The 1964 television speech that turned Ronald Reagan into a conservative leader

Nobody in America switches on the television hoping to see a paid political announcement. It is the broadcast equivalent of a utility bill. It arrives, you endure it, and you forget it. Now ask yourself what kind of speech has to be given on behalf of a presidential candidate who is behind in every poll, to an audience that has never heard of the speaker, in the last week of a campaign everyone already knows is lost. The honest answer is: a speech that has no business changing anything.

And yet this particular speech, delivered by a former movie actor who had not yet held a single elective office, is the reason a young California conservative movement found a leader, and the reason that, sixteen years later, the Republican Party nominated that same man and sent him to the White House. Let me tell you how it happened, what he actually said, and why it should interest anybody who has ever had to make a case to people who were not ready to hear it.

The man before the speech

Start with the biography, because the speech did not come out of nowhere. Ronald Reagan was born in Illinois in 1911, worked as a radio sports announcer, and went to Hollywood in the late 1930s. He served as president of the Screen Actors Guild, the union for film actors, for several terms after the Second World War, and in that job he fought Communist influence in the labor movement. In those years he was a Democrat. He had voted for Franklin Roosevelt, and he campaigned for Democratic candidates, though by the 1950s he was supporting Republicans for President, including Dwight Eisenhower.

In 1954 he took a job that changed his life. He became the host of General Electric Theater, a weekly television anthology, and as part of the contract he traveled the country speaking to General Electric plants and employees. For eight years he gave talk after talk to factory workers, managers and community groups. He wrote much of what he said himself. The speeches that came out of this were a long conversation with ordinary Americans about taxes, government and freedom. If the speech of 1964 was a sudden triumph, it was a triumph that had been rehearsed in hundreds of plant cafeterias.

The show ended in 1962, and the same year Reagan changed his party registration to Republican. In 1964 he campaigned for the Arizona senator Barry Goldwater with the same energy he had brought to the GE circuit.

Goldwater and the doomed campaign

To understand the broadcast, you need to understand what it was for. Barry Goldwater had won the Republican nomination in July 1964, defeating the establishment wing of the party. He was a principled, blunt, Arizona conservative who said what he believed, even when it hurt him, and I tell his story in Barry Goldwater lost 44 states and won the next generation of conservatives. After President Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, Lyndon Johnson held a lead in the polls that no Republican was likely to close. The Democrats ran advertisements portraying Goldwater as reckless and extreme.

In the closing days, the Goldwater campaign bought national television time for a speech by Reagan, a filmed version of a talk he had given many times. It aired on October 27, 1964, one week before the election. The program was called, simply, "A Time for Choosing." It ran about half an hour. And it contained very little about the candidate it was meant to help.

What he actually said

If you have never read the speech, I'd recommend it, because it holds up. The text is available in several places, including the Reagan Library's website. Let me give you the shape of it, and then a few of its best moments.

He began with the stakes. The theme was that the choice in the election was not between Left and Right but between up and down. "Up" was man's old dream of individual freedom, and "down" was what Reagan called the ant heap of totalitarianism. He described a line running from the political philosophy of freedom at one end to government control at the other, and said that people who thought they could trade a little freedom for a little security were walking down it.

He made the case on specifics. He went through farm subsidies, welfare spending, Social Security and foreign policy, using facts and figures as he understood them in 1964. Some of the examples have been argued over since, as his speeches always were. The point was the approach: he argued with data, with stories about real people, and with a calm voice. He did not shout.

He told jokes. The speech has a famous line about permanence in government: that a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth. That line gets a laugh because it has the unmistakable ring of truth. Reagan understood that you can win more converts by making people grin than by making them angry.

He asked a question. He asked whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a small intellectual elite in a faraway capital can plan our lives better than we can ourselves. That is the argument of the whole speech in one sentence, and it is as much a question about humility as about politics.

He closed with the future. "You and I have a rendezvous with destiny," he said, echoing Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, a deliberate and generous touch. We would preserve for our children "the last best hope of man on earth," or we would sentence them to a thousand years of darkness. Notice the mood. It is not despair. It is a challenge, delivered with confidence.

That last point deserves emphasis. Reagan was proposing something that Goldwater's opponents had labeled extremism, and he presented it as cheerful common sense. He did not sound angry. He sounded like a neighbor who had thought hard about the problem and was telling you what he had found.

What the speech did

Goldwater lost, and not narrowly. On November 3, 1964, Lyndon Johnson won more than 60 percent of the popular vote, and Goldwater carried just six states: his native Arizona and five states in the Deep South. Fifty states minus six is 44, which is the number in the title of that post I mentioned above. By any normal measure the campaign was a catastrophe, and the conventional wisdom was that conservatism had been buried.

The speech, though, was a different story. Within weeks it had become the one piece of the campaign that people wanted to talk about. It brought in a flood of small contributions for the Goldwater effort. And it caught the attention of a group of wealthy Californians, among them oilman Henry Salvatori, auto dealer Holmes Tuttle and Jaquelin Hume, a businessman. They had backed Goldwater, they liked what they heard in the broadcast, and they began to ask the obvious question: why was this man not running for something himself?

By 1965 a group of those men, who came to be called his "kitchen cabinet," had put together the money and the staff for a gubernatorial campaign. Reagan announced he would run in January 1966.

1966: the governor's race

His opponent was the incumbent, Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, a two-term Democratic governor who in 1962 had beaten Richard Nixon. Brown and his allies tried to run against Reagan's lack of experience, saying he was only an actor. That approach would have worked a few years earlier. But in 1966 California voters were unhappy about campus unrest at Berkeley, which had begun in the fall of 1964, about the riots that tore through the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in August 1965, and about the growth of state spending and taxes.

Reagan, who had a message ready, ran on it. In November 1966 he beat Brown by nearly a million votes. A man who had never held office would now run the most populous state in the country. A fuller account of what he did there is in Governor Reagan, Sacramento and the Welfare Fight Nobody Remembers.

1976: the challenge to Gerald Ford

Reagan's next big test was the 1976 presidential nomination. He challenged the sitting Republican President, Gerald Ford, whom I discuss in Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon and paid for it at the ballot box. This was an unusual and risky thing to do, because challenging an incumbent of your own party is the sort of act that gets a politician branded as a splitter. Reagan lost the first five primaries. Then, on March 23, 1976, he won in North Carolina, and the race turned into a long fight for delegates that went all the way to the convention in Kansas City in August.

Ford won the nomination, narrowly. But after the nominating vote, Reagan was asked to speak briefly to the delegates, and the speech went over so well that many people in the hall left wondering whether they had nominated the right man. Ford lost to Jimmy Carter that November. In 1980 Reagan won the nomination and the presidency, and in 1984 he carried 49 states and won 525 electoral votes, more than any candidate has ever won.

The line from the October 1964 broadcast to the 1980 election is not a straight one, and no one should say that a single speech did all this. But it is a real line.

The other side's best argument

A fair post should consider what skeptics say. Here is the strongest version of the case that the 1964 speech is overrated.

First, it did not win the election. Goldwater lost in a landslide, and the speech did nothing for him at the ballot box. Second, Reagan's rise owed a great deal to events he did not control: the unrest at Berkeley, Watts, the sense in California that the state was losing its way, and the wealthy donors who bankrolled him. Third, the speech was general on policy, and the Great Society that followed in 1965 and 1966, including Medicare, passed with large majorities and remained in place for the rest of Reagan's life. If the speech was so persuasive, why did the programs it attacked survive?

Those are fair points, and I'll answer them.

1. The speech was not meant to win in 1964. It was meant to start something. Politics is a long game. In the weeks that followed, the speech created a name, a donor network and a message. Movements often begin with a defeat. The conservative movement of the 1960s was built from the wreckage of the Goldwater campaign, a point I make in William F. Buckley Stood Athwart History and Then Built a Movement in a different way.
2. Luck matters, but you only benefit from luck if you are ready. Reagan had spent a decade honing a message that fit what Californians were feeling in 1966. When the opening came, he walked through it.
3. Persuasion works on a longer clock than policy does. The programs of the Great Society mostly survived, true. But the argument about how much government we should have changed, and by 1980 the country was ready to hear it. The first fight can be lost while the second is being won.

What conservatives can learn from it

Here is what I'd have you take away.

Argue to the persuadable, not the converted. Reagan did not rant at people who already agreed with him. He addressed the ordinary viewer who might vote either way, and he treated that viewer as intelligent.

Be warm. The man's gift was that he could say a hard thing and make it sound reasonable. People forgive you for disagreeing with them if you obviously like them.

Use specifics. Slogans fade. A speech full of real examples gets argued about, which is what you want.

Have a long clock. The movement that looked dead in November 1964 was the movement that ran the country sixteen years later. Elections are the visible part of politics. The invisible part is who has been quietly persuading whom. The story of one group of voters he later won over, lifelong Democrats who crossed over for him, is told in The Reagan Democrats of Macomb County and the Voters Who Changed Sides.

Remember that the media is only one microphone. In 1964 it was television and a paid half hour. Today it is any number of channels. But the lesson is the same: if you have something to say and the establishment will not give you time, find another way to say it.

The bottom line

• "A Time for Choosing" aired on October 27, 1964, to support Goldwater, who lost in a landslide. Its real impact was to launch Reagan's political career.
• Reagan's skill was to make a hard-edged philosophy sound like common sense: cheerful, specific and respectful of the audience.
• The road from that broadcast to the White House ran through a 1966 governor's race that he won by nearly a million votes and a 1976 challenge that he lost narrowly.
• Losing an election is not the same as losing an argument. Movements are built in the years after the defeat.
• Read the speech yourself and then ask what you would say to a neighbor who disagrees with you. If your answer is angrier than his, you are doing it wrong.