like the Republican Party, it seemed then.

    Among voters less than thirty years of age, identification with the GOP stood at a humiliating 11 percent in 1977. The party was seen as corrupt and just plain worn-out. Despite the Republicans' famous “Southern Strategy,” after the wipeouts of 1974 and 1976 the GOP controlled only 10 percent of the state legislative seats in the eleven states of the Old South. 33 Such was the ruinous political legacy of Richard Milhous Nixon.

    In Reagan's view, the Republican Party could stage a comeback only if it made itself a home for conservatives and conservatism. To that end, in late January 1977 he formally announced his political action committee, Citizens for the Republic (CFTR), through which he would “promote conservative Republican candidates and promote conservative views.” 34

    The CFTR headquarters was set up on the second floor of a nondescript office building in Santa Monica, California. Reagan tapped Lyn Nofziger to run the operation. One of Nofziger's first employees was Cindy Tapscott, a chatty young woman from Oklahoma. In her interview, Nofziger asked Tapscott two questions. “Do you smoke?” She did. “Do you drink?” She did. Tapscott was hired. 35 Nofziger himself was partial to a cigar and a dry martini—no olive, and no vermouth. Aide Jim Stockdale said the group around CFTR in those days resembled “adult juvenile delinquents. I don't think we took ourselves as seriously as the crowds that followed us.” 36 A young follower, Fred Ryan, was a college student at nearby USC, and would frequently drop by the CFTR offices to pick up Reagan literature to pass out to his classmates. 37

    The operation was not slapdash, however. Some of Reagan's