The personal odyssey of Ronald Reagan embodies the story of New Right Republican conservatism. Before World War II, Reagan was a well-known movie actor as well as a New Deal Democrat and admirer of Roosevelt. 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, who formed the extreme left wing of the American labor movement. Dismayed by their hard-line 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 archconservative Barry Goldwater, a Republican senator from Arizona. Confident in their power, centrist Republicans did not anticipate that grassroots conservatives could challenge the party’s old guard and nominate one of their own for president: Goldwater himself. Understanding how they did so in 1964 brings us closer to comprehending the forces that propelled Reagan to the presidency a decade and a half later. Indeed, Reagan the politician came to national attention in 1964 with a televised speech at the Republican convention supporting Goldwater for the presidency. In a dramatic speech titled “A Time for Choosing,” Reagan warned that if we “trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state,” the nation would “take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.”

The Conscience of a Conservative Like Reagan, Goldwater came from the Sunbelt, where citizens embraced a libertarian spirit of limited government and great personal freedom. His 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, set forth an uncompromising conservatism. In direct and accessible prose, Goldwater attacked the New Deal state, arguing that “the natural tendency of government [is] to expand in the direction of absolutism.” The problem with the Republican Party, as he saw it, was that Eisenhower had been too accommodating to liberalism. When Ike told reporters that he was “liberal when it comes to human problems,” Goldwater privately fumed.

The Conscience of a Conservative spurred a Republican grassroots movement in support of Goldwater. By distributing his book widely and mobilizing activists at state party conventions, conservatives hoped to create such a groundswell of support that Goldwater could be “drafted” to run for president in 1964, something he reportedly did not wish to do. Meanwhile, Goldwater further enchanted conservatives with another book, Why Not Victory?, in which he criticized the containment policy — the strategy of preventing the spread of communism followed by both Democrats and Republicans since 1947. It was, he complained, a policy of “timidly refusing to draw our own lines against aggression … unmarked by pride or the prospect of victory.” Here was a politician saying exactly what conservatives wanted to hear.

Grassroots Conservatives Because moderates dominated the Republican Party leadership, winning the 1964 nomination for Goldwater required conservative activists to build their campaign from the bottom up. They found thousands upon thousands of Americans willing to wear down shoe leather for their political hero. Organizations such as the John Birch Society, Young Americans for Freedom, and the Liberty Lobby supplied an army of eager volunteers. They came from such conservative strongholds as Orange County, California, and the fast-growing suburbs of Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and other Sunbelt metropolises. A critical boost came in the early spring of 1964, when conservatives outmaneuvered moderates at the state convention of the California Republican Party, which then enthusiastically endorsed Goldwater. The fight had been bruising, and one moderate Republican warned that “sinister forces are at work to take over the whole Republican apparatus in California.”

Another spur to Goldwater backers was the appearance of a book by Phyllis Schlafly, who was then a relatively unknown conservative activist from the Midwest. Like Goldwater’s own book, Schlafly’s A Choice Not an Echo accused moderate Republicans of being Democrats in disguise (that is, an “echo” of Democrats). Schlafly, who reappeared in the national spotlight in the early 1970s to help halt the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, denounced the “Rockefeller Republicans” of the Northeast and encouraged the party to embrace a defiant conservatism. Contrasting Goldwater’s “grassroots Republicans” with Rockefeller’s “kingmakers,” Schlafly hoped to “forestall another defeat like 1940, 1944, 1948, and 1960,” Democratic victories all.

The conservative groundswell won the Republican nomination for Goldwater. However, his strident tone and militarist foreign policy were too much for a nation mourning the death of John F. Kennedy and still committed to liberalism. Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson defeated Goldwater in a historic landslide. Many believed that Goldwater conservatism would wither and die, but instead the nearly four million volunteers who had campaigned for the Arizona senator swung their support to Ronald Reagan and built toward the future. Skilled conservative political operatives such as Richard Viguerie, a Louisiana-born Catholic and antiabortion activist, applied new computer technology to political campaigning. Viguerie took a list of 12,000 Goldwater contributors and used computerized mailing lists to solicit campaign funds, rally support for conservative causes, and get out the vote on election day. Conservatism was down but not out.

Backed financially by wealthy southern Californians and supported by Goldwaterites, Reagan won California’s governorship in 1966 and again in 1970. His impassioned rhetoric supporting limited government and law and order — he vowed to “clean up the mess in Berkeley,” referring to campus radicals — won broad support among citizens of the nation’s most populous state. More significantly, it made him a force in national politics. His supporters believed that he was in line to succeed Nixon as the next Republican president. The Watergate scandal intervened, however, discrediting Nixon and making Gerald Ford the incumbent. After narrowly losing a campaign against Ford for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, Reagan was forced to bide his time. When Ford lost to Carter in that year’s election, as the party’s brightest star Reagan was a near lock to be the nominee in 1980.