An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  He said he had just heard Nixon speak to a group of businessmen who had been initially hostile to him, then were won over. Nixon had convinced them he was a solid citizen.

  I was such a fan of Ralph Cordiner by then that I decided to reevaluate some of the things that the liberals (including me) had been saying about Nixon. Realizing after that that he wasn’t the villain I’d thought him to be, I volunteered to campaign for him against Kennedy. I told Nixon I was going to register as a Republican, but he said I’d be more effective if I campaigned as a Democrat, and so I agreed not to change my party affiliation until after the election.

  After hearing about my decision, John Kennedy’s father, Joseph Kennedy, who spent a lot of time in Hollywood, asked to see me. He tried to persuade me to change my mind and support his son but I turned him down.

  Although I agreed at Nixon’s request not to register as a Republican, I was really no longer a Democrat by 1960.

  I’d remain a Democrat for another two years, but by 1960 I had completed the process of self-conversion.

  After that, the more I learned how some liberal Democrats wanted to rein in the energy of free enterprise and capitalism, create a welfare state, and impose a subtle kind of socialism, the more my view changed.

  Upon reflection, I’m not so sure I changed as much as the parties changed.

  One of the greatest of liberals, Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the Democratic Party, once remarked: “A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned—this is the sum of good government.”

  My first vote at the age of twenty-one was for Franklin D. Roosevelt. His platform called for a twenty-five percent cut in federal spending and returning to people in the states and local communities authority and autonomy that had been taken over by the federal government. He also declared: “The federal government must and shall quit this business of relief. Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.”

  Many of the relief programs FDR instituted during the Depression were necessary measures during an emergency, but I remain convinced that it was never his intention—nor those of many of his liberal supporters—to make giveaway programs that trapped families forever on a treadmill of dependency a permanent feature of our government. “Doing for people what they can, and ought to do for themselves, is a dangerous experiment,” the great labor leader Samuel Gompers said. “In the last analysis, the welfare of the workers depends on their own initiative.”

  The classic “liberal” believed individuals should be masters of their own destiny and the least government is the best government; these are precepts of freedom and self-reliance that are at the root of the American way and the American spirit.

  But then came the newfangled “liberals” who rejected these beliefs. They claimed government had a greater wisdom than individuals to determine what was best for the individual and it should engineer our economic and business life according to its goals and values; dictate to states, cities, and towns what their rights and responsibilities were; and take an increasing bite out of the earnings of productive workers and redistribute it to those who are not productive. To them, government was the fount of all wisdom—the bigger government was, the better—and they rejected the principles of Democrats who had gone before them.

  “Liberty has never come from government,” Woodrow Wilson, one of FDR’s predecessors and another Democrat, said. “The history of liberty is the history of limitation of government’s power, not the increase of it.”

  Somewhere along the line, the liberal Democrats forgot this and changed their party. It was no longer the party of Thomas Jefferson or Woodrow Wilson.

  The competitive free enterprise system has given us the greatest standard of living in the world, produced generation after generation of technical wizards who consistently lead the world in invention and innovation, and has provided unlimited opportunities enabling industrious Americans from the most humble of backgrounds to climb to the top of the ladder of success.

  By 1960, I realized the real enemy wasn’t big business, it was big government.

  Following the election that year, I began to get more and more invitations from the Republicans to speak at their dinners and fundraisers and they more or less adopted me as one of their own even though I was still a Democrat. When a lot of the nation’s most prominent Democrats got behind socialized medicine, I started speaking out against it. If we didn’t head it off, I said, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”

  In 1962, while campaigning for Nixon during his unsuccessful attempt to unseat California’s Democratic governor, a tax-and-spend liberal named Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, I made it official: I spoke to a Republican fund-raising event near my home in Pacific Palisades and a woman in the audience stood up in the middle of my speech and asked me: “Have you reregistered as a Republican yet?”

  “Well, no, I haven’t yet,” I said, “but I intend to.”

  “I’m a registrar,” she said, and walked down the center aisle through the audience and placed a registration form in front of me. I signed it and became a Republican, then said to the audience, “Now, where was I?”

  20

  BY THE EARLY 1960S, GE was receiving more speaking invitations for me from around the country than I could handle. And, although I was still saying the same things that I’d said for six years during the Eisenhower administration, I was suddenly being called a “right-wing extremist.” The liberals just didn’t like to hear someone say the growth of government ought to be restrained.

  Some of the arrows I was firing into my old political camp seemed to be hitting home. After the Democrats won the White House in 1960, wherever I’d give a speech, in city after city, there’d be a cabinet member or other high official from the Kennedy administration who’d be giving a speech on the same day. In the television business, we used to call that “counter programming,” an effort to knock out the competition with a rival show. I don’t have any proof they planned it that way, but I don’t think it was coincidental.

  In 1962, there was a change in management at General Electric that brought an end to my satisfying eight-year relationship with the company. Ralph Cordiner was retiring and the new management asked me, in addition to continuing as host of the GE Theater, to go on the road and become a pitchman for General Electric products—in other words, become a salesman.

  I told them that after developing such a following by speaking out about the issues I believed in, I wasn’t going to go out and peddle toasters.

  They insisted and when I still resisted, they canceled the show.

  I realized that appearing on the General Electric Theater for so long probably hadn’t endeared me to the people who owned the movie theaters of America. But there was still a part of me that wanted to be a motion picture actor, and in 1964 I made my last picture—The Killers.

  For the first time in my acting career, I played a villain—and the reaction may have proven that Jack Warner had something when he kept casting me as the good guy in those drawing-room comedies.

  The Killers was a remake of a 1946 picture starring Burt Lancaster that was based on an Ernest Hemingway story. I had seen the original picture and hadn’t liked it very much because everybody in the script was a villain and there was no one to root for.

  When Universal asked me to play a gangster in the remake of The Killers, my instinct was to say no. But I’m afraid they took advantage of an actor’s ego:

  “But you’ve never played a villain before,” they said.

  It was a challenge no actor could resist. I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

  A lot of people who went to see The Killers, I’m told, kept wai
ting for me to turn out to be a good guy in the end and dispatch the villains in the last reel, because that’s how they had always seen me before. But I didn’t, and for whatever reason, the picture didn’t ring many bells at the box office.

  Although my movie career was coming to a close, I was still receiving lots of offers to act as a guest star in television shows. Before long I agreed to do another series, as host—and occasional actor—in “Death Valley Days.”

  If I wasn’t scheduled to act in a show, I’d drive down to the studio from our ranch, spend an hour or so taping an introduction for the next show, then drive home; some days, I didn’t even have to get out of my ranch clothes for the filming.

  The job left me plenty of time for speeches and Republican activities, and when I was asked to be the cochairman of Barry Gold-water’s 1964 presidential campaign in California, I didn’t hesitate a moment. I’d met Barry at the home of Nancy’s parents in Phoenix several years before and admired him greatly. His book, The Conscience of a Conservative, contained a lot of the same points I’d been making in my speeches and I strongly believed the country needed him.

  This was the era of the so-called “Great Society.” After he followed John Kennedy into the White House, Lyndon Johnson had begun to make most of the tax-and-spend Democrats of the past seem miserly by comparison. I thought we sorely needed Goldwater to reverse the trend. I said I’d do anything I could to get him elected.

  While another cochairman managed the day-to-day operations of the campaign, my job was to travel around the state speaking on behalf of Barry and to help him raise campaign funds.

  During the summer and fall of 1964, I spoke at many fund-raising functions, but, for me, one was more important than all the others: an address late that summer to about eight hundred Republicans at the Coconut Grove, a big nightclub decorated with palm trees at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

  I gave basically the same talk I’d been giving for years, altering it slightly so that it became a campaign speech for Barry. I recounted the relentless expansion of the federal government, the proliferation of government bureaucrats who were taking control of American business, and criticized liberal Democrats for taking the country down the road to socialism. As usual, I included some examples of Americans whose business or personal lives had been tormented by bureaucrats and cited examples of government waste, including one federal job training program that was costing taxpayers about seventy percent more for each trainee than it would have cost to send them to Harvard.

  I said America was at a crossroads: We had the choice of either continuing on this path or fighting to reclaim the liberties being taken from us. It was a speech, I suppose, that, with variations, I’d given hundreds of times before.

  After dinner, five or six people from the audience came up to me and asked if I would join them for a few minutes at their table.

  The Coconut Grove by then was almost empty. Except for the waiters, who were noisily clearing off dishes and glassware, everyone was gone except this little group, which I later learned included some of the biggest Republican campaign contributors in California, and I sat down with them.

  They asked me if I would be willing to repeat the speech I’d just given for Goldwater on national television if they could raise the money to buy airtime for it.

  “Sure,” I said, “if you think it would do any good.”

  If we did it, I suggested that instead of repeating my speech in front of a camera in a television studio, it might be more effective if I spoke to an audience in a setting similar to the one in which they’d heard it. They agreed and within a few days had raised enough money to buy a half hour of time on NBC a week before the election. We taped the speech in a big NBC studio in front of an audience of invited Republicans, simulating the kind of gatherings that I’d been speaking to for years.

  A few days before the speech was scheduled to go on the air, I got a telephone call from Barry Goldwater. He sounded uneasy and a little uncomfortable.

  Some of his advisors, Barry said, wanted him to use the airtime that had been purchased for my speech to rebroadcast a videotape of a meeting he’d had at Gettysburg with Ike Eisenhower.

  He said they were afraid my speech, coming so close to the eve of the election, might backfire on him because of references in it to problems with the Social Security system. Social Security, of course, was an issue dear to the hearts of many older voters, and Barry said he had spent almost a year denying Democratic claims that he wanted to do away with it. Some members of his staff, he said, thought my speech would bring up the touchy question all over again and set back their efforts to neutralize the issue.

  In the speech, I had strongly supported the concept of Social Security, but I argued that improvements were needed in it—pointing out, for example, that Americans had been deceived regarding the security of their money that was deducted from their paychecks to pay for Social Security benefits. For years we’d all been told that we were contributing to an old-age insurance fund that was being set aside for our retirement years, but, in fact, there was no “fund” at all; it had become a compulsory tax producing revenues Congress could—and did—use for any purpose it wanted, while letting the reserves needed for future benefits fall $298 million in the hole.

  “Barry,” I said, “I’ve been making the speech all over the state for quite a while and I have to tell you, it’s been very well received, including whatever remarks I’ve made about Social Security. I just can’t cancel the speech and give away the airtime; it’s not up to me. These gentlemen raised the money and bought the airtime. They’re the only ones who could cancel or switch it.”

  “Well,” Barry said, “I haven’t heard or seen the speech yet; they’ve got a tape here, so I’ll run it and call you back.”

  Barry was campaigning someplace in the East, Cleveland I think, and my brother, whose advertising agency was working on his campaign, was part of a group that was traveling with him and so he was there when this was all happening.

  According to my brother, who told me about it later, Barry hung up after talking with me and then he and the members of his staff sat quietly in his hotel suite while an audiotape of the speech was played.

  When it was over, Moon said, Barry looked up at everybody and said, “What the hell’s wrong with that?”

  Then he called me and said it was fine with him to go ahead with the speech.

  Of course, now I was really on edge.

  Who was I to tell a presidential candidate what he should or shouldn’t do in his campaign?

  I’d seen the film showing Barry’s meeting with Eisenhower at Gettysburg and didn’t think it was all that impressive. But his people were the experts and they said Ike would do him more good than I would.

  After Barry’s second call, I thought for a while of calling the group who had purchased the airtime and asking them to withdraw my speech. Barry’s advisors had shaken my confidence a little. But then I thought back on some of the other times I’d given that speech—it had always gotten a good response—and decided, after some lost sleep, not to ask them to withdraw it.

  On the evening of October 27, 1964, Nancy and I went to the home of some friends to watch the broadcast of the speech:

  I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. . . .

  I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines. Now one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used, “We’ve never had it so good!” But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn’t something upon which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today, thirty-seven cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector’s share, and yet our government continues to spend seventeen million dollars a day more than the government takes in. . . .

  This idea that gover
nment is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. This is the issue of this election: 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. You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right.

  There is only an up or down: up to man’s age-old dream—the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order—or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course. In this vote-harvesting time they use terms like the “Great Society,” or as we were told a few days ago by the president, we must accept a “greater government activity in the affairs of the people.” But they have been a little more explicit in the past and among themselves. . . .

  It was, as I’ve said, a compilation of a lot of the thoughts I’d been expressing for several years, but if I could summarize in just a few words, I’d say it was a reminder to my listeners of three words that begin the Constitution of the United States: “We the people . . .”

  I wound up the speech with these words:

  You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

  We will keep in mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny. . . .

  When it was over, the others in the room said I had done well. But I was still nervous about it and, when I went to bed, I was hoping I hadn’t let Barry down.

  At about midnight, Nancy and I were awakened by a phone call from Washington, where it was 3 A.M. The call was from a member of Barry’s campaign team, who told me the Goldwater-for-President campaign switchboard had been lit up constantly since the broadcast.