Competing Elites Within a Political Party: a Study of Republican Leadership

Abstract

HE CAMPAIGN for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination managed to avoid the kind of bitter fratricidal conflict which can leave ugly and lasting scars on a political party. The and wings never really confronted each other at the party's national convention or in the period prior to the convention. By the time Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan announced their candidacies, it was against Richard Nixon rather than against each other that their efforts had to be directed. Subsequently, middle-ground candidate Nixon proved well-suited to the task of attenuating the conflict potential within the party, at least at the national level and at least for the duration of the presidential campaign. How different it was in 1964! The liberal-conservative clash surrounding the Republican presidential nomination that year was unusual in both intensity and outcome. It has been accurately described as the most virulent confrontation between the two Republican factions since the 1912 Taft-Roosevelt conflict. The immediate result in 1964, as in 1912, was devastating to the more liberal wing of the party which had long controlled presidential nominations; to the cause of party harmony; and, in the national election, to Republican fortunes generally. If the 1968 Republicans presented an illustration of coalition-building and a muting of longstanding intraparty differences, the 1964 Republicans offered an instance of coalition-breaking and the exacerbation of intraparty differences. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the nature of the liberal and conservative wings of the Republican party by considering the attitudes and backgrounds of individuals who have held leadership position in each of those wings in a single, but highly significant state. More specifically, it is focused on California and it is principally designed to compare the state's Republican elite group supporting Barry Goldwater for the nomination in 1964 with the elite group supporting Nelson Rockefeller with respect to the following questions: