He also hit hard at Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whom Reagan charged with being too accommodating to the Soviet Union. With the North Carolina primary upcoming, the Reagan campaign was on the ropes.Īt this point, Reagan struck back by making an issue of the Panama Canal, which the Ford administration planned to turn over to Panama. Reagan lost the primary by a hairsbreadth, and Ford quickly parlayed the advantage this gave him into victories in six other primaries. Thrust on the defensive, Reagan's campaign operatives made several tactical errors, including keeping the candidate out of the state on election day. In anti-tax New Hampshire, this was a powerful argument. Ford contended that the Reagan plan would give states a choice of bankruptcy or raising taxes. But Ford's strategists seized on a speech Reagan had made in September 1975 in which he said the federal government could reduce spending by $90 billion by allowing state governments to assume responsibility for various federal programs. Reagan's strategists believed that if he scored a quick victory in the first primary of New Hampshire, support for Ford would evaporate. But Reagan was a hero to conservatives, and he lacked the political baggage of having been part of a Washington establishment that been discredited by the interlocking traumas of Watergate and the Vietnam War. It was in this context that Reagan challenged Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976.įord entered the race with the endorsement of almost the entire party political establishment-Paul Laxalt of Nevada, a longtime friend of Reagan, was the only U.S. Vice President Gerald Ford inherited the presidency but was a weakened candidate after he pardoned Nixon in September 1974. Nixon was reelected in 1972, then forced to resign in 1974 because of the Watergate scandal.

The immediate beneficiary of this political realignment was the malleable Richard Nixon, who won the White House in 1968 against a divided Democratic Party and the independent candidacy of George Wallace at a time the nation was shaken by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. On its face, the 1964 presidential election was a reaffirmation of the New Deal and LBJ's 'Great Society,' but Goldwater carried five states in the Deep South and won the overall popular vote in the region in an augury of elections to come. Johnson in the general election, but the GOP remained in conservative hands. Goldwater lost by a landslide to President Lyndon B. In 1964, Goldwater transformed the party by narrowly defeating Nelson Rockefeller, the champion of the Eastern establishment. Meanwhile, within the Republican Party, resurgent conservatives mobilized against what they saw as the 'me-too' policies of the GOP's long dominant Eastern leadership. Many white southerners shared this view as the federal government clamped down on the states while enforcing the civil rights laws of the 1960s-in time the racial backlash would spread to the North after urban disorders there. The business community and many rank-and-file Republicans had become increasingly resistant to what they deemed the heavy hand of government. But in the 1960s, the coalition was fraying along lines of race and class, and the unraveling accelerated during the Vietnam War. Roosevelt in 1933 had been the dominant political movement in the United States for three decades, as it would continue to be until the last year of the Lyndon B. The New Deal coalition created by President Franklin D.

That was not apparent to most Americans when Reagan made his national debut in behalf of Barry Goldwater in 1964. He had an impact because he had deep convictions, star power, and political skills-and also because he arrived on the scene when the winds of change were blowing in the direction of conservatives. Ronald Reagan was a leading force in national politics for a quarter century.

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