California Republican Party state chairman · issued the GOP’s “Eleventh Commandment,” 25 September 1965
Gaylord Parkinson chaired the California Republican Party in the mid-1960s, when the party was still bleeding from the 1964 Goldwater debacle — a race in which East Coast Republicans including Nelson Rockefeller had savaged their own nominee as an extremist. With San Francisco mayor George Christopher and California’s liberal Republicans attacking Ronald Reagan personally in the 1966 gubernatorial primary, Parkinson issued a rule designed to make intra-party knife-fighting a career risk. He pitched it as common ground rather than a Reagan shield, and the party’s liberals eventually adopted it too — but its most famous beneficiary won the primary, beat Governor Pat Brown, and carried the commandment with him for the next quarter-century.