By Jeff Taylor
There was once a time when giants roamed the land. They battled for something more than personal ambition and the spoils of electoral war. Their political philosophies were not monochromatic. These Republican warriors weren’t ciphers like George W. Bush. They weren’t hacks like Bob Dole and John McCain who gained the nomination long after they peaked and long before they deserved.
Three of these titans battled at the 1968 Republican convention in Miami Beach: Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, and Ronald Reagan. Each represented a force within the party. The pragmatic moderate for those who just wanted to win, the colorful liberal for those who cared about civil rights and imagined he might do something different about war, and the smooth conservative for those asking for a little more law and order in the streets and a lot less regulation from Washington. The party chose Nixon. The nation thereby gained a smart but crooked, visionary yet troubled chief executive.
Rule and Ruin is the story of these giants and their smaller associates during the 1960s, mostly in D.C. and on the presidential campaign trail. It is an exciting story, building on conflicts, grudges, and smoke-filled rooms that stretched back to the era of Thomas Dewey, Robert A. Taft, and Dwight Eisenhower. Kabaservice’s writing is excellent—graceful but punchy. His book joins Nicol Rae’s Decline and Fall of the Liberal Republicans as an indispensable volume for students of GOP ideology. Conservatives will be especially interested in the description of Ronald Reagan’s activities from the Goldwater campaign to his election as governor and first attempt at the presidency.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/where-did-the-moderates-go/
There was once a time when giants roamed the land. They battled for something more than personal ambition and the spoils of electoral war. Their political philosophies were not monochromatic. These Republican warriors weren’t ciphers like George W. Bush. They weren’t hacks like Bob Dole and John McCain who gained the nomination long after they peaked and long before they deserved.
Three of these titans battled at the 1968 Republican convention in Miami Beach: Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, and Ronald Reagan. Each represented a force within the party. The pragmatic moderate for those who just wanted to win, the colorful liberal for those who cared about civil rights and imagined he might do something different about war, and the smooth conservative for those asking for a little more law and order in the streets and a lot less regulation from Washington. The party chose Nixon. The nation thereby gained a smart but crooked, visionary yet troubled chief executive.
Rule and Ruin is the story of these giants and their smaller associates during the 1960s, mostly in D.C. and on the presidential campaign trail. It is an exciting story, building on conflicts, grudges, and smoke-filled rooms that stretched back to the era of Thomas Dewey, Robert A. Taft, and Dwight Eisenhower. Kabaservice’s writing is excellent—graceful but punchy. His book joins Nicol Rae’s Decline and Fall of the Liberal Republicans as an indispensable volume for students of GOP ideology. Conservatives will be especially interested in the description of Ronald Reagan’s activities from the Goldwater campaign to his election as governor and first attempt at the presidency.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/where-did-the-moderates-go/
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