Adrian Lee is a solicitor-advocate in London, specialising in criminal defence, and was twice a Conservative parliamentary candidate.
Sixty years ago, on the 27 October 1964, a fading Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan, appeared on a presidential election broadcast and launched his political career with arguably the finest conservative speech since the Second World War.
The speech came at the end of Barry Goldwater’s disastrous presidential campaign. Goldwater was the champion of the party’s Right and had captured the nomination largely through motivating the younger generation.
His seminal 1960 polemic, The Conscience of a Conservative, had given rise to a new nationwide youth organisation, Young Americans for Freedom, which was independent of the Republican Party (GOP) and unashamedly conservative.
It is forgotten today that the Republicans at this time closely resembled the British Conservative Party, since it represented a coalition of broadly middle-class political interests and contained left and right wings.
The Right had not had a champion of its interests in the White House since Calvin Coolidge; after 1932, American politics had moved closer to the European model, with the size of the state increasing exponentially and Keynesian doctrine becoming orthodox. Goldwater represented a break with this consensus.
But it had come at the wrong time. Not only was redistribution of wealth still regarded as the way forward in post-war democracies, but the Republicans’ fate in the 1964 election was sealed before the campaign started with the JFK assassination in November 1963. (Goldwater privately told his supporters that voters were unlikely to change president twice in one year.)
The Democrats were also likely to benefit from widespread public grief. Despite this, Goldwater was eventually persuaded to run by his enthusiastic supporters.
Goldwater was, in truth, more of a libertarian than a conservative. He wasn’t particularly religious (his father being Jewish and his mother being Anglican) and he did not express views on moral issues often. He focussed firmly on promotion of the free-market economy, rolling back the “New Frontier” of the welfare state and standing up to the Soviet Union.
Today, these opinions do not seem particularly extreme, but in 1964 his opponents painted him as an extremist who wished to cut the elderly’s pensions and start a war with Russia. To make matters worse, he gaffed frequently throughout the campaign and his television commercials were corporate and dreary.
By late October 1964, with only a week of campaigning left, Goldwater was stuck on 36 per cent to Lyndon Johnson’s 64 per cent. The Democrats were odds on to win by a landslide. Something had to be done.
The GOP still had one pre-paid slot for a national television broadcast. The original intention had been to screen another generic Madison Avenue film about the wonders of the candidate, but a group of Californian businessmen, led by Henry Savatori, had a different suggestion.
During the campaign, they had come across the actor Reagan giving fundraising speeches on behalf of the GOP. Essentially, he made the same speech to different audiences, but it was written by him and was highly impressive. The businessmen were astonished by the reaction of audiences and therefore suggested that Reagan make the campaign’s final broadcast.
Party bosses were sceptical and pointed out that Reagan had only officially been registered as a Republican for the past two years and had never held political office. They asked the businessmen what exactly they were planning to do with Reagan if he were given the TV slot.
They replied that he would make the same speech, entitled ‘A Time for Choosing’, that he had given to the fundraising dinners. This was almost 30 minutes in length, and required a static audience to watch his oration.
The PR consultants derided the suggestion. After all, this was 1964, not 1874. People were just not going listen to a half hour speech in their homes, when they could turn over to Perry Mason. They were also concerned that the tone of the speech was too conservative and would only appeal to the faithful.
Undeterred, the businessmen said that they would personally pay for the prime-time slot to facilitate the broadcast. The Party managers washed their hands of responsibility and let the foolish businessmen do as they wished.
However, those managers were not finished yet. Reagan was telephoned and pressured to withdraw. The actor replied politely that the decision wasn’t his to make. Other people were paying for it, so it was their decision. The conversation ended, but Reagan learnt later that William J Baroody, the Policy Director of the campaign, and his colleague Denison Kitchel were still trying to stop the broadcast up three hours before it was televised.
When it was finally aired, it was without the Republican Party title, being instead sponsored by an independent body called “TV for Goldwater-Miller”.
The transmission’s grainy black and white film still exists. It opens on a hall of seated Republican activists. The camera then pans over to Reagan standing behind a lectern on a stage. The announcer says that “we take pride in presenting a thoughtful address by Ronald Reagan”. Reagan opens by stating:
“Unlike most television programmes, the performer hasn’t been provided with a script. I have been permitted to choose my own words and discuss my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks.”
From this point, Reagan moves at a fast pace, talking to his audience about the country’s high personal taxes and the debt burden. He touches on the Soviet Union and describes Communism as “…the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind.” Scattered throughout the script are both humorous and personal anecdotes, which help to keep the audience’s attention.
Viewing the recording today, one is hooked on watching the performance through to the end. This speech reaches a level of televised public speaking rarely seen before or since. Reagan had a magnetic hold over conservatives; he doesn’t stop for applause but presses on. There is a reason for this: he was constrained by the amount of airtime purchased.
The speaker tells of two friends who met a refugee, who had escaped from Fidel Castro’s Cuba. After hearing the man’s story, one man said to the other “We don’t know how lucky we are”. Reagan then tells us the Cuban’s response: “How lucky you are? I had some place to escape to!”. He concludes:
“And in that sentence, he told us the entire story. If we lost freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.”
Reagan then sets out the choice at the election as between:
“…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 for ourselves.”
Next up for critique are the Democrats urban renewal programmes, and the fact that they mostly fail to reach their objectives. Reagan talks of how impersonal central government has failed to solve problems of hunger and poverty. In contrast to their original aim, the bureaucratic state had squandered taxpayer’s money on worthless projects.
He recounts a media story that a woman with six children admitted to divorcing her husband to receive higher benefits. He states that:
“When you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we’re denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. 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.”
The speech concluded by raising the moral issues of Cold War. He urges Americans to reject appeasement and opt for “peace with strength”. He quotes Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, the Bible and even Roosevelt. Building to a crescendo Reagan says:
“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on the earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness…You and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and to determine our own destiny.”
The public reaction to the speech was immense. It raised over a million dollars and Goldwater increased his poll ratings by five per cent. He still lost heavily, but Reagan had established himself on the national stage and in 1966 he would win the Governorship of California. His first run at the Republican nomination for President came in 1968.
Above all, conservatives had found their spokesman and future leader – in the space of less than 30 minutes.
