Posted on 06/08/2004 3:25:08 PM PDT by swilhelm73
WASHINGTON -- This may shock you. During the eight years of the Reagan Presidency I was not his biggest fan. I looked not so much at what he accomplished but what he didn't accomplish. My expectations were that government would get smaller under President Reagan. It didn't. I was disappointed.
I looked at the agencies left in place -- the National Endowment for the Arts, the Legal Services Corporation (which has done so much damage) and A.I.D. -- and I felt that the Reagan Administration did not make a real effort to curtail them. I was disappointed.
Also there was school prayer and a Right To Life Amendment. They got lip service but little else. I was disappointed.
There was Sandra Day O'Connor who had already begun to show her independence from the man who appointed her. I was disappointed.
I could go on and on, but you get the picture. The man, I thought, had such incredible potential and goodwill and yet he did not use that to accomplish domestic goals. I was disappointed.
BUT THEN, THANKS to the late Dr. Robert Krieble, my colleagues and I began to travel to the far reaches of the "Evil Empire." We taught politics and small business. Ronald Reagan was already a few months out of office when we made our first trip. As I encountered people in Eastern Europe, the Baltics and in Russia itself, Ronald Reagan loomed as a larger-than-life figure to them. Several asked me in hushed tones if I had ever met him. When I said I had, suddenly my stature grew.
I will never forget being in Tomsk, Siberia. That was an outback place if there ever was one. A big husky fellow in the back of the crowded room where we did our seminar on how to win elections rose up. In a booming voice he asked me if we were for real. I assured him we were. Then he said, "You know Ronald Reagan encouraged us. We felt we could be bolder when he was in office. I get the impression that President Bush is not such a positive person as Reagan. What can you tell me?" Imagine that kind of understanding in one of the really remote places in Siberia. I assured him that President Bush 41 would not betray him or his people. It was then that I said that Yalta was a great tragedy and it is something I and many Americans are ashamed of. The room burst into applause.
Then there was Khabarovsk, in the Far East of Russia. There I met a General who was in charge of the military district of that whole area. He told me he used to get up every morning and say to himself "what are the ten things I can do today to help defeat America?" He went on to confess, "I hated your country." Then he told me one day Pravda was up in arms because President Reagan had charged that the Soviets lied to their people. He said that shook him up. He said he was not sure why but that statement hit him hard. He began to investigate things. He found out that Reagan was right. Lenin, Stalin and right down to the leaders in modern times had lied to him and to the Russian people. He said he had become completely disoriented. Everything he once believed turned out to be a lie. But now he didn't know what to believe. He took his huge hands and grabbed mine. He looked directly into my eyes and said, "Please help me." I indeed tried to, but it was President Reagan who got him to think.
Natan Sharansky, the Soviet dissident who was imprisoned in Siberia when President Reagan made his famous "Evil Empire" speech, came to the Free Congress Foundation when he was released. He expressed profound gratitude to President Reagan. He said that when Pravda (which ironically means truth) splashed on their front page that Reagan had the gall to call the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire," all the prisoners in the Gulag began to spread the word. He said it was absolutely electric. It gave hope to the thousands of refuseniks who were imprisoned for political reasons.
I came to think of Ronald Reagan as the great man he was by talking with those he helped to liberate. Someone finally had the courage to face down the Soviet Union. Soon after we began our efforts in the Soviet empire, the Berlin wall came down. Then all of the Eastern European nations were liberated...even Romania and Albania. Then came the end of the Soviet Union itself.
Today, the nation that had been the dominant threat against America for most of the 20th Century is no more. And the successor nations do not wish us ill.
I WAS SO TIED UP with my agenda that I failed to see the big picture. Sure, President Reagan did not do everything I wanted him to do, but he changed the world. How many other Presidents can claim that? I could have pretended that I was a fan of the Reagan Presidency all along. But that would not have been honest. No, it took travels from one end of Russia to the other, much of Ukraine and ten of the Soviet Republics as well as every country in Eastern Europe, except what is now Serbia, to learn of the greatness of Ronald Reagan.
When the full story is told I should imagine we will learn of many other things this President did to liberate the Soviet empire. Regardless, the people in the former "Evil Empire" know who their hero is. I am just embarrassed that it took me so long to figure it out. Oh yes, and I am no longer disappointed.
I am bookmarking this.
Great post. BUMPUS MAXIMUS.
They have stars in their eyes when President Reagan is discussed, and then excoriate our current President Bush for things that President Reagan did as well, but they are unaware of the practicalities of actual executive service.
For me, I was wary of President Reagan when he first came into office, but I grew to trust him over the years. I found I agreed with much that he did, and that he wasn't the trigger-happy cowboy the media had made me fear.
In his latter years in office, when the media was calling him senile, I remember saying often that I'd trust him senile to make better decisions than the Democrat contender in his prime.
Later, when he really began to suffer memory problems, I dropped that line; but I still feel that way. He was good to the bone.
With all due respect to Reagan's positive impacts on geopolitics - he indeed was kept from doing many of the things he wanted domestically and it was disappointing. I can't blame Reagan. He had a Leftist Congress in his face and an majority of citizens who, while voting for him, did not have the moral strength to take his message into action. When entitlements are at stake it tends to deflate support. Also, the globalists among the GOP's corporate faction were never very supportive of Reagan's social conservatism and his overt afront the the UN and other international entanglements. I have always beleived that having Bush Sr. as VP was a sort of compromise with the Progressive / 3rd way factions of the GOP. W needs to learn from all this and realize that Reagan was right (or, make that Right) and that his own dad was... well, a bit too far to the Left.
I wish he had actually been more of the Rightist, trigger happy type the media tried to make everyone afraid of. I wish he'd actually disbanded a few of the agencies he said he wanted to disband and I wish that he'd gotten his way on more of the military projects he was pushing.
To get the tax cut, he was forced to allow their earmarks to go through. It was the only way, and he correctly decided that putting the economic basis of the country on the right course would be the lynch pin for the rest of the Reagan Revolution.
If Bush Sr. had continued the faith instead of his more moderate, left trending approach, then we could have seen phases 3, 4 and 5 of Ronnie's plans put in place. Now I am hoping that W is reelected so we can see completion. Shrinking government must begin soon - as Reagan once quipped, whereas FDR had the view that government would solve peoples' problems, government is, in the matter of social and domestic economic issues, THE problem. Shut down the Dept. of Education, the NEA, and vastly scale back the EPA. Let the states legislate their own levels of accomodation of the disabled and eliminate all federal level involvement. Eliminate multinational entanglements such as our membership in the UN and our participation in GATT, NAFTA, WTO, etc - negotiate only bilateral one-to-one trade and other agreements with the nations of our choosing. Stop all existing foreign aid and make any new foreign aid contingent upon specific geopolitical needs or explicit reciprocal agreements. There is still so much low hanging fruit. Who will be the next Ronald Reagan? Bush has four years to do what he can, God help him do so. We need to be thinking about 2008 as well. No more luke warm men. The GOP must move from being a reactive damper on "mixed economy" socialism and, instead, proactively lead with our own program. Tough medicine is needed and many now addicted to entitlements must be told "no!" I urge a study of best practices from administrations such as McKinley's. There is so much to be done. We have only just begun.
Legislation may also begin in the Senate.
Appropriations legislation starts in the House, but only by tradition & convention, not by Constitution.
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