Just a few years later we had the Halloween Massacre.
Gerald Ford, in order to avert an insurgency from the right, dumped Nelson Rockefeller and other moderates. Thus ushering in the rise of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld.
Ford v Reagan signaled the end of the moderate Republican...
Prior to the election of 1960, the two leaders of the Republican Party had been Senator Robert Taft and President Dwight Eisenhower. In 1952, those two had fought a close and bitter battle all the way to the convention for the Republican nomination for president. It was only through a questionable ploy at the convention that Eisenhower managed to win the nomination.
There are two points that should be drawn about these men in order to understand the subject at hand. First, Taft was a non-interventionist in foreign policy, to the extent that he was opposed to American involvement in World War II, the Nuremburg Trials and the formation of NATO. Second, Eisenhower more than once said that he was not about to repeal FDR’s New Deal. When Eisenhower left office after eight years, the income tax rate was 91 per cent for the highest income earners.
One last point needs to be made in order to delineate the dichotomy that was to come. Around this time—early to middle sixties––there was actually a moderate wing to the Republican Party. People like Senator Mark Hatfield, Governor George Romney, Senator Charles Percy, Senator Jacob Javits, Governor Raymond Shafer, Senator Charles Mathias, Governor William Scranton, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Congressman Pete McCloskey, these and others constituted a minority, but an influential one, within the GOP. As many have noted, what began to alter the Republican Party, and eventually made its moderate wing extinct, was the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964. That nomination brought to the forefront the extreme rightwing elements of the party—the John Birch Society types—who declared war on the moderate elements in the party. Although the Goldwater forces lost, they succeeded in establishing a beachhead in the GOP. Senator Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was against the high taxation rate, and felt President Johnson was soft on communism. He became the first Republican nominee to consciously run on a Southern Strategy, one which was designed to break up the Democratic majority in the south by employing racist symbology. That strategy, plus the fact that Goldwater was from Arizona, began to rebuild the Republican party on a Southern/Western axis.
This included California Governor Ronald Reagan. Reagan made a last-minute televised appeal for Goldwater in 1964. And that appeal first put him on the national political map. At that time, the highest political office Reagan had attained was president of the Screen Actors Guild.
It was not just Reagan who supported Goldwater; it was also William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley’s Young Americans For Freedom supplied the shock troops for the Goldwater campaign. Goldwater was trounced, but Buckley and Reagan now started to pull the Republican party to the far right. In a blatant effort to exterminate them, Buckley began to defame and run against those from the moderate wing of the party: for instance, Charles Goodell and John Lindsay. The very threat of a Reagan run in 1976 provoked President Gerald Ford to perform the Halloween Massacre. That panic-stricken move, for all intents and purposes empowered the neoconservative movement and triggered the rise of Dick Cheney...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-halloween-massacre-at-the-white-house-92668509/
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