I confess that I was once among that group of smartass youngsters who took Ronald Reagan for a lightweight. He certainly seemed a nice enough old man, though his habits of making corny jokes and napping through important meetings seemed to suggest that he wasn't the great president that his more ardent supporters believed he was. It was easy to dismiss his legacy as being nothing more than deficits, nuclear missiles and a higher drinking age.
The thought that this man, a total fluke among modern presidents, could deserve the greater part of the credit for the infinitely better world he left behind seemed to me - and still does to some - unsettling. That a simple, self-made man operating on nothing more than a strong belief in American exceptionalism and the indispensability of human liberty could do more to improve the human condition than thousands of doctoral theses is, naturally, something the intelligentsia finds difficult to accept.
But time and again Ronald Reagan was right and they were wrong. His great anti-intellectual triumph was in proving that, when taking on problems of enormous complexity, simple solutions are generally preferable precisely because they are simple. The intelligentsia now claims that Reagan had nothing to do with the end of the Cold War; for sure, the crushing weight of the Soviet Union's own collectivist dogma probably played the greatest part in bringing it down.
It is interesting to note, however, that the same people who spout that line in an effort to downplay Reagan's role are those who were least likely to predict the impending demise of communism in the early 1980s, precisely the time at which Reagan intuitively sensed the cracks in the foundation of that fatal conceit.
Back then, newly elected President Reagan told Americans that we could defeat communist Russia because it couldn't compete with our own free-market economy. Marxist-Leninism, he said, would soon wind up on the "ash-heap of history." That, of course, set the striped-pants crowd to howling. Reagan was foolish. A warmonger. A cowboy. His simplistic references to good and evil and insistence on developing Pershing missiles and the Strategic Defense Initiative would surely result in holy hell raining down upon us.
Only it didn't happen that way. President Reagan's oft-derided doctrine of "peace through strength" forced the Soviet Union into a competition it couldn't win, ultimately giving communism that final push over the precipice. Reagan knew that a few nuclear missiles would give the forces of totalitarianism more incentive to negotiate than would policy papers and academic dissertations. Peaceniks and intellectuals had to believe that Reagan was wrong; the position they had staked out meant that his victory was their defeat. Once again, the old man turned out to be right.
I am too young to remember most of Reagan's presidency, but I do remember the singular quality he possessed which finally convinced me of his greatness. The Gipper's greatest asset was, without a doubt, his ability to communicate. The "Great Communicator" moniker was actually used in derision at first, in allusion to some opponents' beliefs that Reagan was all form and no substance. Still, the label stuck simply because of the fact that Reagan was the greatest presidential orator since Abraham Lincoln.
When placed in the context of history, Reagan's communication skills seem all the more incredible. The United States had not had a conservative president since the days of Dwight Eisenhower. The interim had been largely clouded by risky foreign adventures, tax-and-spend economics leading to massive stagflation, and an eroding of the ethic of personal responsibility. Barry Goldwater, the last presidential candidate to run as a true conservative, had been soundly beaten in 1964. Still, Reagan was able to sell the country on his ideological program while remaining extraordinarily popular. He spoke plainly and without condescension, never shrinking from voicing his truest beliefs in the most eloquent formulations.
Reagan often said that he was not a great man, but rather a believer in great ideas. He probably understated his own case, given the unique impact he has had upon his country, his world, and the millions of individuals to whom he gave hope. Last month, tens of thousands of those people stood for upwards of five hours in 95-degree heat to pay their final respects to the greatest president of the 20th century. Signing the condolence book after viewing the president's casket, I realized how difficult it was to come up with a pithy tribute to such an accomplished human being. I settled on a brief acknowledgement of Ronald Reagan's greatest gift to the world: "RR: You are a hero of liberty."
Christopher McAuliffe '05 is a political science concentrator.
