Richard Art Viguerie (; born September 23, 1933) is an American conservative figure, pioneer of political direct mail and writer on politics. He is the current chairman of ConservativeHQ.com.
Life and career
Viguerie was born in Golden Acres, Texas, the son of Elizabeth (née Stoufflet) and Arthur Camile Viguerie. He has Cajun ancestry. His father worked as a middle-management executive for a petrochemical company, and his mother was a practical nurse. Neither of his parents were interested in politics.
Viguerie recalled what caused him to become political "was when MacArthur was fired. I was tremendously frustrated and outraged, and mad as heck at Truman... What cemented my conservative philosophy was Joe McCarthy... I was a young kid and had read Bill Buckley and one or two other books. I believed in what McCarthy did. Even when he was inaccurate, he articulated the concern about a very big problem. There are Communists in this world and that is not a figment of a few right-wingers' imaginations."
In 1957 Viguerie graduated from the University of Houston. He dropped out of law school. He served in the army reserves for six months, after which he worked as a clerk in a small oil company.
Viguerie worked for the Christian evangelist Billy James Hargis in his early career. In an autobiographical note, Viguerie wrote that in 1961 he became executive secretary of the conservative youth group Young Americans for Freedom: "Since 1965, owner of direct marketing/advertising companies such as American Target Advertising. Political/campaign strategist, activist and conservative spokesman and writer."
Viguerie has been dubbed the "funding father" of modern conservative strategy in the United States by some sources. Viguerie does not charge standard fees and expenses from his clients, rather he offers a no-loss guarantee and demands a commission (sometimes as much as 50%) and insists on keeping clients mailing lists for future, creating an extensive conservative donor database.
Viguerie founded Conservative Digest magazine in 1975 and served as its publisher for ten years. Opposing President Gerald Ford's election, Viguerie in 1976 unsuccessfully sought the vice-presidential nomination of the American Independent Party, which had been formed eight years earlier by George Wallace.
Viguerie's development and honing of national direct mail campaigns in the mid-to-late 1970s was considered revolutionary in its approach and was quickly adopted by insurgent conservative political campaigns. Conservative activist and political candidate Jeff Bell applied the strategy in 1978 to unseat longtime liberal Republican Senator Clifford Case in the 1978 New Jersey primary. Bell was defeated in the general election, but his unexpected primary victory was considered a turning point for conservative activist efforts against establishment Republicans.
Political activity
Texas Young Republicans In 1952 and 1956, as a young Republican, Viguerie volunteered for Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential campaigns in Texas. In 1960, when Republican John Tower ran for Senate against Lyndon Johnson, he served as Tower’s Houston campaign manager. Johnson ran for both the Senate seat and the vice presidency, and he won both. When Johnson vacated his Senate seat to become Vice President, Viguerie helped Tower in the subsequent run-off, which Tower won (becoming the first Republican Senator in Texas history).
1964 Goldwater support Senator Barry Goldwater publicly criticized the Republican establishment, including President Eisenhower (viewed by the American public as the World War II liberator of Europe). In 1960, Goldwater called Eisenhower's domestic program "a dime store New Deal." With ghostwriter L. Brent Bozell Jr., Goldwater published The Conscience of a Conservative, saying its purpose was "to awaken the American people to a realization of how far we had moved from the old constitutional concepts toward the new welfare state." The book, calling for a return to conservative principles and a harder stance on communism, inspired many young conservatives, including Viguerie.
In July 1960, when it seemed that Richard Nixon's Republican Party nomination for president was a foregone conclusion, conservatives tried to shape the party's platform to influence him away from what they saw as Eisenhower moderation. They also hoped to convince Nixon to choose either Barry Goldwater or Walter Judd as his running mate. When their attempts all failed and Nixon choose moderate Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., they saw it as pandering to a liberal consensus represented by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Some conservatives even believed that this outcome was proof that the Republican Party would never change and they would need to look elsewhere if conservatism was to succeed. Though still in Texas, Viguerie would later recall his distaste over the situation, saying "I never was a Nixon fan."
In September 1960 a group of young conservative activists met at "Great Elm", the estate of the family of William F. Buckley Jr. in Sharon, Connecticut. The produced a short exposition of their vision of conservative principles and how they should be implemented which was known as the Sharon Statement. This group of activists would take up the name Young Americans for Freedom.
In August, 1961 Viguerie became executive secretary of Young Americans for Freedom. Viguerie would later recall, "I moved to New York, where their offices were. That was no small thing for me, a Texas kid. I lived in Greenwich Village. I had a great time and went to a lot of parties. The conservatives and socialists were two extremes and found and solicited each other's company. I hung around the White Horse, and lived around the corner on St. Marks Place. I knew [democratic socialist] Michael Harrington quite well, and saw Bill Buckley and Bill Rusher. Things were loose and free then, none of the uptightness of the later sixties and seventies. We had a lotta fun."
In the role of executive secretary of Young Americans for Freedom Viguerie gained relationships with William F. Buckley, William A. Rusher, Frank Meyer, and other conservative intellectuals. Viguerie later recalled that inspired by these thinkers "I tried to get as caught up as I could in the classics of conservative thought, but it didn't take long for me to realize I’d never really catch up. ...[I realized] what we didn’t have were marketers. I made a conscious decision to fill that niche—that hole in the marketplace—by immersing myself in the study of marketing for the next 10 years." That year, F. Clifton White began travelling the nation exhorting conservatives to gain control of their local Republican Party organizations so they could elect conservative delegates to the Republican National Convention during the next electoral season.
Viguerie's Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), had been founded by William F. Buckley Jr. and would play an important role in helping Goldwater secure the Republican nomination. On March 7, 1962 Viguerie and the YAF held a sold out event entitled "A Conservative Rally for World Liberation from Communism" at Madison Square Garden in New York City attended by 18,500 mostly young people with senators John Tower, Strom Thurmond, and Goldwater as featured speakers. Viguerie would later write of his opinion of the event, saying "I would nominate the Madison Square Garden rally as the day the modern conservative movement had its public debut. Before that day, what we in the conservative movement were doing was mostly out of the public eye. But when thousands were lined up around Madison Square Garden and the speeches and sellout crowd were front-page, 'above the fold' news the next day in The New York Times, the conservative movement leapt onto the national political stage — and it was a movement largely inspired by Goldwater and the new brand of conservatism he shared with intellectuals such as William F. Buckley, Jr., M. Stanton Evans, Russell Kirk, Frank S. Meyer, William F. Rusher and L. Brent Bozell Jr."
In late 1962 YAF moved their headquarters to Washington, D.C. Viguerie moved into a house there on Capital Hill with his new bride Elaine O'Leary Viguerie. The organization had racked up $20,000 in debt and Viguerie had to seek donations from wealthy donors on the right such as Eddie Rickenbacker, Charles Edison, and J. Howard Pew. He found this method distasteful, "I realized I didn't want to do that kind of thing, and figured there must be a better way. So, I started raising money by mail, but the secretaries could only write so many letters a day. So I said, there must be a better way than this, and one thing led to another, and I got into direct mail."
Viguerie attended that Republican National Convention, held in San Francisco's Cow Palace, as an alternate delegate. He recalled years later, "I was there at the Cow Palace in 1964. I was in the rafters, where the boos for Rockefeller came from." He also recalled coming across a large group of people surrounding a film star, "It was Ronald Reagan. Two years later, he was the governor there."
Viguerie would later write about the divisive atmosphere in the Republican party after Goldwater's defeat. Conservative members like himself were "Angry...about the criticism verging on sabotage Senator Goldwater received from the Republican establishment" and "insulted...over the personal attacks...received at the hands of establishment Republicans". The main voice for remaining within the Republican party was William F. Buckley a policy Viguerie shared, "we had a sense that even though Goldwater had lost the election, his grassroots support demonstrated that millions of Americans thought he was right on many issues. ...We saw the establishment leadership of the Republican Party as intellectually bankrupt, and we believed that if we could just get the message out, we could [win]."
Direct-mail company Though Goldwater lost, Viguerie gained knowledge of the direct-mail strategy and would later become expert in it. In early 1965 he went to the clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives which by law had a record of every donor to a presidential campaign that gave over $50 which it made available for public inspection. Viguerie copied by longhand 12,500 donors that had given to Goldwater's 1964 campaign. This was the beginning of a grass-roots conservative mailing list that would continue to grow throughout Viguerie's career. Viguerie, holding that the mainstream news media was biased, later stated that this strategy allowed conservatism to bypass two obstacles, "Thanks to direct mail, conservatives — and their candidates — were able to become an independent, vibrant force, free of the fetters imposed by the Republican political hierarchy and the liberal media." With only $4,000 in savings he began his direct-mail company "Richard A. Viguerie Company, Inc." His first client was Young Americans for Freedom, but he lost the account within six weeks. According to Viguerie this was due to "one of the frequent upheavals typical of an organization run by a bunch of college kids." The company grew as it found other clients the Conservative Caucus, the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the National Right to Work Committee, the American Conservative Union, Sen. Jesse Helms' National Congressional Club and Gun Owners of America. His company also marketed many conservatives seeking elected office including "congressmen Phil Crane and Bob Dornan, Ron Paul, John Ashbrook, Sens. Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, California state senator H. L. 'Bill' Richardson, and candidates Max Rafferty, Howard Phillips, Jeff Bell and G. Gordon Liddy."