Patrick told CONELRAD in an interview that he escorted the candidate’s wife to the venue. Īuthor Curtis Patrick, who at the time was a young advance man and personal assistant to Senator Goldwater, attended the event and discusses it in his book Reagan: What Was He Really Like? Volume 1. Reagan was to be the star attraction of the evening while Goldwater, who was campaigning elsewhere, was scheduled to address the crowd briefly on film.
The catalyst for his speech being selected for national exposure was, as Reagan recounts in his book, a $1,000-a-plate fundraising dinner for “about 800 Republicans” at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles during the “late summer.” According to two contemporaneous articles from the Los Angeles Times, the pricey fundraiser occurred on Octoand it accommodated between 400 and 500 guests. Ronald Reagan himself confirms most of the oft-repeated chronology in his 1990 autobiography, An American Life. Most Reagan biographies cite a more or less identical confluence of events that resulted in the future president’s appearing on national television on October 27, 1964. “SURE, IF YOU THINK IT WOULD DO ANY GOOD” A more exhaustive history of A Time for Choosing will be posted here in the near future. This excerpt, derived from a much longer examination of the speech, seeks to address these information gaps and recognize the unsung men who made Reagan’s historic political debut possible. And yet, even after half a century, precious few details of how the speech was produced and put on the air have ever been published. Indeed, the story of citizen Reagan’s nationally broadcast star turn on behalf of doomed GOP nominee Senator Barry Goldwater has become a hallowed chapter in the late president’s biography. Over the course of fifty years “The Speech,” as it has been dubbed, has spawned its own mythology in books, articles, documentaries and even a made-for-TV movie. To many conservatives young and old Ronald Reagan’s Octotelevised address A Time for Choosing is the moment that the modern incarnation of their movement was born. I thought Ron was the ideal man to do the speech.” “There was a job to be done and like many others I tried to help.
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