Ronald Reagan: man who won the Cold War and revived the American spirit

He spent most of his career as a film actor. He was not a scholar, nor an intellectual. He had no foreign-policy experience when he was first elected president. He put in a short day at the office and allegedly took naps. He seemed an unserious, whimsical man who spent much of his time cracking jokes. His critics, and even some of his supporters, thought it unlikely that he would prove an effective leader.

Yet even the critics know with hindsight that very important things happened in the 1980s. The Soviet Union began to collapse, and socialism was discredited. Today, there are probably more Marxists on the faculties of Harvard and Oxford than there are in all of Russia and eastern Europe. The American economy, after being in the doldrums throughout the 1970s, went into high gear, pulling up the world economy in the process. The technological revolution really took off: suddenly computers and mobile phones were everywhere.

A generation ago, John F Kennedy told Americans who were young and idealistic to join the Peace Corps. Public service was seen as the embodiment of American idealism. But by the end of the 1980s most young people would rather have started a new company than picked coffee in Nicaragua. The entrepreneur - not the bureaucrat - became the vehicle for youthful aspirations. This cultural shift had policy implications. The welfare state, which had expanded in the US since the 1930s, stopped growing. The era of Big Government that began with Franklin D Roosevelt in the 1930s seemed to come to an end in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.

Was this not the "Reagan revolution" that the old boy promised?

I am part of a generation of young people who became interested in politics because of the Reagan revolution. We saw Reagan as a cheerful, forward-looking guy. We loved his self-deprecating humour. Yet we also saw that, beneath that jocular exterior, Reagan was a determined man who was making some big and important claims. In fact, he was taking on the big idea of the 20th century: collectivism. Reagan wanted to halt the growth of the welfare state at home, and he wanted to dismantle the Soviet empire abroad. These were massively ambitious goals. Many people, including most conservatives, considered Soviet communism to be basically irreversible. So, too, previous Republicans like Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford had made their peace with the welfare state. Reagan was the first person to say: "Government is not the solution. Government is the problem."

Many of us young conservatives came to Washington DC excited by Reagan and eager to be part of his revolution. In short order, many of us found ourselves working for the Reagan administration. We were able to get these jobs because Reagan didn’t want to hire the old guys who worked in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Reagan had run against Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976, and many of these guys had viciously attacked Reagan. "Who needs them?" Reagan figured. "Yes, they have experience, but it is experience in screwing up."

At the age of 26, I was appointed senior domestic policy analyst in the White House. It was an endlessly fascinating place. Walk down one hall and you’d see a group of Catholic nuns. Soviet migrs with long beards sometimes showed up for a meeting with the president. On occasion I saw Afghan children whose limbs had been blown off by Soviet mines. Every administration, I suppose, develops its own character based on the types of people it attracts.

In America, Reagan is today bathed in a kind of warm glow of affection. Republicans revere him, and even Democrats claim to have developed a kinder, gentler feeling for the man. This is in stark contrast to the1980s, when Democrats (like many Europeans) treated Reagan with loathing and contempt. For instance, Eric Alterman of The Nation described Reagan as a "pathological liar" and an "unbelievable moron" with a "heart of darkness" that showed a "fondness for genocidal murders".

Normal people would be unsettled by such allegations. Reagan, by contrast, never exerted himself to rebut his critics. He even agreed with them. Once, asked about his light work schedule, Reagan quipped: "They tell me hard work never killed anyone, but why take the chance?"

In a Eureka College speech during the mid-1980s, Reagan confronted the allegation that he had graduated from a third-rate school with a C average. Reagan mused: "Even now I wonder what I might have accomplished had I studied harder."

Over the years, I have pondered the question of what made Reagan so successful. I have three answers to this question. First, he had a Euclidean certainty about what he believed and where he wanted to take the country. Not only was he a man of conviction, he was a man whose convictions were not open to change.

This is a key point, so let me elaborate a bit. When I was a student at Dartmouth College, I was informed again and again that a liberally educated man has an open mind. Having an open mind means only making provisional judgments, and always being open to new evidence that might change your mind. I realised that Reagan did not share this view. He knew in advance what he wanted to do, say, lower taxes. If his aides informed him that the facts went in the other direction, Reagan’s basic attitude was: "OK, get me new facts."

In this, Reagan was right. It is important for a president to be closed-minded in a certain sense. The reason is that when you are elected president, and come to Washington with an agenda, you are immediately surrounded by highly competent and experienced people who tell you, "Sorry, Mr President, but you simply cannot do that. The Congress will never go for it. There is opposition within your own party. The European governments are sceptical. The Supreme Court is sure to strike it down." And so on.

The open-minded person quickly gets drowned in a sea of facts. Only the man with a firm rudder, only the man who already has decided where he is going, is confident enough to keep going when the political waters get rough.

Second, Reagan instinctively understood that the president, powerful as he is, cannot change the world in 65 ways. He can only change the world in two or three ways.

And so Reagan set his priorities. He wanted to defeat inflation, revive the economy, arrest the advance of the Soviet empire, and that’s about it. The other stuff Reagan didn’t care about.

In the White House, we were sometimes frustrated that Reagan avoided issues like affirmative action, and that he conceded to the liberals on issues like farm subsidies. But Reagan understood, better than we did, that a president has to pick his fights.

Early in Reagan’s first term, he was criticised for failing to recognise one of his own cabinet secretaries. This was Sam Pierce, the secretary of housing and urban development. Reagan saw the guy at a meeting of big-city mayors and greeted him by saying, "And how are things in your city, Mr Mayor?" A bit of a gaffe. Yet the reason for the gaffe was that Reagan didn’t really care about the department of housing and urban development. He saw it as a rat-hole of public policy. He knew that if he went in, he might never come out.

And this was probably a correct perception.

Third, and perhaps most important, Reagan was successful because he didn’t care about what the elite culture said about him.

The former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the former Vice Presidential nominee Jack Kemp are similar to Reagan in some ways, but they differ from him in that both men are very anxious to win the approval of elite culture. As Speaker of the House, Gingrich was always troubled when he was excoriated by Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News. Kemp yearned for the plaudits of the editors of Time magazine and the Washington Post.

Reagan genuinely didn’t care. He had this same attitude when he was governor of California. During the late 1960s, Reagan was repeatedly attacked in the San Francisco Chronicle by the influential columnist Herb Caen. On one occasion Reagan’s aide, Michael Deaver, said to him: "Governor, have you seen these vicious attacks by Herb Caen?" And Reagan’s response was, "Yeah. What’s that guy’s problem?" Reagan’s assumption was that something was wrong with Herb Caen.

This liberation from the tyranny of elite opinion gave Reagan the freedom to operate outside the bounds of what is normally permissible.

None of this is to say that Reagan refused to acknowledge any moral or intellectual authority. But his authorities were drawn from, let us say, outside the bounds of the policy-making world.

The economist Arthur Laffer recalls that shortly after the US invasion of Grenada in 1983, he met Reagan at a conference. He told Reagan that the newspapers had reported that the administration had gone back and forth on whether to go with the invasion.

Laffer asked: "What made you finally decide to do it?" Reagan said, "Well, Art, finally I asked myself, what would John Wayne have done?"

Somewhere deep down, Reagan knew that John Wayne was a better guide on this occasion that the collective wisdom of the Washington establishment.

Reagan’s firm convictions and his indifference to elite opinion were responsible for the biggest and boldest decision of his presidency - the decision to cut taxes and raise defence spending even in the face of a ballooning federal deficit. The deficits not only raised the ire of Democrats, but also fears in Reagan’s own camp.

His budget director, David Stockman, and the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, Martin Feldstein, called on Reagan to scale back the tax cut and to moderate the defence increase. Reagan’s reply was almost farcical. "Gentlemen," he said, "I believe the deficit is big enough to take care of itself."

The media response was one of apoplexy, but Reagan was making a considered gamble. He strongly believed that the tax cuts would energise the economy, and this would ultimately increase the tax base and swell the revenues of the treasury. He was determined to have his defence increase to curb - and, he could only hope, topple - the "evil empire". If this happened, Reagan knew that America would be able to spend less on defence in the future. So there was a kind of logic, albeit a risky logic, behind his assertion that "if we cannot balance the budget now, we’ll have to do it later".

But the Reagan gamble paid off. Although the pundits wailed for more than a decade about the Reagan deficits, the country moved into the 1990s to discover that the annual deficit had vanished. Suddenly America was running big budget surpluses.

Of course, the shameless Clinton repeatedly bowed and claimed credit for the surpluses, but what did he do to produce them? Absolutely nothing. It was the juggernaut of economic growth that began around 1983 and continued virtually uninterrupted through the 1990s that proved to be a tax bonanza for the treasury.

Moreover, huge defence savings from the end of the Cold War contributed to making the dreaded deficits disappear.

On the Left, revisionist historians try to deny Reagan credit for his role in ending the Cold War. "The Soviet Union collapsed by itself," they say. Or, "Gorbachev did it". Neither explanation is believable.

First, while the Soviet Union undoubtedly had economic problems in the 1980s, it also had such problems in the 1970s, and the 1960s, and the 1950s. Come to think of it, the Soviets had economic problems ever since the Bolsheviks took power. Admittedly, these sufferings imposed continual hardships on the Soviet people, but there were no signs during the 1980s that the people were up in arms. Moreover, the ruling class was living comfortably, as it had since Lenin’s day.

So why would this group relinquish power? No empire in history has called it quits, freed its colonies and dissolved itself just because its economy was ailing.

Nor does it make sense to say that Gorbachev brought about the change. First, Gorbachev did not want to end communism, but to save it. Gorbachev went to the Soviet military and said, in effect: "Give me my economic reforms and I will have more resources for you to spend on weapons." Today, Gorbachev claims he was always a democrat and a liberal, but go back and read his speeches and his book Perestroika, published during the 1980s. Gorbachev sought to "reform" communism and the system imploded because it was too rigid to adapt to the reforms.

So Gorbachev was a decent bungler who ended up producing a result he did not intend. Curiously, it was an outcome Reagan sought and predicted when he said, in 1982, that Soviet communism would end up on "the ash heap of history".

Another point to remember is that Reagan was largely responsible for the Soviet Politburo elevating a man like Gorbachev to power. Gorbachev was completely different from the Brezhnev-Andropov-Chernenko type. So why did the Politburo choose him? The reason is that the Soviet strategy that had worked so well during the 1970s had stopped working during the 1980s. Between 1974 and 1980, ten countries fell into the Soviet orbit, starting with the fall of Vietnam and ending with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Since 1981, when Reagan came to power, no more real estate fell into Soviet hands, and in 1983, thanks to an American invasion, Grenada became the first country in history to be liberated from the clutches of Soviet communism.

Moreover, Reagan deployed Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe to meet the Soviet threat there. He announced the strategic missile defence programme. When Chernenko died, the Politburo concluded they needed a new type of leader to cope with this fellow Reagan. And so they put Gorbachev into the ring, where he was outmanoeuvred by Reagan and ended up taking himself, and Soviet communism, over the precipice of history.

The diplomat Clare Booth Luce once said that history, which has no room for clutter, remembers every president by only one line. "Washington was the father of the country." "Lincoln freed the slaves." And so on. It is interesting to speculate on how recent presidents will be remembered.

So what about Reagan? Margaret Thatcher said several years ago: "Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot." This is a pretty good epitaph, but I think Reagan did more than that.

So my line for him is the following: "Reagan won the Cold War and revived the American economy and the American spirit." For this, it seems that Americans and indeed all lovers of freedom owe Reagan a profound debt of gratitude.

Dinesh D’Souza is the author of Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader. A former domestic policy analyst in the Reagan White House, he is currently the Rishwain Research Scholar at the Hoover Institution.

Ronald Reagan, actor and politician. Died: 5 June, 2004, in Los Angeles, aged 93