Reagan played a vital role

London Free Press (Ontario) ^ | 2004-06-11 | Salim Mansur

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In an insightful study of American society and politics, American Exceptionalism, Seymour Martin Lipset wrote, "there can be little question that the hand of providence has been on a nation which finds a Washington, a Lincoln, or a Roosevelt when it needs him."

Lipset would likely concur if the name of Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, was added to his list.

The defining principle of the American experiment in democracy was drafted by Thomas Jefferson on the republic's birth. It is the idea of freedom, and that individuals matter in the life of a nation.

More than 200 years later, in December 1988, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, paying homage to Reagan as his two-term presidency ended, summed up his political career and mission in life with two words: "Freedom works."

Every American presidency is surrounded by events unforeseen, and eventually judged how well it met the tasks at hand and what difference, if any, was made for the better at home and abroad.

What sets apart any presidency as great, or providential, is the intangible quality of the man inside the presidency and how, in surmounting a national crisis, he changes the course of history.

Washington inspired a people and founded a republic. Lincoln saved the union and emancipated a people denied their freedom at the republic's founding. Roosevelt steered America through Depression years, and then, when attacked, made it an arsenal of freedom beyond the oceans.

Reagan came to office at one of the bleakest moments in American history. Jimmy Carter, his predecessor, had spoken of a national malaise gripping Americans in the years following the Vietnam debacle and the Watergate mess that forced Richard Nixon's resignation.

The American economy was stuck in hyper-inflation and unemployment, and many contemplated America's decline and the rise of the Japanese economy.

Then there was the Soviet Union, exuding confidence by invading Afghanistan, while religious fanatics held American diplomats as hostages in Iran. Fidel Castro saw visions of

communism advancing in the Caribbean and in Central America and, ironically, those Europeans liberated from fascism and saved from communism displayed greater suspicions about America than about the Soviet Union.

When Reagan left office in January 1989, he had rescued the American economy from stagflation, an economic disease that is no longer spoken about. And, in Thatcher's words, he was "the man who more than any other can claim to have won the Cold War without firing a shot."

Reagan was regularly under-estimated by opponents, and intellectuals, who believe they possess a more privileged understanding of politics and history than ordinary people.

Reagan projected an image of being ordinary, of an old actor out of depth among those gifted with greater abilities.

Tip O'Neill, the crafty Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last general secretary of the former Soviet Union, learned the hard way how great was the distance between Reagan's image and the toughness of his character and mind in getting what he wanted.

Reagan believed in the greatness of America and held to one big idea he had learned early in his public life. He summed it up in the speech to the Republican convention in 1964: "You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or a right. There is only an up or down: up to man's age-old dream -- the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism."

Reagan's biographers document his incredible personality of goodwill, optimism, generosity, courage, wit, humble beginnings and huge achievements and, most amazingly, his capacity never to hold any malice toward opponents irrespective of how difficult, tenacious or spiteful they were in opposing him.

Like Roosevelt before him, Reagan reconfigured American politics.

And as Roosevelt did, in renewing America's spirits while expanding freedom's frontiers, Ronald Reagan set his nation and the world on a changed path, safer and better, and soared above his contemporaries in winning the hearts of his fellow citizens.

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