Steven F. Hayward - The Age of Reagan

T HAT B ARRY G OLDWATER was heading for a landslide defeat of historic proportions had been evident for months before the November election. Goldwater and his partisans also knew. Goldwater himself had fueled media hostility with his intransigent rhetoric, most notably his infamous phrase: Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the defense of justice is no virtue. Then, too, the nations natural caution and desire for stability worked against him. President John F. Kennedys assassination was still too fresh in mind. Lyndon Johnson had been president for less than a year, and having three presidents in 14 months, William F. Buckley Jr. observed at the time, is the kind of thing people go for in banana republics, not here.

One seemingly small scene was still to be played out in the closing days of the doomed campaign: a nationwide TV address by Ronald Reagan. In what would have been a great historical irony, the Goldwater campaign almost stopped Reagan from making what was to become known as The Speech.

Reagans latest movie, The Killers, co-starring Angie Dickinson, had opened earlier in the year to a poor box office and mixed reviews. Originally intended for TV, the movie was deemed too violent and was diverted to theatrical release. Reviewers thought Reagans character, a tough-guy con man who is killed at the end, didnt fit the nice-guy persona he had portrayed in previous moviesa persona that was obvious type-casting. The most jarring moment in The Killers was the roundhouse punch he delivered to Dickinson, knocking her to the floor. But The Killers was his first movie role in nearly 10 years. It would also be his last.

It didnt matter. He had made a good living for several years as a spokesperson for General Electric, traveling the nation giving speeches with a conservative theme. GE dropped him in 1962, coincidentally the same year Reagan finally joined the Republican Partyafter having been a lifelong Democrat who had voted for Franklin Roosevelt four times, and who had appeared on campaign platforms with Harry Truman in 1948. He had also campaigned for Helen Gahagan Douglas against Richard Nixon in the 1950 California Senate race, and throughout the 1950s he declined invitations from the Democratic Party to run for Congress.

Reagans conversion from a New Deal liberal to a Goldwater conservative in the 1950s is an underappreciated phenomenon, chiefly because it is yet another sign that Reagan was ahead of his time. As of the end of the 1940s, Reagan could still describe himself as a near hopeless hemophiliac liberal. What happened to Reagan ideologically in the 1950s would happen to countless liberal intellectuals in the 1970s. Reagan could be considered the first neoconservative, which Irving Kristol, the ex-Trotskyite, famously defined as a liberal mugged by reality. Reagans detractors assumed that someonehis second wife Nancy, perhapshad talked him out of his liberalism. Reagan himself explained it in 1976: Eventually what happened to me was, because I did my own speeches and did the research for them, I just woke up to the realization one day that I had been going out and helping to elect the people who had been causing the things I had been criticizing. So it wasnt any case of some mentor coming in and talking me out of it. I did it in my own speeches. This was much the same formula for the wave of conversions to conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s. But how did Reagan come to see all by himself so much earlier than anyone else that liberalisms lack of a limiting principle would be its undoing, especially since the most severe derelictions of liberalism lay in the future?