WASHINGTON
-- Twenty-five years ago, on Jan. 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan was
sworn in as the 40th president of the United States. The line
best remembered as the former governor of California took over
the federal government was: "Government is not the solution
to our problem. Government is the problem."
He touched
on four simple themes, the same ones he had been repeating for
years, first as spokesman for the General Electric Co., then as
governor and the post-Goldwater icon of the conservative wing
of the Republican Party: (1) reducing taxes and budget deficits,
thus reducing the power and size of the government; (2) rebuilding
the American military; (3) confronting communism around the world;
and (4) renewing American pride and patriotism.
He blew his
first goal. He reduced income taxes in an energetic first year,
but those taxes and others immediately began creeping up again.
Government kept growing, although spending shifted from domestic
social programs to military spending. Deficits exploded as the
man who had made a career of attacking "tax and spend"
Democrats invented a new kind of Republicanism that might be called
"spend and borrow." Only our grandchildren, as they
pay Reagan's bills, will know the real cost of those policies
and of opportunities lost, beginning with national health care.
But Reagan
did keep his other three promises. He increased military spending
by more than 50 percent. He scrapped "containment" and
"detente" in favor of his own inclinations, articulated
to his first national security adviser, Richard Allen: "I
know you think I don't have a strategy for dealing with communism,
but I do: We win! They lose!"
And the old
actor persuaded Americans to believe in themselves and in a past
imagined, telling us we were better than other people, God's chosen,
the last best hope, citizens of a shining city on a hill. Simply
speaking and speaking simply, Reagan had a gift for turning issues
into emotions. In effect, he dumbed-down America, persuading us
to suspend belief and reality, combining fact and fiction, to
make politics and governance just another subsidiary of his old
business, entertainment. His governance was based on a true story.
A stubborn
and determined old man not greatly interested in learning anything
new, Reagan instinctively understood the presidency in important
ways derided and mocked by many of his contemporaries. He knew
the job is not managing the government; the job is leading the
nation. He knew words could be more important than deeds.
The greatest
irony of the Reagan years, I would argue after working five years
on a book about his tenure, "President Reagan: The Triumph
of Imagination," is that the old man was being managed and
manipulated by a savvy cadre of younger men and an ambitious wife.
But, he hardly knew the names of his staff; the younger men he
called "fellas." They were pretty much interchangeable
to him. His most talented and effective assistant, James A. Baker
III, put it this way: "He treated us all the same, as hired
help."
He seemed
disengaged because he was. He did not care about most of what
the government did. But it seemed that he had come to Washington
with a six-year script for an eight-year presidency. He also seemed
politically dead after his reckless blundering in the Middle East
sent America crusading against Islam, resulting in the deaths
of hundreds of American servicemen and the beginnings of some
of the terrorism we now know. He led his own administration into
illegal (almost comic) arms-for-hostages deals bartered from Teheran
to Tel Aviv to Tegucigalpa.
He was pretty
much on his own by then. Congress and the press treated him as
a fool or a crook. But he knew one big thing, always had: Communism
was falling of its own weight and contradictions. Conservatives
abandoned him, consigning him to Lenin's category of "useful
idiots." But he had found the key to victory in the Cold
War, a Soviet leader who also understood old-fashioned communism
was collapsing. The official notes of the Mikhail Gorbachev-Reagan
meetings, finally released, show convincingly that in the end,
Reagan, trying to save his ideology and his presidency, prevailed
over the Russian trying to save his ideology and his country.
At the end
of 1987, Reagan's seventh year in office, Gorbachev came to Washington.
There was a state dinner on Dec. 8, which ended with Gorbachev
and his wife standing and belting out the lively "Moscow
Nights" as Van Cliburn played the piano. Two days later,
the best of the conservative columnists, Reagan's best friend
in the press, George Will, wrote, "Dec. 8, 1987, will be
remembered as the day the Cold War was lost."
In fact,
it was the day we won the Cold War. Reagan did not, as his champions
preach, win it. We all did, beginning with Harry S. Truman, but
Reagan in his stubborn conviction speeded the end. There was no
one at that west-facing inauguration in January 1981 who imagined
that within 10 years the Soviet Union would be dissolved and a
new Russia would begin applying for membership in the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization.
Well, maybe
Ronald Reagan did. But no one took him seriously -- then.
Copyright
2006 Universal Press Syndicate
