In October of 1964, Ronald Reagan delivered a political address that conservatives now refer to as âThe Speech.â Better known today as âA Time for Choosing,â it was an endorsement of Barry Goldwater over Lyndon Johnson in that presidential election year. Filmed motion picture style before a live audience of supporters, for thirty minutes Reagan the actor stepped into the national political spotlight. For the next forty years, he never really left it.
Reagan was fifty-three that year and had acquired the gravity of middle age. Television viewers expecting the glib leading man of light comedies like âBedtime for Bonzoâ saw a different character altogether. This Reagan could be somber and seriousâand passionate about politics. It was an earnest time for choosing, and the choice mattered for Reagan, and it mattered for America. The man at the microphone was, so he said, the Real Reagan speaking his mind, not an actor reading lines. He claimed that âunlike most television programs, the performer hasnât been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own words and discuss my own ideas regarding the choice that we face.â The issue of that election, Reagan said, was âwhether 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.â Half a century on, the countryâand perhaps the worldâis different for the electoral choice it made.
Today it is nearly impossible to reflect on Ronald Reagan without seeing him as governor, president, âfreedom fighterâ (a favorite phrase from his presidency), and winner of the Cold War. But the context of this book is 1964, two years before Reaganâs unlikely election as governor of California, and just a week before Lyndon Johnson buried Barry Goldwater in the presidential election, winning ninety percent of the Electoral College and sixty-one percent of the electorate. It is worth pausing momentarily and connecting the man and context to âThe Speechâ before moving on to the content of this volume.
Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, in 1911. Not only did he live through both World Wars but also the Great Depression and the first, worst years of the Cold War. His life during this era was undistinguished and typically American. His youth and inner compass were rooted in small-town America, with a loving mother active in church activities and a troubled, traveling salesman father. Reagan attended high school in a neighboring town, lifeguarded, then worked his way through a small, Midwestern liberal arts college. An economics major at Eureka College, Reagan performed in theater, played football, studied, and worked to pay the bills. After a stint as a radio sports announcer, he made it to Hollywood in 1937 following a successful screen test. Although never quite the box-office draw that contemporary leading men like Spencer Tracy or Cary Grant were, Reagan acted in over fifty films and earned the respect and trust of his associates; they elected him president of the Screen Actors Guild seven times, and he was on the board of the Guild or its president for nearly all of the years 1946â1960. In this role, he led negotiations with management and strikes over fair pay for non-celebrity actors. He also became a trusted face on American televisionâin an era of just three networksâas host of General Electric Theater for the eight years between 1954 and 1962.
Thus, by 1964 Ronald Reagan was an aging media personality and had only served in one elected position: as president of a labor union. He had been a great supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal, and past Democratic Party candidates. He was a vocal âDemocrat for Eisenhowerâ in the 1950s. Some would argue that Reagan changed stripes by 1964 if he was supporting a small government conservative like Barry Goldwater. However, the themes that Reagan cared about in the 1940s and 1950s were consistent with those he sounded in âA Time for Choosing.â He believed that the purpose of many of FDRâs programs was to protect the average American and, more generally, that the role of Washington should be to protect peopleâs liberties against Communists abroad or aggressors at home. Reagan valued action that aided the individual, whether by clubs, unions, or political parties. He hated bullying, whether by studio executives or Americaâs enemies.
By the early 1960s, Reagan had come to believe that the biggest bully at home was government bureaucracy. An unintended legacy of the New Deal and post-war federal programs was a growing federal bureaucracy that was not only unelected and unaccountable but was actively persecuting business people, farmers, and tax payers. Reagan came to this awareness while leading the Screen Actors Guild and traveling across the country meeting common people on behalf of GE during an era of government expansion. In sum, he was always a consistent champion of individual rights over any form of exploitation or faceless bureaucratic meddling.
That was the Reagan of âThe Speechâ: a middle-aged, lifelong Democrat who had recently become a Republican. In many ways, the themes of his speech were a product of the times. In 1964 it had been five years since the Soviet Union apparently gained the strategic upper hand by launching Sputnik, and around the world the old Western colonial influences had fallen (India, Indochina, North Africa, the Levant) and vibrant Communist insurgencies suggested that the new countries, like dominoes, were falling. Indeed, although many of todayâs academics mock the âdomino theory,â at the time, it seemed clear that the evidence in the Far East corroborated the domino theory: China, North Korea, and later Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia would all fall to Communism. Communists had taken Cuba and were attempting to export revolution throughout Latin America and Africa. Reaganâs audience was all too familiar with Soviet cruelty across Eastern and Central Europe, and they were deeply concerned about their own future in a nuclear world.
At home, the seeming prosperity of the 1950s was in question after the recession of 1960â1961. The economy was growing, but there was a sense in many quarters that the average citizen had few rights before faceless yet powerful government bureaucracies: federal highways and municipalities were asserting eminent domain; taxes rose, then dipped, and then rose again; the activist Warren Court seemed to be remaking the law; and government agencies seemed to be treading on citizens through central planning, quotas, and fines.
So by 1964 Reagan could look back on the America of his youth and contrast it to a bureaucratized, impersonal American government that no longer protected the rights of citizens. Politically, socially, culturally, economically, and strategically it was âa time for choosing.â Many of the themes sounded by Ronald Reagan in that speech would carry into his multiple terms as governor of California and president of the USA. The then-novel address turned out to be vintage Reagan. Balanced budgets, tax relief, personal responsibility, American exceptionalism, limited government at home, peace through strength abroad, and above all freedomâthose were the driving ideas of Reaganâs political program for decades. It also turned out that Reagan was on the right side of history regarding another of those themes, anti-Communism. He said: âWeâre at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and itâs been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think itâs time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.â
But what of those other Reaganesque ideas and policies? Are they still relevant today? Eight public intellectuals (and Reagan, tooâon film provided by the Reagan Foundation) convened in Regent Universityâs Theatre in 2014 for the universityâs annual Reagan Symposium to discuss a variety of topics, all related to assessing âA Time for Choosingâ in its fiftieth anniversary year. Their edited remarks, summarized below, make up the core chapters of this volume.
Amity Shlaes is chairman and CEO of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation, a syndicated columnist for Forbes and a professor in the MBA program at New York Universityâs Stern School of Business. In âIdeas That Travel: Coolidge, Reagan, and Conservative Economic Policy,â she provides initial reflections on Ronald Reaganâs presidency and provocative comparisons between the 40th president and Calvin Coolidge, the 30th. While Coolidge was, perhaps, a greater president than Reaganâthe federal government was actually smaller when he left office than when he entered itâShlaes sees the two presidents as augmenting one another, at least in economic terms, and it is a fact that Reagan admired Coolidge. Both men came to a realization of American exceptionalism, both moved from somewhat progressive and interventionist economic theories to economic conservatism, and both had defining encounters with public sector unions. Each had his own political time for choosing: Coolidgeâs came in the nineteen teens, when he moved from the progressive wing to the conservative wing of the Republican Party; Reaganâs came in the late 1950s, when he left the Democratic Party for the Republican Party (or, as he liked to say, âI didnât leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left meâ). The âcatalystâ for Coolidgeâs choice was a strike by Boston policemen while he was governor; though sympathetic toward their situation, Coolidge fired them, declaring âThere is no right to strike against the public safety, by anyone, anywhere, anytime.â President Reagan was to take a similar tack when he fired striking PATCO (air traffic control) workers in 1981. Other similarities (and differences) are charted by Shlaes.
Darren Patrick Guerra is Associate Professor of Political Science at Biola University; his doctorate was earned at Claremont Graduate University, and he is the author of Perfecting the Constitution: The Case for the Article V Amendment Process. His chapter, âPreserving Americaâs Written Constitution: Federal Courts and President Reaganâs Defense of Ordered Liberty,â describes President Reaganâs understanding of the Constitution as a vital safeguard of American libertiesâif properly interpreted and appliedâand his efforts to promote that view and restore what Guerra sees as a âproperâ role for courts in the political process. In his âA Time for Choosingâ speech, Reagan quoted Sen. William J. Fulbright of Arkansas (who would later serve as a mentor to the future president William J. Clinton) as saying that the US Constitution has become âoutmodedâ and is an âantiquated documentâ that impedes progressive policies. Accordingly, Progressives favor active federal courts capable of adapting the Constitution to modern developments. Reagan, according to Guerra, wholeheartedly rejected these views and âfought in word and deedâ as president to return courts (and the Court) to a less active and willful place in Americaâs constitutional order. He mounted an âaggressive defense of written constitutionalismâ through his rhetoric, his choice of Attorneys General, and his nominations to the federal bench. The Supreme Court in particular had strayed from its role as âthe custodian of our Constitution,â as Reagan said during his notoriously controversial nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Court. There was a dearth in the federal courts of judges who would (in a now-familiar refrain among Conservatives) âinterpret law, not make it.â Even after Borkâs highly politicized defeat (an episode which created a new verb in our political lexicon, âto Borkâ), the president vowed to nominate another judge who shared his belief in âjudicial restraint.â Reaganâs Attorneys General, especially William French Smith and Edwin Meese, were nominated because they too shared this view of the courts and the Constitution.
Ryan T. Anderson is the William E. Simon Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and the editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey; he holds a doctorate from the University of Notre Dame. In âA New Time for Choosing on Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Todayâs Challenges to the Principles of Ronald Reaganâs Conservative Manifesto,â Anderson asserts (one would think un-problematically) that âAmerica exists to defend the unalienable rights of the Declaration of Independence,â rights that have been challenged in ways that Reagan scarcely imagined in 1964 or, we might add, could even have imagined in 1989 when he left office. Anderson is struck by the contemporary relevance of Reaganâs earlier concerns that government taxes too much, spends too much, owes too much (especially to foreign interests), is transforming into a welfare state that unwittingly traps the poor, and is threatened by âenemies abroad who reject the moral foundations of our political order.â But for all these familiar concerns, Anderson focuses on the necessary cultural underpinnings âif our experiment in self-government is to be successfulââconcerns that Reagan did not explicitly address in 1964. That is why, he says, âwe must decide to stand for the culture that makes freedom possible.â What sort of culture is that? To begin with, according to Anderson, one that protects the natural rights to life and libertyâespecially religious libertyâand (more controversially) by extension one that protects marriage from âmarriage penaltiesâ in the tax code and against too easy divorce practices. Marriage needs protecting because it is âthe fundamental institution of civil societyâ and âthe best protector of the rights of children to pursue happiness.â Government overreach on matters religious and sexual, says Anderson, is the result of âthe rejection of the American Founding and an embrace of progressivism,â and evidently a return to the natural law political principles of the founders (and their great admirer Reagan) is in order.
Claire Berlinski is a City Journal contributing editor, a freelance journalist, biographer, and novelist; she holds a doctorate in international relations from Oxford University and is the author of There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters. Her whimsically titled âA Time for Choosing: âWhen Maggie Chose Ronnieâand When She Didnât: An Exploration of âThatcheriteâ and âReaganiteâ Foreign Policiesâ provides a sympathetic, yet critical, evaluation of Margaret Thatcherâs career as Prime Minister and the complex Thatcher-Reagan relationship during the last years of the Cold War. Despite their similar political philosophies, and contrary to the popular perception of their relationship, the Iron Lady and the Great Communicator sometimes clashed behind the scenes. The clashes were seldom or never over differences of political principle. Both leaders placed a high premium on liberty and individual responsibility. Drawing on Thatcherâs speeches, and her own interviews with Thatcherâs Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, Berlinski concludes: âIn the society Thatcher sought to restore, individual adults, not the state, would make these [myriad moral] choices and individual adults would assume their consequences, this to their own moral benefit. Reagan clearly shared precisely this view.â Indeed, Lady Thatcher wrote in her memoir that on meeting Reagan for the first time, âI knew that I was talking to someone who instinctively felt and thought as I did,â on politics, and even âa philosophy of government, a view of human nature, all the high ideals that lieâor ought to lieâbeneath any politicianâs ambition to lead his country.â Yet they disagreed, sometimes âvehemently.â Those disagreements, Berlinski shows, often stemmed, not from differences in political philosophy but from their views of their respective nationsâ roles on the world stage. Thatcher led a nation that once ruled a world empire (for good, according to Winston Churchill) but was, by the 1980s, on the geopolitical downslope. Reagan, on the other hand, saw the USA (and himself) as a world leaderâparticularly in the global fight against Communismâand tried to position the USA accordingly. This necessarily meant that Reagan âchose to prioritize fighting the Cold Warâand his role as global leaderâover sound financial housekeeping.â For this Reagan was chastised by his friend Thatcher. She wrote him in 1987 that, for all his accomplishments, one of the most important having been âto restore the US economy to health,â she was troubled about US debt and Reaganâs apparently cavalier attitude toward it. On other occasions, too (e.g., in Poland), Thatcher disagreed with Reagan over the means he sought to use, not merely to contain but to defeat the Soviet Union. Reaganâs âStar Warsâ proposal, for example, initially left Thatcher âtruly aghast.â Her disagreements âvexedâ Reagan repeatedly and revealed that in some respects Prime Minister Thatcher was the âconservativeâ (at times a dissenting and alarmed one) and President Reagan the âradicalâ (all Berlinskiâs words). Other illuminating incidents from the Thatcher-Reagan dance are related, and conclusions drawn, by Berlinski.
Stephen F. Knott is Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College and directed the Ronald Reagan Oral History Project at the University of Virginia; he received his Ph.D. in political science from Boston College and is the author of The Reagan Years and At Reaganâs Side: Insidersâ Recollections from Sacramento to the White House. In ââThe Speechâ: Reagan, the Russians, and the Bomb,â Knott, like Berlinski, treats Reaganâs Cold War strategyâin this case, specifically regarding nuclear weapons, and he does so from a deeply informed position on presidential history, and with wit. Rather than the gunslinging war monger whom some of the press corps loved to hate, Knott uncovers the âvisceral anti-nuclear animusâ that came to animate Reaganâs presidency and asks when that animus developed. (It was, after all, an unusual and even unpredictable stance to takeâone that prompted a Reagan advisor to label his boss an âanti-nuclear hawkâ and author Paul Lettow to call him âan original and wildly unorthodox thinker.â) The answer, it turns out, is that Reagan was already an anti-nuclear hawk when he delivered âA Time for Choosingâ in 1964âthough few knew it at the time. There are hints in The Speech, as Knott uncovers, but Reagan had political reasons for keeping his stronger anti-nuclear opinions quiet. He had, after all, been invited by Goldwaterâs handlers to make the address, and Goldwater was on record proposing that NATO be given unilateral authority to use nuclear weapons in Europe if necessary and that perhaps âlow-yield atomic weaponsâ could be used to defoliate Vietnam. Statements like those got Goldwater in hot water with some in the media and the psychiatric community. The fact that Goldwater had been a Major General in the Air Force Reserves only added to perceptions that he was trigger-happy. And as Knott recounts, the Johnson campaign spun Goldwaterâs slogan âIn your heart, you know heâs rightâ into âIn your guts, you know heâs nuts.â Thus, any concerns about nuclear weapons expressed by Reagan would have undermined Goldwaterâs campaign. So it was prudent of Reagan to steer clear of the nuclear issue (with one oblique exception, a reference to âthe threat of the bombâ), and his own preferred tactic of economic pressure against the Soviets, during his campaign speech in 1964. As president, however, Reagan repeatedly supported a strong military buildup while at the same time criticizing the madness of MAD (mutually assured destruction) and expressing his hope for a world without nukes. As he wrote in his memoir (1990), âfor the eight years I was president I never let my dream of a nuclear-free world fade from my mind.â Though his dream was not realized, Reaganâs unlikely rise from âdeeply spiritual, politically engaged B-list actorâ opposed to nuclear weapons, to two-term president of the USA, by the end of which he had negotiated the elimination of a whole class of nuclear weapons (over the objections of all the âexpertsâ) is the stuff, says Knott, of Hollywood. It is also a script written by a âradical visionaryâ Reagan still unknown to many of his fellow citizens.
Ionut C. Popescu teaches political science at Old Dominion University; he holds a doctorate in international relations from Duke University. His âThe Disputed Sources of Reaganâs Grand Strategyâ examines the conflicting assessments of Reaganâs foreign policy toward the Soviet Union, including the criticism that Reagan did not even have a coherent âgrand strategy,â in the parlance of contemporary international relations. Following on from Knottâs and other chapters, Popescu portrays President Reagan as farsighted on the international relations front and certainly possessed of a grand strategy. His chapter then clarifies the sources of that strategy and seeks to draw âlessons from it for our current era.â Popescu does so by uncovering the values and ideas undergirding Reaganâs grand strategy, rehearsing the formal strategic plans Reagan outlined early in his presidency, and analyzing how successful the 40th president was in making his subsequent policy decisions match his early theory. Finally, Popescu seeks to answer the question of how much of Reaganâs foreign policy success was due to planning and how much to learning and adaptation throughout his presidency. Reagan entered office already convinced that America should hold a leading place in world affairs and that the USA was, as he said back in 1964, âin a war [with Communism] that must be won.â This in sharp contrast to the strategy of dĂ©tente adopted successively by Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter. Such a strategy was mere âappeasementâ (a pejorative ever since the days of Neville Chamberlain). Reagan proposed, instead, âpe...