Fifty years ago today, Ronald Reagan captured the hearts and minds of America’s youth. The general view of the late 1960s is that it was a time when drugged-out hippies and anti-war protests took over the country. But there was another concurrent, subculture growing, too: A rising tide of conservative youth. And in June 1967, this group found their champion in a first-time presidential candidate who was the sitting governor of California. His name was Ronald Reagan, of course.
When Reagan ran for the governorship in 1966, local chapters of “Youth for Reagan” sprung up in California. The campaign staff didn’t know what to do with these home-grown supporters and at one point they considered telling the kids’ groups to disband. At which point a young Dana Rohrabacher (the future congressman) camped out on Reagan’s front lawn so he could meet the candidate and convinced him to override his campaign’s plans. It worked.
By June 1967, Reagan was seven months into his first campaign for the presidency. But at the time, the acknowledged front-runners in the race were the liberal Michigan governor, George Romney (father of Mitt); the liberal New York governor, Nelson Rockefeller; and the centrist former vice president, Richard Nixon. (In 1960 Nixon had lost the presidency to John F. Kennedy and two years later he lost the California governorship to Pat Brown—the father of current California governor Jerry Brown, and the man whom Reagan had defeated six months earlier by almost a million votes. Yes, California politics is interesting.)
The first test of strength for the four Republican candidates was the convention of the Young Republican National Federation, held in Omaha, Nebraska, on the third week of June. The group was conservative, having enthusiastically supported Barry Goldwater in 1964. By 1967, across the country and at the national convention, Reagan had become their favorite. And his opponents knew it.
Nixon and Rockefeller didn’t even show up. Indeed, reporters at the time noted that there were no Nixon personnel at the convention, or even a Nixon hospitality suite. Romney was also a no-show, but at least he sent his wife to deliver a short speech. The undeniable star of the show was Reagan.
There were clusters of Reagan balloons floating in the air, Reagan posters, straw hats, and buttons everywhere. Reagan came in person to meet his young supporters and delivered a stirring speech on June 23, 1967.
Reagan had despised President Johnson’s Great Society programs. He told his audience that since 1961, despite the vast spending for the war in Vietnam, non-military spending on social programs had outpaced military spending. Reflecting on the GOP election victories in the 1966 midterms, Reagan urged the young Republicans to continue to stand in sharp contrast to the failing policies of the Democrats: he used the term “sickly pastels,” for the first time in public—which would evolve into his classic line about “pale pastels.”
In front of the Young Republicans Reagan warned that American soldiers in Vietnam were not being given the military tools to win the war. With Israel’s stunning victory in the Six Day War earlier in the month, and Johnson trying to remain neutral in the Middle East, Reagan proclaimed that America had the moral obligation to stand with the Jewish state.
The speech was interrupted numerous times by wild applause and Reagan received a number of standing ovations. An informal straw poll of convention attendees showed Reagan heads above any other GOP candidate, winning 46 percent in the four-man race. A reporter for the New York Times, who had been covering presidential candidates since Truman, proclaimed, “I’ve never seen anything like it. . . . There isn’t anybody who can touch Reagan.”
Ronald Reagan lost the nomination, but won the hearts of the young Republicans who would become a major part of his base in 1980. And the support he received at that Omaha convention would carry through his entire presidency.
Historian Gene Kopelson is the author of Reagan’s 1968 Dress Rehearsal: Ike, RFK, and Reagan’s Emergence as a World Statesman (Figueroa Press)
