Posted on 06/06/2004 8:24:44 AM PDT by knighthawk
IN his annual state of the union addresses, Ronald Reagan, as president, developed one particular device that tells us much about him, his presidency and why he was so liked by the US people and millions around the world.
In each annual address to Congress, he would spend a few minutes focusing on three or four individual Americans, otherwise unknown, who had performed some act of heroism or generosity that embodied Reagan's universally optimistic view of the nation.
It was the first rule of communications: humanise the story, and Reagan was its master. On one occasion he recounted the experience of a Vietnamese refugee, one of the boatpeople on a crowded fishing boat adrift in the South China Sea. The refugee hailed a US naval craft with the cry: "Hey, Mr America! Hey, freedom man!"
This story was quintessentially Reagan, the master of the telling anecdote, of the profound and powerful political symbol wrapped in a simple human story.
Reagan was elected the 40th president of the US in November 1980. He was one of the great US presidents, ranking in the 20th century with Franklin Roosevelt, and historically with Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.
He demoralised the Soviet Union and won the Cold War, he freed the US from the crippling effects of the Vietnam syndrome, he restored American self-confidence and pride, he fundamentally changed the domestic policy debate, he won landslide election victories, he changed the boundaries of the politically possible, he permanently lowered the tax burden, he changed the nature of the debate about the role of government and he was liberty's best friend around the world.
Some revisionism is going on about Reagan. Edmund Morris's biography Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (1999) discloses that after the assassination attempt in which he was shot in 1981, Reagan suffered a slow but steady physical and mental decline.
Others continue to criticise the budget deficits caused by his low taxes and high military spending. But as the rush to name Washington's airport – as well as the US's second biggest public building and countless parks and roads – after him testifies, not to mention his two huge electoral landslides, the US people loved him as president, and love him still.
Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in 1911 in Tampico, Illinois, the son of Nell Wilson and Jack Reagan, a shoe salesman with an alcohol problem.
He was an athlete, a student leader and successful academically at school. One of his high school teachers told me he was the most charming boy she ever taught, but she never expected him to be president.
He went to Eureka College, a small liberal arts campus, and graduated in economics and sociology. Later, he enlisted in the army reserve and began a career in radio broadcasting, but poor eyesight kept him from combat in World War II.
In 1937 he was discovered by a Warner Brothers talent scout and fulfilled his dream of becoming a Hollywood movie star, making 53 films, many of them B-movies, and one television movie (the only time he ever played the villain).
He had been a New Deal Roosevelt Democrat but his time as a leader of the Screen Actors Guild soured him on the Democrats. In the 1950s, with his movie career faltering, he went to work for General Electric as their corporate spokesman and as the host of a regular television program.
It was a television speech he made on behalf of the doomed Barry Goldwater Republican presidential campaign in 1964 that launched him into national political prominence. A group of California businessmen got behind him, and in 1966 Reagan defeated the Democratic incumbent, Pat Brown, in a landslide to become Republican governor of California.
His political philosophy was conservative – traditional values, anti-communism, low taxes and opposition to campus radicalism. In his two terms in office in Sacramento, he was more pragmatic and centrist than his rhetoric had suggested. He even signed into law a liberal abortion statute, something he later regretted.
He flirted with a presidential bid in 1968. Nixon's incumbency in 1972 made a bid then impossible. But he was a strong candidate for the Republican nomination in 1976, and incumbent president Gerald Ford barely beat him in the primaries.
In 1980 he locked up the Republican nomination long before the convention, and he trounced the incumbent, Jimmy Carter, and the third party candidate, John Anderson, in the election. He had called for "a new consensus with all those across the land who share a community of values embodied in these words: family, work, neighbourhood, peace and freedom".
In his campaign he frequently asserted: "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem."
In March 1981 he was shot in an assassination attempt outside the Washington Hilton. He nearly died, and displayed grace, courage and good humour in the aftermath of the shooting. Americans loved him the more deeply and Congress was virtually forced to pass the essentials of his program, a huge tax cut and the biggest ever peacetime build-up in defence forces. But Congress would pass only a small measure of the expenditure-reduction programs he proposed, and a great budget deficit grew.
Nonetheless, Reagan's insistence on low taxes fundamentally altered the political culture and permanently lowered US tax rates. Many economists believe they were instrumental supply-side reforms that produced the great prosperity the US has known since.
But it was in foreign policy that Reagan made his most substantial contribution. Reagan believed deeply that communism was evil. He was the first US president in decades to go on the ideological offensive against the Soviet Union, which in 1983 he described as an "evil empire". Every liberal commentator in the US and around the world denounced Reagan for this, but it injected the clear moral purpose necessary to sustain his foreign policy, and it convinced the Soviets he was serious.
The paradox of Reagan's leadership was that while he was not a profound policy boffin, and was disinclined to develop office fatigue in the endlessly industrious but ineffectual fashion of Carter, Reagan was truly the leader – of the White House and the nation – who imposed his own ideas, his program, by sheer force of personality and argument. Nowhere was this clearer than in his championing of the Strategic Defence Initiative, against the advice of even his close circle.
Reagan saw this as a scientific development that could make the US, and perhaps its allies, safe from nuclear missile attack. More sophisticated strategic thinkers saw it as a deepening and reinforcing of deterrence, by making a nuclear first strike unthinkable. While it was ridiculed by Western liberal commentators, the Soviets took SDI deadly seriously and it had a profoundly demoralising effect on them, for they knew they could never match US technology.
Reagan broke the psychological shackles on the use of US military force by invading the Caribbean island of Grenada when it fell into the hands of communists. His most tragic military mission was his support for the government of Bashir Gemayel in Lebanon, where 260 US soldiers were killed in a terrorist bombing.
He pioneered the Reagan doctrine, under which the US gave limited support to nationalist guerilla resistance movements opposing communist rule in Soviet client states around the world. This had mixed results but was particularly effective in Afghanistan. It broke the Soviets' back, but led to the growth of large number of Islamic extremists with military training.
Reagan always argued that dealing with the Soviets from a position of strength was the only way to get effective co-operation. But he was a peacemaker at heart, and believed that if he could expose president Mikhail Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders to the reality of US prosperity and success, they would be bound to see the inferiority of their system.
And he was right.
Reagan's essential insight into the dynamics of superpower relationships allowed him to negotiate the most effective nuclear arms control, and even nuclear arms reduction, agreements ever signed between the US and the Soviets, far more ambitious than anything attempted by John Kennedy or Nixon.
Reagan always believed he could not have achieved that without first modernising the US nuclear arsenal. The Soviets could see the US developing rapidly ahead of them, to a point where Moscow would not be able to furnish effective strategic competition.
Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger had no reason to love Reagan, who had harshly criticised Kissinger and Nixon's policies of detente. Nonetheless, in his masterly work Diplomacy, Kissinger writes: "Reagan possessed an extraordinary intuitive rapport with the wellsprings of American motivation. At the same time he understood the essential brittleness of the Soviet system, a perception which ran contrary to most expert opinion, even in his own conservative camp."
Kissinger's claim here is huge and it is true. Gorbachev may have been more intellectual than Reagan, but Reagan understood the US better than Gorbachev did. Amazingly, at an elemental level he also understood the Soviet Union better than Gorbachev did.
But it was in foreign policy that Reagan's greatest negative occurred – the Iran-Contra affair, when National Security Council figures, with Reagan's knowledge, sold arms to Iran in exchange for the release of US hostages in Lebanon.
Reagan had been tormented by the plight of the hostages, and frustrated by the apparent impotence of the US to help them. Possibly without his knowledge, some of the money generated from the arms sales was diverted to help the anti-communist Contras in their fight against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. This was the biggest scandal, and the biggest negative, in Reagan's presidency.
Famously, Reagan took naps and holidays frequently – but rather than being weaknesses in leadership, these were strengths. He had a few central convictions – anti-communism, strong defence, low taxes, traditional values – and he made sure they were embodied in his administration's actions. But he certainly did not micro-manage.
One of his greatest assets was his sense of humour. In the 1984 presidential campaign he was already 73 and running against the formidable former vice-president Walter Mondale. In the live debate, Reagan kindly said he would not make age an issue: "I will not use my opponent's youth and inexperience against him." Even Mondale laughed, and the issue was defused.
Most of all Reagan brought to the presidency, and to the nation, a sense of good humoured decency. In his own way he was also very disciplined. He never took his coat off in the Oval Office because he always wanted to remember what a privilege it was to occupy it.
At times his rhetoric, delivered with perfect emotional pitch, soared. After NASA's Challenger disaster, he memorialised the dead astronauts. In the words of a famous poem, he said: "They slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God."
It was perfect.
George W.Bush has tried, it must be said in vain, to emulate Reagan's communication skills and overall style, although the enduring dominance of Reagan's ideas in the modern Republican Party is evident in Bush's determination to enact massive tax cuts while at war.
Reagan's last years were clouded by Alzheimer's disease.
This was a great president, a great man, who answered the challenges of his time, who changed the way we all live, who redefined what was possible. The US was lucky to have had him. So were the rest of us.
Reagan is survived by his wife Nancy and four children.
Ping
Yesterday a Giant died. His death leaves our earth a poorer place and heaven much richer. His legacy will live.
Not true. His daughter Maureen died in 2001.
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