Frank Fahrenkopf

In these quadrennial summers, when we are witness to both the Olympic Games and the nominating conventions of the Republicans and Democrats, it’s conventional to compare the two. The games are one of the most keenly watched television events; NBC paid an astounding $3.6 billion to buy broadcast rights for three series of games extending through 2008. Meanwhile, the networks continue to pare back their coverage of the political conventions, which are major ratings losers.

By almost any standard, the party conventions are fully devoid of the drama or intrigue that once made them must-see TV. There’s no suspense about who the nominees will be. Their running mates will have already been announced. Any controversy within the platform-writing committees will be shielded from public view.

Among the true believers who will be attending the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia is the former chairman of the Republican National Committee under Ronald Reagan, Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. This will be the 60-year-old’s ninth convention. Fahrenkopf served as RNC chairman for six years, the second-longest tenure in the party’s history. As head of the committee, he was a staunch defender of Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal and later became the subject of controversy when he signed a fund-raising letter for a campaign, headed by Lt. Col. Oliver North, to benefit the Contras opposing the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. After leaving the RNC in 1989, Fahrenkopf practiced law at a high-powered Washington firm and is now president and CEO of the American Gaming Assn., the nation’s casino operators lobby.

Fahrenkopf has been married to his college sweetheart, Mary, for 38 years, and is the father of three daughters, two of whom are also lawyers. In a conversation from his Washington home, he talked about his memory of the many conventions he has attended, what he expects from this year’s Republican gathering and the uncertain future of the American national political party convention.

*

Question: When did you attend your first national political convention, and what do you recall about it?

Answer: My first convention was the one in 1968. I was not a delegate and had never been to a convention. I was just sort of a wide-eyed kid. I enjoyed the excitement and the camaraderie a great deal. The great surprise at that convention was Richard Nixon’s naming someone out of the blue to be his running mate: Spiro Agnew. That was a shocker to everyone in the crowd.

The first convention where I was actually involved as a participant was in 1972 in Miami Beach. This was extremely memorable because that was the convention that was disrupted by the Yippies, and the convention hall was surrounded by buses that were parked bumper-to-bumper, with just a few openings where the delegates could go through. There were massive demonstrations against President Nixon and against the Vietnam War, and I was caught up in a demonstration and teargassed.

The 1976 convention was also memorable. That was in Kansas City, and at the time I was chairman of the Nevada Republican Party. We went into that convention with an unelected president, Gerald Ford. He had been selected by Congress to replace Vice President Agnew, who was forced to resign. Then Nixon resigned, and Ford was president. Going into that convention there had been a strong challenge by Ronald Reagan, and it wasn’t until the convention was well underway before Reagan’s bid was defeated.

He tried something that was very unusual at the time. He announced before the convention that if he were to win the nomination, he would ask Richard Schweiker, a senator from Pennsylvania, to be his running mate. He also tried to force Jerry Ford to name his running mate. After a vigorous debate in the Rules Committee and on the floor, that gambit was defeated. Ford went on to win the nomination and chose Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas as his running mate.

Q: Would you say that the 1976 Republican convention had the most drama and suspense of any you’ve attended?

A: No question. There really has not been a contested convention since. The Democrats had a bit of a contest in 1980, but nothing like ours in 1976. You had debates going to the floor about rules that were really crucial. It was the most momentous convention in my lifetime [because] it really went through the process of choosing the nominee. Since then, because of the early primary system, conventions have become merely rubber stamps.

Q: Given that, what is the purpose of the modern political party convention?

A: After the 1988 conventions, Roone Arledge, who was then the president of ABC News, condemned both parties for holding conventions that were a waste of time. At that time, I sat down with my counterpart at the Democratic National Committee and we put together a group to study the convention process. We came up with a proposal to scale back the conventions from four nights to three. Since the networks generally devoted about three hours a night to coverage, that was giving them back six hours of prime time. We asked that the networks give [us] back two hours, one in September and one in October, so that the Democrat and Republican nominees would have time to address the nation before the November election. We sent our proposal to the presidents of the three networks, and we never heard back from them.

But to get back to your question, a national convention is the only time when the leaders of the parties at the state and local levels actually get together in one place at one time. A great deal more goes on at these conventions than merely what happens in the hall. There’s an exchange of opinions, of election strategies and techniques. That makes them extremely valuable, even if some of the drama of the nominating process has been eliminated.

Q: But what is there about a nominating convention today that may be of news value, beyond perhaps speeches by candidates and their supporters?

A: It’s the first opportunity that the nominee and running mate have to present themselves to the American people as a team and to indicate what changes will result should they be elected. The best use of a convention to convey that sort of message to the American people was the 1992 convention in New York, where Bill Clinton and Al Gore put on what was a completely different and new type of convention. Nowhere to be seen were the leaders of the Democratic Party in the House and the Senate. Nowhere to be seen was Jesse Jackson. [Clinton and Gore] came at it with a fresh approach, saying, “We are a new kind of Democrat.”

In so many ways, Clinton broke the mold. The wisdom of the past said, you do not select for your running mate someone from the same part of the country, someone who is about the same age as you, or someone who closely shares your political philosophy. But in picking Gore, Clinton broke the rules. Here you had these two young, fresh-faced candidates who left the convention, jumped on buses and traveled around the country together spreading their message. They used the convention as a base for conveying to the American people a message of who they were, how they were different from past Democrats and how, if they were elected, they intended to change America.

This is a very important lesson for George W. Bush. He has to present himself to the American people and use this convention to convey how he is different from the Republican Party of four years ago. For Gore, interestingly enough, the challenge is much the same that Bush’s father faced in 1988. Gore needs to step out from the shadow of the president he served for eight years, just as George Bush needed to establish himself as a presence unique from Ronald Reagan. So those are just a few of the reasons why conventions can be extremely important to candidates, and to the people who watch the conventions.

Q: At least in the case where there is no incumbent, the one piece of drama that was traditionally expected at a convention was the naming of the running mate. But now even that’s disappeared.

A: It reminds me of the 1980 Republican convention, when there was a move that Henry Kissinger and some others were involved with, to make Jerry Ford co-president, and actually giving Ford some of the powers of the presidency, particularly in the area of foreign policy. We Reaganites cut that off very quickly by bringing Reagan to the floor, where he thanked the delegates for nominating him and announced that he would name George Bush as his running mate. Likewise, George Bush surprised all of us in 1988. Jim Baker [Bush’s campaign manager] and I thought we should replicate what happened in 1980 by bringing Bush to the floor on Wednesday night to announce his vice-presidential choice. Instead, he decided on Tuesday, when he arrived, to announce that his choice was Dan Quayle.

Q: How do you see political conventions evolving? What will the Republican convention be like in four or five election cycles?

A: They will no doubt be shorter. I find it hard to believe that you’ll continue to have four days and four nights. But I hope they never go away. . . . We live in a changing world. I was in charge, for instance, of the Dallas convention in 1984. We set aside an area for trucks with broadcast satellite dishes on them, and I think we had four or five trucks there. Just four years later, we had about an acre covered with satellite trucks, because the media had changed so dramatically. We used to just worry about three anchor booths for the major networks. Now, we have to have all sorts of facilities for cable and local stations, and who knows what the Internet is going to do to affect all this.

Q: What are your hopes and expectations going into this year’s Republican convention in Philadelphia?

A: I haven’t spoken to Gov. Bush, but from what I understand, he does want to make a statement that this isn’t the same old Republican Party that was in San Diego in 1996. There’s talk that they may not even have a roll call on Wednesday night, but that they might somehow spread it out. Bush may not even be there until Wednesday, but will be in different parts of the country and will be beamed back into the hall via satellite TV. Again, I suspect that they will do everything they can to try to replicate the successful convention that Clinton and Gore had in 1992 in New York.