by Henry Olsen
Coaches for both teams in the ideological fight between right and left would from that point forward seek to put a “C” for conservative on the Gipper’s helmet. But he would always run on the label he had devised for himself over decades of thinking about politics: “A” for all-American.
Chapter 3
“A Time for Choosing”: A Star Is Born
The classic showbiz rags-to-riches story is when an actor goes out on stage an understudy and comes back a star. On October 27, 1964, that happened to Ronald Reagan.
Reagan gave a nationally televised address on behalf of Barry Goldwater that evening. Millions of Americans watched him for the first time. By the end of the half hour, they had a new hero. By the end of the week the nearly broke Goldwater campaign was flush with cash sent by Reagan’s viewers. By the end of the year, Goldwater’s financial backers were asking Reagan to run for governor of California—and many were already thinking of the next step up.
They had heard Reagan give a version of the talk he had given for the prior seven years on what he called “the mashed potato circuit.” As we saw in the last chapter, this talk in all its versions drove home a few simple themes: American freedom was under assault by Communists abroad and by liberals at home. The federal government was taxing, regulating, and commanding away traditional American virtues in violation of the Constitution and beyond all control of the public. The solution to this was for the people to take back control of their government through vocal, political action in both political parties. If the people failed to do this, freedom itself was at risk.
These messages were red meat to a conservative audience that had believed them for a very long time. But, as we have seen, Reagan’s message also included many themes inspired by his youthful faith in the public New Deal, which other leading conservatives lacked, ignored, or outright opposed. Reagan’s newfound fame was due to his standard, mid-1950s conservative themes combined with his forceful charisma on camera. But it was also due in part—and his ability in later years to succeed where Goldwater and others had failed was due largely—to these unorthodox elements.
A careful review of what became known as “the speech” shows it contained all the standard features of Reagan’s regular talk. Tellingly, it also included some original elements that were intended to appeal overtly and covertly to Democrats who still loved Franklin Roosevelt. In this vein, “the speech” contained briefer invocations of the same unorthodox features that made Reagan’s conservatism unique. In short, everyone watching that night heard the full Reagan philosophy.
One can understand how unorthodox Reagan’s conservatism was only by comparing it with that of conservatism’s reigning king, Barry Goldwater. The publication of his bestselling book, The Conscience of a Conservative, in 1960 had made Goldwater an overnight conservative hero in much the same way that Reagan’s speech made him Goldwater’s overnight heir. But in many crucial elements, the philosophy Reagan was selling was not the same one Goldwater was hawking. In its tolerance of federal and state governmental power to advance the ability of the average person to live with comfort, respect, and dignity, Reagan’s conservatism was far more activist—and far less opposed to the principles of the public New Deal—than was the Arizona senator’s.
Reagan’s ideas were different from his mentor’s in another, less obvious way. Reagan proclaimed that America was special because it enabled everyone to live according to his or her own choices, but Goldwater’s conservatism bore the stamp of a more traditional conservative belief that America was great because it enabled the naturally great to rise. This difference is indeed subtle, but it made all the difference in the world. A person following Goldwater’s ideas would be naturally inclined to think people deserved everything they got in life, and that the government’s attempt to place a floor under people’s standard of living was itself morally suspect. A person following Reagan’s ideas, on the other hand, could distinguish, as Reagan did, between government efforts designed to lift up and those intended to pull down.
Goldwater’s landslide defeat sent conservatives scurrying back home to determine how they had lost. Could Americans really want what Reagan called “the soup kitchen of the welfare state”? Reagan took an active part in that autopsy, although he said in one postelection speech it couldn’t rightly be called an autopsy because the patient, conservatism, wasn’t dead.1 His analysis, though, again demonstrated that his conservatism was different in both its focus and its relationship to the New Deal. He would end 1964 as conservatism’s last, best hope, but he would also end the year poised to begin to transform conservatism itself.
Reagan started his speech by stating that he had “been permitted to choose [his] own words and discuss [his] own ideas” in the talk.2 Reagan is in fact understating his authorship, as he both wrote all of his own speeches and continued to do so throughout most of his public life until he became president.3 The initial statement also had another, less obvious purpose. It placed the audience’s attention on Reagan, not on the man whom he was endorsing. Indeed, Goldwater wasn’t even mentioned until the twelfth paragraph and then only in passing. Reagan, who often played supporting roles in his movie career, was clearly going to be the leading man in his own, self-authored show.
With this in mind, it’s important to note what came next: Reagan told his audience that he was a former Democrat.4 This was not a standard feature of his regular speech. Introducing Reagan’s prior partisan allegiance into the script early served two purposes. It allowed those Democrats who were watching to see someone like them espouse conservative ideas, and, as important, it gave him legitimacy when he claimed later in his speech that he, and all conservatives, endorsed key philosophical elements from the public New Deal.
After these two innovative elements, “the speech” settled into familiar territory for a mid-1960s conservative. Reagan decried the high tax burden Americans faced. He assaulted deficit spending and low but steady inflation. He argued that America was “at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars,” communism.5 And he praised the Founding Fathers for instituting a novel idea, “that government is beholden to the people,”6 and thereby giving everyone “man’s age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order.”7
These conventional arguments had an unconventional twist, however, in the hands of the former Democrat. As we saw in the last chapter, Reagan’s argument was not that the New Deal programs were themselves wrongheaded or unconstitutional. Rather, he contended that since their stated humanitarian goals could be accomplished with less sweeping and expensive programs, their authors must have another goal. They must intend to use these programs as bait to attract Americans to adopt the government-planned society long sought by socialists worldwide.
Thus, Reagan could tell his audience that what others said was the key choice in the election, “between a left or a right,” was wrong. “There is no such thing as a left or right,” he said, “there’s only an up or down.”8 The real issue in the election, the real options that Americans had to choose between, was “whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”9 Here again we see echoes of Reagan’s liberal period. This is exactly what he said was the main issue for the world and for America during his “hemophiliac liberal” days of 1947 and 1951 as he condemned communism, fascism, and Nazism for believing that only a few were better fit to rule the people rather than the people themselves.10 It was also how Roosevelt defined the challenge facing America in 1932, the reason Americans needed a new deal.
If the problem was government planning and not government action per se, then some government actions on humanitarian grounds could be legitimate. And it is to these things Reagan turned after a lengthy critique of how the government’s farm, public housing, and welfare polici
es cost too much and delivered too little.
Reagan starts this, the most important part of his speech, by attacking liberal bias.
Anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we’re denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we’re always “against” things—we’re never “for” anything. Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.11
Reagan then delves into Social Security, saying, “We’re for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we’ve accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem.”12 After arguing that Social Security should be run as the insurance program it was promised to be, with decent rates of return and the ability to name one’s beneficiaries, he turns to the proposed Medicare program. Before criticizing that, he says, “We’re for telling our senior citizens that no one in this country should be denied medical care for lack of funds.”13 In two short lines, Reagan incorporated into conservatism the main popular element of the public New Deal: the willingness to use government power to prevent people from experiencing undeserved poverty.
His appeal even included a subliminal echo of Franklin Roosevelt. His line about liberals “knowing so much that isn’t so” is funny, witty—and plagiarized. It had been uttered by FDR, quoting Woodrow Wilson using that identical phrase, in his fireside chat 7 nearly thirty years before. We don’t know whether Reagan intended this homage to Roosevelt or whether his photographic memory simply recalled the line. But the implicit message is clear: the problem isn’t that the New Deal’s aims were wrong, it’s that the Democratic Party is no longer pursuing those aims at all.
Reagan’s specific attack on Medicare shows this clearly. His complaint was against the compulsory, one-size-fits-all model that “forc[es] all citizens, regardless of need” into the same program.14 This, according to Reagan, was evidence that the Democrats who proposed these things were really using Harry Truman’s party to advance Henry Wallace’s agenda.
He was much more specific about this in his regular talk, as we saw in the last chapter. There Reagan argued that the continued efforts to pass Medicare after the passage of the Kerr-Mills Act, which gave federal financial aid to the states to set up programs allowing the poorest 10 percent of seniors to pay their medical bills, “without even giving it time to see if it worked,” was proof that Medicare’s proponents were primarily interested in extending government control instead of helping people in need.15
The next two items Reagan said conservatives were for continued in this vein. He said conservatives were for the United Nations, but opposed to its structure, which let small nations outvote larger ones like the United States and its allies.16 He said conservatives were for foreign aid, which was initiated by FDR during the war and extended to peacetime by Truman in the Marshall Plan, but against the waste, extravagance, and bureaucracy-creating results the current program had created.17 Again, it was not the principles of the public New Deal that Reagan objected to; he opposed the manner in which those principles were either ineptly implemented or intentionally subverted.
Reagan followed this with another appeal to Democrats who supported the New Deal but opposed socialism. He raised the example of the 1928 Democratic presidential nominee, Al Smith, who left the Democratic Party in 1936 charging that the “Party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland” was being led down the path of “Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.” “To this day,” Reagan argued, “the leadership of that Party, that honorable Party” (emphasis added) has continued to pursue socialism rather than American ideals.18 Any Democrat listening to these words would hear a clear message: If the battle in this election were really between Roosevelt and Hoover, I’d be with you—and with FDR.
It is here, three-quarters into the speech, that Reagan launches into his only significant defense of Barry Goldwater. What he says is telling. In essence, he defends Goldwater against the charge that he is merely a modern-day Hoover. For Reagan, Goldwater was a man who practiced New Deal principles voluntarily by establishing profit-sharing and medical insurance plans for his employees. “He took 50 percent of the profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension plan for all his employees.”19 Reagan said Goldwater set up a child care center for the children of mothers who were his employees. He told stories of how Goldwater had supported the sick, flown medicine to Mexico to help flood victims, and interrupted his campaign—to his aides’ displeasure—to “sit beside an old friend who was dying of cancer.”20 In Reagan’s telling, Goldwater’s most important attribute was his compassion, not his defense of liberty.
Reagan ended his defense of his old friend by saying “this is not a man who could carelessly send other people’s sons to war.”21 This line was important, as the Democrats were effectively attacking Goldwater’s intense anti-communism as an erratic willingness to engage in unnecessary wars. In response to Goldwater’s backers, who had coined the phrase “In Your Heart, You Know He’s Right” to encourage closeted backers to cast the vote they allegedly wanted to, Democrats said “In Your Guts, You Know He’s Nuts.”22 They had even resorted to dramatic fearmongering.
In early September the Johnson campaign had aired perhaps the most famous campaign ad in history, the “Daisy” spot. In it a small girl picks the petals off of a daisy while counting. When she reaches nine, her image freezes and a male voice takes over, saying “ten.” The male then counts down to zero, at which point three nuclear explosions are shown. The commercial ends with another voice saying, “Vote for President Johnson on November third. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.”23 Without mentioning Goldwater’s name, the Johnson campaign had made its point. One man might start a nuclear war, the other will not.
Reagan used this defense to launch into his final section of the speech, an appeal for a vociferous anti-communism. He argued that the Democrats’ approach amounted to appeasement, a fear of riling an adversary that was already bent on America’s defeat. Such a road would guarantee war, Reagan argued, because ultimately America would have to fight or surrender.
Here Reagan delivered some of his most stirring lines, lines that more than anything else probably sealed his future fate as conservatism’s savior. They bear repeating in full:
You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin—just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it’s a simple answer after all.
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” And this—this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.”24
Fifty years later, even after Reagan’s resolute courage brought the free world to that peaceful victory over communism that those of us who followed him only dreamed of, those words still move me beyond compare. How they must have sounded to the adults who heard them in my infancy I can only imagine.
Reagan then launched into his famous conclusion, one that both included phrases he had uttered many times before and one new one. Again, in full:
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.25
Reagan had uttered variants of the last sentence many times before, but the first sentence was new. It was quoting Franklin Roosevelt’s call from his 1936 renomination acceptance speech that the New Deal
generation had “a rendezvous with destiny.” Reagan’s appropriation of one of the Great Communicator’s most famous phrases could not have been an accident. The entire speech had been directed at one audience, the men and women who, like Reagan, had once believed the Democratic Party was their vehicle but now had to face the truth that it had become wedded to another cause. The phrase “you and I” makes this appeal personal: he is addressing each Democrat who loves America to join him in the crusade, not to leave what he or she had believed behind but to have the courage to fight for what he or she believed. Over the next sixteen years, in speech after speech, Reagan would renew this personal appeal to his kinsmen—and they would respond.
For decades commentators have presumed that this speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater in fact was simply a restatement of the senator’s craggy conservatism. George F. Will even wrote that Reagan’s victory in 1980 showed Goldwater had won, “it just took 16 years to count the votes.”26 But Will also wrote later that Americans were indeed conservatives; with Reagan’s win, they had voted to conserve the New Deal.27 This latter statement is closer to the truth, as a close comparison between Goldwater’s and Reagan’s conservatisms shows.
The two men agreed on a lot. They both valued freedom. They were both fervent anti-Communists. They both believed the government, especially the federal government, taxed and regulated too much. Despite this, they disagreed on three very important matters.
