Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader - Couverture souple

Chapter One
Why Reagan Gets No Respect
Ronald Reagan did more than any other single man in the second half of the twentieth century to shape our world, yet his presidency and his character remain little understood and often grossly misunderstood. Any intelligent examination of Reagan must begin with the recognition that he was a mystery personally and politically. Most people find this difficult to believe, because during his two terms in office Reagan established an intimate television rapport with us. Whether we approve or disapprove of his policies, we think that we know him. Yet we forget that he was an actor.
Lou Cannon, who has covered Reagan journalistically since the 1960s and written three books about him, told me, "I regard Reagan as a puzzle. I am still trying to understand the man." Virtually everyone who knew Reagan well or observed him closely would agree. They are familiar with the public Reagan, but their efforts to discover the individual behind the mask have proved frustratingly elusive. Historian Edmund Morris, Reagan's official biographer, confesses that from a personal or human point of view, Reagan is the most incomprehensible figure he has ever encountered. Reagan's chief of staff, Donald Regan, who felt an Irish affinity with the president, writes that despite his best efforts, he couldn't figure out his boss at all.
Even Reagan's family found him enigmatic and impenetrable. His four children confess that, in many ways, he was a stranger to them. "I never knew who he was, I could never get through to him," remarked Patti Davis. "You get just so far, and then the curtain drops," Ron Reagan told a reporter. "He doesn't like to open himself up, even with us," Maureen Reagan wrote in her autobiography. Reagan's adopted son, Michael Reagan, revealingly titled his book about his relationship with his father, On the Outside Looking In. The conventional view is that Reagan had such a close relationship with his wife that even the children felt excluded. Yet Nancy Reagan also felt that there was a part of Reagan that was inaccessible to her. "There's a wall around him," she writes. "He lets me come closer than anyone else, but there are times when even I feel that barrier."
Peggy Noonan, a shrewd observer of Reagan and one of his star speechwriters, told me that his life was "paradox all the way down." Here was a man who had the most important job in the world, yet he seemed relaxed, even casual, about the way he went about it. He seemed determined to transform the size and role of the federal government, but he seemed curiously detached from its everyday operations. Even though he was the most ideological man to occupy the White House in half a century, he was the furthest thing from an intellectual. Indeed, he provoked the derision of the intelligentsia and many in the press; even his own aides condescended to him; yet he laughed it all off and didn't seem to mind the scorn. He was comfortable consorting with aristocrats and playing golf with millionaires, who considered him one of them, yet he was equally at home with miners and construction workers, who were convinced that he shared their values and had their interests at heart. Few other presidents have enjoyed greater public accolades and affection, yet none of it appeared to satisfy a deep emotional need in him; he was far too self-contained for that. He was gregarious and liked people, yet he allowed virtually no one to get close to him. As president, he often spoke of God and championed a restoration of spiritual values in American life and politics, but he didn't go to church. He was an avid exponent of "family values," yet he was divorced, had strained relationships with his children, and rarely saw his grandchildren.
The political mystery surrounding Reagan was well expressed by his national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, in a conversation with Secretary of State George Shultz. "He knows so little," McFarlane said, "and accomplishes so much." Richard Nixon made the same point at the opening ceremonies for the Reagan Library in 1991. Earlier, Nixon had visited Reagan in the White House and tried to engage him in a discussion of Marxist ideas and Soviet strategy, but Reagan simply wasn't interested; instead, he regaled Nixon with jokes about Soviet farmers who had no incentive to produce under the communist system. Nixon was troubled to hear such flippancy from the leader of the Western world. He wrote books during the 1980s criticizing Reagan's lack of "realism" and warning that "the Soviet system will not collapse" so "the most we can do is learn to live with our differences" through a policy of "hard headed détente." Yet two and a half years after Reagan left office, Nixon admitted that he was wrong and Reagan was right: "Ronald Reagan has been justified by what has happened. History has justified his leadership."
The American electorate did not regard Reagan as an enigma. During his two terms in office, he was a beloved and popular man who was also seen as an effective leader. In evaluating Reagan's leadership, most people used a simple "before and after" rule that seems to apply to all presidents: What was the world like when he came to office? What was it like when he left? For better or worse, a president is held responsible for the things that happen during his tenure. Most people considered Reagan a successful president because the world seemed a better place in 1989 than it did in 1981. For practical people who don't follow politics closely, this fact was decisive. Reagan himself endorsed this crude standard when in 1980 he posed the question, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"
Reagan won the affection of the American people because he seemed like a "regular guy," and they identified with him. Young people thought of him as a national father figure. Even those who disagreed with his policies were quick to concede that he brought dignity and aplomb to the presidency and that he had a twinkle in his eye and laughed a lot. How could you dislike a man who was asked whether he was too old to run for reelection at the age of seventy-three and replied, "What the devil would a young fellow like me do if I quit the job?" People understood that Reagan wasn't an intellectual, but this only confirmed his identification with the average person. Sure, he made mistakes, but that showed he was normal.
Yet this public understanding of Reagan as a good-natured typical American, which predominated throughout the 1980s, solves neither the personal nor the political mystery of the man. Here was the son of the town drunk who grew up poor in the Midwest. Without any connections, he made his way to Hollywood and survived its cutthroat culture to become a major star. He ran as a right-wing conservative and was elected governor of California, the largest and one of the most progressive states in the country. He challenged the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, for the Republican nomination in 1976 and almost beat him. In 1980 he defeated Jimmy Carter to win the presidency in a landslide. He was reelected in 1984 by one of the largest margins in history, losing only his opponent's home state of Minnesota and winning 525 electoral votes to Walter Mondale's 13. For eight consecutive years, the Gallup Poll pronounced him the most admired man in the country. When he left office, his approval rating was around 70 percent, the highest of any president in the modern era -- higher than that of Eisenhower or Kennedy. He was one of the few presidents in this century to bequeath the office to a hand-picked successor, George Bush, who was elected president in 1988 largely on the strength of Reagan's success. With the election of many of Reagan's ideological offspring to a new Republican majority in both houses of Congress in 1994 -- one of the most stunning developments in modern political history -- one may say (as political pundit William Kristol put it) that Reagan won his fourth term. Television reporter Sam Donaldson, who sparred with Reagan throughout his presidency, recently told me that if not for constitutional limitations and his physical condition, Reagan could have been president for life. Moreover, Reagan was more than a mere occupant of the White House. Throughout the world, his name was identified with a coherent philosophy and outlook that people called "Reaganism." He thereby defined a whole era; the 1980s would be inconceivable without him. He changed both his country and the rest of the world, and his legacy continues to loom large over the landscape of contemporary politics, dwarfing politicians of both parties.
How many ordinary fellows have accomplished all of that?

To the intellectual elite -- the pundits, political scientists, and historians -- all of this speculation about the mystery of Reagan's success is sheer nonsense. To the degree that Reagan accomplished anything, the wise men attribute it to "incredible luck," in the words of economist and Nobel laureate James Tobin. Overall, however, the wise men do not believe they have to resort to blind fate to account for Reagan's success. Many of these professionals argue that, taken as a whole, Reagan's record is one of embarrassing failure. They contend that his short-term gains are greatly outweighed by the long-term liabilities with which he burdened the country. Even accomplishments directly attributable to his administration, they charge, are not his work but those of his aides, who handed him a script and stage-managed his performance.
In this view, Reagan was a thoroughly inadequate and inept chief executive. Like Peter Sellers's character Chauncey Gardiner in the film Being There, Reagan was a cheerful simpleton who had no idea of what was really going on, but happened to be in the right place at the right time and somehow managed to convince everyone that he was in charge. But even his critics grant Reagan one skill: he was a master illusionist, the Great Communicator, whose theatrical and oratorical skills kept his countrymen spellbound and cheering through the 1980s, after which the curtain went down, the lights came on, and most of us, at least the smart ones, realized that it was all an act.
This view may seem unduly harsh, but the cognoscenti mean it to be duly harsh. Many intellectuals are convinced that future generations will remember Ronald Reagan in precisely this way. History, the editors of the New York Times Magazine declare, is the "ultimate approval rating." In December 1996 the magazine asked historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who served in the Kennedy administration and helped establish the Camelot myth, to recruit several of his colleagues for a collective verdict on how history is likely to judge American presidents. Schlesinger's list included historians who have apotheosized the New Deal, such as Doris Kearns Goodwin and James MacGregor Burns; Robert Dallek, a Lyndon Johnson enthusiast; the Marxist scholar Eric Foner; and two liberal Democratic politicians, former New York governor Mario Cuomo and former Illinois senator Paul Simon. Not surprisingly, these historians ranked Reagan in the bottom half of the "average" category. They scored Reagan even below his successor, George Bush, and placed him in the undistinguished company of Jimmy Carter, Chester Arthur, and Benjamin Harrison. Other surveys of American social scientists have produced similar results.
"There they go again," Ronald Reagan might have said. It is easy to laugh off such surveys, which tell us more about the pundits being polled than they do about the subjects under consideration. Most adults have lived through the tenure of several presidents. They know and remember too much to have their views altered by scholarly evaluations that can hardly be termed objective or balanced. Yet we now have a new generation of young people with no alternative source of information about Reagan. All they hear is the perspective of their teachers and the media. It is hard for them to detect even transparent bias under those circumstances.
Here is another example of how young minds are being shaped. When Adam Meyerson, editor of Policy Review, consulted the 1992 edition of Bartlett's Quotations, he found thirty-five entries from Franklin Roosevelt, twenty-eight from John F. Kennedy, and only three from Reagan. Even Carter had twice as many as the man whom critics called the Great Communicator. Moreover, the quotations from Reagan were hardly memorable; indeed, they were selected to make him look inane. For example, Reagan is quoted as saying that there is no shortage of food in America. Meyerson contacted Justin Kaplan, the editor of Bartlett's, who said he had made his selections quite deliberately. He added, "I'm not going to disguise the fact that I despise Ronald Reagan."
Even with its excesses, the critique of Reagan is worth examining because it reveals such hostility on the part of the cognoscenti. The degree of animus requires an explanation. Why was this man whom so many people held in such high regard viewed by elites with such fierce derision? Moreover, stated in its most defensible form, the Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the critique is based on facts that we know about Reagan; thus there is a ring of truth to it. Consequently the RSV has made its way into the body politic in one form or another. It is no longer just the enlightened people's view of Reagan, as it was in the 1980s. It seems to have sunk in more broadly. Even some people who like Reagan and voted for him now partly embrace the RSV, and many who don't are unsure how to resist it. So let us face, as candidly as possible, the critique of the Reagan era.
First: those awful Reagan deficits. The RSV blames Reagan for attempting the impossible -- cut taxes, increase defense spending, and balance the budget at the same time. Obviously, the critics said, that cannot be done; the numbers don't add up. So Reagan must be held responsible for what his budget director, David Stockman, termed "two hundred billion dollar deficits as far as the eye could see." The national debt tripled during his eight years in office. The Reagan years added $1.5 trillion (measured in 1990 dollars) to the national debt, more than was accumulated in the entire prior history of the United States. Our children and grandchildren, we are constantly reminded, are going to have to pay it off.
The RSV acknowledges that there was prosperity in the 1980s but insists all the good stuff was purchased on credit. "It was an age of illusions," writes Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post, "when America lived on borrowed time." Social critic Barbara Ehrenreich is ashamed of the selfishness unleashed during what she terms a "decade of greed." She titled her account of that period, The Worst Years of Our Lives. Who can deny in retrospect that the 1980s were a "me decade" in which many people went on a kind of national spending binge? This was the age of Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, of junk bonds, corporate takeovers, and insider trading. The Reverend Jim Bakker installed gold-plated fixtures in his bathroom and an air-conditioned doghouse for his favorite pet. Dynasty was a top-rated television show, and Madonna made her reputation as the "material gift." Then there were those selfish yuppies in their BMWs, speaking animatedly into their car phones. These were all unattractive symbols of the Reagan era.
The end of the cold war? Well, okay. The RSV holds that Reagan deserves praise for signing an arms control treaty with an adversary he once called the "evil empire." But does it really make sense, his critics ask, to credit Reagan with bringing down the Soviet Union? No. The Soviet Union collapsed for internal reasons. There was an economic crisis, the RSV affirms, and finally the old men...

William Kristol The Weekly Standard D'Souza's fine new study provides a fresh opportunity to consider Reagan's achievements.

Robert L. Bartley Editor, The Wall Street Journal A spirited reminder that the Teflon president cured stagflation, won the cold war and conquered malaise. Too bad the chattering classes never noticed.

Rush Limbaugh An unforgettable portrait of Reagan the man, and an exposé of his critics from which they will never recover.

David Gergen Editor-at-Large, U.S. News & World Report D'Souza provides timely and illuminating answers to the riddle that has stumped so many others: why this ordinary man rode so tall in the saddle as President.

P.J. O'Rourke author of Parliament of Whores The best story I have read in years, and the truest.

Tom Wolfe author of The Bonfire of the Vanities This marvelous book will drive the intellectual establishment -- the conservative cadre as well as the liberal legions -- straight up the wall. It convincingly demonstrates Ronald Reagan's moral, political, and -- yes! I'm afraid so! -- intellectual superiority to the entire lot of them.