This is the speech that began Reagan’s political career. Two years later, he would be elected governor of California, beating liberal, two-time incumbent, Edmund Brown Sr. (future, four-time governor Jerry Brown’s father). Reagan would run for president in 1968, 1976, 1980 and 1984.
In 1968, Richard Nixon would run away with the nomination and win one of the closest presidential elections in American history.
In 1976, Reagan would give semi-incumbent Gerry Ford a run for his money, in the primaries. (A criminal conspiracy in the offices of the Washington Post succeeded at undoing Nixon’s landslide, 1972 re-election over South Dakota Sen. George McGovern, and running him from office. Gerald Ford was president, because Nixon had chosen the powerful Michigan congressman to replace elected Vice President Spiro “Ted” Agnew, who had been convicted and imprisoned for accepting bribes as Vice President, for favors going back to his time as Maryland governor.
In 1980, the third time proved the charm, as Reagan ran away with the nomination and the election, over Democrat incumbent, former Georgia governor, Jimmy Carter. In 1984, Reagan won in an even bigger landslide over Walter Mondale, Carter’s Vice President and the former senator from Minnesota.
During much of Reagan’s presidency, Democrats in and outside the media sought to undo his electoral victories, with charges of “treason,” alleging that he had conspired with Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to get American hostages held in our Iranian embassy in Tehran released, and then to preclude the election of George H.W. Bush as president, via the 1987 Iran-Contra Hearings.
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