For a speech that launched one of the most consequential political careers in American history, it didn’t seem to be a good idea to some people.
The race for the White House had only a week left, and Gallup had the Republican challenger behind in its latest survey, with 36 percent to the incumbent president’s 64 percent.
The nationally televised half-hour program, Rendezvous with Destiny, would divert valuable resources from the challenger’s desperate efforts to get out the vote.
The candidate wouldn’t even appear on the program. Instead, a Hollywood actor who had switched parties just a couple of years before would deliver the message.
The program was taped before the campaign’s manager and policy director even knew about it — and when they saw the tape, they were aghast: The speech dealt with an issue the campaign wanted to avoid at all costs.
But the manager couldn’t cancel it. California friends of the broadcast star, led by an oil-industry titan, had paid the production and placement costs out of their own pockets.
When the candidate personally called and asked the speaker not to let the program be aired, he dodged and weaved. It wasn’t up to him, the star said. It was other people’s money and their decision, not his. Besides, he asked, what was wrong with the message?
In the end, Senator Barry Goldwater watched the tape of 53-year-old Ronald Reagan’s speech with special attention to the segment on Social Security that his manager and longtime confidant, Denison Kitchel, and campaign policy director, William J. Baroody, had objected to. When the tape finished, he turned to the two men and growled, “What the hell’s wrong with that?”
Nonetheless, one observer later claimed that three hours before the broadcast began on the evening of Tuesday, October 27, 1964, Kitchel and Baroody were still trying to get Reagan’s speech replaced with a rerun of a program that featured Goldwater himself.
But because the half-hour special was paid for by Henry Salvatori and other California friends of Reagan through an independent committee called “TV for Goldwater-Miller,” all Kitchel and Baroody could do was carp, fret, and prepare their “we told you so’s.”