This is the 100th anniversary of his birth and everyone else is giving their view on the man and his time, so here is mind. I don’t lie and say I’m objective like Katie and the rest of the children. I’m a conservative and that inclines me to his views. More than that I’m a free thinking man and anyone who thinks cannot be objective. Thinking gives rises to judgments which are the cornerstone of opinion.
I was 15 years old when the former governor of California has elected president in 1980 and I have to say I was a little uneasy. He had only one real job in the government (governor of our largest state) and I thought you had to be a long term government nerd to be successful at the biggest government job there was. Like the typical 15 year old, I knew everything.
But by the end of his first term I was a 19 year old and proudly cast my first vote in a presidential election for Reagan in his 49 state landslides (and he came within 8000 votes of taking Mondale’s Minnesota). And to the greatest degree since I’ve been voting that was a vote for the man and what he was…and represented.
I remember growing up during the Reagan years and America coming out of its shell from the social unrest in the 60s followed by the double disasters of Vietnam and Watergate. I really recall an idiot, err intellectual saying the presidency had become too big for one man to handle and we should have both a president and a prime minister. Like many an over educated moron I’ve seen over the years he was wrong. The job didn’t become too big…the men in the job were too small. Reagan handled it with time to spare.
I recall how many of the elite in this country smear Reagan and calling him an idiot, non thinking, uninformed. One of my favorite movies is
Airplane and a scene has a woman in obvious pain from spoiled food. Her description, “I haven’t felt this awful since we saw that Ronald Reagan film.” The movie was released on July 2nd 1980…having fun at the man’s expense as he is heading to the Republican nomination as the Democrats were in a nose dive behind a failed president.
However an excellent book is
Reagan in His Own Words, that hand written notes he used for his weekly speeches on radio during his eight years in office. Reading them you see an intelligent man, not necessarily educated but well rounded and experienced. To say the least an opposite of the current occupant of the White House who needs two Teleprompters to address elementary school students…and unlike B Hussein Obama, Reagan could take being shot at, figuratively and literally.
But more to the point, Reagan was well educated by a life spent mainly in the private sector and seeing America as he was travelling the country for General Electric (and damned he must be sick seeing what has become of that once great American company). He met Mr and Mrs America, saw their real issues, worries, desires and beliefs as a minor actor. Not as a politician seeking office. And in those travels in the 50s and 60s Reagan saw the beginnings of the encroaching federal government and the overbearing 4th branch of it, the bureaucracy.
One of the points made in his first inaugural speech was the federal government did not create the states but the states created the federal government to handle specific items (e.g national defense) and “outside of those legitimate functions, government does nothing better than the private sector…” Therefore he went into getting taxes cut, the bureaucracy curtailed and project American power which he knew was for good (unlike many on the left who see American expansion and power as nothing but the personification of evil in the world). And ain’t it refreshing to see a politician who says “This is what I will do” and then does it.
The results. Millions in new jobs, a rebuilt military, an economy restored, inflation tamed, interest rates down, a nation’s faith re-established, billions in revenue into the treasury, actual progress in arms control (reduction instead of limitation with authentication…”trust but verify”), the Soviet empire on its dying breath.
Billions in new debt…oh well, can’t win it all.
One thing that shows the difference between him and other occupants of the White House was the support he gave our allies (such as England in her dispute with Argentina over the Falklands) or the political support he gave the Poles after during the Solidarity uprising or the support he gave the Afghanistan resistant against the Soviet’s invaded. Compare that to recent uprisings against oppressive regimes (Iranian students, Liu Xiaobo in China, Tea Party in the US ;<) ) and the support (or lack thereof) from our current government. To borrow a phrase attributed to Peter Jennings, “Well some presidents do it well and some don’t.”
I’m not calling this man perfect. His failure to secure the border first while giving amnesty to over three million illegal aliens in the Immigration bill was a blunder. Again, trusting Congress to give him three dollars in spending cuts for every dollar of tax reduction is beyond naïve. Not vetoing more spending was a disappointment. The Social Security Reform of Act of 1983 was not reform but just kicking the can down the road to actual reform, private accounts.
However all in all we were light years ahead as a country in 1989 than in 1981. Sometimes I wonder about my failures…then I look at Jimmy Carter and I say “Hey, I’m ok.”
I recall June 5th 2005. I was heading to work at 100pm and on the radio was a news broadcast that the health of the former president had taken a turn for the worse. Being 93 I knew the end was likely near. After going on duty at 200pm I was listening to the Cigar Dave Show and then dispatched to an auto accident. After arriving I spoke with the drivers for a few minutes then returned to my car. Instead of General Cigar Dave, it was Dan Rather talking about Reagan. I knew he was gone. And for the first of many times that week, I unashamedly wept.
The following Sunday I was heading into work and as I turned onto the interstate I saw dozens of American flags at half staff. The visual that stayed with me.
How to wrap it up? As anyone who’s seen this blog knows I love STRATFOR.COM. I was one of the first addicts to the site over ten years ago and in an email to its Vice President I mentioned how they were better than some of the drug pushers I know. They got all the Intel weenies like me hooked when it was free and then started to charge. He loved the email so much he comped me for six months. But back in June 04 I thought they did a great farewell to the man. So I’ll just let it stand on its own.
Geopolitical Diary: Wednesday, June 9, 2004
Ronald Reagan’s body arrived in Washington today. The “Geopolitical Diary” would not be complete if it did not note his passing. The very least that can be said is that he presided over the United States while the Soviet empire imploded. The very most that can be said is that his policies caused the Soviet Union to collapse. The truth probably rests between those two poles.
Geopolitical events, like great economic processes, are never in the control of one man, and rarely are the result of conscious policies. People argue that the Soviet Union was driven to ruin by the American arms race and that Reagan knew this would happen. The fact is the Soviet Union was moving toward ruin because of an unsustainable social system and because of serious geographical problems. Its agriculture and its rivers never matched up. Moreover, it is not clear that the arms buildup — which was begun by Jimmy Carter, not Reagan — was intended to undermine the Soviets. It was meant simply to counter the Soviets. The idea that it was intended to cripple the Soviet Union was introduced after the fact.
We can debate Reagan’s role in the fall of the Soviet Union forever. What cannot be disputed is this: He believed the Soviet Union was going to collapse, and he believed it would happen within his lifetime. He believed this at a time when almost no one else believed it. He was ridiculed for his simplistic thinking, silly generalizations and lack of sophistication by serious thinkers and policy makers all over the world. But the fact is that the cowboy was absolutely right in his reading of history — and the world-renowned scholars were wrong. We know of no major Soviet expert in or out of government who was prepared to argue in 1980 that the Soviet Union would not survive the century. Reagan did argue that. He was laughed at. He was right.
In order to study geopolitics, scholarship is useful — but imagination is essential. When we think back over the 20th century, it is extraordinary how radically the world changed every 20 years or so. Think of the difference between 1900, 1920, 1940, 1960, 1980 and 2000. Hardly any sober scholar at any of these points could have imagined the nature of the world 20 years hence. Scholars tend to think in linear terms — 2020 will be like 2000, only more so. In fact, if history holds true, 2020 will be extraordinarily different from what any of us imagine now. The modern world, on this level, is a world of discontinuities.
It is difficult to see the forest when you are counting trees, and scholars and experts are disciplined in tree counting. Reagan was not. He called himself a “big picture man” and was ridiculed for it, with people claiming he was out of touch with reality. Perhaps, but the empirical fact is this: He was right when all of the people who saw themselves as intimately in touch with reality were wrong. The scholars and specialists were arguing that the United States must reach a broad détente with the Soviet Union because, like it or not, we shared a small planet. Reagan said living with the “evil empire” was unnecessary because it was going to collapse.
In our business, there is one measure of success: being right. Reagan was right on the most important issue of the second half of the 20th century. Some might say he just got lucky, but, frankly, we don’t buy that. He was right because he reduced the problem to its essence. He looked at the Soviet Union as a poorly functioning empire and argued that the Soviet system was going to lose control of that empire. His argument was simple, but it was not simplistic. That is what his critics always missed: Geopolitical analysis must be simple; it must identify the essential force and ignore the secondary and tertiary forces. The underlying engine of a historical epoch must be identified. Specialists create models that include too many variables — and come up with the answer that the situation is too complicated to predict what will happen, and will probably never change. Reagan reduced the problem to its essence and correctly identified the trajectory.
We tend to confuse the terms “intellectual” and “intelligent.” An intellectual is a person who makes his living dealing in ideas. He is learned by profession. He could also be a moron. There is no guarantee that an intellectual is intelligent. At the same time, there are people who are enormously intelligent, but not at all intellectual. They do not make their living working with ideas. They are not learned. But their unencumbered intelligence can sometimes see the future more clearly than someone who is encumbered by complex ideas that their intelligence can’t sort through.
Reagan was no intellectual. That allowed him to see things that intellectuals could not see. He was ridiculed savagely in his time. He was called a cowboy, ready to involve the United States in dangerous, even nuclear wars. He was accused of ignoring the sophisticated advice of European allies. He was accused of using simplistic moralizing and silly analogies to analyze the Cold War. There was little he was not accused of. But in the end he was right about the course history would take — and his critics were wrong.
In the intelligence racket, the pay is low, the hours long and respect hard to find. There is one compensatory pleasure: the ability to say, on occasion, “I told you so.” As Reagan is buried, let us all pause and say on his behalf to the Council on Foreign Relations, retired European diplomats and the entire faculty of Harvard University: “He told you so.”
Rest In Peace Mr President…the world is much better for you being here.
