Becoming Ronald Reagan by Robert Mann

Author:Robert Mann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036060 History / United States / 20th Century, BIO010000 Biography & Autobiography / Political
Publisher: Potomac Books

12

Have You Reregistered as a Republican Yet?

Through April 1962 Reagan was busy. His speeches attracted more attention, thanks to citizens and businesses who paid to broadcast his remarks on television and radio stations. In Tucson, the Pima County Republican Committee bought time to play Reagan’s speech “Losing Freedom . . . by Installments” on a radio station in late February.1 About the same time, a radio station in La Grande, Oregon, announced in a newspaper ad it would air the speech “by popular demand.”2 A few days later, KWKH radio in Shreveport, Louisiana, broadcast—“by popular request”—a speech Reagan had delivered to the Tyler, Texas, Chamber of Commerce.3 When Reagan spoke in early March to the Amarillo, Texas, Chamber of Commerce, a television station and its affiliate radio station carried his address live.4

After Reagan spoke to an audience of 10,000 in Dallas in March 1962, the Lone Star Steel Company played “Ronald Reagan’s now famous speech, ‘What Price Freedom,’” on television and radio stations in the region, including on a Texarkana, Texas, radio station and a nearby Shreveport television station. The company also published excerpts from Reagan’s speech in weekly newspaper advertisements and reported the response was “overwhelming.”5 In her syndicated Hollywood column, Louella Parsons (like Reagan, she grew up in Dixon, Illinois) claimed Reagan’s crowd in Dallas was larger than those John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon had attracted during their recent visits to the state.6

Audiences did not need Reagan’s presence or voice to enjoy his speeches. In January, in Port Angeles, Washington, members of the Rotary Club listened as the program chairman read the text of a speech Reagan had delivered the previous October in San Francisco.7 Other groups that gathered to hear recordings of Reagan’s speeches included the Seymour, Indiana, Kiwanis Club (in mid-January) and the Minnesota Chapter of the Daughters of Founders and Patriots of America in Minneapolis (in March).8

After taking the summer off, Reagan roared back into politics in the fall of 1962, backing Nixon in his ill-fated race for California governor against the incumbent Democrat, Pat Brown. During September and October, Reagan appeared on Nixon’s behalf in places like Redlands, Oakland, San Bernardino, Santa Clarita, San Diego, San Rafael, Santa Rosa, and Los Angeles.9 As he had in 1960, Nixon suggested that Reagan should campaign for him as a Democrat. Reagan did so until he appeared one day at a fund-raising event near his home in Pacific Palisades. Reagan recalled a woman stood up in the middle of his speech to ask, “Have you reregistered as a Republican yet?”

“Well, no, I haven’t yet, but I intend to,” Reagan replied.

“I’m the registrar,” Reagan said the woman announced, as she marched down the center aisle and laid a registration form before him.

“I signed it and became a Republican,” Reagan recalled, “then said to the audience, ‘Now, where was I?’”10

On October 9, Reagan shared a platform with Governor Brown at the California Real Estate Association’s annual convention in Oakland, condemning high taxes and warning about Communist subversion of the federal government.

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