I hope that Lyn Nofziger was invited to Reagan's funeral. He wrote the following piece on his blog four months ago:
Feb. 5, 2004--Ronald Reagan will be 93-years-old tomorrow. He is largely bed-ridden now and suffers from advanced Alzheimer’s Disease so he will not be aware of the date or the passing of time.
Tragically, he also will not be aware of the love and esteem most Americans have for him even today, 15 years after he left office.
Conservatives, of which he was chiefest, more and more look on him as one of the nation’s greatest presidents, ranking with Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. It will not be surprising if one day his likeness is carved on Mt. Rushmore.
All presidents leave legacies. Some work at it. Bill Clinton, for instance. But the good he did, because all presidents do some good, is overshadowed by personal scandal and negative character traits.
In Reagan’s case, while some of those around him worried about a legacy, the man himself did not. On his desk was motto someone had sent to him in his early days as governor of California. It read: “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.”
As president, Reagan, unlike many others who have served in that office, knew what he wanted to accomplish, knew why he was there. He was not bothered by the minutia of government. Neither did he have a laundry list of small things he wanted done for political purposes.
He had two major goals, both predicated on the philosphy that liberty is man’s most prized possession. Domestically he wanted to reduce the burden of government on the American people In foreign affairs he was interested in only one thing: ending the expansion and threat of world communism.
Reagan believed in limited constitutional government that would do only those things the people could not do for themselves. He believed in individual freedom and individual responsibility and toward those ends he sought to do two things. One, reduce taxes on the grounds that the individual could spend his money better and more efficiently than government could spend it for him. Two, for the same reason he wanted to reduce the size and scope of government. He never wavered from his belief that government “should get off our backs and get its hand out of our pockets.”
From fighting communist efforts to infiltrate the moving picture industry following WWII he reached the conclusion that communism as a philosophy of government was evil. From there it was only a small step to concluding that the Soviet Union was an evil empire and that detente and the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) were not the road to lasting world peace. He instinctively realized that good and evil could not exist side by side.
His refusal to cater to the Soviet Union or to accept the inevitability of an ever- expanding communist empire was instrumental in its collapse.
Domestically, the tax cuts he pushed through led to a nearly 20-year period of sustained economic growth.
These accomplishments in themselves would constitute a major legacy for any president, but there is more. There is an indefinable something that Reagan brought to the presidency. That was a spirit of optimism that spread out and infected and affected the entire nation.
Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter, worried that the nation’s problems were so many and so large they could not be solved. He wondered if the job of president hadn’t grown to big for any one person to handle.
Reagan, on the other hand, had no doubts. He was confident that he could do the job, mainly because he knew what it was he wanted to accomplish. More than that, he had an almost mystical faith in both God and the American people. He believed that with God’s help there was nothing they could not do if they set their minds to it.
He believed strongly that God has a purpose for America. He believed that He had set this nation here between the two oceans to be a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world. It should be, and is, he insisted, “a shining city on a hill.”
Yes, Reagan’s accomplishments were monumental. But even more important was the inspiration and optimism he re-instilled in an entire nation. Who could ask for a better legacy? |
