On Oct. 27, 1964, in the midst of a contentious presidential election, actor and political spokesman Ronald Reagan gave a nationally televised speech on behalf of the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater. The speech, later known as the “A Time For Choosing” speech, is credited as the beginning of Reagan's career in politics.
By the 1950s, Ronald Reagan had become a well-known Hollywood actor. He had served as president of the Screen Actors Guild and had a keen interest in politics. He had served stateside during World War II, working primarily in public relations and film projects that had fit well with his star status. He had been a firm supporter of both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman. When Dwight D. Eisenhower ran for president in 1952, Reagan supported the Republican, though he remained formally a Democrat until 1962.
As Reagan's political attitudes changed, so did the fortunes of his career. He soon found that he was no longer being offered substantial film roles, and soon turned to TV. In 1954, General Electric created a Sunday night anthology series for TV titled “General Electric Theater.” GE hired Reagan to host each installment. Part of his contract called for him to visit GE plants around the country so the company could offer a little bit of Hollywood dazzle for its employees. In all, Reagan visited nearly 140 GE plants throughout his tenure with the company.
Reagan's speeches on these tours increasingly became more political. He began telling the GE workers about his distrust of big government, its waste and redundancy, and the problems associated with high taxes. Many workers approached him after the speeches to tell him that they shared his views, while others phoned GE to tell them they didn't appreciate the political lecture. Though the company had hired him to tell Hollywood stories to its employees, it nevertheless stood behind Reagan and let him continue speaking about the issues he was passionate about. In 1962, General Electric Theater ended after a leadership change at GE. Reagan was now free to pursue other career avenues.
Reagan had been intrigued with Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater's book, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” and soon supported his bid for the White House in 1964. Goldwater's representatives reached out to Reagan and asked him to work on the senator's California campaign, to which the actor agreed. As the race between Goldwater and the incumbent President Lyndon Johnson heated up, Reagan was asked to give a nationally televised speech supporting Goldwater in late October, just before the election.
The Republican strategy targeted the South. Ever since the end of Reconstruction, the South had voted Democrat as a block, with one or two states occasionally breaking ranks. Now, with Johnson's alienation of Southern Democrats because of his support for civil rights, the president looked vulnerable. Reagan, a former Democrat himself, could possibly bring the mass of disaffected Southern voters into the Republican camp.
Reagan began the speech stating, “I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines.” He went on to rail against government mismanagement and unnecessarily high taxes: “Today, 37 cents of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector's share, and yet our government continues to spend $17 million a day more than the government takes in. We haven't balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We have raised our debt limit three times in the last 12 months, and now our national debt is one and half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world.”
Reagan denounced Johnson's Great Society, which included the expansion of several government programs. Reagan lamented how, he believed, liberals thought that the government could meet all of the people's needs without consequence. “A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.”
He also bemoaned the mismanagement of welfare aid, which in the ’60s dwarfed similar aid given by the government during the Great Depression. He stated that when he or other concerned residents spoke out against such mismanagement, they were inevitably attacked as enemies to humanitarian aid. “Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.”
He also lauded the importance of a strong national defense: “There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace — and you can have it in the next second — surrender.” He pressed the attack against big government: “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear.”
Throughout the speech, Reagan repeated that the American people had a choice. He said they could choose freedom and the path of the Founding Fathers, or they could choose the inevitable slide toward socialism that would accompany four more years under Johnson. “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”
In the book “When Character Was King: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan,” former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote: “He stepped into history. He did it in part by making for Goldwater the case that Goldwater had never managed to make for himself. And in making the case for Goldwater, he made the case, in effect, for modern political conservatism. And no one, standing and speaking into a microphone on television, had ever quite done that. To those of us who worked for him, and for all of those followed, it came to be known as The Speech.”
Subsequently it came to be called the “A Time for Choosing” speech. Reagan stated that he had never received more mail than he had in the wake of the speech, despite the fact that he'd been an actor in Hollywood. Inevitably, many people believed that Reagan, not Goldwater, should be the candidate to take down Johnson. It was too late in the race, of course, and Reagan lacked political experience. Still, heads started talking about a Reagan run for the California governorship in two years.
In the book “Reagan: The Life,” biographer H.W. Brands wrote: “In American political history, no speech ever did more than Reagan's to launch a national political career. Lincoln's 1860 Cooper Union address earned the Illinoisan credibility in the East; William Jennings Bryan's 'Cross of Gold' speech won him the 1896 Democratic nomination. But both Lincoln and Bryan had been in politics, been members of Congress.”
Reagan was a political outsider, Brands noted, who had never held elected office or even sought to hold one. Additionally, he had been a Republican for only a few years — not a reliable party man. Yet, as Brands wrote: “with one speech he became the most attractive Republican in America.”
Goldwater's 1964 presidential bid ended in failure. Goldwater took only 52 electoral votes compared to Johnson's 486. The race, however, was significant in some regards. First of all, in addition to his native Arizona, Goldwater succeeded in taking South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. The deep South had voted as a block, for the first time since Reconstruction, for a Republican. This perhaps not only illustrated the South's anger at Johnson over his stand on civil rights, but also perhaps reflected an appreciation for Goldwater's new brand of social conservatism, an appreciation that proved a strong bulwark of 1980s Reagan Republicanism.
Also, 1964 was the last presidential election in which Utah's electors voted for a Democrat.
Reagan did indeed run for the governorship of California in 1966, and went on to serve two full terms. He was elected president of the United States in 1980, riding the wave of social conservatism that he had helped to create in 1964.
Cody K. Carlson holds a master's in history from the University of Utah and teaches at Salt Lake Community College. An avid player of board games, he blogs at thediscriminatinggamer.com. Email: ckcarlson76@gmail.com