COLUMN ONE : A Trial by Fire in the ‘60s : Civil rights and Vietnam tested the conservative ideals of Dole, Gramm, Alexander and Buchanan. Turbulent times produced lessons in character and compromise.

Amid the watersheds of the 1960s, its assassinations, its quixotic civil-rights marches and roiling urban riots, its Vietnam quagmire and anarchic street theater back home, the election of Richard Nixon on Nov. 5, 1968, is now a moment almost muted in counterpoint, pale against the high drama of his resignation six years later.

But for four men whose careers took wing in the 1960s and who now oppose each other for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, Nixon’s ascension was a seminal event in an unruly decade. It was a source for the first wave of the modern conservative movement, a time when true believers first tasted political power and tested long-cherished notions that have shifted the nation’s social and economic path.

Bob Dole, Patrick J. Buchanan, Lamar Alexander and Phil Gramm entered the 1960s from scattered points. By decade’s end, the Nixon years had energized them all with a sense of possibility and purpose.

Dole, already a member of Congress, entwined his fortunes with Nixon’s. Buchanan, a young editorialist, brought his hard-right ideas inside the Nixon White House. Nixon’s civil rights strategy helped Alexander launch his political career. Gramm honed a career in free-market theory that found its first government champions among Nixon’s advisors.

They all came through the other side of the 1960s, preferring order to the decade’s chaos, recoiling from its drift toward violence, wary of its social upheaval and unimpressed by its shambling counterculture.

Conservatives then as they are conservatives now, each stood apart from the others within the wide demarcations of their common ideology. In the decades since, Dole, Buchanan, Alexander and Gramm each has staked out major roles as conservatives and politicians. But they used the 1960s to fashion their political cloaks, tailoring them to suit their temperaments, times and surroundings--altering them when the styles no longer fit their purposes.

Three decades on, they are still defined by the paths they chose then. Like anyone who took sides in that turbulent decade, they are marked, as well, by their responses to its overarching issues--civil rights and Vietnam.

For Dole, 72, the oldest of them, the ‘60s provided an introduction to national politics and a career path that tacked, like Nixon’s, between the right and a more pragmatic center. Dole was a Midwestern conservative who edgily backed civil rights, a World War II generation hawk on Vietnam who did not make the war his passion until he found his adult political voice as Nixon’s truculent “hatchet man.”

Caustic, with a banty rooster’s strut, Buchanan waded into the decade’s ideological wars like a bar fighter, a far-right intellectual tough who exhorted victory in Vietnam and scorned civil-rights leaders. As a St. Louis editorial writer and later as a Nixon aide, Buchanan reveled in scathing attacks on liberal pieties that left even some White House colleagues wondering whether he teetered on the edge of bigotry. Yet he ended up swallowing his conservative pride, choosing access to power over ideological purity.

Tennessee-born, and brought up to admire a more genteel line of conservatism, Alexander backed integration as a college newspaper editor, then went on to clerk for a federal judge who issued landmark school desegregation rulings. But as he leapfrogged into politics in Washington, then back in Tennessee, Alexander’s youthful stance bent to prevailing conservative tradewinds--opposing the use of school busing.

Another student caught in the throes of integration, Gramm distanced himself from its fallout, held rapt by the steely laws of the marketplace. Yet even in his cloistered quest to carve out a career as an academic economist, Gramm was still stamped by the ‘60s. A libertarian who rejected government intrusion into private life, he was a Vietnam War supporter too busy to fight in it, using student and civilian deferments to stave off the draft.

The 1960s shook them all, confronting cherished political ideals with uncomfortable questions of personal principle. Thirty years later, those choices still resonate.

CHAPTER ONE / A Contrarian’s Role

Bob Dole celebrated his own victory the night Nixon swept into office. After eight years as a congressman from the prairie town of Russell, Kan., he was going to the U.S. Senate.

He was a comer who never quite took to the campaign trail. Every two years after arriving in Congress in 1960, Dole hit the road at a frantic pace that passed like an acrid dose of cod liver oil. Through sheer will, he mastered the lonely road life, perfecting his Bob Hope imitations, trading small talk with strangers until he knew their faces and their lives.

“You could tell by his mood he wished he was somewhere else,” recalls Jim French, a florist and Republican state committeeman who drove Dole through 58 counties in the 1966 race. “But by God, he was a trouper.”

Dole wolfed salt peanuts and Coca-Colas in the back seat, catnapping as the car headed deep into the wheat fields of west Kansas. Hopscotching from town to town, three speeches a day, he gathered crowds of farmers and merchants at legion halls and service clubs. The son of a grain silo operator, Dole had inherited a keen knack for agrarian issues, up on the latest wrinkles in price supports, farm credits, overseas grain sales. It kept his seat secure.

Few gatherings passed without a tactful mention of his military service in Italy and the frozen right arm. It hit home with the veterans, as did Dole’s stern warning to dike the Communist tide in Asia. Dole rarely fished for sympathy when he retold the tale of his battle injury, leavening the reference by saying it won him a “bedpan promotion” to captain.

But “if a meeting wasn’t going good, sometimes I’d have a guy in the back of the room ask him about the war wound,” says French. It would switch the conversation to make it more positive.”

Democrats who showed life signs were branded soft on Communism. In his first congressional campaign, in 1960, Dole’s hardball patriotism won him the blessing of his predecessor, Wint Smith, a 300-pound former brigadier general whose broad Stetsons and arch-conservatism had been Kansas staples since 1946.

Once in the capital, the 37-year-old Dole wavered little from Smith’s hard line. Government was to be fended off. Foreign policy was other countries’ business unless Reds were involved.

In the House, Dole took the role of contrarian, voting no on Medicare, poverty programs, aid to cities. The Great Society “didn’t look too great to him,” says Joe Skubitz, then a Kansas Republican congressman.

But amid Lyndon B. Johnson’s wave of domestic initiatives in 1964, Dole found a liberal cause he could support. He voted for civil rights.

It was an acceptable risk. Farm Belt Republicans had grown tolerant on racial issues, following the lead of Ohio conservative Sen. Robert Taft, who in the 1950s supported equal opportunity in principle. And in Kansas, while white voters “were not exactly friendly to blacks,” recalls Robert C. Ellsworth, a Kansas House colleague, black numbers were so few that whites “could forgive [Dole].”

His political cover secure, Dole revealed a compassionate side. Conscious of government’s role in his own recovery, he voted for aid to the disabled and for school lunches.

“There’s a part of him that understands underdogs,” admits Norbert Dreiling, a former Kansas Democratic Party chairman and longtime Dole adversary.

But Dole was careful not to expose that part of him too much. Over eight years in the House, there is not a single reference in the Congressional Record to any Dole speech or exchange on the House floor explaining his civil-rights position. In the same period, Dole went on the floor twice to laud the celebration of International Pancake Day, a yearly race in Liberal, Kan. In wheat country, pancakes are not taken lightly.

Dole’s House mates say he preferred thrashing through his misgivings in private. In 1968, Kansas Republican Larry Winn sat with him on the House floor, watching as Dole “sweated out” a looming vote on an open housing bill. Dole was reluctant to take fire from Kansas’ home developers. But when the time came, both men voted “aye.”

In his 1988 autobiography, “Unlimited Partners,” Dole supplied a reason for those votes. Conservatives, he said, believe that life is a contest. “But to be valid, the contest must be open to all equally, and the same set of rules must be applied to everyone.”

Other conservatives had their own interpretations.

CHAPTER TWO / The Street Fighter

The man could dance.

In the working-class bars of East St. Louis and the roadhouses of rural Hillsboro, Pat Buchanan could break it down like a dervish. In June 1962, the 24-year-old Columbia University journalism graduate landed at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, his personal style and ideology old beyond his age. But there was nothing ossified about him. He properly kept a sport coat with him, but he took it off when he did the Dog.

That was the Buchanan paradox. His highly conservative rhetoric was genuine. Yet he wanted to get to know his foes even as he flayed them.

Buchanan set liberals’ rockets off, says Denny Walsh, then a veteran investigative reporter at the newspaper, because “they don’t how to take a conservative who comes from the gut and who’s so articulate, highly intelligent and well-read.”

Those who gritted their teeth at his editorials saw a stranger his friends did not recognize--a martinet with a vocabulary, hectoring for American apartheid.

“He was the same as he is today, just less polished,” says Rep. William L. Clay (D-Mo.), then a leader of the Congress of Racial Equality. “He was an overt racist then. Now he’s a covert racist.”

St. Louis was not Selma. Its early 1960s segregation was not mandated by law. But de facto separation still fogged corners of city life. Department stores hired only white sales clerks. Police routinely made mass arrests of black citizens.

Buchanan insisted in his 1990 biography, “Right from the Beginning,” that he had always thought segregation was morally wrong. But he also believed in a local proprietor’s “constitutional right to be wrong.” Buchanan accepted equal opportunity, but not when it interfered with individual rights.

Civil-rights leaders denounced Buchanan as a defender of the racist order. Clay never heard slurs from him. But jailed for 105 days for a bank sit-in, Clay was called “rabble-rouser” and “racial incendiary” in print. The columns were unsigned, but Clay saw Buchanan’s hand behind the “verbal shrapnel.”

What lay behind Buchanan’s salvos depended on where you stood on the battlefield. Buchanan later told a Nixon colleague that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was “immoral, evil and a demagogue.” Yet when King spoke at a Baptist church in north St. Louis in summer 1962, Buchanan showed up early for a good seat. He had nothing for the collection plate, but sat respectfully as King preached nonviolent action.

“He wanted to hear directly where King stood on issues, not just hearsay,” recalls his pew mate, Mary Jane Jackson, wife of a reporter then at the Globe-Democrat.

Buchanan went alone when he strode into an auditorium at St. Louis’ Washington University in 1965 to joust with an audience of war protesters. “He was thrilled to death to be entering the lion’s den,” says Joe Kelly, who moderated the debate.

Eyes narrowed as he spoke, Buchanan told the students: “All of you are here on a pass because of your [student] deferments.”

He himself was 4-F, rejected from military service by a draft board in Washington, his hometown, in 1960. He had Reiter’s syndrome, a knee condition that triggered bouts of arthritis. But by 1965, he was often jogging six miles a night. It was his therapy, beating pain through exercise. Some anti-war opponents wonder why he never tried to be reclassified.

When Nixon appeared in December 1965 at a cocktail party in Belleville, Ill., Buchanan wangled an invitation. An admirer since the failed 1960 presidential campaign, Buchanan told Nixon he wanted to “get aboard” early on his 1968 campaign team.

Though Goldwater was his ideal, Buchanan wrote later that Nixon had been a “class act in the 1964 race,” campaigning hard for the GOP nominee. And Nixon warmed up to Buchanan during an interview in his Manhattan law office. “Nixon liked street fighters,” recalls former White House lawyer Leonard Garment. “That was Pat.”

Buchanan was Nixon’s first campaign hire. Soon enough, he had a desk outside Nixon’s office, calling the former vice president by the tough-guy sobriquet he used out of Nixon’s earshot: “Old Man.”

CHAPTER THREE / A Young Integrationist

Lamar Alexander took to college life like it was invented for him.

The 18-year-old east Tenneseean arrived at Vanderbilt University with a crewcut and a guitar in fall 1958. By the end of the semester, he was a bright young man going places.

Good grades came easily. He ran track. He made the right friends. He double-dated with the governor’s daughter. On a properly tuned piano, he was a human jukebox, fluent in Rachmaninoff, ragtime and Fats Domino.

“Lamar kept packing more things in his day,” says William Mowry, a retired suburban Chicago business executive who was Alexander’s roommate.

By senior year, Alexander added one more activity that would not fit neatly on his resume--integrationist.

The summer before, he had gone to Columbus, Ohio, for a college leadership convention. On the drive back, he talked about the budding civil-rights movement with another Vanderbilt student, Roy Blount.

“It turned out we both thought it was time to desegregate Vanderbilt’s undergraduate class,” says Blount, now an acclaimed humorist.

Black students from Fiske University had organized sit-ins at Nashville lunch counters and bus stations since 1960. Pressured, the city agreed to desegregate public facilities. By 1962, Vanderbilt had opened graduate programs to blacks, but Chancellor Harvey Branscomb was wary of alienating school trustees.

Alexander was a son of the South, but he was an east-Tennesee Republican, too, more moderate than the southern Democrats who blocked schoolhouse doors. A century earlier, east Tennesseeans had cast their lot with the Union fight to end slavery; now they shook their heads in disapproval at the obstructionist games of Govs. George Wallace of Alabama and Orval Faubus of Arkansas.

Alexander and his idealisic circle decided to take the issue to their fellow students. To some, he says, it “seemed like we were taking a fairly radical view.”

As editors of the Hustler, the college newspaper, he and Blount began advocating open admissions. Alexander wrote the editorials, calling the university’s reluctance to fully integrate “cowardly.” Another friend, John Sergent, submitted a resolution to the student leadership asking for a campuswide referendum on integration.

It took nerve. Football players muttered at them when they passed on the way to class. One day, the phone rang at the Hustler office. Blount answered. “We’re gonna get you guys if you don’t back off,” a voice said.

Blount was both frightened and thrilled. “In hindsight,” he says, “it wasn’t that scary--but it gave Lamar and all of us the satisfaction of taking issue with the shame of our region.”

Alexander’s push for integration failed to catch fire with students. Not until he was readying to take a prized scholarship to New York University Law School did the campuswide vote finally come. The resolution lost.

A few months after he headed north to law school, the school was quietly integrated. Alexander believes the pressure from his small group of idealists forced trustees to accept integration. Sergent is less certain.

This was the way the world worked. Ideals ran to entropy, life moved on. If Alexander took the episode as a lesson, he never remarked on it in public. But neither would he ever again take such a passionate stand on behalf of integration.

CHAPTER FOUR / A Teaching Career

Integration did not come as easily to the University of Georgia.

On Jan. 6, 1961, by federal court order, the first black students walked onto the Athens campus. They ran a gantlet of white supremacists, silent to taunts as they enrolled, protected by police. A few nights later, white students rioted, setting fires for two days until the National Guard clamped down.

For months, hard feelings persisted among some whites. Others resigned themselves to the new age. “We were there to get an education and have a good time,” says Jim Miller, a former Reagan administration budget chief.

That was how Miller’s new friend, Phil Gramm, saw things. They had had met soon after Miller’s wife, Demaris, befriended Gramm in a physics lab. He was an odd sort, a drawling, wise-cracking country boy who walked with an old man’s stoop. “Jimmy, you have to meet my new lab partner,” she told Miller. “He’s funny and smart as a whip.”

And poor as a churchmouse. Young segregationists could grouse about race, but the debate had little immediacy to a money-starved student. When his funds dwindled, Gramm left Athens for a year, detouring to a bank teller’s job in Atlanta before he could return. Working part time, he finally found time to debate. Interested in the school’s literary societies, he had two choices--the Demosthenians and the Phi Kappas. The dividing line was race.

“You had to [at least] be neutral [on segregation] to be a member of Phi Kappa,” says Atlanta lawyer Robert Miller, a Gramm classmate.

The segregationists joined the Demosthenians. Gramm joined the Phi Kappas. “I cut no slack for bigotry,” he says now.

His flirtation with the debating life was fleeting. He was after an economics degree. Georgia’s department was hardly a beacon of intellectual rigor, but it was up to date. The activist-government concepts of British economist John Maynard Keynes still held sway in the Johnson administration, but in academia, Keynes’ day was fading. The hot idea was the free-market theory of Milton Friedman.

Georgia had few Friedmanites, but its economics department was steeped in classic free-market thought. There was David McCord Wright, an elderly Harvard-trained classical capitalist. There were Nick Beadles and Dick Timberlake, monetarists whose opposition to government intrusion was so intense they became libertarians.

Gramm learned from them all. And he embraced libertarian thought--a natural move, he says, for “any economics graduate” of the era. Government, the libertarians thought, was best when it kept to itself--removed from the economy, social issues, even foreign wars.

That, of course, was theory. In practice, government still had its uses for Gramm. When the economics department was offered a government-funded Defense Scholarship for a deserving graduate, Beadles volunteered the “goofy-looking country boy.” Gramm readily accepted, earning his doctorate in three years.

A teaching career loomed. Beadles advised Gramm to “go west,” find a school where “they don’t ask you where your family comes from like they do in the South.” Gramm chose Texas A&M.;

Readying to move, he informed his local draft board in Columbus. On July 7, 1967, the board gave Gramm a civilian teaching deferment, one of five stays from the draft Gramm was granted between 1965 and 1969.

Like other Southern boys, Gramm believed in America’s decision to make a stand in Vietnam. But it was not his to fight.

CHAPTER FIVE / Stands on Race

Up until election day, 1968, Pat Buchanan was about as close as one could get to a man about to be President. He was there when the Nixon campaign was still a storefront operation--just Nixon, Buchanan, Garment, Shelly Scarney (Buchanan’s future wife) and Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s personal secretary and zealous guardian who later took the blame for the 18-minute gap in a key Watergate tape.

Buchanan was in on many early decisions. He ghost-wrote Nixon’s think pieces, fenced with the press, dashed off memos on everything from political tactics to foreign affairs. Sidelined by eye surgery, he returned with a black eyepatch, looking “like a damned pirate,” Garment recalls.

But as the campaign grew, Buchanan’s role became limited to speeches and ideas, his access to the “Old Man” curbed. He had a third-floor office in the Executive Building but Bob Haldeman guarded the Oval Office. Worse, Buchanan had to wrestle for the President’s ear with William Safire and Ray Price, who were conservative, but less doctrinaire.

“Pat always chafed about the fact that our group was not important enough in policy-making,” said James Keough, who oversaw the speech writers.

There was another source of tension, former Nixon staffers recall. As Nixon shifted from the campaign mode to policy-making, Buchanan watched the President’s conservatism become tempered by pragmatism. In his own way, so did Buchanan’s.

It was not that Buchanan changed his views. Judgment Day would come first. Rather, he would not jeopardize his role as the right-wing angel on Nixon’s shoulder, a loyalist even as Nixon zagged to the center on race, Vietnam and detente. He considered quitting when Nixon went to China, says Mort Allin, a former Buchanan aide. But Buchanan stayed on, accepting ideological setbacks to remain close to the throne.

The dilemma became apparent early in the campaign. When King was assassinated in April 1968, Nixon asked his aides if he should go to Memphis for the funeral. Buchanan “was explosive” against it, a campaign staffer recalls, telling Nixon the move was “catering to the blacks.”

Nixon overruled him and flew to Memphis.

Through Nixon’s first term, Buchanan urged Nixon to let communities “hold off” integration with “freedom of choice.” That was “Morse code for segregationists,” says George Washington University historian Leo Ribuffo.

“The ship of integration,” Buchanan crowed in 1970, “is going down.”

His boast came in a memo to Nixon defending a speech he was writing for Vice President Spiro Agnew. The speech, Buchanan said, would “tear the scab off race in this country.” He led off by comparing the tumult caused by school busing to the shelling of Ft. Sumter, S.C., that ignited the Civil War. “From there,” says Garment, who was appalled, “it got worse.”

Worried the speech would embarrass Nixon, domestic advisor John Ehrlichman asked Garment to intervene. “We worked all night on it,” Garment recalls. “Pat kept defending his words and I kept counterdrafting. The speech became totally incoherent. So finally I sent a memo to Nixon and said you must not under any circumstances let this speech be made.”

The speech was canceled, auguring Buchanan’s long freeze-out on racial issues. For the remaining Nixon years, Price was the one usually called in when the “Old Man” planned a speech on civil rights.

Nixon remained a moving target on racial issues. By staying silent as federal courts pushed ahead on busing and by letting administration lawyers obey court dictates, Nixon was able to “exploit the resentments against busing that resulted,” says Northwestern University historian Michael Sherry. “That way he could play both sides of the fence.”

The political success of Nixon’s maneuvering was not lost on Republicans campaigning in 1970. A Republican would take advantage of the busing issue to win votes in Tennessee that year. The campaign was managed by former White House hand Lamar Alexander.

Alexander was among the young Nixon campaign volunteers who joined the White House “kiddie corps” in early 1969, a step up from his job as an aide to Tennesse Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr. Alexander had entered politics after working as a law clerk for John Minor Wisdom, a New Orleans federal judge who played a key role in speeding up school integration.

His year with Wisdom in 1965 is still a fond memory for Alexander. At 25, he was doing research for a “historic” judge, one of the sharpest legal minds on the federal bench. At night, he played trombone for tourists at a French Quarter beer garden.

Starting in June, Wisdom issued a series of landmark decisions that helped pave the way for school busing--a policy Alexander would oppose. Wisdom ruled that school systems had a “positive duty to desegregate,” says J. Eugene Marans, who also clerked with Wisdom in 1965.

Alexander declines to say how he viewed Wisdom’s rulings during those days as a clerk. But “as I look back,” he says now, “I’m afraid that forced busing has not helped create better schools.”

He maintained lawyerly discretion on civil rights matters during his near-two year stint in the White House, where debate raged over busing. Alexander had been hired as a deputy to Bryce Harlow, Nixon’s respected congressional relations aide. From a desk outside Harlow’s office, Alexander spent his days trying to prod along Nixon initiatives in the Senate.

Chester Finn, who worked on desegregation issues as a domestic aide, said Alexander offered little comment on race. “He was there like we all were, to learn.”

The lessons proved useful when Alexander returned to Tennessee to manage the 1970 gubernatorial campaign of Wynfield Dunn, a guitar-playing dentist from Memphis. White Tennesseans were seething at judicial orders to bus black students into white schools.

Dunn won, a victory he describes as a “popularity contest.” But his carefully drawn stance on busing hardly hurt him. Dunn disagreed with busing but respected the dictates of federal judges. “Busing was antithetical to my thoughts,” he says. “Lamar,” he adds, “was on board with me.”

Looking back, Alexander sees “no inconsistency” in his stance. In 1962, it had been “right to break down the laws that required legal segregation.” Eight years later, it was wrong “to focus on children, because of their color, to try to create racial balance in the school.”

High-minded principles had given way to the complicated calculations of 1970s politics. The movement was splintered, its issues grayer, no longer the province of young idealists.

How the young college editor of 1961 would have reconciled with the politically seasoned campaign manager of 1970 was a question only Alexander could answer. One thing was certain: School days were over.

CHAPTER SIX / The War in Vietnam

When he had to, Bob Dole could bend a little.

He was as staunch an anti-Communist as anyone in the House. But when his hard line ran up against west Kansas wheat politics, one of Dole’s ideals had to give. At President John F. Kennedy’s first proposal to sell American grain to the Soviets, Dole sounded the alarm. It was “trading with the enemy.”

But if all politics is local, then all politics in west Kansas is wheat. It took a while, but Dole reconsidered. By the time he reached the Senate in 1969, Russian grain sales were one more boon for Kansas farmers.

It was the way Dole mastered the Senate process, the way he would master his own personal politics. Bend when necessary. Nixon did.

On Vietnam, however, Dole was unbowed. He had backed Johnson’s war effort, but Dole was more supportive of the plight and morale of U.S. troops than he was of Johnson’s policies.

The 1968 election changed all that. As Nixon implemented his glacially paced “Vietnamization” strategy of turning over the war to the South Vietnamese, Dole sensed a vacuum. Democratic senators were picking at Nixon daily, echoing protesters in the streets. Dole picked back.

On the Senate floor, he asked if Democrats had succumbed to “isolationist hysteria.” Would “they have us curl up in a fetal position and withdraw, literally and actually, from the world?” He shattered Senate decorum, questioning the patriotism of peace advocates. Even Republicans were aghast. Sen. William Saxbe (R-Ohio) called Dole a “hatchet man” for Nixon.

“What irritated me was his implication that we weren’t being faithful to the men in Vietnam, that we were undercutting our soldiers,” recalls former South Dakota Democratic Sen. George S. McGovern, who clashed repeatedly with Dole.

The two would become allies on at least one major issue--development of the food stamp program. On the war, however, Dole gave no ground.

Dole intimates understood. He had felt a political kinship with Nixon ever since he had come to Kansas to campaign for him in 1964. Dole, who would sob at Nixon’s funeral, was not shy about his admiration.

“Bob wanted to go up in the Senate and you don’t go up by sitting in a chair and picking your nose,” says Jim French. “He got a higher profile that way. And Nixon remembered.”

In January 1971, Dole got his reward. Nixon chose him as chairman of the Republican National Committee. The Senate victory was prize enough, the start of a career in national politics. But taking the helm of the national party was an honor that made anything possible--even the White House.

“Nixon appreciated what Bob had done for him,” said Ellsworth, who went on to work as Nixon’s political director and ambassador to NATO. “He stood by him when the whole country was in an uproar.”

Even amid that uproar, there were places demonstrators avoided, colleges where anti-war dissent was not tolerated. Texas A&M; was one.

At A&M; khaki-uniformed ROTC trainees walked unaccosted by protesters. Cadets were in nearly every class. When they needed counseling on academic performance, there were civilian professors willing to volunteer advice. Among them was Phil Gramm.

He had come to Texas, a prized professorial recruit, in 1967 and fell right into academic life. Still a die-hard libertarian, he began blending in with the faculty’s informal sartorial spirit. His hair grew shaggy. He wore sandals to class, looking “like a regular hippie,” recalls Jerry Birdwell, a life insurance agent Gramm befriended. He had found his niche.

But a year later, Gramm was in quicksand. There was a shake-up in the economics department. Any professor unable to keep up with the latest changes in theory could pack up.

“It was a hothouse, publish or perish,” recalls Robert Ekelund, then a colleague in the economics department. The pair slaved on articles past midnight. And Gramm filed for another draft deferment, a request granted by his Georgia board on Sept. 19, 1968.

College and career were obvious choices. Alexander had gone the same route, taking deferments at law school and in his job as law clerk. Unlike Gramm, who took deferments until a national lottery replaced the draft in December 1969, Alexander made himself available when his clerkship ended. Just turned 26, he was reclassified 1-A, but was never called.

Gramm has long explained his deferments by saying that when he first applied for one, “there were very few Americans in Vietnam.” It was a distant war, one that had little bearing on his life.

In fact, by October 1965, when Gramm won his first student deferment, the war was no longer so distant. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution, authorizing U.S. action in Vietnam, had passed more than a year earlier. The day of the military advisor was done. In May 1965, the first Marines had landed. That year, 231,000 American men were drafted; by year’s end 184,000 were stationed in South Vietnam.

Friends say Gramm’s support of the war was unstinting. “He was hawkish,” says Ekelund. “Phil’s attitude was: It’s not much of a war, but it’s our war.”

But Gramm was less ironclad in his support for the draft. Former Georgia professor Timberlake recalls a barbecue at Gramm’s house in 1966 when the future senator described the draft system as “discriminatory taxation and involuntary servitude.”

Gramm does not recall the party. He says: “I had no objections to the draft. I signed up for the draft. Had I been drafted I would have reported and served.” But he acknowledges that “theoretically I agreed” with the libertarian argument against the draft.

Its architect was economist Friedman, who testified before Congress that the draft was an unfair tax that fell, in the form of low military wages, on those conscripted. As an economist, Gramm agreed with Friedman’s “argument about fairness to people who served,” but he maintains it had no sway on his own draft experience.

By 1968, Friedman’s free-market arguments had roused a generation of young economists. Nixon’s victory brought the first wave of them into government. Nixon hired Martin Anderson, who played a key role in the internal debate that did away with the draft. Alan Greenspan came on board briefly as a speechwriter, and Paul McCracken served as Nixon’s first chairman of the Council on Economic Advisers.

In bringing the first wave of Friedman disciples into government, Nixon “provided the seeds for a whole new economic era,” historian Ribuffo said. It was an era that would provide government jobs for Phil Gramm’s wife, Wendy, whom he met when she interviewed for a job at A&M;, and for many of the men Gramm graduated and taught with at Georgia and Texas. Gramm himself began talking up his free-market beliefs at business club meetings in small east Texas towns in the early 1970s, blazing his own trail.

The others went to Washington as hired hands. Gramm was going on his own terms.

CHAPTER SEVEN / Prismatic Recall

They look back sometimes with difficulty, always through prisms held tightly to accentuate what they want to remember.

For Dole, the ‘60s passed as a rush of advancement, the start of a long march into the spotlight. Buchanan cherishes the good fight. Gramm never forgets the long nights bent over texts, the hard road out of poverty. Alexander, a man who counts friends by the score, remains close to his Vanderbilt idealists.

In February 1985, Alexander, Sergent and Blount had a small Vanderbilt reunion, sitting down before an audience with civil-rights patriarch James Lawson to recall names and deeds from three decades back.

Memories sometimes fade beneath the anger of the day. When Alexander mentioned the problem of “illegitimate births,” several female activists in the audience groaned at his choice of words.

Blount sat stunned in silence. He wanted “to defend Lamar because he was my friend,” the author recalls, “even though I agreed with the women.”

The moment passed, nostalgia reasserted itself. “The more we talked about the old days, the quainter it all seemed,” Blount says. “It was like someone else’s past.”

But it was theirs. They took stands and retreated, blurred ideology with expediency. In the expanse of public life, these were not grand blunders or leaps of imagination that ignited or smothered a political career.

They were just the inevitable personal erosions that adulthood chisels and a political career jackhammers. The decade’s turmoil heightened the process, imposing its private choices, the small murders of the soul. No one got out of the ‘60s alive.

Times researchers John Beckham, Lianne Hart and Edith Stanley contributed to this story.

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About This Series

In these group portraits, The Times examines turning points and touchstones in the lives of Republicans seeking the White House.

* Sunday: Growing up: The boys who would be president, and the places that shaped them.

* Today: Coming at the ‘60s from another direction: Civil rights, Vietnam and political choices.

* Tuesday: Marriage and family: Norman Rockwell visions vs. today’s realities.

* Wednesday: Life after Reagan: Rivals seek to claim the mantle.

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The ‘60s: Lives & Times

1963

Patrick J. Buchanan: Working as editorial writer at St. Louis Globe Democrat

Phil Gramm: Attending Georgia University

Dogs and fire hoses used on civil rights marchers in Birmingham, Ala.; march on Washington in support of civil rights attracts 250,000; Kennedy assassinated in Dallas

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1964

Lamar Alexander: Third year at New York University law school

Bob Dole: Completing second House term from rural district in Kansas; votes for Civil Rights Act

Congress passes landmark Civil Rights Act; Congress approves Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, paving the way for massive U.S. military buildup in Vietnam; Lyndon B. Johnson defeats Barry Goldwater for president; mass arrests of free-speech protestors at UC-Berkeley

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1965

Alexander: Clerks for federal judge in New Orleans, takes civilian occupation draft deferment

Dole: Backs Voting Rights Act

Gramm: Graduate student in economics at Georgia; takes student draft deferment

Watts riots; Voting Rights Act becomes law; U.S. troops in Vietnam total 184,000.

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1967

Gramm: Hired as assistant economics professor at Texas A&M;

Buchanan: Aide to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign

San Francisco’s Summer of Love; riots in Newark and Detroit; Vietnam protestors march on the Pentagon; U.S. troops in Vietnam total 475,000

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1968

Dole: Elected U.S. senator

Alexander: Works for Nixon campaign in New York as organizer

Buchanan: Works as Nixon speechwriter

North Vietnamese launch Tet offensive; Martin Luther King assassinated in Memphis, spawning widespread urban riots; Robert Kennedy assassinated in Los Angeles; Democratic comvention in Chicago disrupted by Vietnam protestors; Nixon defeats Hubert Humphrey for president

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1969

Alexander: Joins Nixon White House as legislative aide

Buchanan: Joins Nixon White House as speechwriter

Dole: Emerges as one of staunchest defenders of Nixon’s Vietnam policy

Gramm: Divorced from first wife

U.S. troop total in Vietnam peaks at 543,400; manned U.S. space capsule lands on moon; Woodstock rock festival

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THE SIXTIES / The Other Candidates

How the other GOP presidential candidates spend the unruly decade:

Robert K. Dornan / Congressman

Activities: Began the decade as a member of the California National Guard and the U.S. Air Force Reserves. (He was a fighter pilot in peacetime, during the Dwight D. Eisenhower years.) Was a radio and television talk show host and producer, 1965-76. Won local Emmy awards for his show, “Tempo,” and later hosted “The Robert K. Dornan Show,” where he originated the POW-MIA bracelets for U.S. soldiers captured or missing in Vietnam.

On the era: Describes himself as coming from a conservative family that “truly saw Vietnam as part of the bigger picture of communism and the evil empire.” On civil rights: “I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. My [1994 Democratic congressional] opponent thought he was going to kill me with that. He accused me of lying. And we had found, like a gift from God, a color picture of me in my Air Force uniform with my Silver Wings on, sitting in the third row with Sammy Davis Jr., James Garner and Tony Franciosa.”

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Steve Forbes / Magazine publisher

Activities: Began the decade as a pre-adolescent, moved on to the Brooks School, where he was president of the Young Republicans Club. Attended Princeton University, where he was founding editor of Business Today, the nation’s largest magazine published by students for students.

On the era: “I was deeply in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of ’65. That seemed almost elementary.” On Republican repudiation of those measures: “The Republican party is still paying for that. The fact that it took 90 years after reconstruction to get back on track again is not one of our proudest moments.”

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Alan Keyes / Former State Department official

Activities: In 1967, at the age of 16, became the first black elected president of American Legion Boys Nation; met President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House. Graduated in 1968 from Fort Sam Houston High School in San Antonio, Texas. Attended Cornell University, 1968-70, spending one year abroad in Paris.

On the era: “I did not understand why it was when I was at Cornell, for instance, that the professors there were kind of surrendering to their students who were yelling and screaming about how everything had to be relevant, and, therefore, you got rid of all the courses on Western history and philosophy and so forth and so on, and just taught trendy Marxist stuff. . . . To this day, I look back on that period and I still can’t quite figure out why you had a generation of people who, when the traditional values and mores and structures were challenged, didn’t just look the kids in the eye and say, ‘Look, you’re the kids, we’re the grown-ups, now you do what we tell you.’

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Richard G. Lugar / Senator

Activities: Left U.S. Navy in 1960 after serving for three years and acting as intelligence briefer to the chief of naval operations. Elected to the Indianapolis School Board in 1964; in 1967, at age 35, he was elected to the first of two terms as mayor of Indianapolis.

On the era: “I was profoundly influenced by the civil rights revolution in the 60s . . . The coalitions I tried to build, not only with Democrats, but with minority citizens, are just as strong in my life today as they were then . . . I made commitments for justice and quality of opportunities in those days, and fullfilled them.”

Researched by GEBE MARTINEZ, MARIA L. LA GANGA and BOB SIPCHEN / Los Angeles Times

Sources: Interviews with The Times and others, including PBS series “The Challengers ‘96” campaign speeches and literature.