Soccer Dad

3 on Reagan + 1

I would say that the following three articles did as good a job as capturing the essence of Ronald Reagan.
Charles Krauthammer, writing "He Could See for Miles" in Time

He achieved all that with two qualities: courage and conviction. Conviction led him to initiate economic shock therapy to pull the U.S. out of the stagflation of the 1970s. Courage allowed him not to flinch when his radical economic policies (and those of a merciless Federal Reserve) initially caused the worst recession since the Great Depression — and during a congressional election year (1982) to boot.

Reagan didn't waver, and by 1984 it was morning in America. The new prosperity gave a lilt to the rest of his presidency. But you don't get called great for lilt. You get called great for victory. And Reagan won the cold war.

Conviction told him that the proper way to deal with this endless, enervating, anxiety-ridden ordeal was not settling for stability but going for victory. Courage allowed him to weather the incessant, at times almost universal, attacks on him for the radical means he chose to win it: the military buildup; nuclear deployments in Europe; the Reagan doctrine of overt support for anticommunist resistance movements everywhere, including Nicaragua; and the piece de resistance, strategic missile defenses, derisively dubbed Star Wars by scandalized opponents. Within eight years, an overmatched, overwhelmed, overstretched Soviet Union was ready for surrender, the historically breathtaking, total and peaceful surrender of everything — its empire and its state.

Then Robert Samuelson gave Reagan credit for his economic policies (something referred to by Krauthammer but given the complete treatment here) in "Unsung Triumph"

It's a magnificent irony. Amid all the affection and adulation for Ronald Reagan, one of his greatest achievements stands all but overlooked. He helped subdue double-digit inflation, setting the stage for the prolonged economic expansions of the 1980s and 1990s. High inflation largely brought Reagan to power; low inflation made his presidency popular and successful.

We forget now how much inflation once frightened Americans. In 1979 Daniel Yankelovich -- a leading student of post-World War II public opinion -- wrote this: "For the public today, inflation has the kind of dominance that no other issue has had since World War II. The closest contenders are the Cold War fears of the early 1950's and perhaps the last years of the Vietnam War. But inflation exceeds those issues in the breadth of concerns it has aroused among Americans. It would be necessary to go back to the 1930's and the Great Depression to find a peacetime issue that has had the country so concerned and so distraught."

What unnerved people was not merely that inflation was high (13.3 percent in 1979) but that it was rising (in 1976, it was 4.9 percent) at an unpredictable pace and that no one could stop it. President Jimmy Carter had fumbled with a host of confusing policies -- including wage-price guidelines -- to little avail. The steady upward march of prices fed the sense that Carter had lost control of events, an impression reinforced by his handling of the Iranian hostage crisis.

Finally there's Jeff Jacoby in "The modest giant" remembering that Ronald Reagan was the first president he voted for. (And I feel similarly that this makes Reagan special in my book.) Jacoby emphasizes the former President's humility:

It occurred in 1981, shortly after the assassination attempt. Reagan was still in the hospital and one night, feeling unwell, he got out of bed to go to the bathroom. "He slapped water on his face, and water slopped out of the sink," Noonan relates. "He got some paper towels and got down on the floor to clean it up. An aide came in and said: `Mr. President, what are you doing? We have people for that.' And Reagan said, oh, no, he was just cleaning up his mess, he didn't want a nurse to have to do it."

That was Reagan: On his say-so armies would march and fighter jets scramble, but he hated to trouble a hospital orderly to mop up his spill. That humbleness, it seems to me, is a mark of Reagan's greatness, too -- and a key to understanding the outpouring of affection his death has unleashed.

These three articles are all required reading to remember the best qualities of the 40th President of the United States.
UPDATE: Gregory Kane weighs in, in his own inimitable fashion:

IF I'VE HEARD it once since President Reagan died, I've heard it a dozen times.

"Reagan didn't do anything for black people."

Since Reagan was elected president of all Americans, you have to wonder from whence came the notion that he, or any other American president, should do anything "for" one particular ethnic or racial group. Still, the argument can be made that Reagan did for black people what he did for Americans of every other race and ethnicity: He tried his best to disabuse us of the notion that the federal government is our mommy and daddy. It was Reagan, more than any other president of the last half of the 20th century, who reminded us that the Founding Fathers meant for our Constitution to be a limit on the powers of the federal government, not a license for the expansion of its powers we've seen since the New Deal.

Still, there is at least one group of black people Reagan most certainly did do something "for." They live on the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada.

This of course differs from the more standard fare in the Baltimore Sun.

Posted by SoccerDad at June 11, 2004 04:23 PM | TrackBack