Voice of America (Reagan on the Radio)

The Weekly Standard ^ | February 5, 2001 | Andrew Ferguson

[RWR8189]

Editor's note: A look back at President Reagan, from the February 5, 2001 issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Ronald Reagan, 1911 - 2004

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Reagan, In His Own Hand
The Remarkable Writings of Ronald Reagan that Show How He Created a Revolutionary Vision for America
edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson
Free Press, 544 pp., $ 30

 

IN TIME FOR HIS NINETIETH BIRTHDAY, the Free Press is bringing out the writings of Ronald Reagan--nearly 550 pages worth, heavily annotated in very small type--and the inescapable question that confronts the reader as he slogs along is, "Why?" A readable and judicious selection of Reagan's writing, drawn from different sources over a span of many years, would have been welcomed, probably, by Reagan's friends and foes alike, as a window into his political and intellectual development. But Reagan, In His Own Hand is what journalists call a document dump.

From early 1975, when he left office as governor of California, until late 1979 (not counting a year-long hiatus to run for president in 1976), Reagan rode the circuit as a speechmaker, published a twice weekly newspaper column, and syndicated a five-minute, five-day-a-week radio commentary. Ghostwriters took care of the newspaper columns, but as an old broadcaster Reagan enjoyed writing most of the radio scripts himself. According to the editors of Reagan, In His Own Hand, he wrote two thirds of the more than one thousand commentaries delivered in those years, scribbling away at his desk at home or as he traveled, in the first-class compartment of airplanes and the backseat of chauffeured cars. The handwritten drafts were retrieved not long ago from Reagan's personal papers.

And here they are. More than two hundred and fifty of them. A very long parade of four-hundred word essays, meticulously recreating in typescript Reagan's own crossovers, rewrites, marginalia, and emendations. Some of the pieces are charming, even touching in a way a politician's words seldom are. Some are compelling for their arguments or foresight. Others are mortally repetitive or too dated to be of interest to anyone but historians, and many are not only dated but dross. The editors give the general reader no hint as to which is which, and for most people the book will be tough sledding.

Why are they all here then? You can't help but suspect that the editors wanted to impress their audience with the sheer mass of Reagan's late-1970s prose. The madness in their method comes clear in the first few pages of the introduction, whose reverential glow sometimes approaches parody: "When Reagan wrote, he didn't scribble or scrawl, he wrote in a clear script. When he reached the bottom of the legal pad, he carefully flipped the page over, tucked it in on the back side of the pad, and proceeded onto the second page."

Wow. No wonder America loved him. The introduction continues over the next eight paragraphs with comments from other Reagan employees:

 

He was constantly writing. . . . But all the time he was writing. . . . He'd turn on his reading lamp and would constantly be writing. . . . Reagan would sit in the backseat with his legal pad, writing. . . . All the way up, Reagan would be writing. . . . He would be writing in the backseat when we drove back. . . . He was always just writing. . . . When I woke up, he'd still be working, just writing away. . . . You know, everyone's got things to do. And his thing was writing. . . .

 

All right already! He wrote, he wrote! But the crucial point here is that writing is an intellectual activity, the sign of an active mind. What they're being defensive about, these editors and former employees, is the image of Reagan held by the chattering class, from the late 1960s onward, that he was incapable of any intellectual activity more complicated than brushing his teeth. He was "an amiable dunce," in the famous words of Clark Clifford (who was, by contrast, an unctuous sleazeball). Reagan's image was reinforced--sometimes slyly, sometimes bitterly--by several memoirs published during and after his administration, in which the doddering, kind-hearted president was depicted by suave and clear-eyed staffers as utterly clueless about the most elemental aspects of his presidency. Reagan himself didn't help matters any. His ghost-written presidential memoir, An American Life, was a breezy greeting-card of a book that seemed pasted together from newspaper clippings and showed few signs of having been read by its putative author.

Reagan, In His Own Hand is thus part of what might be called the Reagan Reclamation Project, an attempt by the president's professional admirers to prove his detractors wrong, wrong, wrong. "Maybe he was a lot smarter than most people thought," George Shultz writes wryly, in an affectionate foreword to the book. Others go much further in their enthusiasm, all the way over the top. Mark Burson, the executive director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, says that Reagan, In His Own Hand "provides the most compelling evidence yet that the president was indeed a man of letters worthy of comparison to our Founding Fathers and their remarkable legacy--the Federalist Papers."

That "most compelling evidence yet" is a nice touch--as though lots of compelling evidence for the Reagan-Publius connection has already been piling up. Burson does his cause no good with these flights of fancy. Reagan (shouldn't it go without saying?) was no Madison or Hamilton or Jay, and his writings, as this new collection makes plain, fall rather short of the Federalist Papers. But so what? Reagan's admirers should be happy enough to take him on his own ground, which is the ground, after all, on which his detractors will have to deal with him, sooner or later. What Reagan, In His Own Hand does show is that quite apart from his accomplishments as president--which made him the most successful and consequential American politician of the second half of the last century--Reagan was an endearing and impressive man.

In or out of office, he was a publicist. The word has fallen on hard times, owing to the greasy exertions of the press agents and flacks and hired guns who call themselves publicists today. Reagan was a publicist in the earlier sense--a man of conviction whose job it was to make his beliefs palatable and persuasive to the general public, an intermediary between the world of ideas and the world the rest of us inhabit. The title "Great Communicator" is more than a pop historian's shorthand; he really was extraordinarily good at this, long before he surrounded himself with talented speechwriters and "communication specialists." He knew what he believed, he was unhindered by second-guessing, and he had the gifts of simplicity and compression. Together these made him a perfect tribune for the age of electronic media, which is impatient with elaborate argument. Here he is, with characteristic abbreviations, in a talk called "America's Strength," from December 1976:

 

Our system freed the individual genius of man. Released him to fly as high & as far as his own talent & energy would take him. We allocate resources not by govt. decision but by the mil's. of decisions customers make when they go into the mkt. place to buy. If something seems too high-priced we buy something else. Thus resources are steered toward those things the people want most at the price they are willing to pay. It may not be a perfect system but it's better than any other that's ever been tried.

 

At the time Reagan was making this broadcast (if you'll forgive a personal note) I was enrolled in an introductory economics course, hacking my way through Paul Samuelson's famous textbook Economics. Into this brief, bracing passage, Reagan packed more truth about the marketplace and human behavior than Samuelson managed to fit into his hundreds and hundreds of turgid pages. But back in 1976, just about every sophisticated, cultured, thoughtful, well-educated--you get the idea--person assumed that Reagan's view of the market's virtues was a superstition that time and circumstance had transcended. Reagan persisted, of course. And unafraid to be thought "behind the times," he proved himself ahead of them.

The same holds true for his views on foreign policy. They were clear and uncomplicated, and all the more powerful for their clarity and lack of complication. A large percentage of these little essays deal with America's role in the world. In hindsight they can make for stirring reading--especially in hindsight. We've grown used in recent years to politicians reminding us how simple foreign policy was during the Cold War, how bright was the line between right and wrong, how self-evident was the course to be pursued against the Soviet Union. But the Cold War consensus they pretend to remember had vanished by 1965. They've forgotten (conveniently enough) how alarmed sophisticates were at Reagan's assertion of truths that later guided his presidency and helped bring the Cold War to a happy end.

On the radio he summed up his view as "peace through strength"--the commonsense belief that an adversary will be more cooperative if he's impressed by your military power and constancy of purpose. From this conviction came Reagan's call for a vastly increased military budget, his opposition to the return of the Panama Canal and SALT II treaty, and to the Helsinki Accords, and his rejection of the dispiriting orgy of negotiation and wishful thinking that had constituted foreign policy under Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Reagan devoted dozens of broadcasts to each topic. "Detente," he mused in 1975, "isn't that what a farmer has with his turkey--until thanksgiving day?" Polite people simply weren't supposed to talk like this in 1975: "Communism is neither an ec. or a pol. system--it is a form of insanity--a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature. I wonder how much more misery it will cause before it disappears."

A publicist is a salesman of ideas, and Reagan's idea was freedom. It might be this preoccupation that dates the book more than anything else. You don't often hear the word anymore in our political conversation--scarcely at all, for example, in the presidential campaign just ended. In the Eminem era, Americans might be forgiven for thinking that their country suffers from too much freedom instead of not enough. Even George W. Bush, booming a tax cut that some of his supporters called "Reaganite," has chosen to rationalize his policy on the old, pre-Reaganite grounds of economic stimulus, rather than as a way of broadening freedom against the encroaching power of the state, or of reaffirming the right of free people to keep what they earn. The passion for freedom--from imperial forces abroad, from meddlers and do-gooders at home--has been drained from politics since Reagan left the scene.

Partly this is the fault of Reagan himself, a consequence of his success. It is easy to make the case that Reagan, though he campaigned as a Reaganite, didn't govern as one. In constant dollars, federal spending increased in the Reagan years by more than thirty percent; instead of eliminating two cabinet departments, as he had pledged to do, he added another one; in his final year he approved a new entitlement, catastrophic health insurance, that would have rivaled Medicare (it was later repealed). The list of heresies is long. But there's no denying his success on two broad fronts. First, by pursuing a foreign policy that accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union, he allowed the political culture to redirect its attention to smaller matters; no politician thought to campaign against teen smoking when all those missiles were pointed at us. And second, by lowering tax rates and pressing the case for deregulation, he recast the relationship between the government and the market conclusively in favor of the market; the boom that followed is in its eighteenth year.

Reagan's success had an unintended effect. It rendered obsolete the ideological arguments around which he had built his political career--the arguments that animate these essays. Which gives the book a musty odor, the crinkly feel of an artifact. But that's okay, too. For all its bloat and redundancies, it is a valuable set of documents. It offers a new and unexpected measure of Reagan's greatness: His ideas were so persuasive, and they worked so well, that we've already forgotten them.

 

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

[Bob J]

Don't allow the media to spin the death of Reagan as they did his life. Go to the FR Reagan Vigil thread and pledge to attend/organize a vigil in your area now!