CONVENTION '96: WHERE'S THE PARTY?

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Arrayed against them was a burgeoning New Right in war paint. It wanted nothing less than to demolish the welfare state, including Social Security, and roll back federal powers over business and the states, while aggressively challenging the communist world, to the brink of war (and beyond). Its intellectual center was the National Review and its founder, William F. Buckley, who started the magazine in 1955 in part to reclaim conservatism from the cranks, conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites who had dragged it into the phosphorescent margins of American politics.

Catholic, patrician and Ivy League, Buckley was not entirely like the movement he summoned into shape. The New Rightists drew their strength from the fast-growing Sunbelt states of the South and the West. Their hero was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Richard Nixon did not excite them. Forget for a moment his impeccable credentials as a cold warrior. He had spent eight years as Vice President to the pliant Dwight Eisenhower, a man the Old Right had never entirely forgiven for winning the 1952 G.O.P. nomination away from their longtime hero, Ohio Senator Robert Taft.

Real rightists thought Nixon too had a squishy center. To the disgust of the Goldwater faction, he had spent much of the 1960 campaign courting Nelson Rockefeller, the lustrous epitome of the party's East Coast liberals. The last straw came on the eve of the G.O.P. Convention. At a meeting in Rockefeller's Manhattan apartment (read: Satan's throne), Nixon agreed to liberalize the G.O.P. platform, in part by adding an unequivocal civil rights plank. Goldwater compared the meeting to Neville Chamberlain's capitulation to Hitler at Munich. For the final insult, Nixon chose Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., a pedigreed symbol of the Eastern aristocrats, as his running mate.

To the red-blooded right, Nixon's defeat that November proved it was pointless to court the centrist vote already seduced by Kennedy. Even before J.F.K. moved into the White House, the New Right began remaking the G.O.P. in its own image. In 1960 Goldwater published The Conscience of a Conservative, an outline of his beliefs and his game plan for victory that eventually sold 3.5 million copies. For Buchanan, who read it as a student at Georgetown University, it was "our New Testament." Immediately after the election, activist F. Clifton White organized a meeting of 32 businessmen, lawyers, oilmen and bankers as the nucleus of a drive to nominate a conservative, preferably Goldwater, in 1964.

The rest is bloody and familiar history. Goldwater won the nomination (after a nominating speech by political newcomer Ronald Reagan) and ran, forthrightly, as Goldwater. He proposed to make Social Security voluntary and eliminate farm subsidies, positions his party would not dare to suggest again seriously for almost three decades. He supported giving nato field commanders the authority to launch nuclear weapons. On Election Day, Goldwater was crushed, getting just 39% of the vote. The G.O.P. lost two seats in the Senate, 37 in the House. It was a sign of Bob Dole's popularity in his district that he managed to hold onto his House seat, though by just 5,000 votes, while Goldwater, whom Dole had supported, lost Kansas handily.