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28 2 Blaming “the Sixties” The RISe oF RonALD ReAGAn Reagan came to power in California in opposition to the riots that were going on. . . . It was a very, very rowdy period in American history. . . . He first ran for president—people don’t focus on this— in 1968. James A. Baker III (2004) By characterizing his political rise as an antidote to the 1960s, Ronald Reagan successfully propelled debate about the decade to the center of American politics. But long before the phrase “the sixties” entered the national vocabulary, before the backlash against the Great Society had begun, and even before Reagan had won his first election in 1966 as governor of California, he expressed his hostility to the liberal ideas associated with the era. The notion of “the sixties” began to take shape during the 1960s themselves, well before the end of the decade, when conservatives such as Reagan started to rail against Johnson’s Great Society and those who did not support the U.S. effort in Vietnam. In the 1960s and 1970s Reagan strongly and repeatedly criticized big government, liberals, and the era’s permissive social ethos. his rhetoric as president was quite consistent with his previous public statements. Throughout his political life he argued for a return to a pre-1960s America . once elected president in 1980, Reagan continued his assault on “the sixties.” he called for an “American renewal” and vowed to do all he could to overturn what he viewed as the sins of the decade, which, he said, had damaged American education, morality, and the economy and had promoted crime and drug abuse. Turning against “the Sixties” michael Deaver, asked if Reagan felt that the 1960s had been harmful to Americans, replied without hesitation: “oh, I think so. he couldn’t go on 29 The Rise of Ronald Reagan a campus or they’d blow it up,” he said. “The only way to go on campus was to go under armed guard.”1 Both Reagan and Deaver were especially fond of telling one story.2 “Back in those riotous days of the sixties,” Reagan claimed in 1984, students from the assorted campuses of the University of California “demanded a meeting with me. And they kind of had a chip on their shoulder , but I was pleased to meet with them, because in those days if I went near a campus I could start a riot.” (Reagan used this or a similar phrase over ten times during his presidency, especially in his 1984 reelection campaign.) “When they came in, they slouched in the usual uniform of that day, and their spokesman, resplendent in T-shirt and barefoot, opened by telling me . . . ‘Your generation doesn’t understand its own sons and daughters,’” Reagan recounted. “I tried to pass it off. I said, ‘Well, we know more about being young than we do about being old.’ And he said, ‘no, I’m serious.’ he said, ‘You didn’t grow up in a world of instant electronics, of computers figuring out problems that once took months and even years. You didn’t have nuclear power and jet travel and journeys out into space’—and so forth.” When the student paused to take a breath, Reagan replied: “‘You’re right. our generation didn’t have those things when we were your age. We invented them.’ It sure did change the tone of the discussion.”3 Reagan was in full adversarial mode during the 1960s. By the 1964 presidential campaign, he recalled in his 1990 memoir, “Lyndon Johnson had begun to make most of the tax-and-spend Democrats of the past seem miserly by comparison. I thought we sorely needed Goldwater to reverse the trend,” he wrote. “I said I’d do anything to help get him elected.”4 on october 27, 1964, Reagan gave an address—officially titled “A Time for Choosing” but more commonly referred to as “The Speech”—as part of a nationally televised broadcast on behalf of Goldwater, who sponsored the program. Reagan, still an actor at the time, began by declaring that he had switched parties. he then introduced themes that would mark the rise of the Right from the 1960s on. After charging the government with excessive taxation and spending, he turned to the subject of Vietnam. “We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars,” he insisted. Retelling the story of a Cuban refugee who had...

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