> The "Old Guard" was never able to get the nomination for one of
> their own.
You forget Nixon, their party leader after Taft's death. And you forget their nomination of Goldwater. And you forget the 20s.
You are in fact extrapolating solely from the FDR years, where the real problem was that that Taft, their leader, couldn't win the general election -- he was extremely uncharismatic -- and refused to accept that fact, which every practical minded Republican could see. This kept any other old guardist from getting the nomination instead of him, and Repugs of any stripe who wanted to win didn't want him. When he died in 1953, the Old Guard went back to nominating presidents the moment Ike was out of the way.
Ironically, had Eisenhower not been parachutted in at the last minute, there is no doubt that Taft would have won the nomination in 1952; he had the nominees so completely sewn up that Ike's gang had to jury-rig the rules to free some up. Taft's certain nomination is in fact a large reason why Ike accepted. He thought Taft was the only person in the country who could lose to Truman. He thought it would destroy the Republican party. And that Truman would destroy the economy with his profligacy.
And when Ike was president, the old guard which got a majority in the Senate on his coattails immediately set out to completely overthrow his foreign policy with the Bricker Amendment. It would not only have taken us out of Nato, it would have made the treaty that founded it unconstitutional and virtually impossible to make again. And Ike couldn't stop them. The only thing that saved Ike was triangulating with the Dems. (And it still only missed passage at the last minute by one vote.) Ike was very much in control of the government, but not at all of his party.
Michael