A Recent History of Electoral Skulduggery

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I’m Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD:  And I’m Bob Garfield. This week:

SEN. TED CRUZ:  I, I recognize that the media is all eager to talk about an alliance. There is no alliance.

SEN. TED CRUZ:  John Kasich made the decision in his own political self-interest to withdraw from Indiana.

BOB GARFIELD:  That's Ted Cruz disavowing the supposed “alliance” between himself and John Kasich that the media had been tripping over itself to cover earlier this week.

MALE CORRESPONDENT:  Kasich will stop campaigning in Indiana and Cruz will do the same in Oregon and New Mexico.

MALE CORRESPONDENT:  - trying to block Donald Trump from racking up enough delegates to win outright before the convention.

BOB GARFIELD:  How did they ever get such an idea? Well, in part because Ted Cruz and John Kasich said so.

SEN. TED CRUZ:  It is big news today that John Kasich has decided to pull out of Indiana, to give us a head-to-head contest with Donald Trump.

BOB GARFIELD:  For his part, Kasich’s top strategist, John Weaver, tweeted, quote, “I can't stand liars” although, of course, he could have been talking about anything. Thus concluded the latest and most bungled scheme of the 2016 GOP campaign season. If nothing else, it gave the current frontrunner plen-ty to work with.

DONALD TRUMP:  They are really trying to stop me. Everybody knows it, everybody sees it.

BOB GARFIELD:  The thing is, he’s not entirely wrong. The GOP has been trying to come up with a way to stop Trump, ever since it realized he wasn’t just going away. But if Trump and his supporters are scandalized, they shouldn’t be surprised.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  In fact, journalist and historian Rick Perlstein says that the GOP’s “stop Trump movement” is just the latest chapter in a long history of election scheming. Just ask Barry Goldwater in 1964.

RICK PERLSTEIN:  He was seen as an extremist, a part of a movement that had taken over the party establishment from the ground up. He spoke of the cravenness of not being willing to challenge the Soviet Union because of fear of nuclear war. He was speaking of doing things like making Social Security voluntary. He had voted against the Civil Rights Act at a time in which civil rights workers were being murdered in cold blood in Mississippi. He was even, like Mr. Trump, endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

When he gave his convention speech, which is traditionally a ritual of reconciliation in which you usher all the conflicts of the past under the bridge, instead of doing that, he said:

SEN. BARRY GOLDWATER:  …that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

 [AUDIENCE CHEERS]

RICK PERLSTEIN:  Which was precisely what he was not supposed to say.

 [BROOKE LAUGHS]

In fact, Richard Nixon said that when he heard it he was sick to his stomach.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Let’s just cycle back before that convention speech. In the primaries, the party was trying to stop him, how?

RICK PERLSTEIN:  Right. The first attempt to stop him was beating him at the ballot box. Nelson Rockefeller ran. He lost a very decisive primary in California. And, you know, after that the party establishment tried to draft a likely contender, but they couldn't find anyone. There was a fellow named William Warren Scranton, the handsome and charismatic governor of Pennsylvania, who they called “the Hamlet of Harrisburg” –

 [BROOKE LAUGHS]

- because he refused to step up to the plate. Finally, he did a few weeks before the convention. It was far too late. Barry Goldwater glided to the first ballot victory.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And when Scranton did finally decide, he sent a letter to the delegates that was –

RICK PERLSTEIN:  That’s right.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  - decidedly, in the parlance of our day, smug.

RICK PERLSTEIN:  The leaders couldn't believe that the party had been stolen from underneath their nose, and William Warren Scranton - this very WASPy name - sends this open letter directed to Barry Goldwater in which he said, the delegates are not a flock of chickens whose neck you can wring at will, the idea that somehow they were being manipulated. That, of course, made the delegates only more resentful of this elite. They were, in fact, gung-ho for Barry Goldwater. Many of them had been recruited at the precinct level. That's how they took over the party, from the bottom up.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Goldwater became the eventual nominee, at which point the party fell in line and supported their candidate full throatedly.

RICK PERLSTEIN:  Um, rather not. You see in the archives letters to Lyndon Johnson, phone calls to Lyndon Johnson, from Republican senators pledging their loyalty to, in fact, the Democratic ticket. You have people who wouldn't appear onstage with Barry Goldwater. The only guy who would was this sad sack pathetic guy, Richard Nixon.

 [BROOKE LAUGHS]

And everyone knew that his career was finished.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And the media?

RICK PERLSTEIN:  There was a paper called the New York Herald Tribune. It basically was Horace Greeley's paper. It was a paper that was there at the founding of the Republican Party, associated as closely with the Republican Party as the Wall Street Journal was associated with Wall Street.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

RICK PERLSTEIN:  And they resoundingly turned against Barry Goldwater. Time Magazine was seen as a Republican magazine. They turned against Barry Goldwater. All of these Republican newspapers in towns and burgs across America turned away from the historic allegiance to the Republican Party because the Republican Party had plainly gone crazy.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So what about four years later, in 1968, did the party then get its act together and find a candidate it could endorse?

RICK PERLSTEIN:  The first thing I heard when I saw that Kasich and Cruz were kind of conspiring to deny Donald Trump the nomination was something that allegedly happened in 1968. Ronald Reagan entered the campaign at the last minute, literally announced his campaign at the convention, which is inconceivable now. And Nelson Rockefeller was running for president too. And supposedly, Rockefeller and Reagan said, if we both get in and deny Richard Nixon the 50 percent of the delegates plus one that he needs to win on the first ballot, as the metaphor put it, we’ll have “tipped the football.” And there was kind of a gentlemen's agreement that then we'll see who can catch the Hail Mary pass and carry it across the goal line. But until then we’re basically working together.

It didn't work. Richard Nixon made a deal with the South in the person of the Senator Strom Thurmond, promising not to enforce civil rights laws. And that took away Southern support from Ronald Reagan. Once again, a second ballot was not achieved as, in fact, a second ballot has not been achieved since the 1940s.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mmm. Now, 1964 and 1968 were both back in the days of the smoke-filled rooms -

RICK PERLSTEIN:  Very much so.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  - before the system of primaries we currently have took hold. Party leaders could secretly handpick convention delegates.

RICK PERLSTEIN:  Yes, they had something called favorite son candidates, so let's say you're a governor of a big state like California, and you would basically pronounce yourself a presidential candidate. You weren't really running for president. Basically, you held the entire delegation, those dozens and dozens of delegates, in your pocket and you became a powerbroker.

Things changed after 1968, when the Democrats, following the defeat of Hubert Humphrey in the absolute debacle at the convention in Chicago –

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Now, let us point out that Hubert Humphrey famously snagged –

[BOTH SPEAK/OVERLAP]

RICK PERLSTEIN:  That’s right.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  - that nomination without participating in a single primary.

RICK PERLSTEIN:  Exactly, and since he lost, the reformist faction in the party had basically a pretty strong argument to make some changes. And the changes they made, in a commission that was chaired by Senator George McGovern, was that we were going to put the choice to the party rank and file through primaries, which were in very limited application before that point.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And so, then 1972 rolled around and –

RICK PERLSTEIN:  The party rank and file chose as their standard bearer George McGovern, who was considered by the party elite way too much of an outsider. Our friend Mr. Nixon [LAUGHS]

 [BROOKE LAUGHS]

- who’s now the president of the United States, his minions were out there trying to sabotage the Democratic candidates that they considered more viable in a general election against Hubert Humphrey, the Maine Senator Edmund Muskie. But one candidate that they never sabotaged was this guy George McGovern because he couldn't win.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm. [AFFIRMATIVE]

RICK PERLSTEIN:  He did win, once again, a convention in which a first ballot victory was still in doubt, he ends up with the nomination.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But the Democratic Party leadership was really mad.

RICK PERLSTEIN:  That's right. In fact, a Democratic senator gave a blind quote to the columnists Evans and Novak, saying that George McGovern was the candidate of “Acid, Amnesty and Abortion.” It turned out that that very senator was Thomas Eagleton who McGovern chose as his running mate.

 [BROOKE LAUGHS]

And, and Hubert Humphrey, in a phone call to Richard Nixon, congratulating him for his victory, very much makes it seem, to me at least, that he had worked for his own candidate’s defeat.

 [CLIP]:

SEN. HUBERT HUMPHREY:  Mr. President.

PRESIDENT-ELECT NIXON:  Hubert, how are you?

HUMPHREY:  Well, fine, and I wanted to call up just to congratulate you on this historic victory.

NIXON:  Well, thank you very much. You’ve been a very statesmanlike man, but I felt you had to fight for your man, and I understood why, but I know that you didn’t approve of some of the tactics.

HUMPHREY:  Well, I’ll have a talk with you sometime. I did, I did what I had to do.

NIXON:  Of course you did.

HUMPHREY:  If not, Mr. President, this whole defeat would have been blamed on me -

NIXON:  That’s right.

HUMPHREY:  - and some of my associates.

NIXON:  That’s right. That’s right. No, I know. [LAUGHS]

HUMPHREY:  You know that.

NIXON:  That’s right.

HUMPHREY:  Well –

NIXON:  Well, we’ll get together and we’ll work for the good of the country, that’s the important thing.

HUMPHREY:  We surely will, and I, I…

 [END CLIP]

RICK PERLSTEIN:  But, you know, poor McGovern, he wants to pivot to the center but establishment of the party isn’t gonna let him. When it comes to, you know, Acid and Amnesty and Abortion, Nixon and McGovern basically had the position on abortion and they had a similar position on decriminalizing marijuana.

But the point is power. The old establishment of the party fought back. Every time one of these insurgencies either wins or looks like it's going to win, they change the rules for next time. For example, the Democrats, to make sure that an established candidate won, you know, established something like Super Tuesday, where they had a bunch of Southern primaries on one day. Well, lo and behold, who won Super Tuesday in 1984? It was Jesse Jackson.

 [BROOKE LAUGHS]

The lesson for the parties [LAUGHS] is that democracy is a messy thing, and if you're going to change the rules to try to control the rules, you may find yourself with egg on your face at the end.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Rick, thank you very much.

RICK PERLSTEIN:  My pleasure, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Rick Perlstein is a journalist, historian and author, most recently, of The Invisible Bridge:  The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.