Laura Jane Gifford. The Center Cannot Hold: The 1960 Presidential Election and the Rise of Modern Conservatism. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009. x + 242 pp. $32.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-87580-404-0.
Reviewed by David Stebenne
Published on H-1960s (August, 2011)
Commissioned by Ian Rocksborough-Smith (University of the Fraser Valley)
How the Presidential Election of 1960 Helped Shape the GOP's Future
A lot has already been published about the presidential election of 1960, but Laura Jane Gifford’s new book shows that there still are new and interesting things to say about it. The Center Cannot Hold is focused on how that election was shaped by emerging tensions within the Republican Party between its moderate-to-liberal wing, headed by incumbent president Dwight D. Eisenhower, and its more strongly conservative one, of which William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater were the best known leaders then.
Gifford organized her study by looking intensively at six important aspects (one chapter is devoted to each) of that emerging rift: Nelson Rockefeller’s quest both to succeed Eisenhower as leader of the moderate-to-liberal wing and to chart a bolder course for such Republicans; GOP efforts to increase their share of African American votes in the key swing states of the North; National Review’s contribution to the debate over whom strongly conservative people should support for president in 1960; young Republican activists and especially the most strongly conservative ones; GOP efforts to win South Carolina and to expand in Dixie more generally in 1960; and the Nixon campaign’s ineffectual efforts in 1960 to win the support of voters of eastern European ancestry by emphasizing Cold War issues.
Those six windows into how the growing rift among conservatives contributed to the defeat of the Nixon-Lodge ticket in 1960 help clarify why that happened. Most contribute fresh insights into what by now seems an all-too-familiar story of a vague, unconfident Nixon out-debated and out-campaigned by the telegenic and well-spoken John F. Kennedy. For example, Gifford’s chapter on Nelson Rockefeller reveals how poorly he organized his abortive bid for the GOP nomination in 1960. Rather than work to create a corps of supporters within the ranks of party activists, Rockefeller chose instead to articulate a message mostly by talking to national party leaders and by speaking to voters at public events around the country. Ignoring the crucial middle tier of the party nomination process proved fatal in 1960 and afterward, and undermined significantly, Gifford argues persuasively, moderate-to-liberal Republicans’ efforts to retain control of the national GOP.
The chapter on the National Review reveals very clearly just how ambivalent strongly conservative Republicans were about Nixon’s candidacy, how little energy they invested in his election that year, and how crucial Barry Goldwater’s active support for the Nixon-Lodge ticket was then to persuading New Right Republicans simply to vote for it.
The chapter on young Republican activists is interesting because it explores three different groups (National Students for Rockefeller, Youth for Goldwater, and College Youth for Nixon). Giffords’s research indicates that Rockefeller’s seeming disinterest in grassroots organizing led to a missed opportunity here. Had the Rockefeller camp helped organize and fund National Students for Rockefeller properly, the rise of the New Right among young Republicans would at least have been blunted. Strongly conservative young Republicans, in contrast, found more backers among their elders and an articulate leader in Barry Goldwater. Perhaps crucial, as The Center Cannot Hold illuminates, was the difference between a leading liberal Republican who cared most about becoming president and a leading conservative Republican who cared most about reorienting the Republican Party to pursue different policies. With respect to that key difference, Nixon was more like Rockefeller than Goldwater, which contributed to the Republicans loss of the youth vote (except in the South and far West) in 1960.
The chapter on the Nixon-Lodge campaign’s efforts to capture the votes of so-called white ethnics of eastern European origin by emphasizing Cold War issues was entirely new, at least to this reviewer. In a sense, GOP strategists here were ahead of their time in 1960 because the Democrats had not yet done much to alienate that kind of voter. The Democrats’ decision to nominate a Catholic candidate who often sounded like a hawk also did much to undercut this particular GOP strategy. Less emphasized by Gifford but also important was how much more run by mainline Protestants the GOP of that era was, which made the task of finding effective surrogates to help persuade white Catholics of eastern European ancestry to vote Republican in 1960 very difficult.
The two chapters of The Center Cannot Hold that deal with GOP efforts to win more black votes in the North and more southern states are less original, but useful in reminding the reader that Nixon, who was his own chief strategist, tried to do both and in the end, as a result, succeeded in doing neither.
The Center Cannot Hold is not without flaws. The related issues of foreign competition, inflation, and organized labor are not dealt with directly and intensively, but doing so would have revealed other key divisions between moderate and more conservative Republicans. Even more serious, Gifford does not take moderate conservatism seriously as a distinct political category, which blurs her discussion of Eisenhower-era Republicanism. Even so, she has written a useful book that students of the modern Republican Party would do well to consult.
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Citation:
David Stebenne. Review of Gifford, Laura Jane, The Center Cannot Hold: The 1960 Presidential Election and the Rise of Modern Conservatism.
H-1960s, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32632
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