'Bill Brock Believes'
Give credit where it's due
In the early fall of 1970, when Congressman Bill Brock of Chattanooga challenged the re-election of US Senator Albert Gore of Carthage, the late columnist Joe Hatcher raised a ruckus about a Brock campaign billboard.
Hatcher was the venerable political writer at The Tennessean and, some insisted, he mainly channeled on Page One the Democratic political preferences of our editor John L. Seigenthaler. (This was back in the day when Nashville had two dailies, and the pages of the Nashville Banner could likewise be counted on to channel its Republican publisher James G. Stahlman, only less furtively.)
Anyhow, the Brock billboards in question were simple things, as all good political billboards tried to be in that day. You saw a picture of Brock’s handsome face on the right side and, on the left side, just three words:
“Bill Brock Believes”
That’s all it said. And yet, in the rising cultural/political “southern strategy” of President Richard Nixon and the national GOP, that’s all it took to locate Brock in the partisan spectrum. I remember spotting these ads myself - and wondering, as I drove, what exactly was it that Congressman Brock believed. I was in my last year of college, working nights and weekends in the Tennessean newsroom, and my daily commute into town from Murfreesboro took me past at least one of these boards.
Hatcher’s column continued, “Big billboards across the state now proclaim BILL BROCK BELIEVES. But the billboards don’t say what Bill Brock believes…”
The piece recounted various “no” votes Brock had cast in his first years in Congress, including spending bills for health, education, regional development, higher education, clean air – all policy subjects that The Tennessean editorially supported.
Compared to such weighty topics, I admit now that this billboard episode was a most trivial matter. But it was fun to write about (I did so myself) and, in fact, our needling must have struck a nerve somewhere inside the Brock campaign. Two weeks later, new billboards appeared on roadsides, adding three words to the text.
“Bill Brock Believes…What You Believe”
A small victory for the morning newspaper, and of course it was thoroughly forgotten two short months later when Brock defeated Gore (51% to 47%). He went on to serve as Tennessee’s junior senator for six years.
That tiny skirmish was only one memory, among hundreds, that came to mind this week when I read the news that Bill Brock had died, at age 90.
These days we miss elected leaders like Brock. He was a Navy veteran, a traditional conservative, and we disagreed with many of his votes. But he did not disparage his political opponents between elections. He took criticism in stride.
He once opposed President Gerald Ford’s Republican nominee to the TVA Board, and the man was never confirmed. In my own time as Washington correspondent for the newspaper, Brock was always accessible and willing to explain why he voted this way or that. He didn’t mind being bothered with an after-hours phone call from a reporter.
In Tennessee, we remember 1970 as the year when not only Brock was elected to the Senate, joining Senator Howard Baker in Washington, but also the year Winfield Dunn of Memphis became governor. There were now three Republicans elected statewide.
Brock’s Senate years ended when he lost to the Democrat Jim Sasser in 1976. It was a hard year for most Republicans, only two years after the Watergate break-in, the televised investigative hearings in 1973, Nixon’s resignation in the summer of 1974, and then the pardon that President Ford granted to Nixon.
But in Brock’s post-Senate years, he became chairman of the Republican National Committee, and his influence over the 1980 national convention was profound. Republicans had been in high-level disagreement over how to move past Nixon and, in particular, where to hold that next convention.
Some party leaders favored meeting somewhere in the Sunbelt, as a show of prosperity, but Brock disagreed. He preferred that national TV viewers see Republican delegates gathering in a city that was struggling with President Jimmy Carter’s economy. Brock preferred Detroit, and he prevailed. And there Ronald Reagan was nominated.
A few months later, in early November, Reagan won big and Brock’s career as a national and international leader was not over. He became Reagan’s Secretary of Labor and also the U.S. Trade Representative, serving with distinction in both roles.
In the end, what Bill Brock believed was no longer a mystery.
Brock could argue with the DNC chair and then have dinner with him. I miss leaders who had friends across the aisle.