Joe Shell - Backing Goldwater

Backing Goldwater

On April 22, 1963, Shell and Assembly member Bruce V. Reagan (no relation to Ronald Reagan) founded the United Republicans of California to promote the potential presidential candidacy of U.S. Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona, who was not yet an announced contender. Bruce Reagan had been the unsuccessful candidate for comptroller in 1962 against the Democratic incumbent Alan Cranston. Unlike Shell, Bruce Reagan had been among those conservatives who had refused to endorse Nixon. The conservative dissidents opposed the "big-money" Rockefeller Republicans and launched a middle-class grass-roots campaign. In San Marino, for instance, fifteen groups went door-to-door in a registration drive that changed the composition of the California GOP. They distributed Goldwater literature and two conservative books, None Dare Call It Conspiracy by John Stormer and A Choice Not An Echo by Phyllis Schlafly, then of Alton, Illinois. Ultimately, the activists gave away some two million copies of the books.

In 1964, Shell was a Goldwater delegate to the Republican National Convention in San Francisco. Just a month earlier, Goldwater had narrowly won the California presidential primary on June 8 over Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York. In working for Goldwater, Shell personally financed a particular speech which he thought would be helpful. Nancy Reagan contacted Shell and asked if her husband, actor Ronald Reagan, could deliver the speech to the Republican convention. Shell hesitated, but agreed when Mrs. Reagan persisted. This was not "The Speech", officially "A Time for Choosing", delivered on national television on October 27, 1964, in which Reagan paraphrased Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt in acknowledging the nation's "rendezvous with destiny". Shell was said to have regretted for the rest of his life having allowed Reagan to deliver the speech.