In the late 1970s, the founders of the National Conservative Political Action Committee devised new methods of raising money, stoking fear and resentment, and targeting liberal candidates for shocking defeats. In the 1980 national election, one of their targets was U.S. Senator George McGovern from South Dakota.
Author Marc C. Johnson's new book explores the 1980 election and how it changed the face of American politics. The book is called "Tuesday Night Massacre: Four Senate Elections and the Radicalization of the Republican Party."
Johnson is a former broadcast journalist with experience in politics and public affairs. "Tuesday Night Massacre" is released this month.
Lori Walsh:
Marc, thank you for sitting down with us. We appreciate your time. A new book, it seems like it's a very timely one in the nation but also will be of high interest to South Dakota readers. It's hard to know where to start because this is really looking at 1980 election, the defeat of George McGovern is how most people in South Dakota will remember it. We need to go back a bit to understand the context of it, back to Barry Goldwater and some other events. Take us back before we reach the 80s or the late 70s and 1980 and tell us why we need to start there.
Marc Johnson:
Thank you Lori for the opportunity to visit with you. Yes, you're exactly right. We have to go back to at least the early 1960s. It's a moment, I think, in history, a moment in time, for conservative politics in the United States that is unlike the moment we're in right now where the party is really struggling to define what it's all about. That was certainly happening in the early 1960s. Barry Goldwater, of course the Arizona senator, very conservative guy, wins the party's nomination for president in 1964 and then is just obliterated in a landslide defeat by Lyndon Johnson. Lots of people wrote him off at that point and wrote off the hard right element that he championed and that championed him. The fight for the soul of the Republican party continued in the 1960s and into the 1970s.
I make the case in my book that that is really the origin of the Republican party that we have seen emerge over the last decade or so. A lot of the veterans, if you will, wind up having very prominent roles in Republican and conservative politics in the late 1970s and particularly in this, what I think, is a culminating period, this 1980 election, where several things came together at the same time that were difficult to see at the time, difficult to understand. With the perspective of looking back on it for 40 years now, you can see that some really important things came together to create a hinge moment in the development of the modern Republican party.
Lori Walsh:
When you say hard right, let's be more specific with some of Goldwater's policies, including his relationship to actual white supremacy and white supremacists. This is no joke.
Marc Johnson:
Right. He opposed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, was one of Republican vote in the Senate against the Civil Rights Act. He said that it was unconstitutional. I would have trouble making the case that he himself was an overt racist in the way that some southern democrats frankly were in that period, but he certainly was not sympathetic to the civil rights movement, and he attracted to him and his campaign certain fringe elements on the Conservative hard right of the country that really championed his cause. The John Birch Society, which has come back in the news this many years later as having sort of a resurgence. He was not certainly openly courting the Ku Klux Klan, but white supremacist southerners were certainly sympathetic to his presidential campaign, largely because the Democratic party began to embrace civil rights in the early 1960s and passed, with Lyndon Johnson's prodding, the Civil Rights Act in 1964. A number of southern states sort of defected and permanently defected, as it turns out, from the Democratic Coalition that existed for so long.
Goldwater is at the cutting edge of creating this new nationalistic populist Republican party. I argue in the book that that carried over into the 1970s. A lot of the folks that believed as he did, in essence, wound up taking over the Republican party.
Lori Walsh:
I want to talk about... Let's introduce this National Conservative Political Action Committee and some of the key players and what's motivating them to start a new way of operating, a new way of fundraising, a new way of punching to the throat with their messaging. How do they begin? Some of these names are really familiar to us now.
Marc Johnson:
There were three principal organizers of the National Conservative Political Action Committee in 1975. All were young Republican conservative activists. The face of the organization eventually became a guy by the name of Terry Dolan, born in New Jersey, very active in the college Republican movement as a young guy. He joined with two other Republican activists, conservative activists. Charlie Black, who is still around in Washington DC, a pretty powerful, influential lobbyist. He worked in the Reagan administration later. A guy whose been in the news a lot the last few years, Roger Stone, who is a self-described dirty trickster, became a confidant and advisor to Donald Trump, eventually was caught up in the congressional investigation into the Russia interference with the 2016 presidential election. Then of course, had his sentence recently commuted before President Trump left office. Those three guys were the real organizers of this Conservative Political Action Committee of 1975.
They had lots of encouragement, primarily from Jesse Helms, the very conservative Republican senator from North Carolina, who gave them some, I would say, credibility with the rest of the real movement conservatives of that period. They also allied very closely with a guy by the name of Richard Viguerie, who is also still around. Viguerie has been called the funding father of the New Right. He pioneered direct mail fundraising efforts in the 1960s really, by working for Goldwater, later working for George Wallace in his presidential campaigns. Viguerie became the fundraising guru, so to speak, for the National Conservative Political Action Committee.
They didn't make any secret of what they were out to do. They wanted to take over the Republican party, not reform it really but remake it. Dolan, for example, was very disdainful of the moderate element in the Republican party. He wanted to purge moderate Republicans from the party. I would argue he was very much at the leading edge of that, but that effort has largely succeeded.
Lori Walsh:
He sort of moved fast and break things, in this way that seems familiar to people today when you think about social media companies and how they started different political ideology. These are young men who don't like the rules and have something to say and are willing to go forth and really leverage their intelligence, their connection and their big ideas. Do I have that [crosstalk 00:09:33].
Marc Johnson:
You have said that very, very well. I would say that they understood that better and earlier than many did, that certain things were coming together in this period that they could really make hay with. Political opinion polling was becoming much more sophisticated. They employed a guy by the name of Arthur Finkelstein, who was, by all accounts, a brilliant political pollster. It was easier to do public opinion polling in this period because you didn't have cell phones. You didn't have the internet. You could typically get people at home on their landline telephone and people were not skeptical of confiding in pollsters as they had become since. Doing opinion polling was relatively easy. You could get a good sample and it was quite trustworthy. Finkelstein was brilliant in phrasing issues in a way that brought out emotions in those issues. Somebody was quoted... I quote someone in the book as saying that he could look at a poll and see emotion. These guys really understood that the most effective political messages almost always involve emotion, anger, resentment, fear, sort of a disdain for the status quo. They really capitalized on that.
Then you have the ability, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, a pivotal Supreme Court decision in 1976, the Buckley case, that basically opens the flood gates so to speak for these independent expenditure campaigns to raise and spend unrestricted amounts of money, as long as they were not coordinating with any candidate. NCPAC, with vigorous fundraising, Finkelstein's messaging, to reach literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people with direct mail, highly emotional messages, that really, I would say sort of stirred up a certain element on the conservative right in America, made them more interested in participating and writing checks if you will to participate in the political process.
One of the consequences of that, and again why I think why 1980 is so important, is that before that election cycle, US senate races tended to be statewide affairs. Somebody is running for the United States Senate in South Dakota, it's pretty much a decision that focuses on what people in South Dakota are doing. During 1980 and after 1980, every United States Senate race became a national race. We saw that recently, just profoundly, in the Georgia run off elections. Virtually everybody in the country that was paying attention to politics is focused on who is going to win these Georgia run off elections because it is absolutely pivotal to who is going to control majority control of the United States Senate. Senate elections, more and more, have become not a question about who necessarily best represents South Dakota or Indiana in the United States Senate, but which party is going to control the Senate on a national level.
That happened, also as a result I think, of 1980. They were focused very much on these emotional issues, anti-abortion, opposed to the Panama Canal Treaties, giving away the Panama Canal. There was a lot of resentment at the time about a financial bail out package that had been engineered for New York City. New York City was facing bankruptcy and the federal government basically came to its financial rescue. That was cast as the conservative heartland, bailing out these liberal elites in New York City. So really emotional hard edged issues, often times very close to the line or crossing over the line of not being truthful or accurate.
The other thing that NCPAC was very much focused on was rejecting the whole idea of bipartisanship. Why try to work with the other party? We need outwork them, outthink them, beat them at the ballot box, beat them up in public opinion, and the only way to get where we want the party to get is to essentially demonize the other side. They were enormously successful in advancing that strategy.
Lori Walsh:
There's a couple things that I want to spin out a little bit more and I want to get to McGovern and that race specifically. Let's start with their strategy. Start early. It's not nuanced. It can be straight up dishonest at times. Outline their basic strategy and how they come to it and then let's superimpose that on the McGovern campaign where his vulnerabilities lie. Some of where they hit him... He's a World War II veteran. It's shocking in some ways, the things that they attempt to go after. Strategy first, and then overlay that on the McGovern campaign for us.
Marc Johnson:
The strategy was both simple and brilliant. Number one, start really early, to redefine these incumbents. The incumbents that I focus on in the book are George McGovern in South Dakota, Birch Bayh in Indiana, who in 1980 was a three term Democrat. John Culver in Iowa who was the least senior of the four that I focused on, just in his first term in the Senate, and Frank Church in Idaho, who was a four term incumbent, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In each case, NCPAC and its allies began very early, like in 1979, even early in 1979, to begin to redefine these guys in a way that would, as Dolan proudly said, "We're going to have you voting against these guys and you won't even remember why." That's almost a direct quote that he gave at the time.
The attacks began early. These guys are out of step with their state. They're too liberal for their states. They've become part of the Washington elite. Those attacks just continued persistently for months and months, even before the incumbent Democrats were even thinking that they were even in an election, re-election cycle. It really eroded the favorability ratings of these guys. One of the benefits of being able to go back 40 years is in McGovern's papers for example, or Frank Church's papers, you can see the public opinion polling that they were doing for the campaigns. In every case, these incumbents started with high levels of public approvals in their state. By the time the election really began in earnest in 1980, their approval ratings had been denigrated to such a point that their conservative challengers were really within striking distance of making it a campaign as each did.
Lori Walsh:
Before you even knew what was hitting you, it was already hitting you.
Marc Johnson:
The pernicious nature of it was not only the starting early, but the attacks from a nameless, faceless, out of state group that was really difficult to hit back against. Different tactics were used. Different strategies were used by the incumbents to try to counter this. None of them worked very well because it was really difficult. If your opponent is taking a shot at you, you can say, "Congressman X is incorrect about that and he should know better for the following reason." When you're dealing with a nameless, faceless committee headquartered in Arlington, Virginia that is bombing into the state with radio and television and newspaper ads, news releases, direct mail, it's pretty hard to identify who is actually behind this, what their motives are, whose paying for it, et cetera. It became a real difficult thing to counterattack. In fact, you can almost argue that the counterattacks that were mounted by McGovern and Church and others served to reinforce the negative message that NCPAC was peddling. If you went back and tried to correct the record, you were almost, by nature, highlighting the allegation that the incumbents were considered to be so unfair.
Lori Walsh:
The nebulous nature of this, and you mentioned independent expenditure campaign, talk to me about how that fits into campaign finance limitations and this whole notion that they're not campaigning for the opponent. They're just campaigning against somebody else. They can't have contact with the opponent and that's really important in this South Dakota race because it appears that those rules are even violated, but it's very hard to prove. Explain that a little bit for our listeners.
Marc Johnson:
Yes, in the early 1970s, Congress passed a Federal Election Campaign Finance Act, which attempted to reign in some of the excesses frankly, of this burgeoning political action committee movement in the country. Then in the post-Watergate period, there were some additional reforms put in place to require greater financial disclosure of donors and that sort of thing.
One of the things that is so difficult to track is the vast amounts of money that are being spent in these campaigns. Again, to use the Georgia analogy most recently, something like 450 million dollars in independent committee expenditures were made in those two run off elections. For the average voter, how do you figure out whose actually behind that money? You can spend hours, and I've tried, digging through the Federal Election Commission records about who is really supporting which effort. There are so many different layers of political action committees giving to other committees and individual giving to a political action committee that then gives to a nonprofit that can conceal its money, so called dark money. It becomes a vicious web that is in no way, comports with the idea that voters should have information about who is supporting candidates or who is opposing candidates.
Again, that's a fixture of this 1980 cycle, where these rules get really, really muddled. The Buckely decision made it clear that an independent expenditure campaign could raise and expend unlimited amounts of money as long as there was not coordination with another campaign. I think I, at least circumstantially, demonstrate in the book that there was a lot of coordination between these various campaigns in these various states. Between NCPAC and the Republican conservative challengers, they did a pretty good job of hiding it. As you suggest Lori, it was very difficult to try to prove. I think pretty much everybody who observed those races at the time. I talked to a number of them. They said, "You could really sense that there was a level of coordination taking place. It was impossible to prove."
Actually the South Dakota Democratic party did prove that there had been coordination between NCPAC and the campaign for then Congressman Jim Abner. Took that appeal all the way to the Federal Elections Commission. The FEC staff wrote quite a blistering report on the level of coordination between this so-called independent campaign run by NCPAC and Abner's own Senate campaign. Then the full commission refused to provide any sanction for the Abner campaign.
It defeated the whole purpose of saying that there should be some sanction if these coordination rules were violated.
Lori Walsh:
What was Abner's take on all this or his relationship with it? I get the sense that there was a great discomfort for him and maybe not a full grasp on exactly what was happening in the grand scheme of what this means for the future for example. Tell me more about that.
Marc Johnson:
He was a little bit all over the map about it. On the one hand, I was surprised to learn that he was quite a reluctant candidate in 1980. He thought Senator McGovern was generally in pretty good standing, that it would be difficult to beat him, that he might have trouble winning a Republican primary, but eventually he emerged as the candidate. He emerged with considerable enthusiasm for his candidacy from NCPAC. They supplied his campaign with polling information that indicated that he would be a really strong candidate against McGovern. There was a real encouragement on the part of NCPAC that he should get into the race.
By the same token, when these independent expenditure efforts became a focus of the public part of the campaign, he really wanted to disavow any connection, said that they were muddying the water for voters, making it difficult to run his own campaign the way he wanted to run it. Again, one of the pernicious aspects of these independent campaigns is that they could do these kind of nefarious nasty hip job type campaigning and the person who was benefiting from it, in this case, the Republican challengers, tended to be able to say, "Well that's not me. That's not my campaign. I'm separate from that." They could benefit at the same time from having those effective attacks being launched against their opponents.
I think Jim Abner in South Dakota, Dan Quail who won the Senate race in Indiana against Birch Bayh in 1980, Steve Simms in Idaho against Frank Church, all disavowed NCPAC, said, "We don't want anything to do with these guys." Again, it's having your cake and eating it too, being able to disavow the effort but at the same time, benefit from the fact that these guys are beating the crap out of your opponent.
Lori Walsh:
McGovern says in 1979 that the future of the country is at stake here. What does he see as this starts to unfold that gives him the knowledge that, in his opinion at least, there's a whole lot more at stake then just whether George McGovern will go back to Washington?
Marc Johnson:
I think all of these guys, McGovern and John Culver in Iowa were perhaps the most eloquent about talking about it, saw that this emotional, anger driven, grievance driven politics was really going to, number one, change the nature of politics in America, and profoundly change the way the Senate approached its business. All of these guys are, I would say, were institutionalists when it comes to the Senate. They had a real reverence for the place as an institution where bipartisanship was to be strived for, not always successfully attained. There was a real sense to get things done for the good of the country you had to come together on really big things and work together, civil rights, Vietnam, the issues that had dominated the 1960s and on into the 1970s. We think of those two decades, particularly the 60s, as being very contentious times. They were. Student unrest on campus, great concern about the war in Vietnam, civil rights protests, assassinations. At the same time the Senate accomplished a tremendous amount of lasting import for the country. Passage of the Civil Rights Bill, Medicare was created, public radio and public television were authorized. Immense amount of good was done for the country in that period, even though the political climate was really quite nasty in many respects.
That sense of bipartisanship, that sense that George McGovern could work with a Republican like Bob Dole from Kansas, and create the food stamp program for example, that Birch Bayh could work on a bipartisan basis to create legislation to make it possible for colleges and universities to have patents on inventions that were created as part of academic research, that Frank Church could work across the aisle with John Sherman Cooper, a Republican from Kentucky to try to bring about an end to the war in Vietnam. There was a real sense for this reverence to the institution. I think McGovern, in particular, John Culver in particular, said, "It's going to make it really difficult to work across the aisle if we let every one of these campaigns become a death grudge match between the parties." There is not going to much basis for cooperation if that's the way we're going to conduct ourselves politically.
Lori Walsh:
In many ways, you could argue he was right, that it's very difficult.
Marc Johnson:
Yeah, I would argue that he very much was right, that the Senate has changed a lot. One of the big issues in the late 1970s that carried on into these 80s campaigns, was the effort to ratify the Panama Canal treaties, the effort to return sovereignty to the Panama Canal to Panama, an issue that dated back to at least the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. Every president from Eisenhower to Jimmy Carter who finally signed the Panama Canal treaties, advocated for the return of the canal sovereignty to Panama, in part because tens of thousands of American military personnel were stationed in Panama, not just to protect the canal, but to protect the canal from Panama, Panamanians. A real concern that this canal, operations to the canal, would be jeopardized because there was such unrest about the United States essentially controlling this vital resource in a sovereign nation.
The canal treaties pass on a bipartisan basis. One of the biggest supporters on the Republican side was Howard Baker, the Republican leader of the Senate from Tennessee, but it passed on a bipartisan basis. Richard Vigory, Terry Dolan, these leading lights of the new right really saw this as a powerful and emotional issue that could be weaponized in a way to go after these incumbents who had supported the treaty. Of course, all of these Democrats supported the treaty. They pounded on it for year after year, even though the issue was gone and decided, they continued to pound on it as a very divisive issue in these 1980 elections.
The irony of course is that 40 years on, the United States has had quite good relations with Panama. The Panama Canal has been enlarged and improved under Panamanian sovereignty. It's not been an issue where we have to worry about the operations of the canal. The people who predicted that the United States, in essence, doing the right thing and returning sovereignty to Panama, would ensure the long term success of the canal, have been proven right. They got kicked around pretty badly on a political basis for doing that in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Lori Walsh:
The cry to insult somebody for wanting to give away the canal sounds, in its messaging, it has a cleanliness or a clarity to it that build the wall campaign does. Talk just a little bit about just the hyper focus on one issue that maybe is way more complex than three or four words, but how do we see that today, that kind of messaging and the focus of it still being a really successful political tool to get votes in spite of it really, by and large, being an incredibly complex topic that can't be summed up in three or four words.
Marc Johnson:
Right. Give away the Panama Canal fits on a bumper sticker. Baby killer fits on a bumper sticker. McGovern and Church and Birch Bayh were all accused of being baby killers because in some cases, they had a pretty nuanced position on abortion. Frank Church, for example, in Idaho, long called himself an anti-abortion Democrat, a pro-life Democrat. His position was essentially the same as the Mormon Church position on abortion. He was attacked for being unwilling to write support of anti-abortion amendment to the US Constitution. Same issue with Senator McGovern in South Dakota.
A very emotional issue, a very complicated issue, a nuanced issue, that can be reduced to just a handful of words made to be the focus of grievance or anger on the part of people were receiving that message. It can be a very, very powerful thing. I think it has become the essence of political messaging of today. It is the essence, I would argue, of Republican messaging today. There's an anger and a grievance in so much of the dialogue that you hear from Republican members of Congress about all kinds of things. Public policy, with all due respect to people on the political right, is a complicated business. Determining healthcare policy or energy policy or transportation policy is not a simple matter. You're not able to reduce it to a catchy slogan, or if you do, you simplify it to the point of distortion. That's what happened with a lot of these issues that were too complicated to be treated in such a cavalier fashion.
Lori Walsh:
I wanted to ask you, and this isn't something that you particularly covered in your book, but I'm curious to hear your opinion on it, and that is the role of the media as an opponent. When we talk about a strategy of really starting early, I think of Governor Kristi Noem in South Dakota who lately has been very vocal about how the media treats her. Sometimes I think if she had an opponent for governor in 2022, she would have someone else to talk about but it seems sometimes the media or journalists are the opponent, the political opponent, the enemy. How does the media and journalist coverage evolve during this time that we're seeing the results of today?
Marc Johnson:
That is a wonderful and profound question that I think a lot of us who care about journalism and the future of information that allows people to make political decisions, informed political decisions, are really worried about frankly. Again, I see some of the seeds of journalism being the enemy of politicians in this 1980 period. One of the news organizations that was most aggressive in covering NCPAC and it's tactics was the Idaho Statesman newspaper in Boise, Idaho, the capital city of Idaho, where I lived for a long time. That actually became an issue in the campaign. NCPAC had bumper stickers printed up that said, "I'm voting for Steve Simms. The Statesman made me do it," as though the newspaper was part of the discussion of a political campaign. That was maybe an early indicator of the fact that there's a market for at least some people in American politics to make hay by attacking the messenger so to speak, the person or people or institutions that are trying to provide insight into what's going on, to provide accountability to people in public office and easy to make them the target of these kinds of attacks.
I think it's enormously dangerous. I think it's requiring a new level of engagement on the part of so many journalists and news organizations who have to tip toe through this minefield of trying to provide a solid fact based, as objective as they possibly can be, assessment of issues and personalities, and at the same time being the focus a lot of times, of attacks by those very same personalities. It's an enormously complicated thing.
For a long time, and I was guilty of this as a reporter myself, I think journalists for a long time thought of covering politics as a he said, she said kind of story, that you report on what candidate A says and then you get candidate B's response to that. That kind of reporting, it seems to me, is really woefully inadequate these days because it just does not get to the essence of what is really happening most of the time.
I see some real changing of that approach to do more fact checking, to do more analysis of what people are saying and compare it to issues that they've taken in the past. I think that's all to the good. At the same time, I can only imagine what folks in your position, Lori, and others are feeling when you become the focus of the story so to speak, as opposed to the policy or the politician being the focus of the story.
Lori Walsh:
Independents are the fastest growing political party in South Dakota. I'm sure that's not a unique story nationwide as at least some of those people who are making that decision are frustrated with this kind of lack of bipartisanship or this divisive campaigning. Is there a change on the horizon or are we just going to be dealing with the kind of legacy of some of these independent expenditure campaigns for the foreseeable future?
Marc Johnson:
I certainly hope so. I try to be an optimist about this. Seeing the last fours years particularly and maybe the last decade before that in particular, it's hard to be terribly optimistic that a resilient democracy continues to be resilient when you have as much discord and disdain for facts and basic information as we seem to have right now. When I submitted this book to the publisher, University of Oklahoma Press, a great academic press by the way, and not just because they published my books, but a really great organization, the editor suggested that the subtitle of the book ought to be, "The radicalization of the Republican party." I thought, maybe that's going too far. I had suggested something like, "The decline of American Democracy." They argued that no, you really told the story here of how a political party had systematically become radicalized over the last 40 years.
I've thought about that, particularly since the events of January 6th at the nation's Capitol. When you see this, it's almost hard to believe still to me, you see these incredible scenes of an insurrectionist mob, many of them supporting white supremacist viewpoints, militia viewpoints, storming the Congress of the United States, to try to stop the certification of a free and fair election that in state after state had been certified by local election officials, had been reviewed by judges at every level. To think that some people in the Republican party are now being condemned by their followers for saying the person who incited those mobs should be held to account, gives me pause as to whether we can claw our way out of this cul de sac that we seem to find ourselves in.
I don't think radicalization is too big a word to use with what has happened to the GOP in so many ways, the embrace of the big lie that the election was somehow stolen from a Republican president. It really does harken back to some of the big lies that were told in the 1980 campaign against these incumbent Democratic senators. In my mind, it's not hard to see where the kind of grievance driven, fear driven, anger driven politics of the 1980 campaign winds up with blood being spilled on the steps of the United States Capitol.
Lori Walsh:
The book is called Tuesday Night Massacre. The author is Marc Johnson. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. We really appreciate it.
Marc Johnson:
Lori, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much.