The Presidency: The Bottom Line on Reagan

There is a tendency in the fervid national catharsis over the Iran arms scandal to treat the past six years of Ronald Reagan's presidency as a kind of hallucination.

In the white-hot center of the controversy, it is as if inflation had not been bested, the interest-rate genie not stuffed back into the bottle. The exuberant entrepreneurship that created 630,000 new businesses and 11 million new jobs is forgotten, as if the thought had never darkened the detached cerebrum of the Hollywood has-been. The truth is that Reagan's unabashed enthusiasm for competition, risk and profit has given the managers of U.S. capitalism enough new spirit to carry the message right through to the next President, be he Democrat or Republican. Prosperity has been no mere conjurer's trick; it was paid for with a painful recession that was the first valley of the Reagan presidency. Since then, a few rascals like Ivan Boesky have let greed run wild, but most business people got down to work and reaffirmed that the honorable creation of wealth is at the heart of a healthy democracy. The scent of the buck is kindling creativity again even in the depressed farm belt and idled steel valleys. And Reagan's sermon that trade must be free the world over will continue to resonate even as new pressures build for protection.

While the White House has been in and out of more political battles than one can count in the past half a dozen years, the armies of the industrialized world have been mercifully underemployed. There have been no superpower standoffs, no new Viet Nams in Central America, no Cuban missile crises or Afghanistan invasions, no oil embargoes. There have been failures like Lebanon and frustrations like Nicaragua. Yet a significant number of experts believe that even if Reagan does not manage to negotiate a reduction in nuclear weapons, the grim specter of World War III, an image relished by demagogues on both right and left, has actually receded a bit. No small part of that legacy is Reagan's insistence on building a better fighting machine and his courage to use it when American interests are threatened. The young Americans who bombed Libya, who apprehended the Achille Lauro hijackers, feel better about themselves and their capabilities, and for that reason the world has more respect for U.S. power. That change will not go out of office with Reagan.

At the time of the Iran fiasco, the free world was making gains in the war against terrorism. That war was declared globally and carried to the enemy almost exclusively by Reagan. The President struck back against fanatics who murdered the innocent. He pressured other countries to pursue suspected terrorists. Whether or not his heartfelt if foolish effort to trade arms for hostages, and with Iran, of all nations, will now encourage even more ( terrorism remains to be seen, but the betting is that the global village has come to understand that no society that seeks respect can support or tolerate the savagery of the Rome airport massacre.