October 27, 1964: The Republican Party runs a half-hour program promoting the candidacy of their nominee for President, Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona. It is titled Rendezvous with Destiny -- ironically, a phrase associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt, the great liberal President of the 1930s and '40s -- and it is hosted by actor Ronald Reagan, who had delivered a speech like it elsewhere that fall, under the title A Time for Choosing. Which, ironically, echoed one of the Goldwater slogans: "A Choice, Not an Echo."
Reagan had supported Roosevelt 4 times, and Harry Truman in 1948. But he began his shift to the right by seeing -- or thinking he was seeing -- Communist influence in American labor unions, including one he was once elected by his peers to lead, the Screen Actors Guild. It's the only thing he ever should have been President of.
In 1947, he and actress Jane Wyman were divorced. Contrary to a later myth, it wasn't over politics: Wyman was a Republican, and supported his runs for office. In 1949, he met another actress, Nancy Davis, and married her in 1952. Nancy had been guided toward arch-conservatism by her stepfather, a Chicago neurosurgeon named Loyal Davis, and he and Ron got on so well that Ron accepted his views as well.
By the 1950s, he was hosting the TV show General Electric Theater, and going around the country, giving right-leaning speeches on behalf of GE, and speaking to other corporations, denouncing high taxation and government regulation. He made disparaging remarks about John F. Kennedy in the 1960 campaign. But it was only in 1962 that he actually changed his party registration from Democratic to Republican.
Seeing an opportunity to help Goldwater, who was badly struggling against the Democratic incumbent, Lyndon B. Johnson, California Republicans asked Reagan to use his speaking ability to assist Goldwater with a televised speech. He accepted with one stipulation: That he give the address in front of a live audience, as he had grown accustomed to doing.
Reagan spent weeks tweaking and practicing the speech. It was scheduled to air on October 27, 1964, from an NBC studio in Los Angeles, as part of a pre-taped TV program called Rendezvous with Destiny. An unnamed announcer said, "Ladies and gentlemen, we take great pride in presenting a thoughtful address by Ronald Reagan." Those who would later criticize Reagan as one of the least thoughtful political figures of their time might find that introduction laughable. He began:
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 on 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, 37 cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector's share, and yet our government continues to spend 17 million dollars a day more than the government takes in.
We haven't balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We've raised our debt limit three times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world. We have 15 billion dollars in gold in our treasury. We don't own an ounce. Foreign dollar claims are 27.3 billion dollars. And we've just had announced that the dollar of 1939 will now purchase 45 cents in its total value.
And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man.
All this ignored the fact that all this taxation meant that the economy was, in fact, booming, and that, yes, to that point, the American people really had never had it so good. He went on:
Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are."
And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to." And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth...
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 capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well, I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down: Up, man's old, old-aged 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.
Reagan made references to a pair of LBJ cronies: Billie Sol Estes, who, in 1962, while LBJ was Kennedy's Vice President, had paid off U.S. Department of Agriculture officials for grain storage contracts, and eventually served, on different charges, 8 and later 4 more years in prison; and Bobby Baker, who became what would now be called LBJ's chief of staff while he was Senate Minority Leader, and had also bribed government officials, and later served a year and a half in prison for tax evasion.
Reagan gave lip service to Social Security, something the Republicans had opposed since its proposal and passage in 1935, but trashed LBJ's "Great Society" as a whole: "No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So governments' programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth."
He closed as follows:
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."
Winston Churchill said, "The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits, not animals." And he said, "There's something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells 'duty.'"
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.
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. Thank you very much.
Today, conservatives refer to this address as "The Speech," and tell us that it rallied support for Goldwater all over the country, and that it launched Reagan on the path to becoming the next great conservative politician in America. Washington Post reporter (and later columnist) David S. Broder called the speech "the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic Convention with his 'Cross of Gold' speech."
(I guess Broder, a Chicago native, had forgotten another Democratic Convention speech delivered in Chicago: Adlai Stevenson's acceptance speech in 1952: "Let's talk sense to the American people." And Hubert Humphrey's "human rights" speech at the 1948 Convention in Philadelphia.)
In fact, the speech was a complete flop. Pretty much the only people who watched it were Republican loyalists. It raised over $1 million for Goldwater's campaign -- about $9.4 million in 2022 money -- but if that money's use won any State for Goldwater, it saved his home State of Arizona. Other than that, he only won 5 Southern States, which were angry at LBJ for getting the Civil Rights Act passed. So the speech did next to nothing for the candidate it was meant to support.
But it did wonders for Reagan: It made him the front-runner for the Republican nomination for Governor of his adopted home State of California in 1966, and he won. He was re-elected in 1970, and, while the State Constitution then allowed Governors to serve a 3rd term, he chose not to run again in 1974, so he could concentrate on his 1976 run for President. He didn't get the Republican nomination that time, but got it in 1980, and the rest is history -- and myth.
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October 27, 1964 was a Tuesday. Mary T. Meagher, who won 3 Gold Medals in swimming at the 1984 Olympics, was born. This was also the day that Albert DeSalvo was arrested, and confessed to being the serial killer then known to the public only as "The Boston Strangler." I have a separate entry for that event.
Baseball season had ended 12 days earlier, when the St. Louis Cardinals beat the New York Yankees in Game 7 of the World Series. Football was in midweek.
There were 3 games played in the NBA that night, including a doubleheader at the old Madison Square Garden. The Philadelphia 76ers beat the St. Louis Hawks, 100-81. Then, the Boston Celtics, unaware of the arrest made back home, beat the New York Knicks, 131-103. And the San Francisco Warriors beat the Baltimore Bullets, 101-90 at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium (now the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium).
One game was played in the NHL: The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 3-2 at the Chicago Stadium.
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