American Experience; 1964; Interview with Richard Viguerie, Conservative Activist, part 3 of 3

It's an amazing, unprecedented flip in the South in one election. You see what civil rights did, and Johnson predicted it when he signed the civil rights bill. I think he said, I've lost the South for a generation, which he may have been understating it, clearly, you know. That's a phenomenal thing to happen in American politics, almost unprecedented, right? I assume so, but go water campaign was a watershed moment in American politics, and it's probably underappreciated by most political experts, because it did serve to launch the conservative movement that did nominate an elect and reelect Ronald Reagan, and provides the primary opposition to big government today. And it just provided a watershed movement for America here, it was George. What did the pundits, the day after the election, historic landslide for Johnson, the largest

victory ever, I think, at that point? What did the papers, what did the pundits say about Barry Goldwater and the President? Well, of course, this was the end of Barry Goldwater's political career. It was the end of the conservative calls, and it set the Republican party back, maybe a generation, and the obituaries were loud and very clear. They just said, this is a watershed moment, and the Democrats are going to go forth and govern America, maybe forever, who knows. But it was, you know, quite frankly, it was tough. It was dark days. I remember very clearly the Republicans didn't even have a third of the Congress, a third of the House did they didn't have, or even House or Senate. And anything Johnson wanted was just going right on through. And it was hard for me to read the newspaper quite frankly.

Sometimes it was late in the day before I could look at the front page, look at the sports page, just comics, whatever, but it was just tough to, because there was just nothing between, you know, what Lyndon Johnson wanted and what he achieved. And how did you all regroup? What was it? Well, we were working. We didn't, none of us went back into, you know, and forgot about politics, even though it was tough. I started my company in January of 1965, optimistic, excited about the future, organizations were getting foreign, people were beginning to run for office, and we knew that we were behind the barricades, and it was tough times. But we were prepared to charge hell with the bucket of water, and we just, we, we, we, we, most of us were second generation conservatives. First generation was Bill Buckley, Russell Kirk, Barry Goldwater, John Tara, and the second generation conservatives were now probably into fourth generation, but we were the entrepreneurs.

Most conservative organizations that are operating today were started by second generation conservatives, Heritage Foundation, Kato, all of, you know, what Pat Robinson did in Jerry Falwell in American Conservative Union, we were all second generation conservatives there. And we, we were launching a movement, I think, and we knew what we were doing. We were building a movement. We consciously did that. We met, we met for nine, ten years at, at my home, every Wednesday, for two or three hours, eight, nine, ten of us, planning the conservative movement, it was a period of time when in the late seventies we'd reconvene with the congressional back benchers, Newt Gingrich, Ben Weber, Bob Walker, and others there. And just plotting and planning, we'd go off on weekends and Friday and Saturday and have long strategy sessions.

We were consciously building a movement, and we were under the radar. I remember a few days after the November 1980 election. I was a guest of God for spurring the long time Christian Science Monitor, a political editor in Washington, and he would have a couple of times a week, a breakfast for a newsmaker, and he had just print journalists there. So there's twenty-three, twenty-four people there for breakfast when he had me as his guests a few days after the November election. He started the first question with Mr. Vigory. Where did this landslide for the Republicans come? Conservative elected president, Republicans had control of the Senate now. Major pickups in the House, Governor seats, you know, nobody saw this coming, had this all happen. So excuse me, Mr. Spirited, you didn't see it coming, but I can't tell you how many press conferences we called. You didn't show up, and your friends didn't show up. I can't tell you how many press releases we put out. There was probably never a movement, revolutionary type movement, as young conservatives felt

we were in those days, that was more ignored by the press, you know. And I said, by the way, just out of curiosity, how many have ever heard of the Reverend Pet Robertson in two hands went up? And here, you know, Pet Robertson was a major leader of the Conservative calls for decades out there, and the print journalists, they just didn't know him. Later they became aware of who we were, but they ignored us in the 60s and 70s. All right, we've got about 15 minutes. Is there a personal moment that sums up 1964 for you, bellowing at the top of your lungs and the rafters of the Cow Palace, you know, if you look back at that year, which was full of so much change for you and for your thoughts, what was it? Well, you know, 1964 was important for the Conservative movement for the Republican party,

but for me personally, I got very emotionally committed to the Conservative movement in such a way that I decided I wanted to go full time and try to market the Conservative movement to the country. And in the summer of 1964, I discovered that if you were a candidate for president, you had to file with the clerk of the House of Representatives, all your $50 and larger contributors, donors. So I started collecting all those, and I got about $12,500, wrote some myself and then hired some women to help me there. And so with that mailing list of $12,500 goldwater, $5,000 donors, I was able to start my own company and go out and help a lot of a certain new Conservative organizations get started, candidates run for office, et cetera. So while we took a shellacking in 1964, we were putting together the seeds of our future

growth. You could argue that that list was the kind of the DNA, the genetic code of the Conservative movement for the next 25 or 30 years? It's a good way to say it because that list of $12,500 and names that I added to it later because the same applied to states. So I started being a little fax machine and I went to Texas, I went to California, I went all over the country. And when long before I had 100,000 Conservative donors that then helped grow the Conservative movement that we have today. Why? 64. Why did the winds of change sweep across the country with such force in that year at that time? There was a lot happening in the country. The country was in turmoil, uproar, we, you know, the 1950s were supposed to be the silent decade and then with the 60s, with the election of Kennedy and the civil rights

movement in young radicals and liberals, the Beatles come to America, exactly. Exactly. The feminist mystique is published. The civil rights three workers are murdered in Mississippi, freedom, summer. And of course, Kennedy is murdered and things are happening out there. I mean, just as the country is in turmoil, we've, the World War II has now been over almost 20 years and people are settling in and we're trying to figure out where we're going in a country and where do we need to make changes in the country and midcourse corrections if you would. And so a lot is happening out there and it just was a very exciting time and we're still living now based on things and decisions that were made back in the 60s.

Do you think, do you think about January 1st, 1964, where you were, and where you were on January 1st, 1965, what changed? In that one year, I don't have myself personally a direction for myself or the conservative movement. Something is focused on, on Go War. It's just, this is, you know, so huge and so big that we can't do anything other than just bring all resources, you know, to this one battle. We've got, you know, a chink in the, in the armor of the enemy, so to speak, and we've got a drive through it. And so we spend the year getting the nomination for, for Go Water and then trying to get him elected.

And then once that is over, now we've got to figure out where we go for it, you know. And then I decide I want to start my own business and start marketing the conservative organizations, candidates, books, magazines. And I, I begin to see it way for it and I'm meeting with friends. And we all begin to see now that Go Water is politically not a major player going for it. So that left a vacuum there so that myself and our friends, we could now go in and help fly the plane. I already often have talked about how the concerns were on this airplane. The plane was bouncing around all over the sky and we were nervous and we didn't like the way the plane was flying. So after a while in the mid-60s, we walk up to the cockpit and knock on the door. You could do that in those days and we, nobody answered. Either we opened the door, there was nobody flying the conservative plane. So I sit down over here and somebody else, you know, Paul Warwick sits here with his

legal pad and Howard Phillips puts his coffee cup here and Jerry Falwell and we all sit there and we begin to, you know, fly the conservative plane and provide leadership for a movement that had no leadership. Go Water was not a leader so much he was a spokesman. He was a very articulate spokesman. And a movement needs both spokesman and leaders. And so we now provided that leadership because there was a vacuum. If you look back on this year, why do you think it's important to care about 1964 or why do you think it's important that we remember it? 1964 was almost a gateway to our future because what happened in 1964 was a preview of what's coming.

We're having a new way of dealing with our minorities in the country. We're having a different way we're going to approach foreign policy. We're going to have a different opposition party to the Democrats and women's rights are just beginning to be articulated. And much of America is changing, not all for the good. Some of the sexual liberties that began to be expressed in the mid-60s were still living with now. So it was a door to our future and once we went through it, there was no going back. I think of the title of Dean Atchison's book, Present at the Creation. Yeah. Kind of where you were. Exactly. And I wrote a book called, I was present at the Revolution, I think she said. But in 1964, you could say to paraphrase Dean Atchison's book, Present at the Creation.

This was the, I was fortunate as a young concerted, be present at the creation of a new America. And it wasn't just politically, it was in our treatment of women and minorities. Our culture changed, much of America changed and there was no going back. Yeah, it's almost as if on all of these levels, cultural, political, military, because Vietnam is just really beginning and Johnson takes some faithful steps that are going to really, I mean, he makes the decision to send troops into Vietnam in 1964, late in the year. Socially, all of these things happen and the genie is out of all of you, there's no going back. Did you feel that? Very definitely.

You know, when you're there at the birth of something, I'm not sure you see it all that clear. Looking back, we can see it was a historic time. It was a game changer. If you would, I remember David Broder, the longtime political dean of the political writers in Washington, DC, came to my office and was, we were talking about what I was doing in direct mail and how direct mail was the first opportunity conservators had to bypass, go around the monopoly that the left had on the microphones of the country. And looking back, I could see what we were doing there. And he said he reminded him of someone who was told that they speak in prose and didn't realize they were speaking in prose, but they could see it once they pointed out to him. And I could see what we were doing in the 60s and the 70s, developing a media that bypassed

the mainstream media. And it changed American forever because today we have four major, what we call new and alternative means of communication that bypassed the mainstream media and direct mail was the first, but then came along talk radio, cable television, and then the internet. And it leveled the playing field for conservators, but we were just getting started with using direct mail, ideologically, politically, in the 64 campaign. So you covered a fair amount of this, but there are things we really need, and I'm not sure what we're going to do, but there are things we need to do, but there are things we need to do.

So, how do we understand, in the convention, since you were there, and it's great to have somebody who's there? Traditionally, the primary is bare-knuckle, open warfare, and you win the nomination and what do you do? You attack to the center, right? You immediately, you're conciliatory. What Goldwater does at that convention? He does something different. What did he do? And one of the newspaper reporters, when Goldwater made his acceptance speech and talked about extremism, is no... In defensive liberty. In defensive liberty is no vice. I'm starting again, because that phrase in your head started again. Well, let me just make sure I've got it. Extremism in the defensive liberty is no vice, and moderation in the defense of justice is no virtue. I'm not justice every liberty. No. Moneration in the pursuit of liberty. No.

I think... Is it freedom? No, it's not freedom. I think it's justice. I think... Anybody got an iPad? You know, I'm embarrassed right now, because I've been watching this all kind of... For weeks, when you get so into it, have a look at that real quick, I'll tell you why. Park that. We'll move on. And then in the next question, we'll go back to it. Just let's do a couple of quick things, because I know we got to get you in the car. What was your reaction to a choice not echo that book? Why did it catch fire? Phil Schlafly's book, A Choice Not An Echo, very articulate and clearly said what all of us were thinking that we didn't need to be merely mouth about our political views. We should just speak truth to power. We should just go out there and say it like it is. And we had been living with Republican nominees for president and for governors and senators

who were just moderately less liberal than the Democratic opponent. And that was in the thirties and the forties and the fifties. And now in the sixties, she's saying, you know, we need to... No pale pastels. We need to have bold colors, you know. And that just...it was just more of what Go Water was saying and more of what John Tower and Buckley and Russell Kirk was saying. And did it catch on? Oh, it caught on immensely and it's her book sold millions and millions of copies. And it had an impact on Raleigh Reagan. Raleigh Reagan began to echo her theme as well. No pale pastels. What was the conservative position on the Civil Rights Act? What was that official kind of line, whether or not it played out or not? Well, what was the...at the time, what was the position? You know what I said?

Come on in. Quick. And go ahead. I don't know if there was any thing that you could call an official line. There was a position that Go Water took, there was position that Buckley took, and they took a constitutional position on it. They didn't think it was constitutional that there. And quite frankly, for most conservatives, it was something that they didn't focus on. We just weren't...you know, it wasn't high on our radar screen. We were opposed to segregation. We were opposed to the terrible treatment of the blacks in the South or wherever. But quite frankly, it wasn't something that was high on our priorities. There were exceptions, but most of us, we were focused on other issues. How can we understand how most conservatives, including you, saw LBJ's agenda, you know, his laundry list that was in his state of the Union address, the war on poverty, everything in the big liberal agenda?

How did you see that at the time? Well, it was terrifying to us because we saw America changing in right in front of our eyes. But what was terrible? Okay. When Lennon Johnson, and I was raised in Texas, so I followed Lennon Johnson's career, and we called him Landslide Lendon, and that's another story. But the Lennon Johnson did not have a reputation back in the forties and in the fifties of being a wild-eyed liberal. But once he became president, then he did move hard left and basically proposed legislation to give the liberals all their dreams. And it just began to, our country, as we understood, it began to disappear with the war on poverty and all these new government programs. And it just was terrifying to us because once you set up a government program, it's exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to walk it back. And we could see our country with all the social programs of Lennon Johnson just going

away. I think that's it, because that's exactly what I wanted, was just a little bit of a sense of where you were from or where you came from. I think we're good. Here comes the big quote, and it is, freedom in the defensive liberty is no vice. I would remind you that extremism in the defensive liberty is no vice, and let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. You were right, moderation in the pursuit of justice. I shouldn't have questioned you one bit, so here he is, he's just one of the nomination. It's kind of like an axiom that you walk up and you do one thing, and what does Goldwater do? Well, Goldwater acts as Goldwater, I guess, being this rugged individualist. He says that extremism in the defensive liberty is no virtue, and moderation in the defense

of justice is no vice. Did I get it right? No, you got it right. You got it right. You got it right. It's like a sewageism. Yeah. But what about what he chose to do, that's what's interesting to me? He didn't do what you were supposed to do. Goldwater, when he got the nomination rhetorically and early actions campaigned as a conservative. He didn't reach out to his Republican opponents who were to his left. He selected a conservative congressman from New York, Bill Miller, as his vice president candidate. And he didn't balance his ticket. He didn't balance his ticket. And he didn't throw any olive leaves to his vanquished foes in the Republican Party. And there was a lot of hard feelings because the big government Republicans, the Rockefeller Wing of the Party, did everything possible to deny him the nomination.

After Rockefeller withdrew, of course, Bill Scranton tried to get the nomination. And they were just trying everything and they were attacking him verbally and undercutting his campaign. There was nothing but hard feelings all the way around. And it was a campaign that was doomed from the start just because if the party was not unified and House divided, it cannot stand. And so, but what helped me understand what the conventional thing is to do if you're the nominee at the convention. What's your nomination speech usually? Well, you try to, one, you want to unite the party. And you want to, Nixon was known as saying that each political party campaigns to their extremes on their edges, so to speak, and the first one to the middle wins. And Go Water made no attempt to reach out to his vanquished foes nor to a campaign in the middle that just was not going to be very Go Water.

And we're done. Let's just get room to 30 seconds of silence. We just need silence here, please, and roll it. And room to, Richard, thank you, I think.