Taking a trip down GOP convention lane

The Republican National Convention produced its share of pomp and promises, many of which we have addressed in earlier editorials. Humility is needed in evaluating positions and predicting what will unfold from here. Nothing, as we have learned repeatedly, is guaranteed.

The realities of current production deadlines mean that this was written well before former President Donald Trump took the stage in Milwaukee to accept his party’s nomination. On Sunday, we will consider his speech, the convention itself, and where we are as a nation as this election season marches on. We’ll make judgments, prognostications and, if history is a guide, possibly some mistakes.

The Republican convention — like its Democratic counterpart — has been a topic of interest for Newsday’s editorial board throughout the newspaper’s existence. That was true from the first convention the board had an opportunity to examine — the 1944 GOP gathering in Chicago. With World War II raging, the board contrasted that chaos with the dependability of U.S. elections, an appraisal unsettling now after the attempted assassination of Trump.

“The Old World has proverbially decided their elections with the latest in bullets and shiny revolvers,” the board wrote, “while the United States, even in these topsy-turvy days, approaches its time-honored and traditional national elections with no hint of change in its method of ruling by ballot.”

So let us take you on a trip through some of Newsday’s analysis of Republican conventions across the decades, beginning with 1964, whose similarities to now include a rightward drift by the party and the presence of a contender from New York.

As that convention opened in San Francisco, Newsday’s board explained the unexpected rise of conservative Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, poised to become the GOP nominee. The board described an American milieu that has a modern-day echo.

“There is a latent vein of conservatism in this country on which Goldwater has capitalized,” the board wrote. “There is a latent sense of unease that looks for helplessly simple answers to the agonizingly complex questions that face us as well as the whole world.”

Later, like all of its predecessors and followers, Newsday’s board focused on a local politician — New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. A moderate, Rocky was the front-runner in early 1963. But his remarriage to a woman 18 years his junior doomed his chances. The convention featured frequent clashes between supporters of Goldwater and Rockefeller, and boos during the governor’s convention address.

The board termed his speech “Rocky’s Finest Hour,” writing that he “never spoke with more fire than he did last night to the Republican National Convention. He was addressing a largely hostile audience, and he knew it in advance. Yet he was imperturbable, he radiated good humor, and he spoke out of obvious concern.”

But the board got one element wrong when it declared the Goldwater-inspired party platform “broad enough” to be accepted by “all Republicans and perhaps even by some Democrats . . . ” Four months later, Goldwater lost to President Lyndon Johnson in a landslide.

The board was right on the money four years later when it questioned 1968 GOP nominee Richard Nixon’s choice of obscure Maryland Gov. Spiro Agnew as his running mate. Worried about the line of succession after the recent assassination of John F. Kennedy, the board called Agnew “a comparative nonentity” who lacked experience. “What kind of President would he make?” The nation never found out. In 1973, Agnew resigned after pleading guilty to tax evasion in connection with kickbacks he received from contractors during his political career in Maryland.

A different form of skulduggery with modern overtones emerged at the 1952 GOP convention in Chicago, when the editorial board considered a campaign by candidate Robert Taft’s Southern supporters who walked out of several state conventions and “set up rump conventions” to declare their choices as those states’ official national convention delegates. “Chicanery of this sort used to be popular and effective,” the board wrote. “It won’t work anymore.” And it did not. Delegates voted down the maneuver and Dwight D. Eisenhower, the board’s choice for president, got the nomination and cruised to victory in November. Newsday’s opining included praise for three local delegates — Rep. Leonard Hall, Nassau County Executive J. Russel Sprague and Suffolk GOP chairman R. Ford Hughes — for working “tirelessly” on behalf of Eisenhower.

The 1980 convention in Detroit also foreshadowed the one that just wrapped in Milwaukee. The editorial board referred to nominee Ronald Reagan’s platform as backward-looking and worried whether it “reflects the mood of most of the electorate, much less the needs of the nation.” Given his overwhelming victory over incumbent Jimmy Carter, Reagan was apparently on to something.

But Newsday’s board foresaw the platform’s troubling evocations when it noted that “it’s hard to escape the impression that in this one the Republicans are displaying a misplaced nostalgia for the past as much as they are drawing a blueprint for the future.”

It’s hard to escape, in other words, the presaging of making American great again.