Reagan's Revolution by Craig Shirley Read Free Book Online

our Tricentennial.
    It sounded like an easy assignment. They suggested I write something about the problems and issues of the day. And I said I could do so, riding down the coast in an automobile, looking at the blue Pacific out on one side and the Santa Ines Mountains on the other, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was going to be that beautiful a hundred years from now as it was on that summer day.
    Then, as I tried to write—let your own minds turn to that task. You’re going to write for people a hundred years from now who know all about us. We know nothing about them. We don’t know what kind of a world they’ll be living in.
    And suddenly, I thought to myself as I wrote of the problems, they’ll be the domestic problems of which the President spoke here tonight; the challenges confronting us; the erosion of freedom that has taken place under Democrat rule in this country; the invasion of private rights; the controls and restrictions on the vitality of the great free economy that we enjoy. These are our challenges that we must meet.
    And then again there is that challenge of which he spoke, that we live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction, nuclear weapons that can in a matter of minutes arrive in each other’s country and destroy virtually the civilized world we live in.
    And suddenly it dawned on me, those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge.
    Whether they had the freedom that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here. Will they look back with appreciation and say, thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom; who kept us now a hundred years later free; who kept our world from nuclear destruction? And if we fail, they probably won’t get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom and they won’t be allowed to talk of that or read of it.
    This is our challenge. And this is why we are here in this hall tonight. Better than we’ve ever done before, we’ve got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we’ve ever been. But we carry the message they’re waiting for.
    We must go forth from here united, determined, that what a great general said a few years ago is true: There is no substitute for victory. 1
    Every conservative who was old enough remembers where he or she was on the night of August 19, 1976, when Reagan gave his speech at Kemper Arena.
    Lou Cannon said, “In a sense, it wasn’t a great political speech saying to vote one way or the other . . . it wasn’t political in the sense of dealing with strategy . . . but it was Reagan’s heart . . . it set him apart from other politicians and political figures at the time.” 2
    “From that day forward, I think American politics changed,” said Al Cardenas, Reagan’s Dade County Chairman, who had driven from Florida to Kansas City to volunteer for the campaign. He was so poor at he time that he had to borrow cash from some of the Reagan staff just to pay for the gas to drive back home. 3
    Jack Germond of the Washington Star made the analogy between Reagan in 1976 and John Kennedy in 1956, when Kennedy lost the nomination for Vice President. “He’d made a strong showing at the convention and you could see right then that he’d be a hell of a player in 1960.” 4
    All across America, men and women, most of them decades younger than Reagan, were moved and motivated to “get involved.”
    At a seafood restaurant on Cape Cod, a nineteen-year-old waiter and bartender was mesmerized as he watched Reagan’s speech on the television in the cocktail lounge and vowed to “get involved” when he got back to college.
    Two thousand miles away on a wheat farm in eastern Colorado, a fair, red headed twelve year-old girl, who had spent