Ronald Reagan's "A Time for Choosing" Speech October 27, 1964

By Douglas Murray @ The Free Press

Among my legion of disdains is a particular contempt for people who inherit their politics. Nothing makes the heart sink more than somebody who explains their view by saying, “My family has always voted Democrat,” or “I come from a long line of Republicans.” So what? I always twitch. How about thinking for yourself?

Among those I most respect, however, are people who are willing to change their minds—and admit to doing so. People who break away from not only their parents’ politics but also their own past convictions. We should remind ourselves of such people during election season, a time when attitudes harden and calcify.

Among America’s best-known political apostates is Ronald Reagan. Having grown up with a fervent Democrat for a father, he moved to California to pursue acting with similar politics. Later in life, he would describe his younger self as a “near-hopeless hemophilic liberal,” so passionately had he “bled for ‘causes.’ ”

In Hollywood, he could not help but notice that his tribe no longer shared his views. “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” he remarked in 1962. “The party left me.” Two years later, he explained why he had come to believe in the Republican project, in one of the greatest examples of political oratory in America’s modern history.

I have been meaning to write about “A Time for Choosing,” ever since I devoted a column to Barry Goldwater’s failure at the Republican National Convention of 1964. For it was at that very same convention that Reagan launched his political career.

And it was in the months that followed that he worked on “The Speech,” as he called it, giving versions of it in many different forums across the country, honing it, adding to it, and getting it by heart. Great orators, like great actors, try out their material, again and again, adjusting it according to how it is received. It was not until October 27, 1964 that Reagan delivered “A Time for Choosing” as a televised address, from Los Angeles. 

“Unlike most television programs, the performer hasn’t been provided with a script,” he began. “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 in the next few weeks.”

Today, many of us notice that our politicians do not like telling us what they plan to do with power, if we should give it to them. Ask about inflation, and they will tell you where they were brought up and in what circumstances. Ask about what they would do with a foreign adversary, and they will scoff that they have no intention of telling you. Reagan had no such problems.

In “The Speech” he was willing to get into technical detail about government overspending, and what he proposed to do about it. “Our Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues,” he observed. “They want to make you and I believe that this is a contest between two men—that we’re to choose just between two personalities.” But policies matter, as do values, and Reagan made his plain, in the simplest language: “A government can’t control the economy without controlling people.”

And, Reagan reminded America, government ought to be “beholden to the people,” not the other way around.

Hence his deep objection to Communism. Effortlessly slipping from statistics into a grander, more emotive register, Reagan emphasized the existential threat of a nuclear-armed Soviet Union:

“We’re at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it’s 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.”

Whatever the dangers of the world today, it should be remembered that America has been through worse and nearer crises in the past, the Cold War being one of them.

Recently, I read a 20-year-old book by one of Reagan’s speechwriters, the great Peter Robinson. He helped Reagan write the 1987 speech in which he called, as leader of the free world, for Germany’s liberation. The State Department tried, multiple times, to remove the most crucial line. Robinson remembers Reagan insisting that it be put back in.

In West Berlin, Reagan demanded: “Tear down this wall!” 

Robinson admits, in his book, “This may sound like an odd admission coming from a former speechwriter, but when I first joined the President’s staff, I sometimes wondered whether his speeches really mattered.” But here was a sentence that made history. Rereading the speech years later, Robinson writes, “The words sounded like the call of a trumpet.”

The story behind this sentence brings us back to the opening line of “A Time for Choosing,” in which Reagan began by pointing out that nobody was telling him what to say. Ever since Reagan had moved to the right, he had been portrayed as dim by the left, a man who was just good at reading a script. No hatred is quite so acute as the hatred for an apostate. But Reagan would think for himself. In the deepest sense he wrote his own script—and the script for his nation.

In “The Speech,” he cautioned against a mindset that he saw much of America slipping into. “We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.” That is a great line, not just because it is pithy, but because it makes you wonder whether you might be one of those many people, or might occasionally be one, at least. It encourages self-reflection in the listener, rather than the desire to have your own opinions and prejudices comfortably confirmed.  

At the end of the speech, Reagan hit a peak of rhetoric that is Churchillian—even Athenian. Reading it today, it seems to me that Americans, and the world, should be grateful that here was a man with real reasons to seek power, and a decent estimation of what, if achieved, he hoped to do with it.

“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.”

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Click below to listen to Douglas reflect on Reagan’s timeless speech, “A Time for Choosing”: