Word: campaigns
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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During his senior year, Finch plunged into the successful congressional campaign of Norris Poulson, later mayor of Los Angeles. Only 21, he went to Washington as Poulson's executive secretary, and soon struck up an acquaintance with another freshman California Congressman down the hall. At the end of the day, Nixon and Finch would talk politics?"war games," in Finch's words?and found that they generally agreed. For Finch, 13 years Nixon's junior, it was, as he recollects, "all very flattering." On Nixon's urging, Finch returned to California two years later to get a law degree from...
...years as chairman of the Los Angeles County Republican Committee?a big post for a man in his early 30s?he was invited to Washington by Nixon in 1958 to handle the then Vice President's bid for the 1960 presidential nomination. That year he became Nixon's campaign director. Many observers of that contest maintain that if Nixon had not persisted in meddling with every detail of the campaign?an unfortunate tendency he learned to master in 1968?he would have become President eight years sooner...
...Finch shepherded George Murphy through his victorious senatorial campaign. Two years later, in 1966, he won his own election as Lieutenant Governor of California, after what then-Aide William Callender calls a "slide-rule precision campaign that for timing, vigor, and calculation was classic." Finch polled the biggest majority any California Republican had ever achieved in a statewide race, and 92,000 more votes than Ronald Reagan received for Governor. As the returns piled up for his first political victory since college, Finch cried: "How sweet it is! How sweet...
Reagan should not have expected a rubber stamp. Even during the campaign, Finch had demonstrated his independence. He opposed, for example, the vote-catching anti-pornography legislation that Reagan vigorously supported. "Finch has adroitly managed to establish an aura of independence without really differing consequentially," said Assembly Democratic Leader Jesse Unruh, with a trace of admiration. "And that takes some doing...
During last year's campaign, Finch was almost constantly at Nixon's side, providing counsel on every key decision. The President's admiration for Finch's political acumen is almost unbounded, and he sometimes refers to him as a "political poet...