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| Reagan's Greatest Victories |
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A sharp mind produced a conservatism without social intolerance |
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By ANDREW SULLIVAN |
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Posted Sunday, June 6, 2004
All Presidents, like all human beings, get many things wrong. Ronald Reagan's extraordinary achievement as President of the U.S. was to succeed in getting the two biggest challenges of his time right: defeating the Soviet Union and reviving the American economy and spirit. Neither of those achievements was inevitable. Both were fiercely opposed at the time. But he persisted — his visionary focus matched only by a gentleness of character and a brilliance of rhetoric. The gentleness first. Yes, he was known throughout the world as a cowboy. That helped. It certainly rattled the Kremlin — and all the other enemies of America. But personally, he was civil to a point. Reading the extraordinary collection of his letters to a wide variety of ornery correspondents — from international statesmen to high schoolers — you get a sense of how easily this came to him. "I have been informed of your complaint about my broadcasts and your suggestion that they be taken off the air," he wrote to one irate listener in his days as a broadcaster. "I'm sorry you feel that way and hope you won't mind my writing a few words in my own defense." He disarmed his correspondents as cheerfully as he disarmed the Soviets. At the same time, Reagan was unflinching in the defense of his ideas. His critics thought he was stupid. Nothing could be further from the truth. His radio talks — given hundreds of times on a variety of political topics — are superb, intelligent popular journalism. They were the reflection of a man interested above all in ideas. In one he summed up the essence of his belief in human freedom in his own idiosyncratic shorthand: "Our system freed the individual genius of man. Released him to fly as high & as far as his own talent & energy would take him. We allocate resources not by govt. decision but by the mil's. of decisions customers make when they go into the mkt. place to buy. If something seems too high-priced we buy something else. Thus resources are steered toward those things the people want most at the price they are willing to pay. It may not be a perfect system but it's better than any other that's ever been tried." That's about as acute a defense of market capitalism as you'll find. His collected letters reveal an equally sharp mind. There's a detailed missive setting professor Arthur Laffer right on gas taxes; there's a complex analysis of spending trends on his watch; there's a long explanation of the crossed wires that led him to pay tribute to dead SS officers at a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany. And as early as 1982, there's candor about his strategy for defeating the Soviets. He tolerated the deficits, he explained, for a long-term reason: "I don't underestimate the value of a sound economy, but I also don't underestimate the imperialist ambitions of the Soviet Union ... I want more than anything to bring them into realistic arms-reduction talks. To do this, they must be convinced that the alternative is a build-up militarily by us. They have stretched their economy to the limit to maintain their arms program. They know they cannot match us in an arms race if we are determined to catch up. Our true ultimate purpose is arms reduction." A decade later, you could see how effective his long-term strategy was. And the money saved by winning the cold war — together with the lower tax rates he bequeathed — helped give us the boom of the 1990s. In retrospect, the Reagan deficit of the 1980s was a long-term bargain. But Reagan's significance went far deeper than merely getting the big issues right. Americans knew in their hearts that this unlikely man understood the deepest meaning of their country in a way no one else had for a generation. He saw what America's promise was; he exhilarated in its energy; he drew strength from its optimism; he drew out of Americans what was already in them and gave it shape and words and a grinning upward nod of the head. Sure, there was always work to be done. But the point was the escape — to a ranch in California, to a new world, to a constantly changing future. He marshaled conservatism without calling forth the dark seam of religious or social intolerance. In his personal life, he was often distant and cold. But his real peers were ordinary Americans, whose fears he assuaged and whose hope he rekindled. He took responsibility seriously but wore it so lightly. He gave Americans purpose again, and in return they gave him love. "During my first months in office," he once wrote to an old friend, "when day after day there were decisions that had to be made, I had an almost irresistible urge — really a physical urge — to look over my shoulder for someone I could pass the problem on to. Then without my quite knowing how it happened, I realized I was looking in the wrong direction. I started looking up instead and have been doing so for quite a while now." Well, now, at last, he will look face to face. And as surely as we are now grieving, he will be smiling.
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