When Linwood Holton died Nov. 2 at age 98, just about every obituary recalled and showed films and pictures of Virginia’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction walking his daughter into a primarily black high school in Richmond.
That was in 1970, at the height of controversy over court-ordered integration of public schools in the South. While Southern Democrat governors such as Alabama’s George Wallace famously "stood in the schoolhouse door" to block the admission of black students, Republican Holton appeared to be opening the doors up with his own children.
The scene moved a nation and, as it turned out, Holton was on the right side of history. Under the Nixon administration, the Department of Health Education and Welfare and the Justice Department worked closely with local school boards and parents’ groups to carefully oversee integration. Within a few years, nearly all schools in the South were integrated without incident.
As a figure of inarguable consequence, "Lin" Holton should have been a natural for higher office. As it turned out, he never held office after leaving the governorship in 1973 and ended up supporting Democrats in his twilight years — notably son-in-law Tim Kaine, former governor of Virginia and now U.S. senator, and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 runningmate.
"I supported Lin because I wanted a Republican governor, but he was not a conservative and the Republican party was growing increasingly conservative," Jim Gilmore, former Virginia governor and one-time Republican National Committee chairman, told Newsmax. "The party changed with the times, but he didn’t."
Morton Blackwell, Republican National Committeeman from Virginia and longtime conservative activist, agreed.
"Conservatives, including me, had rallied behind Linwood Holton for Virginia governor in 1969," Blackwell recalled, "I provided him an excellent statewide youth coordinator whom I had trained. At the 1972 Virginia Republican State Convention, Gov. Holton tried to impose his own choice as state party chairman.
"Instead, a conservative majority of the convention, including me, elected [conservative] Dick Obenshain as state chairman. From that moment, Holton acted as if conservative Republicans were his enemies."
The coalition of fiscal and cultural conservatives who rose in the 1970s and helped Ronald Reagan come within an eyelash of taking the presidential nomination from President Gerald Ford was evident in the Old Dominion state. Led by State Party Chairman Richard Obenshain, they swept nearly all of the state’s national convention delegates.
Holton remained a Ford supporter.
In 1978, polls showed the still-respected former governor easily winning a general election for Virginia’s open Senate seat. But, Republican activists agreed, he would not win a statewide convention or primary because he was simply out of step with his party’s conservative grassroots.
Deciding on a convention as the venue for choosing a Senate nominee, Republicans oversaw a six-ballot fight between Obenshain, former Navy Secretary John Warner, and Holton. In effect, it was a dress rehearsal for campaigns of the future — ideologically-driven conservatives and the "celebrity campaigner" with "star power" — Warner had vast personal wealth and wife Elizabeth Taylor commanded vast audiences and much publicity.
Obenshain edged out Warner and won the nomination. Shortly thereafter, the nominee was killed in the crash of a single-engine plane. Warner was given the nomination and went on to serve 30 years in the Senate.
And Holton? He placed a distant third and was eliminated early on the fifth ballot.
Linwood Holton was no doubt a trailblazer for Republicans in the South. The Harvard Law School graduate and U.S. Navy veteran of World War II ran for governor in 1965 when the party was in the proverbial telephone booth. With help from Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, he did better than any Republican before him.
He won the governorship four years later with 52% over Democrat William Battle, former ambassador to Australia and son of a former governor.
Holton was a leader of consequence. But he was also a man of his times and, when it came to the Republican Party in the 1970s, the times were clearly changing.
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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