a time for choosing · reagan

Ronald Reagan's televised speech for Barry Goldwater in October 1964 made him a national figure: a case against the growth of government and for individual freedom, and against accommodation with communism, framed as a choice between self-government and 'the ant heap of totalitarianism'. Set beside the Kennedy and Johnson inaugurals it marks the fault line of postwar American politics.

Read with John F. Kennedy's Inaugural (1961) and Lyndon Johnson's Inaugural (1965) in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.