On this day in 1964, Americans voted for president.  It was our first election in the U.S., our introduction to something called the Electoral College, and I recall watching the results with my father on television.  He always said President Johnson would be elected but told me to keep an open mind to what Senator Goldwater was saying.  My father liked his conservative message but understood that he was a bit ahead of his time.

At the end of the night, the results were a landslide for Johnson, who had succeeded President Kennedy the year before.  The numbers went like this: LBJ got 61% of the popular vote and 486 electoral votes!

In a couple of years, the great landslide of 1964 fell apart because of Vietnam.  LBJ avoided the subject of Vietnam in 1964 and promised not to send troops.  Senator Goldwater, on the other hand, called for a decisive victory.  At one point, he said something about using atomic weapons to defoliate the jungle covering the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  In retrospect, I wonder how many of the 58,000 G.I.s lost in Vietnam would have been saved if we had hit the Trail hard in 1964–65.

President Johnson ran an effective campaign against Senator Goldwater by painting him as dangerous and unfit to be president.

The GOP made a huge comeback in the 1966 midterms, and the Democrats were in disarray by 1968.  LBJ did not seek re-election and was followed by Richard Nixon.  LBJ won big, but the GOP went on to win seven of the next ten elections. 

And last, but not least, we met future governor and president Reagan during the campaign.  On October 27, 1964, Mr. Reagan gave his famous “A Time for Choosing“ speech.  We did not see the speech live because those were the days before cable and internet.  In that speech, Mr. Reagan related the story of a man who left Cuba looking for freedom.  This is what he said:

Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

It touched our family, because we knew exactly what this Cuban was talking about.  It was my first reference to a man named Reagan. 

That opened the door to his 1966 victory in California and set the table for the presidency.  And my father was right when told us over breakfast to keep an eye on that man.

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Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.