For the Great Communicator, presidency was about big dreams
June 7, 2004
WASHINGTON -- Ronald Reagan was the only big-time office-holder I covered who entered public life as a dreamer and never changed. He achieved an extraordinary number of those dreams. But he never stopped thinking about those visions that, as a practical politician, he conceded could not be realized.
In 1986 at the height of the Iran-Contra scandal, I was President Reagan's guest at lunch in the White House. Near its end, I asked him if he ever regretted not pressing for a gold standard. ''Oh, yes,'' he said. ''That would really have stabilized the economy, but --" ''Mr. President!'' his chief of staff, Donald Regan, interrupted sharply. ''Oh,'' said the president, with his characteristic shake of the head and half-smile, ''Don doesn't like me to talk about the gold standard.''
Don Regan, a lion of Wall Street before coming to Washington, was no dreamer. But Ronald Reagan was -- with practical limitations. He never stopped dreaming about the gold standard, but was practical enough to realize it was one bridge too far. He had fulfilled dreams that practical men like Don Regan thought unachievable: sharply reduced tax rates that revived the U.S. economy and victory in the Cold War, with the Soviet Union gone.
Grudging praise of Reagan, even in death, paints him as an intellectual midget who had one or two big ideas he relied on staffers to put into action. Reagan was not consumed by details, as no great leader should be. But he was more deeply involved than liberal critics admit, and more often than not he was fighting off senior aides.
The decision made early in Reagan's administration that made possible all future success was distinctively his own. When the air controllers (the only labor union that supported him for president) went on strike in violation of the law, Reagan was determined to break them. Secretary of Transportation Drew Lewis flinched after a while and advised a compromise. Some of Reagan's most conservative aides wanted to back down. But Reagan, who had begun his public life negotiating labor contracts as head of the Screen Actors Guild, would not budge.
The message conveyed by that obstinacy was that Ronald Reagan was no mere B-movie actor propelled into the Oval Office by a whim of fate. He was no man to be trifled with. That message traveled across the sea to Europe and into the very halls of the Kremlin. Nothing could have so strongly asserted Reagan's stature in foreign chancelleries than the air controllers dispute.
On the big issues, Reagan rejected the importuning of his senior aides. He refused to temporize on the 1981 tax cut that ended Jimmy Carter's stagflation. At Reykjavik in 1985, he turned down State Department advice for an arms deal and stood fast to open the way for the Soviet collapse.
That was not expected by the heads of government who met Reagan for the first time at the 1981 G-7 summit in Ottawa. Europe's socialist politicians were openly contemptuous of the ''cowboy'' American. Only Britain's Margaret Thatcher supported Reagan. But by the 1987 G-7 summit in Venice, the Europeans were treating Reagan with the utmost respect.
Reagan was the mirror image of Richard M. Nixon. Nixon really believed in very little and was nearly non-ideological, but he was engrossed in the minutiae of political maneuver. Reagan carried a heavy ideological load but was uninterested in political intrigue. That was why Nixon's presidency was a disaster and Reagan's one of the most successful in the nation's history.
Reagan was fortunate to come along midway through a national political realignment that had begun with Nixon's election a dozen years earlier. The Reagan Democrats, at odds with their ancestral party, were ready to cross the political divide. Reagan made it possible for them as Nixon would have made it impossible.
He was perhaps the nation's most ideological president. Oddly, he was one of the most intellectual presidents. He was a voracious reader (from right-wing publications to economic theory) and an industrious writer of his own letters all his life. To call him the Great Communicator does not do justice to this dreamer of great dreams.
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