1972: A Study in Contrasts

In 1972, the Republican Party held a carefully scripted convention, which became the prototype for what conventions have become in the last few decades. By contrast, the Democrats, at their convention that year, let it all hang out. Whether that contributed to one of the biggest Republican landslides in history at the general election and, if so, what was cause and what was effect, is difficult to pin down exactly.


The Republican incumbent, Richard Nixon, was all but unopposed for renomination. Two Republican congressmen challenged him, one from the left and one from the right, but neither challenge was serious. Pete McCloskey won one delegate during the primaries. With Nixon firmly in control of the party machinery as an incumbent president, and firmly in control of the convention, where only one delegate opposed his renomination, there was nothing stopping his campaign from turning the convention into what the television world would in later decades label an infomercial.

Much has been written about how television was, first, Nixon's undoing, in 1960, and then the vehicle for his comeback when he devoted a great deal of his campaign resources toward projecting a good image on television during his successful 1968 campaign. That same type of effort was carried forward to the 1972 campaign.

Spin doctor extraordinaire David Gergen, in Eyewitness to Power, recalls:

"You're in charge of the convention script," [Dwight Chapin] told me....I was to coordinate all of the speeches in the hall, ensuring that they stayed within tight time constraints and didn't slop over each other. Implicit was the challenge of keeping the speeches crisp and fresh for the large audience that watched conventions in those days.

Next: The Democrats take a different approach.