E-Notes

Ronald Reagan Remembered

June 10, 2004

by Harvey Sicherman

Harvey Sicherman, Ph.D., is President of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former aide to three U.S. secretaries of state. For more on President Reagan, see “The Rest of Reagan,” by Harvey Sicherman, Orbis, Summer 2000.

Ronald Reagan lived a uniquely American life. It was also, as he himself often remarked, a highly improbable one. A small towner from the Midwest parlays a sporting talent into radio broadcasting, broadcasting into movie-acting, thence to union leadership, thence to corporate communications, finally to politics, vaulting from the governorship of California to his party’s presidential nomination on his second try. Two landslides and eight presidential years later, Reagan bequeaths an economic revival and victory in the Cold War to an admiring America. “All in all, not bad, not bad at all,” as he declaimed in his farewell address.

His personal life was not entirely a smooth, glittering progress. An alcoholic father; the typically rapid rise and fall of old-style Hollywood stardom; a depressing divorce; difficult relationships with his children, one of whom predeceased him; and most troubling for him, the knowledge that Alzheimer’s meant a terrible ordeal for his beloved wife Nancy. But his placid surfaces never reflected inner ripples. The future president developed early those mannerisms often associated with small-town Americans: a self-sufficiency, modesty and a cheerful personality who greeted strangers with a genuine “hello, glad to meet you.” Even in the White House, Reagan joked that he “lived above the store.” Truman and Eisenhower shared some of those traits but not so abundantly, and their sense of tragedy was more fully developed, both having seen war close up.

Reagan was often derided as a “throwback,” a man out of his time. The actor become governor become president did not mind the charge which he refuted by winning elections and topping the polls. In fact, he was quite up to date. Reagan mastered radio in the style of FDR, whom he greatly admired. His Hollywood training for the silver screen put him at ease for the television screen. Thus, the wonderful timbre of his radio voice was joined to a striking stage presence, uniting those most modern of skills, the reinforcement of the aural by the visual.

Reagan also understood instinctively that the Presidency was a “performance”: it could work only if its occupant exemplified the dignity, grace, and rhetoric that was expected by the American people. Gifted with a phenomenal memory, Reagan always had the right lines. More importantly, he believed the lines, especially those about America the Good, and America the possibly even Better. These were timeless.

Still, they were insufficient in and of themselves to elect a man, however genial, to the presidency. After all, he used them on behalf of Barry Goldwater in 1964 for a campaign so disastrous most thought both the candidate and his ideas had been decisively repudiated. But almost two decades later, the United States looked like losing the Cold War to the Soviets while its economy sank into stagflation. Many eminent commentators thought the Presidency had become a failed institution. The “times” were those of a depressed American spirit.

This was “fear itself” and Ronald Reagan would banish it. It was nothing less than “moral rearmament,” restoring America’s self-confidence and with it, optimism about the future. Despite an attempted assassination that slowed his early months in office, Reagan changed the country’s mood in a very short time. The times were right for Reagan’s brand of enthusiasm and he knew it.

In foreign affairs, as Henry Kissinger has often remarked, statesmen must live on their intellectual capital because the pressures of office rarely allow a replenishment. Reagan became president at seventy years of age. His “capital” on the Cold War derived from personal experience and intellectual conviction. As leader of the Screen Actors Guild in the late forties, he dealt with communists and judged them people interested only in power, scornful of truth, liberty, and democracy— in short, what was good about America.

As for the Soviet Union, Reagan was a “container” in the vigorous way of the early Cold War. He believed that the communists justified their tyranny through conflict and expansion but this “evil empire,” to use Reagan’s famous later phrase, operated on such absurd economic and social principles that if its aggressive march could be arrested by superior Western strength, then its collapse could be foretold. This had to be done while avoiding the disaster of a nuclear war. He summarized his views in his autobiography: “You had to wonder how long the Soviets could keep their empire intact. If they didn’t make some changes, it seemed clear to me that in time communism would collapse of its own weight, and I wondered how we as a nation could use these cracks in the Soviet system to accelerate the process of collapse.”

One task therefore was “moral rearmament of the West.” Another was military rearmament, even if it meant very large deficits. Yet another was a negotiation from strength that would ease military tensions even as other pressure on the Soviets increased. Altogether, the “correlation of forces,” to use the Soviet phrase, would be changed for the benefit of the democracies.

None of this proved as smooth as the obituaries suggest. Reagan pursued policies that angered U.S. allies and produced vast crowds of European protestors; he was scorned and derided by the chattering classes on both sides of the Atlantic. But his eyes were on the Kremlin. Reagan’s ability to rearm in the midst of a deep recession, and his readiness to decry the Soviet empire while remaining popular, made a deep impression. When Gorbachev finally appeared on the scene, the correlation of forces was shifting fast and the “process of collapse”—soon to be called perestroika— was underway.

The two did not hit it off immediately. “A real dinosaur” said Gorbachev after the first exchange; “a hardheaded Marxist ideologue” concluded Reagan. Nor was their progress gentle. In the famous collision at Reykjavik in 1985, Reagan angrily concluded that Gorbachev was after SDI, the missile defense system key to U.S. security in Reagan’s mind. Yet, the two managed to salvage nuclear arms reduction in Europe. And two years later, Reagan would produce a favorite set piece in Berlin: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

By 1989, Reagan declared that U.S.-Soviet relations were fundamentally altered. Reagan had learned a Russian formula, which he repeated with tiresome frequency: “trust but verify.” And Gorbachev, he was sure, would take the evil out of the Soviet system.

Most analysts regarded Reagan’s conclusion as somewhat premature. This was largely because the Soviet empire still lay thick upon the world and geopolitical conflicts had hardly dissipated. It fell to his successor to manage the peaceful demise of the Soviet Union which accelerated, as he thought it would, once the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Nor were Reagan’s own policies uniformly wise or successful: Central America appeared a draw; Afghanistan was still aflame; the United States suffered a stunning reversal in Lebanon while making no headway on the Arab-Israeli conflict or peace in the Persian Gulf. Moreover, by the end of his term, Reagan had been hard-pressed by the Iran Contra scandal, a byproduct of a defective management system.

Reagan’s weakness in this respect was the darker side of his strengths. The presidential intellect was not at fault. Rather, it was Reagan’s detachment from issues that he did not fathom because he lacked curiosity or relied on others to fix. Reagan’s self-sufficiency let him pick a strong cabinet to do the people’s business while he focused on what mattered most to the country and where his instincts offered a sure guide. Otherwise, he relied on consensus to see him through; when the team could not develop a script, and he lacked an instinct, he would not decide. This left a vacuum soon filled by unseemly official warfare that Reagan seemed powerless to arrest.

Reagan’s deficiencies pale beside the rightness of his choices on the big strategic issues. He did what every successful president must do, namely, strike a balance between American aspirations and international realities; negotiate to get the 80%, as he put it, and to work the 20% later; be prudent in the use of force; and trust the people. “We the people” he proclaimed to be the most important foundation of American democracy; “for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead,” the most important credo; “after all, we are Americans,” the most important distinction. The throngs of Americans who turned out to pay their respects were celebrating these qualities even as they mourned his passing.

Fittingly enough, Ronald Reagan died on the eve of another of his favorite set-pieces, the commemoration of D-Day. This was the event that marked the change in America that changed the world. And it would fall to Reagan to revive the spirit of that change and, in so doing, change the world once more.

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