ROBERT L. PEABODY RESEARCH INTERVIEW NOTES, 1964-67

Soon after suffering severe losses in the 1964 elections, Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives began discussing organizational and leadership changes. As a political scientist specializing in the study of Congress, Professor Robert Peabody of Johns Hopkins University became interested in studying these potential changes.

Beginning in late December 1964, Peabody conducted off-the-record interviews with many Republican members of Congress and a few of their staff members. Although he apparently did not tape any of these interviews, Peabody took brief notes during the discussions and then typed up more detailed summaries soon thereafter. The bulk of this collection consists of the typed interview notes, although some folders contain only handwritten notes and a few contain both the typed and handwritten versions. Peabody used some of these interview notes as source material for a scholarly article on the Ford-Halleck leadership contest. He published the article ("The Ford-Halleck Minority Leadership Contest, 1965") in 1966 as Number 40 of the Eagleton Institute Cases in Practical Politics and later reprinted it as a chapter in his book Leadership in Congress: Stability, Succession, and Change (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976).

Many of the interviews focus on the successful campaign of Gerald R. Ford to unseat Charles Halleck as Minority Leader of the House. Ford had announced his challenge on December 18, 1964 and the brief, but intense, campaign ended with a 73-67 victory by Ford in the January 4, 1965 meeting of the Republican Conference (or general caucus). Some of the "Young Turks" who played key roles in Ford's campaign were Robert Griffin, Charles Goodell, and Donald Rumsfeld. Many interviews also contain information on Melvin Laird's contest with Peter Frelinghuysen to succeed Ford as Republican Conference Chairman. Laird won by a 77-62 margin in the Conference meeting on January 4.

In subsequent weeks, House Republicans faced other leadership contests. One of Ford's earliest acts as Minority Leader was to back Representative Peter Frelinghuysen in his campaign to replace the incumbent Minority Whip Les Arends. Arends prevailed in the January 14 voting, thereby handing Ford his first defeat. Ford-supporter Charles Goodell was a candidate to chair the Republican Policy Committee, but the emergence of John Rhodes as a candidate threatened another major leadership battle. This confrontation was avoided through the creation of a new Planning and Research Committee to do long-range policy planning. The Republican Conference named Rhodes chairman of the Policy Committee and Goodell chairman of the Planning and Research Committee. Many interviews discuss both the Whip contest and the long struggle over the Policy Committee, including frequent interviews with Goodell.

During the period in which the House Republicans were making these leadership decisions, Representative Al Quie was chairing a Committee on Organizational Structure. This committee examined the organization of the House Republicans and recommended changes. For instance, it recommended that members with leadership roles should not also serve as the ranking Republican on standing committees of the House. A small number of interviews, especially those with Quie, focus on the work of this committee and the ratification of its recommendations by the Republican Conference.

Peabody continued interviewing into April 1965 and conducted some further interviews in 1966. Although many of the later interviews touch on the 1965 leadership races, they focus on assessments of the work of the leaders since that time. Some include information on the handling of such issues as the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1966, and the Vietnamese War. Others concern the upcoming 1966 congressional elections.

When Professor Peabody donated this collection to the Ford Library, it was arranged in six folders, organized by topic. Interviews and background material appeared in each folder. As the topics overlapped and many interviews related to multiple subjects, archivists reorganized the interviews into a single chronological sequence during processing. See Appendix A for a list showing the original organization of the interviews.

Related Materials (August 1994)
The most important related collections are the Ford Scrapbooks and the Ford Congressional Papers. In the latter collection, see especially the folders labeled "Republican House Organization" in the General and Case File for 1964 and 1965 (Boxes A16 and A30). For information on the activities of the Republican House leaders in later years, see also the House of Representatives File in the Robert Hartmann Papers. In addition, many of the William Syers interviews concern Ford's work as Minority Leader.