"The Speech" October 27th, 1964 [entire speech]

In the fall of 1964, while campaigning on behalf of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan delivered a speech entitled "A Time for Choosing" that generated an unprecedented enthusiasm in Republican circles and marked the Gipper's arrival as rising political star on the national stage. In substance the speech was very similar to those delivered by Barry Goldwater in 1964, stressing a profound distrust of LBJ's "Great Society" programs, describing the threat of international communism in apocalyptic terms, and condemning the growth of the federal government's power, size, and influence in American life. In style, however, Reagan's address outshined anything that Goldwater had done, and it came to be known simply as "The Speech". Two years after this address, Ronald Reagan would be elected governor of California and by 1976 he would mount a viable challenge to Gerald Ford for the the GOP presidential nomination. When Reagan won the presidency in 1980, he would continue to sound many of the same themes that he first set forth in this 1964 barnburner.


---rsd

Here is the text.