Reagan: Champion of Conservative Politics

Ronald Reagan, an infectiously optimistic president who forged an enduring relationship with the American people, dedicated his presidency to two goals - the destruction of Soviet communism abroad and the reduction of government at home. He lived to see the first achieved, if not the second.

The nation's 40th president, he was the most conservative since Herbert Hoover, and the first to hold office for two full terms since Dwight D. Eisenhower at mid-century. Elected in 1980 at age 69, Reagan left office at 77, the oldest president to serve. He died Saturday at age 93.

His eight-year, trillion-dollar arms buildup strained the Soviet Union's resources, helping to bring about the Kremlin's demise in 1989 after four decades of superpower rivalry. But at home Reagan failed to staunch government's growth. He called government "the enemy," but it expanded during his watch, and so did the deficits he deplored. The national debt tripled, to $3 trillion, while he held office.

Five years after he left office, he revealed, on Nov. 5, 1994, in a note in his own handwriting, that he was a victim of Alzheimer's, a mind-crippling disease, and had begun the journey "into the sunset of my life."

Through a lifetime in the public eye, Reagan demonstrated an uncommon ability to give voice to the innate patriotism of the American people. And, more than any other politician of his time, he had an affectionate, long-lasting relationship with his countrymen.

He was "Dutch" Reagan, the radioman. He was "the Gipper," forever asking voters to win one more for him. His eyes glistened when he heard the national anthem. He was comfortable with himself. He was sunny. He kept short office hours and joked about it. Yes, he said, it was true that hard work never killed anyone, "but, I figure, why take the chance?"

Reagan took office in 1981 at 69, an age at which most people have ended their work lives. Behind him was a full life, as a radio sports announcer, an actor who made 51 movies in 29 years, a television performer, a traveling spokesman for the General Electric Co., a two-term governor of California and a champion of conservative politics.

Originally he was a New Deal Democrat, and even carried a union card in his Hollywood days and headed the Screen Actors Guild. He later became an "Eisenhower Democrat" and still later a Barry Goldwater Republican.

Although he became conservative to the core in thought and speech, in office he acted more pragmatically than he talked. He could accept compromise without acknowledging it.

He even repeated it in his first inaugural address. Yet at every turn contradictions abounded. He preached a balanced budget but never proposed or achieved one, and the government continued to grow during his presidency. The national debt nearly tripled.

He denounced the "Evil Empire" but ultimately came around to doing business with that empire, the Soviet Union. He signed the first arms control accord that actually eliminated existing nuclear weapons.

He exalted family values, yet he was the first divorced president, and his own family life was anything but idyllic. As adults, two of his children - Michael and Patti - wrote bitter memoirs describing their father as icy and remote. In illness, he and his wife, Nancy, reconciled with all four of his children - Michael, a son adopted with his first wife, actress Jane Wyman; Maureen, a daughter of Reagan and Jane Wyman; and Patti and Ron, born to Reagan and Nancy. Maureen died in 2001 of cancer, her father too ill to come to the funeral.

His were the simpler verities. He did not believe in welfare, and denounced "welfare queens." He loathed the progressive income tax, a distaste implanted when he started making big money in Hollywood and giving a lot of it to Uncle Sam.

He was frankly, openly, unblushingly patriotic and nostalgic. America thrilled him; he fervently believed she was a "city on the hill."

"Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America," he confided in a farewell television address to the people, his 34th Oval Office speech.

"We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn't get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio."

When he left office, at age 77, he held the highest popularity rating of any retiring president in the history of polling.

Reagan carried all but six states in defeating incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter and independent John Anderson in 1980 but he commanded the loyalty of only 50.7 percent of the voters in that election. Bad economic times helped elect him. The Democrats tried to picture him a zealot who never let the truth get in the way of a moral-making yarn, an effort sometimes facilitated by zany Reagan pronouncements, such as his assertion that trees are a major source of air pollution.

After four years - two years of recession, two of prosperity - Reagan was re-elected with 59 percent of the vote, carrying 49 of the 50 states in defeating Democrat Walter F. Mondale, who had been Carter's vice president.

Reagan's first inauguration occurred at an electric moment in American history. Just 36 minutes after he took the oath of office, word was flashed that a plane had left Iran carrying 52 Americans to freedom after 14 1/2 months as hostages. It was a happy omen for a stand-tall president.

He embraced a conservative economic theory called "supply side," a belief that tax cuts would stimulate the economy and so pay for themselves. When it did not work out that way, Reagan explained that Democratic Congresses had been too timid in applying the concept.

In any event, by the time Reagan left office his goal of eliminating the deficit was still elusive - his eight budgets averaged deficits of $180 billion.

On Reagan's 70th day as president, March 30, 1981, a dramatic, frightening event occurred; the way he handled it had the effect of cementing his affectionate relationship with the people.

Reagan was leaving the Washington Hilton after addressing labor leaders. As he headed for his limousine, a young drifter, John Hinckley, fired six shots at him. A bullet lodged an inch from Reagan's heart.

As an anxious country awaited word of his fate, Reagan issued his own medical bulletin, in the form of a wisecrack to Nancy: "Honey, I forgot to duck."

To the surgeons he said, "Please tell me you're Republicans." Despite the reassuring banter, he had been more gravely injured than anyone let on at the time.

In his first major appearance after his recovery, Reagan addressed Congress. To a boisterous reception, he thanked America for its good wishes, including a letter from a second grader who worried that if the president didn't get well, "you might have to make a speech in your pajamas."

Congress responded, overcame its misgivings and enacted Reagan's 25 percent tax cut that critics later called the cause of Reaganomic's deficits.

He was a notably hands-off president. He kept aides at bay, receiving their reports without comment. He believed in Cabinet government. He left almost everything - save core philosophy and presentation - to underlings, including what he called "the details" - foreign policy, the budget, appointments to office.

So detached was Reagan from day-to-day operations that he was the last to be told when White House Chief of Staff James Baker swapped jobs with Treasury Secretary Donald Regan in Reagan's second term. Regan said later he was struck by how "uncurious" Reagan had been about the reshuffling. He didn't know that the deal had been cleared with Nancy Reagan.

Reagan could afford detachment - he had Nancy. She was his protector, his booster, his adviser.

He hated to fire people and stayed loyal to subordinates who got him in trouble - Interior Secretary James Watt, National Security Adviser Richard Allen and Regan - but when Nancy Reagan saw they were damaging his presidency, she quietly engineered their departures.

She was called ruthless, and when her husband stood to be damaged she indeed was ruthless. Perhaps more than any first lady, she was a power behind the scenes, one to whom presidential aides deferred.

"What have you done to my husband?" she once demanded of Mike Deaver, a public relations adviser, when she perceived that he had failed him.

The love Ronald Reagan held for his wife was plain to see. He brightened in her presence, slumped when she was away for long. "I miss her if she even steps out of the room," Reagan wrote in a tribute on their 40th wedding anniversary.

During a photo opportunity in the 1984 campaign, Reagan was asked what America could do to bring the Russians to the negotiating table. He stood in silence for a full five seconds. Finally, Nancy whispered, "Doing everything we can." Reagan grinned. "Doing everything we can," he said.

Humor and anecdotes played a big role in his success. "In public and private," wrote biographer Lou Cannon, "Reagan regularly poked fun at his age, his work habits, his movies, his ideology, his vanities, his memory lapses, his supposed domination by his wife and even the widely held view that he was unintelligent."

Even disasters that would rock other presidents - the loss of hundreds of Marines in an attack on their barracks in Lebanon, the bizarre sale of arms to Iran and the diversion of profits from that sale to Central American rebels, the decision to visit a German cemetery at Bitberg where Nazi storm troopers were buried - left no evident wounds. His protective coating of good will earned him the title "The Teflon President."

Everyone marveled at how little this president seemed to age. Whether he dyed his hair was a matter of national speculation. His hair did not turn gray while he was in office, and was only barely tinged with gray years later.

Reagan governed on the basis of core belief and anecdote, and associates made use of that inclination to catch his interest. When Regan, as treasury secretary, wanted to convince Reagan of the need to reform taxes, he personified the issue, telling Reagan about 60 big corporations and concluding: "Your secretary paid more in federal taxes last year than all of those giant companies put together."

It worked. Reagan got behind the bill. Its enactment was considered the major domestic achievement of his second term.

Regan wrote in his memoirs that in his years at Treasury he never got marching orders directly from the president. Instead directions came from aides, like Edwin Meese, who rarely even invoked the president's name. "I found this disembodied relationship bizarre," Regan said.

Any other president might have exploded in anger if a subordinate confessed, as Budget Director David Stockman did in a magazine interview, that "supply side" was a game of smoke and mirrors, a disguise for old-fashioned trickle-down theory and said, "None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers."

There were explosions of fury, but not from the boss. Some Republicans and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, supply-side true believers, called for Stockman's hide, but he survived, having only to endure a for-show "woodshedding" over lunch with Reagan.

Reagan was so self-confident that he could joke even about his dependence on others to put words in his mouth. "I came over on such short notice that I haven't had a chance to read my remarks yet," he started one speech. "But the speechwriters usually do a pretty good job, so I'll just begin."

Not as much as he wanted nor as much as he claimed, Reagan reshaped the American government. He left intact such New Deal programs as Social Security, but gutted the anti-poverty programs of Lyndon Johnson and the general revenue sharing idea of Richard Nixon. He reduced taxes for the rich. Opponents accused Reagan and his cohorts of boorish indifference to the plight of the unfortunate, seizing upon such evidence as an administration effort to classify, for school lunch purposes, ketchup as a vegetable.

Yet, for all of Reagan's conservatism, federal spending more than doubled during his watch. And rather than eliminate the Departments of Energy and Education, as he wanted, he added a new one, the Department of Veterans Affairs. Still, he left office declaring, "We were all revolutionaries, and the revolution has been a success."

In foreign affairs, Reagan built the arsenals of war while seeking - and achieving - unprecedented arms control agreements with the Soviet Union.

Some historians believe that Moscow's attempt to keep pace with Reagan's trillion-dollar arms buildup was a big factor in the communist superpower's ultimate collapse, which occurred after Reagan had left office.

He startled his own advisers by going on television to propose "my dream" of an anti-missile space shield and offering to share the technology, once developed at American expense, with the Soviets, an offer they rejected.

His Strategic Defense Initiative - ridiculed by opponents as "Star Wars" - was never completed despite the more than $30 billion spent on it, although less fantastical aspects of the plan to intercept missiles survive. And the attempt to match Star Wars may also have helped bankrupt Moscow.

In a way, however, Reagan was a peace visionary, capable of proposing to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at a summit at Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986 the abolishment of all nuclear weapons.

After he left office, it seemed that Reagan had more impact in reshaping the Republican Party than he had had on the government. For many years, the GOP was divided into a liberal and a conservative wing, with the liberals often dominant. After Reagan, conservatives were in control, and if a candidate had moderate instincts, as the first President Bush was believed to harbor, he had to be careful. The term "liberal Republican" fell from the political lexicon.

Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on Feb. 6, 1911, in a four-room apartment over the general store of Tampico, Ill., the younger of the two sons of Nelle and John Reagan. His father was an alcoholic shoe salesman who had trouble supporting his family.

The elder Reagan said the baby looked like a little Dutchman, and the nickname "Dutch" took hold.

For a time, the Reagans lived on Chicago's South Side. When Ronald was 9 they settled for good in Dixon, Ill. During the Depression, the father took a minor New Deal job, distributing relief to the town's needy.

At Dixon High School, Reagan participated in football, basketball and track, acted in school plays and won his first election, as president of the student body.

In the fall of 1928, Reagan enrolled in Eureka College, a small Christian school near Peoria, on a half-tuition scholarship.

He majored in economics and sociology, took part in dramatics, football, track and swimming, joined Tau Kappa Epsilon and again was elected student body president.

As a 17-year-old freshman, Reagan made a speech during a student strike against the elimination of some courses. The courses were restored and the college president resigned. More significantly, Reagan for the first time got a sense of what he could do with words.

After graduation, he went to Chicago to seek a job in the young medium of radio and was advised by a station receptionist to try "what we call the sticks."

He got a job as a $10-a-game sports announcer for WOC in Davenport, Iowa, and went on to a $75-a-week salaried position at WHO in Des Moines. He covered track meets, title fights and Big Ten football live, and simulated broadcasts of Chicago Cubs baseball from a play-by-play telegraph wire.

He lined up a screen test while in California for Cubs spring training, was signed to a $200-a-week contract and made his debut as a radio announcer in the 1937 film, "Love is on the Air."

In his first four years, Reagan made 28 movies. He got his first big break as the halfback George Gipp in "Knute Rockne, All-American." It was Gipp, in the movie, who implored the coach from his deathbed to have the boys "win one for the Gipper," a phrase associated with Reagan for the rest of his life.

Reagan became president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947 and was elected to five more terms.

He cooperated in a purge of suspected communists from the movies during the Cold War years. He appeared as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but tried to protect the innocent.

In World War II, he made training films for the troops. After he returned to Hollywood, his film career languished. From 1954 to 1962, he appeared as host and performer on the popular General Electric Theater on television and toured the country as a G.E. ambassador.

He and G.E. parted company in 1962 after his basic speech became increasingly political. He went on to host "Death Valley Days," a Western series on television, and appeared in it occasionally.

Late in the 1964 campaign, Reagan gave a nationally televised speech on behalf of Goldwater's presidential candidacy, telling Americans, "We defend freedom here or it is gone."

Those remarks - known in Republican lore as "The Speech" - hit themes that Republicans are still reciting; he was against high taxes, government regulation, bureaucracy. It raised a flood of contributions, and was a turning point for Reagan. A group of wealthy businessmen persuaded him to get directly into politics and run against incumbent Democratic Gov. Edmund G. "Pat" Brown.

Brown derided him as "just an actor," the first in a parade of opponents to underestimate Reagan's appeal. Reagan turned his lack of experience into an asset, running as a "citizen politician," a role he never gave up.

He attacked student rebels on University of California campuses, pictured welfare recipients as "a faceless mass waiting for handouts" and beat Brown in the election of 1966 by 700,000 votes.

In the first appearance of a Reagan line that would echo through the decades, he said, "For many years now, you and I have been shushed like children and told there are no simple answers. Well, there are simple answers. There just are not easy ones."

After a scandal-free and surprisingly moderate term, he easily won re-election in 1970.

Despite his conservative rhetoric, state spending doubled during the Reagan years and taxes rose faster in California than in the rest of the country. As governor he signed the country's most permissive abortion law, later saying he did not know it was so liberal.

And he caught the presidential bug. At the last minute - 48 hours before the first ballot - he became a candidate for the Republican nomination in 1968, but it was too late. Nixon had tied up the votes.

Reagan returned to California where he busied himself writing a newspaper column and making radio commentaries and banquet speeches.

In 1976, Reagan challenged President Gerald Ford unsuccessfully in the Republican primaries.

Ford lost the general election to Democrat Jimmy Carter and Reagan was the front-runner from the start to take on Carter in 1980.

By time the Republican convention opened, Reagan was the only remaining candidate in an original field of seven. After flirting with the extraordinary idea of drafting Ford, the former president, as his vice presidential running mate, he instead picked his chief rival for the nomination, George H.W. Bush, even though Bush had ridiculed Reagan's "voodoo economics."

In the campaign against Carter, Reagan capitalized on public dismay over inflation, asking endlessly, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

After his two terms as president, Reagan settled into life in a fashionable Los Angeles enclave, Bel Air.

He signed a deal worth up to $7 million to publish a volume of speeches and wrote his memoirs, and lined up a $50,000-per-speech lecture contract.

Even in retirement, he was dogged by the biggest scandal of his presidency, the Iran-Contra affair, which arose from the disclosure that he authorized secret arms sales to Iran while seeking Iranian help to gain release of American hostages held in Lebanon. Some of the money Iran paid was used - without his knowledge, Reagan always insisted - to aid the Contras, the anti-communist rebels fighting the Marxist-led government of Nicaragua.

But evidence introduced in the trial of Reagan's former national security aide, Oliver L. North, showed that Reagan was more deeply involved than previously disclosed in efforts to encourage other countries to aid the Nicaraguan rebels.

Reagan lectured at Oxford, England, welcomed old foe Mikhail Gorbachev to his ranch at Simi Valley, toured Alaska and sent an occasional barb of criticism toward President Clinton.

Reagan returned to Washington one last time on Feb. 3, 1994, to speak to a Republican dinner marking his 83rd birthday three days later. He spoke for 25 minutes, bringing his audience of 2,300 to its feet with a defense of his conservatism and his fight against communism.

"Who can forget those so-called 'experts' who said our military buildup threatened a dangerous escalation of tensions?" he asked. "What kind of fool, they asked, would call the Soviet Union an 'Evil Empire'? But, as events have shown, there was nothing foolish in my prediction that communism was destined for the ash heap of history."

Reagan's disclosure, 10 months later, that he was suffering from Alzheimer's brought a worldwide outpouring of sympathy and praise for his courage in speaking out. Little was said after that about his condition. But some old political friends said they stayed away because it hurt too much to see him.

Mrs. Reagan made public service announcements on behalf of Alzheimer's groups and, despite conservative opposition to human embryonic research, has helped raise money for that cause, believing it could help find cures for diseases such as her husband's.

A year after he went public about his Alzheimer's, she said, "there've been better" days. Reflecting on the joys that came her way, she said, "You pay for everything, don't you?"

A few months later, Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister who was Reagan's British soulmate in the 1980s, told of visiting Reagan. She said she and her husband were pleased that Reagan recognized them, but she didn't know if he recalled her role.

"You don't say, 'Do you remember?'," she said. "You talk about things. You look at the beautiful grounds. ... I know he has good days and bad days."

Four years later, Mrs. Reagan told an interviewer that her husband was no longer capable of having a conversation that makes sense.

And last month, she said, "Ronnie's long journey has finally taken him to a distant place where I can no longer reach him."

In his statement announcing he had Alzheimer's, Reagan thanked Americans for allowing him to serve as president - and summed up with familiarly affectionate words for his country.

"When the Lord calls me home, whenever that may be," he said, "I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future. I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead."

Pardon me, but that's absolute bullshit. Revenues doubled during Reagan's turn ... Congress spent the money faster than it came in.

God bless Ronald Reagan---for understanding the nature of true liberty. He was the Great Communicator for the great message of getting the government off of the backs of the American people and unleashing their potential. Economic liberty and the right to control one's one destiny in a free nation are the source of the light shining from this city on a hill.

Until www.reaganvigil.com goes live late tonight or early tomorrow, here is a link to the website to organize candlelight vigils in hometowns across America and internationally.

http://ice.he.net/~freepnet/reagan/

We put it together in a hurry, so please forgive its lack of slick appeal, but it should get the job done.

Send it out to everyone you know, every list you've got so that folks can get together and start organizing vigils!

And if you are in Washington DC Sunday night, come by Lafayette Park across the street from the White House at 6 PM.

Let's get this together for the Gipper!

KRD

You tell it sister!! Today's sad news takes me back & makes me want to renew the call for a line item veto.

Oops, ROTFL I tried to catch it to check your gender, but found I was too late. Er, you tell it brother!!!

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