I was an adult during the late '70's and I well remember how the economy was. Remember stagflation? The misery index? Inflation plus the unemployment rate - both of them frequently in double digits. Communism surging around the world - Cuban troops and Russian advisors in a dozen or so African countries, civil wars and revolutions in Latin America, European countries like Italy and Portugal on the verge of going Communist. It seemed as if the free world was dying. Reagan turned everything around. He said the Soviet Union was an evil empire, that Communism would be put in the dustbin of history, stood at the Berlin Wall and said "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! - and amazingly it happened!
Reagan was the first, and so far the only, politician who I have ever found inspiring. I came of political age during the Reagan years when I was a high school student in Canada. In political science class we learned that the essence of the Canadian philosophy of government could be remembered with the mnemonic POGG - peace, order, and good government. I preferred life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and hearing Reagan speak was always a thrill for me.
The record, of course, is never as glorious as the rhetoric but a number of important accomplishments occured under Reagan's watch. In the economic sphere, the reduction in marginal tax rates was a great and lasting achievement. It's hard to believe today that top marginal rates used to approach 70%.
Reagan also deserves great credit for standing up to the air traffic controllers thereby sending a strong signal that the country would not be taken hostage by the labor unions as had happened and continues to happen in much of Europe.
Inflation was also brought under control under Reagan - the 1982 recession was second only to that of the Great Depression but it's hard to see how that pain could have been avoided. Reagan had the fortitude to take the political heat of the downturn and stay the course thereby laying the groundwork for growth in the following decades.
Deregulation began under Carter but continued under Reagan, leading to innovation in previously moribund industries.
In foreign policy of course, Reagan saw further than anyone else. Only Reagan predicted that communism would end up on the dustbin of history and at critical moments he took the actions necessary to make it happen.
Not all was positive of course but the rest can wait for another day.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok
marginalrevolution.com
IN MEMORIAM: RONALD REAGAN, 1911-2004
The election of 1980 was the first presidential election I remember (I was 7 years old, going on 8). The Iranian hostage crisis was going on, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, and the economy was going to hell in a handbasket. So naturally, applying my 7-year-old-going-on-8 mind to the situation, I conclude that with all of the problems going on in the world, it would be a terrible time to change Presidents and have to acclimate an entirely new Chief Executive to the office and its burdens. Better to keep the same experienced team in place.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, I cringe at that line of thinking, and am thoroughly ashamed of it. Because Ronald Reagan turned out to be one of my political heroes. I will go through life wishing that I cheered him on in 1980, and that I was old enough either then, or in 1984 to cast a ballot for him.
It is certainly the case that ever since the advent of the Cold War, various Presidents of the United States--both Democrats and Republicans--worked to protect the foundations of liberal democracy against a totalitarian ideology that was the successor to fascism. Victory in the Cold War is due to the efforts of those Presidents; from Harry Truman's Berlin Airlift, to Eisenhower's calm and collected leadership confronting the Soviet menace, to Richard Nixon's ability to discomfit Soviet leaders by his successful courting of mainland China into a strategic partnership with the United States. Even the properly criticized Jimmy Carter was able to make some strides against the Soviets by placing human rights on the agenda, and highlighting the plight of Soviet refuseniks and other political dissidents.
But Ronald Reagan was unique in the panoply of Presidents who confronted the Soviet Union. Why? Because he thought the Soviet empire could be rolled back and defeated:
In an ironic sense Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West but in the home of Marxism- Leninism, the Soviet Union. It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens. It also is in deep economic difficulty. The rate of growth in the national product has been steadily declining since the fifties and is less than half of what it was then.
The dimensions of this failure are astounding: a country which employs one-fifth of its population in agriculture is unable to feed its own people. Were it not for the private sector, the tiny private sector tolerated in Soviet agriculture, the country might be on the brink of famine. These private plots occupy a bare 3 percent of the arable land but account for nearly one-quarter of Soviet farm output and nearly one-third of meat products and vegetables. Overcentralized, with little or no incentives, year after year the Soviet system pours its best resources into the making of instruments of destruction. The constant shrinkage of economic growth combined with the growth of military production is putting a heavy strain on the Soviet people. What we see here is a political structure that no longer corresponds to its economic base, a society where productive forced are hampered by political ones.
The decay of the Soviet experiment should come as no surprise to us. Wherever the comparisons have been made between free and closed societies -- West Germany and East Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Malaysia and Vietnam -- it is the democratic countries that are prosperous and responsive to the needs of their people. And one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward the Communist world. Today on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east to prevent their people from leaving.
[. . .]
What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term -- the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people. And that's why we must continue our efforts to strengthen NATO even as we move forward with our zero-option initiative in the negotiations on intermediate-range forces and our proposal for a one-third reduction in strategic ballistic missile warheads.
And pursuant to the new strategy that Reagan proposed, the intelligence agencies of the United States began to redefine their mission so as to win the Cold War, instead of merely trying not to lose it:
When President Reagan took office, the CIA's hypothesis was that the Soviet economy was growing at a three-percent annual rate. To anyone who had seriously studied the numbers — or who had spent an hour walking the streets of Moscow — this was nonsense. Part of my job was to set out and explore an alternate hypothesis: namely, that the Soviet economy had begun to shrink and was on the verge of collapse. More precisely, Casey ordered me to ask this question: If in fact the Soviet economy has begun to shrink, what should we expect to see?
The career analysts responded by digging in their heels; by insisting that the Soviet economy was growing steadily and dismissing the alternate hypothesis as unworthy of serious attention. So I wrote a lengthy "think piece" memo that simply made the assumption that the Soviet economy was shrinking, then outlined what the downward spiral would look like. Casey made sure that just about everyone inside the CIA and elsewhere in the intelligence community read that memo — and knew that he, personally, thought its radical hypothesis might be correct.
Now, of course, the very analysts who had scoffed at this new hypothesis started jumping in with their own ideas — often quite insightful, by the way — of what we might expect to see if the hypothesis were correct. For instance, we would see signs of discontent among the population. Moscow would start shifting military spending to the civilian sector in ways that helped the economy the most but reduced military power the least, such as by transferring steel from tank production to manufacture of (badly needed) locomotives. We would see increased efforts to purchase Western technology for civilian factories, to boost productivity without adding labor, which was increasingly scarce as birth rates plunged. We would see increased sales of Soviet oil and gas to Europe, to increase hard-currency earnings with which to purchase this technology. And so forth.
Literally within days, analysts throughout the intelligence services — not just at the CIA — began coming to me with bits and pieces of information that had never before surfaced. One afternoon an analyst handed me a report on the growing number of strikes — strikes! — at Soviet factories. I asked why this information hadn't surfaced before. He shrugged and replied, "No one here was interested. It just didn't fit." That report was on Casey's desk in five minutes, and on the president's desk later that same afternoon. Likewise with an astonishing report that another analyst brought to my office one day recounting an episode in which Soviet workers literally stopped and surrounded a train that was carrying meat. Troops arrived and surrounded the workers, and the standoff had to be resolved by the Politburo itself — which decided to allow the workers to offload and take the meat, rather than risk a shootout.
Casey delivered this knockout report to President Reagan in person. Then he ordered me to meet with analysts throughout the intelligence community, not only in Washington but overseas, to make sure they knew the director and the president wanted anything that might provide more evidence of the Soviet Union's economic troubles — and we wanted it now. And Casey ran interference by making sure that no deskbound bureaucrat would sit on whatever came in, whether from some analyst in the basement or from one of our clandestine agents abroad. Moreover, he brought in new analysts to replace some of those who just didn't "get it." It made for some nasty episodes in the office, but the raw stuff started reaching us fast and we started pulling the dots together into a pattern.
As the evidence accumulated, we weaned the CIA from its original hypothesis to the new one. Well armed now with solid and growing evidence that the Soviet economy was imploding, President Reagan had the confidence to move forward with his strategy of pushing the Soviet Union to its breaking point.
The thought that the Soviets could be defeated elicited much chuckling among those who supposedly "knew better":
In 1982, the learned Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University wrote in Foreign Affairs, "The Soviet Union is not now nor will it be during the next decade in the throes of a true systemic crisis, for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability."
This view was seconded that same year by the eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. [who is on the Left, and who was Counselor to the President during the Kennedy Administration--ed.], who observed that "those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse" are "wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves."
John Kenneth Galbraith, the distinguished Harvard economist, wrote in 1984: "That the Soviet system has made great material progress in recent years is evident both from the statistics and from the general urban scene. . . . One sees it in the appearance of solid well-being of the people on the streets . . . and the general aspect of restaurants, theaters, and shops. . . . Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower."
Equally imaginative was the assessment of Paul Samuelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Nobel laureate in economics, writing in the 1985 edition of his widely used textbook: "What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth. . . . The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth."
Columnist James Reston of the New York Times in June 1985 revealed his capacity for sophisticated even-handedness when he dismissed the possibility of the collapse of communism on the grounds that Soviet problems were not different from those in the U.S. "It is clear that the ideologies of Communism, socialism, and capitalism are all in trouble."
But the genius award undoubtedly goes to Lester Thurow, another MIT economist and well-known author who, as late as 1989, wrote, "Can economic command significantly . . . accelerate the growth process? The remarkable performance of the Soviet Union suggests that it can. . . . Today the Soviet Union is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States."
Throughout the 1980s, most of these pundits derisively condemned Mr. Reagan's policies. Mr. [Strobe] Talbott [Ambassador at Large for Russian Affairs and Deputy Secretary of State during the Clinton Administration; now President of the Brookings Institution--ed.] faulted the Reagan administration for espousing "the early fifties goal of rolling back Soviet domination of Eastern Europe," an objective he considered misguided and unrealistic. "Reagan is counting on American technological and economic predominance to prevail in the end," Mr. Talbott scoffed, adding that if the Soviet economy was in a crisis of any kind, "it is a permanent, institutionalized crisis with which the U.S.S.R. has learned to live."
All of these Doubting Thomases were proven wrong, of course. Shortly after Reagan left office, the dominoes in Eastern Europe began to fall. The Velvet Revolution in the former Czechoslovakia kicked out the communists and brought to power Vaclav Havel--one of the most heroic figures of the modern era, and a progeny of the Reaganesque belief that communism need not be merely contained, but could be completely defeated as well. In Romania, Nicolae Ceaucescu and his bloodthirsty gang got exactly the end they deserved. After a decade of holding out against democratic reforms, Wojciech Jaruzelski and his government finally gave way to Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement (in addition to Reagan's profound influence, Pope John Paul II was supremely instrumental in helping to undermind the communist government in Poland). And who could possibly forget the joyful and unbelievable scene when the Berlin Wall came down and when Germany was finally reunited? (Reagan was interviewed that night on Primetime Live by former press corps adversary Sam Donaldson, who to his credit, warmly gave Reagan praise for the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the end of the interview, Reagan only asked for a little time to inquire about one question: While everyone was happy and overjoyed at the fall of the Berlin Wall, why would anyone be surprised that people would choose freedom over slavery? As always, the great man knew how to cut to the heart of the matter.)
Was Reagan responsible for the end of the Cold War? Not solely. Again, Democrats and Republicans worked together to defend American security and the security of our allies against the threat posed by the Soviets. But Reagan was the only President who realized that the Soviets need not merely be contained. They could be completely defeated and left "on the ash heap of history." And to the credit of Reagan's adversaries, they recognized that he was perhaps the prime player in the victory of the West:
The general response among America’s chattering classes has been that Reagan was the political equivalent of the millionth customer at Bloomingdale’s. He was the guy lucky enough to walk through the door as the prize was handed out, as if everything was pre-ordained and would have happened the same way no matter whether the White House had been occupied by Michael Dukakis or George McGovern or Susan Sarandon. An alternative theory posits that Gorbachev was some sort of Jeffersonian kamikaze pilot, taking his whole nation over the cliff for the thrill of being proclaimed Time’s Man of the Decade.
Oddly, that’s not the way the Russians see it. Says Genrikh Grofimenko, a former adviser to Leonid Brezhnev, "Ninety-nine percent of the Russian people believe that you won the Cold War because of your president’s insistence on SDI," the Strategic Defense Initiative, as Star Wars was formally called. Grofimenko marvels that the Nobel Peace Prize went to "the greatest flimflam man of all time," Mikhail Gorbachev, while Western intellectuals ignore Reagan -- who, he says, "was tackling world gangsters of the first order of magnitude."
[. . .]
As early as 1963, Reagan argued that the arms race should be not reined in but accelerated. "If we truly believe that our way of life is best, aren’t the Russians more likely to recognize that fact and modify their stand if we let their economy come unhinged, so the contrast is apparent?" he asked in a speech that year. "In an all-out race our system is strong," said Reagan, "and eventually the enemy gives up the race as a hopeless cause."
He wanted to use American technology to leverage an arms race that would force Moscow’s wheezing command economy into a Hobson’s choice between guns and butter. Either way, Reagan believed, the Soviets would lose: They could never keep up with the United States in an arms race, but abandoning it would be suicidal for a state that conducted all its business at gunpoint.
Reagan finally got to test his theory when he entered the White House in 1981. His defense team drew up a plan, later expanded into National Security Decision Directive 11-82, that explicitly made U.S. defense spending a form of economic warfare against the Soviets. The United States would "exploit and demonstrate the enduring economic advantages of the West to develop a variety of [arms] systems that are difficult for the Soviets to counter, impose disproportionate costs, open up new areas of major military competition and obsolesce previous Soviet investment or employ sophisticated strategic options to achieve this end." The objective was to make arms spending a "rising burden on the Soviet economy."
In retrospect, Reagan’s point that the Soviet economy was on life support seems obvious to the point of banality. In fact, that’s one of the arguments his critics use against him: that the Soviet economy would have imploded anyway, even without Reagan’s defense buildup. But that’s not the way foreign policy intellectuals saw it in 1982.
[. . .]
Reagan nonetheless persisted. He boosted production of conventional arms and borrowed a play from the Soviet book by backing anti-communist insurgencies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Most controversially, he poured billions of dollars into his missile defense program.
Whether SDI will ever work (20 years later, it’s still mostly theoretical) and whether, even if it does work, it’s a wise strategic choice in a world where America’s most implacable enemies are not superpowers with hundreds of ICBMs but terrorists with suitcases, are arguments for another time. But what has largely been overlooked in the debate is that the Soviets had no doubt whatsoever that it would work.
At arms summits, Gorbachev frantically offered increasingly gigantic cuts in strategic missiles -- first 50 percent, then all of them -- if Reagan would just abandon SDI. Schweizer, mining Soviet archives and memoirs still unpublished in the West, shows that Gorbachev’s fears echoed throughout the Politburo. SDI "played a powerful psychological role," admitted KGB Gen. Nikolai Leonev. "It underlined still more our technological backwardness." Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko understood exactly what Reagan was up to: "Behind all this lies the clear calculation that the USSR will exhaust its material resources before the USA and therefore be forced to surrender." Most tellingly of all, the East German-backed terrorist group known as the Red Army Faction began systematically murdering executives of West German companies doing SDI research.
Reagan, unmoved, stiff-armed the Soviets on SDI while winning huge concessions on other weapons. When Gorbachev complained, Reagan needled him with jokes. (Sample: Two Russians are standing in line at the vodka store. Time passed -- 30 minutes, an hour, two -- and they were no closer to the door. "I’ve had it," one of the men finally snarled. "I’m going over to the Kremlin to shoot that son of a bitch Gorbachev!" He stormed up the street. Half an hour later, he returned. "What happened?" asked his friend. "Did you shoot Gorbachev?" Replied the other man in disgust: "Hell, no. The line over there is even longer than this one.")
The arms buildup (and a little-appreciated corollary, Reagan’s jawboning of the Saudis to open their oil spigots and depress the value of Soviet petroleum exports) quickly took its toll. The Soviet economy began shrinking in 1982 and never recovered. By Schweizer’s accounting, the various Reagan initiatives were costing Moscow as much as $45 billion a year, a devastating sum for a nation with only $32 billion a year in hard-currency earnings. Meanwhile, Reagan’s rhetoric (the "evil empire" and "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speeches in particular) emboldened opposition movements in Eastern Europe. Less than a year after Reagan left office, the Berlin Wall fell; the Soviet Union itself disappeared a little later.
Of course, Reagan's legacy should not end by just being measured by its Cold War accomplishments (though those accomplishments are surely the defining feature of the Reagan legacy). After three failed Presidencies and one caretaker government--that of Gerald Ford's--Reagan proved to a doubting public that the Presidency could be made to work again. His tax cuts (the top rate was hovering at around 70% at the time Reagan took office) stimulated the economy, and gave the United States one of the longest peacetime expansions in history. He restored the general sense of hope and optimism that Americans had lost since the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. And Reagan will be remembered as well for challenging the New Deal ethos of expanding government by putting forth a vision of smaller government, one that trusts people and private enterprise more than it does a disconnected governmental coterie in the nation's capital. No one believes that the people who work for the Federal Government are bad people. But conservatives and libertarians had to struggle for decades before Reagan to put forth the message that when it came to analyzing the problems of states and localities, the people best in the position to do that were the ones living in those states and localities.
There were, of course, mistakes and shortcomings in the Reagan Revolution. The legacy of the New Deal and expansionist government is still with us, so it proved much harder to roll back government than Reagan must have initially thought. The withdrawals from Lebanon and the arms sales to Iran were terrible policy mistakes that undermined Reagan's--and America's--credibility for a while. No Presidency is perfect, particularly not one that serves for eight years and is thrust in the midst of history-changing events.
But when the history is finally written, Ronald Reagan will be remembered as one of the best and most consequential Presidents of the 20th Century. His impact was, overwhelmingly, a positive one. He helped us prosper at home, and he helped free others abroad. His most controversial statements--remember the "Evil Empire" speech?--which elicited derision from those who regularly looked down their noses at him (former Defense Secretary and Democratic eminence grise, Clark Clifford, once called Reagan an "amiable dunce") were cheered by those seeking freedom abroad. If history is just, in the end, Reagan will be lauded for his beliefs. Those who mocked him--many of whom are discussed brilliantly and unsparingly here--will be the ones laughed at in the end.
Job well done, Mr. President. We'll miss you. And I'm sorry for rooting against you 24 years ago. Chalk it up to the mistakes of youth.
pejmanesque.com
....I was in the military when RR was sworn in, and his policies began to take effect. The comparison between RR's and Carter's regime was like night turning into day. We went from grey, faceless drones, bent-backed under the weight of communism, to Red White and Blue Patriots quite literally overnight. It swept all of society, not just the military. We entered a new age, with a Leader, like all of them are, set up and blessed by God. And yes, even Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were put in place by God. Mysterious ways. Nuff said.
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banedad.blogspot.com
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Certain figures in history, like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or Winston Churchill, were not simply titans among men, but came along at a particular point in history where their talents were most needed.
So it was with Reagan.
Before Dutch came into office, this country was in real trouble. Back then, it really was the "worst economy since the depression", Vietnam and Watergate were still fresh in the public's minds, and the Soviet Union was viewed as the stronger of the two super powers by many people. In those days, some people genuinely wondered if America's best days were behind her and school children, myself included, feared that a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States would end all life on this planet. Those were dark days for our country.
Then along came Reagan.
While many people believed America's day in the sun had passed, Ron Reagan said the best was yet to come -- and he was right. In his eight years in office, Ronald Reagan rebuilt our military, turned America's economy around, slashed taxes, helped create 19 million jobs, and perhaps most importantly, broke the Soviet Union.
In a break from the policies of his predecessors, The Great Communicator spoke openly of the Soviets as an evil empire, launched a massive military build-up, including the "Star Wars" program that the Soviet Union feared it could not match, freed Grenada from Soviet rule, supported anti-Communist freedom fighters around the world, spent billions to bleed the Kremlin dry in Afghanistan, and did everything he could to create enormous financial pressure on the red menace.
In 1991, after Reagan had left office, his efforts paid off and the Soviet Union fell, freeing hundreds of millions of Eastern Europeans from the grip of the Russian Bear. That would have been thought to be beyond belief before 1981, but Reagan's policies made it possible.
However, merely noting Reagan's accomplishments is not enough to convey why Reagan was so beloved. How do you explain to people Reagan's patriotism, his infectious optimism, his abiding faith in God, or the confidence he had in the people of America in a time when so many others were apprehensive and uncertain about our future?
Reagan was like a bigger than life hero from one of his movies. He showed up when America, and yes, even the rest of the world, needed him most. Then he saved the day, rode off into the sunset, and left all of us with a debt of gratitude that we could never fully repay.
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rightwingnews.com
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Reagan's biggest achievement historically, IMO, is the dramatic liberalization of economic policy. Thatcher and Reagan shifted the West's economic viewpoint from Freidman to Hayek... in the US this seemed a bit odd at the time, but to the UK it was salvation from economic meltdown. There is a convincing argument that the US was rapidly approaching a similar meltdown, and Reagan's economic policy shift saved us from it.
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I wonder how many people still remembered the terror of the Cold War, the fear of nuclear war.
I recall there were quite a lot of people in the 1980s, who claimed Reagan was "rocking the boat" of the balance of power between the West and the Soviet Union -- who claimed, in essence, that Reagan would "provoke" World War III.
In hindsight, they were wrong. He started a process of real nuclear disarmament (Reykjavik, remember?). Funny, how hindsight makes all the things that were being said in the past seem loopy, treacherous or plain wrongheaded.
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maroonblog.blogspot.com
And finally, the great man's farewell address summing up his time in office and surveying the future:
Our Revolution
Reagan’s farewell address.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Below is the text of Ronald Reagan's farewell address to the nation after his eight years as president, delivered in the Oval Office on January 11, 1989.
This is the 34th time I'll speak to you from the Oval Office and the last. We've been together eight years now, and soon it'll be time for me to go. But before I do, I wanted to share some thoughts, some of which I've been saving for a long time.
It's been the honor of my life to be your president. So many of you have written the past few weeks to say thanks, but I could say as much to you. Nancy and I are grateful for the opportunity you gave us to serve.
One of the things about the presidency is that you're always somewhat apart. You spend a lot of time going by too fast in a car someone else is driving, and seeing the people through tinted glass — the parents holding up a child, and the wave you saw too late and couldn't return. And so many times I wanted to stop and reach out from behind the glass, and connect. Well, maybe I can do a little of that tonight.
People ask how I feel about leaving. And the fact is, "parting is such sweet sorrow." The sweet part is California, and the ranch and freedom. The sorrow — the goodbyes, of course, and leaving this beautiful place.
You know, down the hall and up the stairs from this office is the part of the White House where the president and his family live. There are a few favorite windows I have up there that I like to stand and look out of early in the morning. The view is over the grounds here to the Washington Monument, and then the Mall and the Jefferson Memorial. But on mornings when the humidity is low, you can see past the Jefferson to the river, the Potomac, and the Virginia shore. Someone said that's the view Lincoln had when he saw the smoke rising from the Battle of Bull Run. I see more prosaic things: the grass on the banks, the morning traffic as people make their way to work, now and then a sailboat on the river.
I've been thinking a bit at that window. I've been reflecting on what the past eight years have meant and mean. And the image that comes to mind like a refrain is a nautical one — a small story about a big ship, and a refugee and a sailor. It was back in the early '80s, at the height of the boat people. And the sailor was hard at work on the carrier Midway, which was patrolling the South China Sea. The sailor, like most American servicemen, was young, smart, and fiercely observant. The crew spied on the horizon a leaky little boat. And crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck and stood up and called out to him. He yelled, "Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man."
A small moment with a big meaning, a moment the sailor, who wrote it in a letter, couldn't get out of his mind. And when I saw it, neither could I. Because that's what it was to be an American in the 1980s. We stood, again, for freedom. I know we always have, but in the past few years the world again, and in a way, we ourselves rediscovered it.
It's been quite a journey this decade, and we held together through some stormy seas. And at the end, together, we are reaching our destination.
The fact is, from Grenada to the Washington and Moscow summits, from the recession of '81 to '82, to the expansion that began in late '82 and continues to this day, we've made a difference. The way I see it, there were two great triumphs, two things that I'm proudest of. One is the economic recovery, in which the people of America created — and filled — 19 million new jobs. The other is the recovery of our morale. America is respected again in the world and looked to for leadership.
Something that happened to me a few years ago reflects some of this. It was back in 1981, and I was attending my first big economic summit, which was held that year in Canada. The meeting place rotates among the member countries. The opening meeting was a formal dinner for the heads of government of the seven industrialized nations. Now, I sat there like the new kid in school and listened, and it was all Francois this and Helmut that. They dropped titles and spoke to one another on a first-name basis. Well, at one point I sort of leaned in and said, "My name's Ron." Well, in that same year, we began the actions we felt would ignite an economic comeback — cut taxes and regulation, started to cut spending. And soon the recovery began.
Two years later another economic summit, with pretty much the same cast. At the big opening meeting we all got together, and all of a sudden, just for a moment, I saw that everyone was just sitting there looking at me. And one of them broke the silence. "Tell us about the American miracle," he said.
Well, back in 1980, when I was running for president, it was all so different. Some pundits said our programs would result in catastrophe. Our views on foreign affairs would cause war. Our plans for the economy would cause inflation to soar and bring about economic collapse. I even remember one highly respected economist saying, back in 1982, that "the engines of economic growth have shut down here, and they're likely to stay that way for years to come." Well, he and the other opinion leaders were wrong. The fact is, what they called "radical" was really "right." What they called "dangerous" was just "desperately needed."
And in all of that time I won a nickname, "The Great Communicator." But I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: It was the content. I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn't spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation — from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in principles that have guided us for two centuries. They called it the Reagan revolution. Well, I'll accept that, but for me it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a rediscovery of our values and our common sense.
Common sense told us that when you put a big tax on something, the people will produce less of it. So, we cut the people's tax rates, and the people produced more than ever before. The economy bloomed like a plant that had been cut back and could now grow quicker and stronger. Our economic program brought about the longest peacetime expansion in our history: real family income up, the poverty rate down, entrepreneurship booming, and an explosion in research and new technology. We're exporting more than ever because American industry became more competitive and at the same time, we summoned the national will to knock down protectionist walls abroad instead of erecting them at home. Common sense also told us that to preserve the peace, we'd have to become strong again after years of weakness and confusion. So, we rebuilt our defenses, and this New Year we toasted the new peacefulness around the globe. Not only have the superpowers actually begun to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons — and hope for even more progress is bright — but the regional conflicts that rack the globe are also beginning to cease. The Persian Gulf is no longer a war zone. The Soviets are leaving Afghanistan. The Vietnamese are preparing to pull out of Cambodia, and an American-mediated accord will soon send 50,000 Cuban troops home from Angola.
The lesson of all this was, of course, that because we're a great nation, our challenges seem complex. It will always be this way. But as long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours. And something else we learned: Once you begin a great movement, there's no telling where it will end. We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.
Countries across the globe are turning to free markets and free speech and turning away from ideologies of the past. For them, the great rediscovery of the 1980s has been that, lo and behold, the moral way of government is the practical way of government: Democracy, the profoundly good, is also the profoundly productive.
When you've got to the point when you can celebrate the anniversaries of your 39th birthday, you can sit back sometimes, review your life, and see it flowing before you. For me there was a fork in the river, and it was right in the middle of my life. I never meant to go into politics. It wasn't my intention when I was young. But I was raised to believe you had to pay your way for the blessings bestowed on you. I was happy with my career in the entertainment world, but I ultimately went into politics because I wanted to protect something precious.
Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: "We the people." "We the people" tell the government what to do, it doesn't tell us. "We the people" are the driver, the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which "We the people" tell the government what it is allowed to do. "We the people" are free. This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I've tried to do these past eight years.
But back in the 1960s, when I began, it seemed to me that we'd begun reversing the order of things — that through more and more rules and regulations and confiscatory taxes, the government was taking more of our money, more of our options, and more of our freedom. I went into politics in part to put up my hand and say, "Stop." I was a citizen politician, and it seemed the right thing for a citizen to do.
I think we have stopped a lot of what needed stopping. And I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.
Nothing is less free than pure communism, and yet we have, the past few years, forged a satisfying new closeness with the Soviet Union. I've been asked if this isn't a gamble, and my answer is no because we're basing our actions not on words but deeds. The detente of the 1970s was based not on actions but promises. They'd promise to treat their own people and the people of the world better. But the gulag was still the gulag, and the state was still expansionist, and they still waged proxy wars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Well, this time, so far, it's different. President Gorbachev has brought about some internal democratic reforms and begun the withdrawal from Afghanistan. He has also freed prisoners whose names I've given him every time we've met.
But life has a way of reminding you of big things through small incidents. Once, during the heady days of the Moscow summit, Nancy and I decided to break off from the entourage one afternoon to visit the shops on Arbat Street — that's a little street just off Moscow's main shopping area. Even though our visit was a surprise, every Russian there immediately recognized us and called out our names and reached for our hands. We were just about swept away by the warmth. You could almost feel the possibilities in all that joy. But within seconds, a KGB detail pushed their way toward us and began pushing and shoving the people in the crowd. It was an interesting moment. It reminded me that while the man on the street in the Soviet Union yearns for peace, the government is Communist. And those who run it are Communists, and that means we and they view such issues as freedom and human rights very differently.
We must keep up our guard, but we must also continue to work together to lessen and eliminate tension and mistrust. My view is that President Gorbachev is different from previous Soviet leaders. I think he knows some of the things wrong with his society and is trying to fix them. We wish him well. And we'll continue to work to make sure that the Soviet Union that eventually emerges from this process is a less threatening one. What it all boils down to is this. I want the new closeness to continue. And it will, as long as we make it clear that we will continue to act in a certain way as long as they continue to act in a helpful manner. If and when they don't, at first pull your punches. If they persist, pull the plug. It's still trust but verify. It's still play, but cut the cards. It's still watch closely. And don't be afraid to see what you see.
I've been asked if I have any regrets. Well, I do. The deficit is one. I've been talking a great deal about that lately, but tonight isn't for arguments. And I'm going to hold my tongue. But an observation: I've had my share of victories in the Congress, but what few people noticed is that I never won anything you didn't win for me. They never saw my troops, they never saw Reagan's regiments, the American people. You won every battle with every call you made and letter you wrote demanding action. Well, action is still needed. If we're to finish the job, Reagan's regiments will have to become the Bush brigades. Soon he'll be the chief, and he'll need you every bit as much as I did. Finally, there is a great tradition of warnings in presidential farewells, and I've got one that's been on my mind for some time. But oddly enough it starts with one of the things I'm proudest of in the past eight years: the resurgence of national pride that I called the new patriotism. This national feeling is good, but it won't count for much, and it won't last unless it's grounded in thoughtfulness and knowledge.
An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. 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. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-'60s
But now, we're about to enter the '90s, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren't sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven't reinstitutionalized it. We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs protection.
So, we've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important: Why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, four years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing of her late father, who'd fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, "We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did." Well, let's help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let's start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual. And let me offer lesson No. 1 about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.
And that's about all I have to say tonight. Except for one thng. The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the "shining city upon a hill." The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.
I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still.
And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that; after 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.
We've done our part. And as I walk off into the city streets, a final word to the men and women of the Reagan revolution, the men and women across America who for eight years did the work that brought America back. My friends: We did it. We weren't just marking time. We made a difference. We made the city stronger. We made the city freer, and we left her in good hands. All in all, not bad, not bad at all.
And so, good-bye, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.
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