THE WAY THEY WERE...

I was a bit surprised to learn that several prominent GOP politicians were moderates in the 60s and would be denounced as RINOs today.  Newt Gingrich headed the New Orleans Rockefeller for President group when he was a graduate student in history at Tulane. When Donald Rumsfeld was in the House, he was part of the "Young Turks" who supported moderate conservative approaches to governing. After Goldwater's historic defeat, he wanted to remake the GOP into "a reasonable, constructive, and effective force" and helped replace the GOP minority leader Charles Halleck with the more moderate Gerald Ford. After he joined the Nixon Administration, he became Machiavellian. In 1969, Dick Cheney was a graduate student in political science at the University of Wisconsin and "was thoughtful, open-minded and distinctly moderate. He had many liberal friends and even some friends on the radical fringes of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)."

SOURCE: Kabaservice