Takeover by Richard A. Viguerie Read Free Book Online

his grown children, divorce her, then persuade a young mother of four youngstersto abandon her husband and their four children and marry the governor?” At that point, Rockefeller’s doom as a national candidate was sealed, but he wasn’t about to admit it. 3
    Michigan governor George Romney was a much more appealing standard-bearer for establishment Republicans, and Romney emerged as the front-runner in the race to be the Republican nominee in 1968.
    After Republicans did well in the 1966 off-year election, the Republican establishment had some cause to believe that the old order would be restored. Republicans picked up three Senate seats in 1966, and the winning Republican candidates; Charles H. Percy of Illinois, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, and Howard Baker of Tennessee, were all establishment-type Republicans.
    Republicans also picked up forty-seven House seats. However, almost half of those seats were in the South and West and were won by candidates who, if not fire-breathing Goldwater conservatives, were at least a lot more conservative than their classmate, George H. W. Bush, of Texas House District 7.
    Eight new Republican governors were also elected, many of them in the South and West as well, including the new governor of California, Ronald Reagan.
    While the recruitment of Ronald Reagan to run for governor of California, and who did what to convince him to run, has entered the realm of myth, there are several key points that bear on the situation in which conservatives find themselves in the aftermath of the 2012 election.
    The men who recruited Reagan were all men of the New West; they had no ties to the old Republican establishment.
    Robert Tuttle, Reagan’s director of White House personnel and son of Reagan “kitchen cabinet” member Holmes Tuttle, recalled that his father, Henry Salvatori, and A. C. (Cy) Rubel “were all self-made. … What I admired about them, especially that early group, was they didn’t really want anything. … They all just wanted better government. And they wanted smaller government. They were allconcerned about the size of government. In those days, in the ’50s right after the war, the tax rate was 90 percent.”
    As Robert Tuttle later said, “they were concerned about the size of taxes. They saw how Communism was a real threat, a real menace, and they were concerned about that, and how we were responding to it. They loved their country and they’d all been fantastically successful. … It was interesting because these guys were all about ten to fifteen years older than Ronald Reagan, but he was a real hero to them. What they loved about Reagan was that he could articulate what they felt and articulate it so well.” 4
    Tuttle, Salvatori, and Rubel were later joined by other successful entrepreneurs, such as Justin Dart and Joe Coors, who all recognized that to win, Republicans didn’t need to become more like Democrats; what Republicans needed was someone to articulate the conservative beliefs they held, and articulate them well.
    Some New Right conservatives, including me, wanted Joe Coors to put himself forward to be secretary of commerce. Coors’s response was that if Reagan wanted him to serve, he knew how to get in touch with him—he wasn’t looking for a job.
    Joe Coors and the other early Reagan kitchen cabinet were selfless men, only interested in their country.
    I will expand on this later, but these successful entrepreneurs looked at Reagan, and probably without really ever saying it, applied the same analysis they would apply if they were evaluating a new product or business idea, what I call “Viguerie’s Four Horsemen of Marketing”:
    • Position (a hole in the marketplace)
    • Differentiation
    • Benefit
    • Brand (it’s what makes you singular or unique)
    Reagan’s position was that he filled the “hole” of being the national conservative leader that was left in the marketplace by Goldwater’s epic defeat; he was a fresh face, different from