The enduring legacy:

Although most Americans were familiar with Reagan from his movies, this was the first many had glimpsed of his politics. A Democrat for most of his life, he had only recently switched to the Republican Party, and he agreed to try to help rescue the doomed Barry Goldwater campaign in the final weeks before the election.

The Reagan whom Americans saw on the night of Oct. 27, 1964, was not the avuncular, optimistic Reagan of his film roles, or of his subsequent political career that emphasized “morning in America” and the “shining city on a hill,” but a comparatively angry and serious Reagan, serving up partisan red meat against liberalism and the Democrats. “Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government,” he declared, “and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.”

The speech couldn’t save Goldwater. And his landslide defeat by President Lyndon Johnson was thought at the time to represent a sweeping repudiation of conservatism. Yet “A Time for Choosing” created a groundswell of support for Reagan’s own entry into electoral politics two years later. It also provided a template — an understanding of government as ruinously ambitious and out of control, projecting weakness and uncertainty to our enemies abroad — that still defines conservatism today.

ronald reagan