Making Foreign Policy at the Grassroots: Cold War Politics and the 1976 Republican Primary

On June 28, 1976, Ronald Reagan wrote to Southern Chairmen’s Association member Clark Reed to explain his stance on the issues affecting his challenge to incumbent President Gerald Ford. What at first looked to be a hopeless cause for Reagan was shaping up to be a battle that the former California governor could potentially win. Reagan told Reed he opposed mandatory school busing (which he said should be settled by “local communities”), a national health insurance program, and the Humphrey-Hawkins bill. Reagan also took the opportunity to take stock of his campaign and its evolution since the previous November, noting that the months of “campaigning has convinced me as well of something I didn’t know when I began: the American people are ready to halt the retreat of the last several years that has gone under the name of detente.” Public opposition to détente—and more broadly, Ford’s foreign policy—jump-started Reagan’s campaign after defeats in a number of early primary elections. Reagan did not intend to make foreign affairs the cornerstone of his candidacy, but refocused his attention to the Cold War after he found audiences responded enthusiastically to his call for expanding America’s global reach to fight communism. Americans wanted to refight the Cold War, Reagan concluded, as they had demonstrated their belief that the “best guarantee for peace—the guarantee our Soviet adversaries understand—is military strength.”¹

As Reagan hinted in his letter, grassroots activism in 1976 provided the context for his campaign’s focus on national defense and foreign affairs. These grassroots activists were a diverse group. Eastern European immigrants upset over the Helsinki Accords and the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaties (SALT), defense workers and military personnel who lost their jobs to budget cutbacks, anti-Castro Cuban Americans, and southern Democrats angered over American involvement in Southern Africa, all gravitated toward Reagan in 1976 to expand American military might. While recent historians have noted that the recruiting of new groups of Americans within the coalition of the Republican Party in the 1970s propelled Reagan to power in 1980, it was not partisan mobilization alone that made Reagan’s campaign a winning failure.² Structural changes in the 1970s enabled grassroots agency, influencing partisan politics and the “intermestic” dimensions of the Cold War.³ The end of the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the decline of the American economy created a heady and combustive political and cultural atmosphere in the United States that formed the context for foreign policy debates in the mid-1970s. Reagan and his supporters also exploited changes to campaign finance law and tectonic shifts in American electoral politics (particularly the increasing advantage special interests and activists exerted over the party system), leading to the rightward shift in U.S. foreign policy.⁴ The various structural factors that created the conditions for a more hawkish approach to foreign policymaking in the 1970s in turn shaped Reagan’s first run for the presidency. Voters’ distrust of détente, and their general interest in adopting more hard-line national defense policies, convinced the former California governor that the country would embrace an interventionist, aggressive, and uncompromising foreign policy agenda were he elected. The political coalition that changed Reagan’s campaign strategy in 1976 therefore reflected the breakdown of U.S.-Soviet détente well before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, making further negotiations between the United States and Soviet Union difficult. Without widespread public legitimacy, future diplomatic agreements between the United States and communist powers were elusive.⁵

Rather than viewing Reagan’s unequivocal opposition to détente in 1976 as a forgone conclusion, therefore, this essay suggests his foreign policy agenda changed over time, due to the public’s reaction to changes in international and domestic politics during the 1970s. Only after Reagan was convinced that voters had repudiated détente did he commit to a hard-line foreign policy. While Reagan was a conservative ideologue, he was also a politician who was willing to modify his political agenda to...