1 gen 1964 anni - Goldwater gets republican nomination. "A time for Choosing"

Descrizione:

At midcentury, the Great Depression and World War II discredited the traditional conservative program of limited government at home and diplomatic isolationism abroad. Moderate Republicans, who came to dominate the GOP in the 1950s, sought to temper the New Deal modestly but not to dismantle it. A right-wing faction nonetheless survived within the party. Its adherents continued to oppose welfare liberalism but reversed their earlier isolationism, which gave way to anticommunist interventionism. In the postwar decades, conservatives pushed for military interventions against communism in Europe, Asia, and the developing world while calling for the broadest possible investigation of subversives at home (see “Red Scare: The Hunt for Communists” in Chapter 24).



However, conservatives still failed to sway American voters in the two decades after World War II. The Republican Party was divided, and conservatism and the GOP were not synonymous. Republican voters by and large continued to favor moderates, such as Dwight Eisenhower, Thomas Dewey, and Nelson Rockefeller. These were politicians, often called liberal Republicans, who supported much of the New Deal, endorsed the containment policy overseas, and steered a middle course on social change. The conservative faction was out of power but did not give up its hopes of a majority within the Republican electorate. In the 1960s and 1970s, those hopes rested on two dynamic figures: Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Together, the two carried the conservative banner until the national electorate grew more receptive to right-wing appeals.


Before World War II, Ronald Reagan was a well-known movie actor and a New Deal Democrat. However, he turned away from liberalism, partly from self-interest (he disliked paying high taxes) and partly on principle. As head of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952, Reagan had to deal with its Communist members — the extreme left wing of the American labor movement. Dismayed by their hardline tactics and goals, he became a militant anticommunist. After nearly a decade as a spokesperson for the General Electric Corporation, Reagan joined the Republican Party in the early 1960s and began speaking for conservative causes and candidates.

One of those candidates was the forthright conservative Barry Goldwater, a Republican senator from Arizona, who surprised centrist Republicans by winning the party’s 1964 presidential nomination. Goldwater’s nomination previewed the coalescing conservative forces that would put Reagan in the White House sixteen years later. Indeed, Reagan the politician first came to national attention in 1964 with a televised speech at the Republican convention supporting Goldwater for the presidency. In a dramatic address titled “A Time for Choosing,” Reagan warned that if Americans chose to “trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state,” the nation would “take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”

Barry Goldwater was a three-term senator from Arizona before he ran for the presidency in 1964 (this photo was taken during the campaign). Goldwater’s conservative influence on the Republican Party was considerable and laid the political groundwork for the rise of Ronald Reagan a decade and a half later.

At the 1964 Republican National Convention, the conservative groundswell won the nomination for Goldwater — and shocked both moderate Republicans and reporters in the convention hall. However, Goldwater’s strident tone and militarist foreign policy were too much for a nation still committed to liberalism. Aided by the legacy of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson defeated Goldwater in a historic landslide. Many believed that Goldwater conservatism would wither away after its brief moment. Instead the nearly four million volunteers who had campaigned for the Arizona senator built toward the future. Skilled conservative political operatives such as Richard Viguerie, a Texas-born Catholic and antiabortion activist, applied new technology to political campaigning. Viguerie took a list of 12,000 Goldwater contributors and used computerized mailing lists, which were new at the time, to solicit campaign funds, rally support for conservative causes, and get out the vote on election day. The major beneficiary of this new form of political organizing was Ronald Reagan.


Financed by wealthy southern Californians and supported by Goldwaterites, Reagan won California’s governorship in 1966 and again in 1970. He succeeded with a promise of limited government and law and order — referring to campus radicals, he vowed to “clean up the mess in Berkeley” — a pledge that found broad support in the nation’s most populous state. His rhetoric also made him a force in national politics, and supporters believed that he was in line to succeed Nixon as the next Republican president. Due to the Watergate scandal, however, Gerald Ford was the incumbent president, which gave him just enough of an edge to narrowly defeat Reagan for the Republican nomination in 1976. When Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in that year’s election, the party’s brightest star only had to wait — Reagan was a near lock for the Republican nomination in 1980.

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