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Arizonan had the delegates’ hearts, minds, and votes. But Nixon did hit the trail for Goldwater and probably campaigned harder than any other national Republican figure in 1964, save Goldwater himself. Goldwater took note and would not forget his sometime friend’s efforts. He had gotten over his animosity toward Nixon and was deeply appreciative of Nixon’s tireless work after many moderate and liberal Republicans had abandoned him.
    Despite Goldwater’s triumph at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1964, his nomination did not immediately herald a new era for the GOP—especially in Washington. For many years before and after 1964, liberal and moderate Republican Senators met on Capitol Hill each week for lunch at what was called “The Wednesday Club.” In 1967, following the GOP’s midterm comeback, a large number of newly elected Senators joined with the incumbent Republican Senators to propose new government programs and controls while denouncing conservatives in the party as a “minority of a minority.” Senators attending included Hugh Scott and Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, Chuck Percy of Illinois, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, Ed Brooke of Massachusetts, Jacob Javits of New York, Charles Mathias of Maryland, Clifford Case of New Jersey, and Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, among others. In the 1960s and into the mid-seventies, the Wednesday Club was considered by many to be an important incubator for GOP progressive thought. Today, The Wednesday Club no longer exists. Without Reagan’s 1976 challenge of the incumbent but unelected Ford, the Republican Party would most likely have continued its leftward drift.
    Goldwater lost in a landslide due to the harshness of rhetoric, but also because of Lyndon Johnson’s dirty campaign and the memory of a martyred President. Still, conservatives knew the Goldwater effort wasn’t meaningless. The effort, for the first time, introduced real, conservative solutions to the problems faced by Americans.
    The Republican National Committee, which previously had a direct mail house file of only 40,000 names, had over 600,000 direct mail contributors by the time of Goldwater’s loss. Yet the elected leadership of the GOP was moving to the center, and GOP candidates running in 1966 did not run as the children of Goldwater. By and large, they ran as traditional Republicans who were defenders of the status quo. The one notable exception was the new Governor elected in California.
    Reagan had won in a landslide primary over his liberal opponent, San Francisco Mayor George Christopher, and defeated incumbent Democrat Edmund G. “Pat” Brown in the general election by over a million votes. Brown had handily defeated Richard Nixon four years earlier, nearly destroying Nixon’s political fortunes.
    In both the primary and general election, Reagan continued to hammer at the existing order and hone the same message he had used in campaigning for Goldwater two years earlier. 1966 was a comeback year for the GOP, but not because of ideology or because the party was moving in a new direction. Instead, it was somewhat of a backlash year against then President Johnson. More importantly, GOP voters who had voted for Johnson in 1964 or did not participate in that election returned to the fold, voting in their natural and normal patterns for an off-year election.
    Brown’s campaign, misunderstanding Reagan’s appeal, ran half-hour commercials of Brown, which included the Governor’s telling a group of assembled schoolchildren, “and don’t forget, it was an actor who shot Lincoln.” 16 California voters were appalled, including Dan Blocker, who played Hoss Cartwright on the popular show Bonanza . Blocker renounced his endorsement of Brown, and Lyn Nofziger of the Reagan campaign did everything he could to exacerbate Brown’s impolitic predicament with the media.
    Separate from the Republican Party, an intellectual and political “conservative movement” was developing, though