Ronald Reagan and the Populist Wave
Don’t trust me, trust yourselves.
—Ronald Reagan
I was four years old when I heard over our small kitchen radio that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed. All I knew was that he was very important and it was very sad, so I ran next door to broadcast the news to my neighbors. Not long after I remember seeing scenes on television of buildings burning in American cities (the King assassination riots in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, and Kansas City).
After that, my political memories jump to a kaleidoscope of jarring images of injured soldiers being carried onto helicopters, angry kids with long hair and bell-bottoms carrying signs, police in riot gear at colleges and universities, and watching my camp counselors crying in August 1974 on the night Richard Nixon resigned.
Then my recollection takes me back to the summer of 1976, sitting on the colorful braided rug in our living room, playing cards with my friend Pam. In our small red rambler-style home, the television blared the coverage of the Republican Convention. Walter Cronkite, the lead anchor of CBS News, was, to put it mildly, not my parents’ favorite, but they watched him anyway. (When he signed off his broadcasts with “That’s the way it is,” my dad would often say, “No, Walt, that’s the way you say it is!”) Ronald Reagan came up only 117 delegates short, losing the nomination to the incumbent Gerald Ford. My mother said something akin to “the Rockefeller Republicans always win.” (Even though Ford had already scotched Nelson Rockefeller from the ticket, it still had a nice ring to it.) Although I didn’t understand what she meant, I did know that I liked Reagan’s square jaw and speaking style. Ford, even in victory, was bland and boring. But to this 13-year-old tomboy, Reagan, even in defeat, was mesmerizing and resolute.
When people ask me why I gravitated toward conservatism at such a young age, I usually attribute a good deal of it to my parents, James and Anne Ingraham. Growing up in the Hartford, Connecticut, suburb of Glastonbury, I found my own areas of anti-parental rebellion, but politics was not one of them. I caught the political bug by listening to their conversations (often not flattering) about the media, or politicians—especially liberal Republicans. For instance, they thought Lowell Weicker, former governor and three-term senator from our state, was “just as bad as the Democrats.” (Weicker campaigned against a state income tax only to support it after his inauguration as governor.)
Reagan was something else altogether—he was speaking for people just like them: middle-class, hardworking, never-take-handouts, flag-flying, World War II–generation patriots. “He’s Goldwater, although a hell of a lot better,” my dad used to say of Reagan. Gerald Ford was a placeholder, not an incumbent in the truest meaning of the word since he was not elected, but the “Watergate president,” as my father said.
Barely a teenager, I innately understood that, if implemented, Reagan’s conservatism would mean the lives of average people like us would get better. We had no special connections and were not born into privilege. Allowing families to keep more of their own money, cutting wasteful government spending, law and order—it all seemed solidly grounded in truth and common sense. It resonated with me because for years I had heard my mother repeat her homespun wisdom, depending on the situation that we faced: “Work and you’ll learn the value of a buck”; “Don’t spend beyond your means”; or “Don’t let anyone push you around.” (She also said “don’t chase the boys,” which I confess I didn’t follow too well.)
Perhaps my mother was tough and no-nonsense because she needed to be to survive. Growing up very poor in Willimantic, Connecticut, during the Depression, her mother died when she was only 14 years old. In effect, she became like a mother to her little sister Mickey, and did all the family’s cooking, cleaning, and ironing. She worked at the American Thread Mill in town before she married my father in 1952. When I was a kid, she cooked and dished out food in my elementary school cafeteria. After we were all in school, she was a waitress at a local steakhouse—a job she held until she was 73 years old, her hands arthritic from carrying heavy trays for so many years. Polish people are hard workers, she would tell me. “People make fun of the Poles,” she would say defensively, “Let ’em say what they want, we’ll outwork ’em every time.” To her, it was simply unacceptable to be an entitled American; it galled her to see “able-bodied Americans just sitting around, waiting for the mailman to deliver a government check.”
In 1976, Reagan was warning of the government that spent too much, the welfare system that robbed people of their incentive to work, and the political ambivalence toward the growing threat of the Soviet Union. From my adolescent perspective, I thought Reagan and my mother would have gotten along very well.
I vividly remember the moment Reagan, at the 1976 convention, mentioned a time capsule in the off-the-cuff remarks he made when a victorious Ford brought him out on stage. We had just buried our own “time capsule” in Gideon Wells Junior High to mark the bicentennial year of the American Revolution, so he got my attention. He asked, what would the people of America, on her tricentennial, think of what we did in 1976?
Whether they will have the freedom that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here. Will they look back with appreciation and say, “Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom? Who kept us now a hundred years later free? Who kept our world from nuclear destruction?”
And if we fail they probably won’t get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom and they won’t be allowed to talk of that or read of it.1
Looking back at the archival footage of that night 40 years later on YouTube, I relived the experience all over again. Chills. Goose bumps. Almost as good as being front row at my first Billy Joel concert. Watching the reaction shots in the Kemper Arena, it really did seem obvious that most people knew they had nominated the wrong guy.
Such a dispiriting defeat would have wrecked many a candidate, but not Reagan. “It was this incredible, crushing defeat, and it didn’t crush him,” recalled Reagan policy adviser Martin Anderson. Describing Reagan’s mood on the flight back to California after the painful loss, he noted: “He just came back up, shook his head, and said, ‘Okay, what’s next?’ And that began the campaign for the year 1980.”2
The Biggest Tent
For those who are too young to remember, Ronald Reagan’s presidency was the last one that deserved a real exclamation point for conservatives. The broad-based coalition he built included many different types of voters. One of the reasons I loved Ronald Reagan was that he understood how important it was to grow the conservative movement. Social conservatives, defense hawks (the neoconservatives), populists, libertarians—they were all drawn to his transformative, bold ideas. Unlike Mitt Romney, who wrote off 47 percent of America as “unwinnable,” Reagan believed his conservative message would have wide appeal if it was passionately and convincingly articulated. Obviously, he was right. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 44 states to Jimmy Carter’s six. Erstwhile liberal Republican-turned-Independent John Anderson was a third-party pest, but the 6.6 percent of the vote he captured was not consequential. (Reagan beat Carter by 9.7 percent.) “He built a stunning electoral landslide by taking away Mr. Carter’s Southern base, smashing his expected strength in the East, and taking command of the Middle West,” wrote Hedrick Smith in The New York Times.3 Then, in 1984, Reagan went even bigger.
I remember that evening vividly. I was a student at Dartmouth College and had served as the editor of the conservative student weekly, The Dartmouth Review. Our college election night party at the Hanover Inn in 1984 was a total riot. Few of Dartmouth’s liberal faculty showed up, but we at the Review put on a great celebration. It was packed. I wish we’d had cell phones back then so I could have captured on video all the seething leftists outside, peering through the glass of the Hayward Lounge where balloons and streamers turned the event into a red-white-and-blue extravaganza. Everyone was in a great mood. God, I loved the ’80s.
By the end of the evening, Ronald Reagan had captured 525 out of 538 electoral votes—the highest total ever by a presidential candidate—against Democratic challenger Walter Mondale. That meant that Reagan, the ultimate anti-Establishment candidate, won 97.58 percent of all the electoral votes. In fact, the only state Mondale carried was his home state of Minnesota—and that Reagan would have won with a switch of just 1,876 votes in a state with over two million voters. Were it not for the president insisting that his campaign pull back the reins in Minnesota to give Mondale a shot at winning in his own backyard, the Gipper likely would have won all 50 states.4 A consummate gentleman.
A big part of the story of the last 30 years is that different people followed Reagan for different reasons. Various right-of-center factions each claim him as a shining textbook example of their beliefs borne out on the presidential stage. Reagan was a genius who combined different categories when he communicated. That’s why he won 49 states in 1984. For every libertarian quote from Reagan, you can find a populist quote from Reagan. So it’s easy to see why each group now amplifies their favorite Reagan themes and mutes the others.
The core of Reaganism was this: returning power to the people by disempowering behemoth bureaucratic institutions yields the greatest freedom for all. He believed in the individual over the state. Drop in at any point along the Reagan time line—even during his days as a Democrat—and you will hear him declaring his belief that power should reside with the citizens, not government. Today we refer to this idea as “Reaganism,” but he would have hated that term. This, after all, was the man who had a plaque on his Oval Office desk that read: “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t care who gets the credit.”5 But more than that, he knew that lasting political movements must be built around principles, not personalities. Reagan liked to say, “Don’t trust me, trust yourselves.” That was his consistent view throughout his political life, and it helped pave the path for the populist movement of the present. It’s easy to see why historians have called him “a true American populist.”6
The Ultimate Outsider
Today we remember Ronald Reagan in almost mythic terms, as a towering figure whose ascendancy and landslide presidential victories were inevitable, even predictable. Yet many of those who claim to have been with Reagan all along weren’t—not by a long shot. Libertarians, for example, attacked Reagan’s economic populism for decades. Until recently I did not appreciate how many writers who call themselves conservatives are actually libertarians. But as we saw during the 2016 election cycle, the libertarian numbers in the GOP are just not that significant, and the same was true under Reagan.
Here is what the leading libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, wrote about Ronald Reagan’s economic policies in a 1988 policy paper: “If President Reagan has a devotion to free trade, it surely must be blind, because he has been off the mark most of the time.”7 Their beef? Reagan had the audacity to protect American jobs and companies by slapping hefty tariffs on some foreign goods, like Japanese electronics (a 100 percent tariff) and motorcycles (45 percent tariff, a move meant to help Harley-Davidson). Libertarians like to say that we can’t criticize how China manipulates markets if our government occasionally interferes with a pure market system. Absurd. For one, that’s like saying we could not criticize the Soviet Union for human rights abuses because we occasionally backed allies with less than pristine human rights records. And second, whatever level of interference we impose upon markets, it’s infinitesimally small and in no way comparable to China for the simple reason that theirs is not a market economy at all.
For added anti-Gipper libertarian gusto, Cato likened Reagan to the man who presided over the Great Depression and dubbed him “the most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover.” It’s one of the oldest (and lamest) tricks in the book of the anti-populists: impugn anyone who doesn’t worship trade agreements and tariff-free commerce as a “protectionist,” “isolationist,” or “nativist.” All throughout the 2016 election, Trump and any of us who supported him were showered with the “-ists.” Should Reagan have had America unilaterally disarm economically against countries that subsidized their industries and manipulated their currency? Since when is it bad to “protect” our nation and its workers? Reagan wasn’t picking winners and losers willy-nilly in the marketplace. He was giving American industries a fighting chance to compete against nations who rig the rules in their favor. Personally, I’ve never found libertarianism to be an interesting worldview. Politics takes place in the real world with real people, not in the dusty pages of an Ayn Rand novel.
But libertarians weren’t the only one’s sniping at Reagan. During the first half of his career, the GOP Establishment didn’t have much use for him either. That is, until he dragged them kicking and screaming to seismic political victories that reshaped the contours of U.S. policy. In the 1970s, “the other major GOP players—especially Easterners and moderates—thought Reagan was a certified yahoo,” recalls Reagan historian Craig Shirley. “To a person, by the time of Reagan’s death in 2004, they would profess their love and devotion to Reagan and claim they were there from the beginning in 1974, which was a load of horse manure.”8
The political “wise men” on both sides of the aisle had spent years dismissing Reagan as a simpleton. Henry Kissinger once told President Richard Nixon that even though Reagan was “a pretty decent guy,” his “brains are negligible.”9 Clark Clifford, adviser to four Democratic presidents and Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of defense, infamously labeled Reagan “an amiable dunce.”10 History got the last laugh.
Fighting for the Little Guy
Ronald Reagan’s populist-conservative instincts annoyed elites of both parties because he was everything they were not. He always fought for the little guy because his people were the “little guys.” Reagan was a kid from Dixon, Illinois, with an alcoholic shoe salesman for a father and a degree from tiny Eureka College that he paid for with a football scholarship. The elites knew all the right power players. Reagan knew all the right principles. His respect for the working class was rooted in his own hard-scrabble upbringing. Even as a Hollywood actor, a General Electric spokesman, and later the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan was always most at home with everyday people. As Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan put it, “more than any president since [Andrew] Jackson, he spent the years before power with the people, the normal people of his country.”11
For those who know the real story, that isn’t hyperbole. I sometimes have to remind myself that anyone born after 1970 has scant recollections of Reagan’s presidency. Even I, as a young speechwriter in the Reagan administration in 1987 (more on that later), did not fully comprehend his improbable path to the presidency.
From 1954 to 1962, Ronald Reagan traveled the country as a spokesman for General Electric. In addition to hosting the TV show General Electric Theatre, Reagan’s duties as the company’s “goodwill ambassador” meant he traveled to over 135 GE factories to meet with and speak to over 250,000 workers in 38 states.12 The experience changed him forever.
“When I went on those tours and shook hands with all of those people, I began to see that they were very different people than the people Hollywood was talking about,” Reagan recalled. “I was seeing the same people that I grew up with in Dixon, Illinois. I realized I was living in a tinsel factory. And this exposure brought me back.”13
Throughout his Hollywood years, Reagan had been a Franklin Delano Roosevelt New Deal Democrat. But in the eighth and final year as General Electric’s traveling ambassador, Reagan made a decision that would transform American politics: he switched parties. His motives were not opportunistic, but pragmatic. Given the expansion of Soviet communism, the explosion of federal government, the soaring tax rates that ate away at the people’s wealth, and Democrats’ embrace of 1960s countercultural values—Reagan had simply had enough. “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” Reagan famously declared. “The party left me.” And it would be that courageous decision of conscience that set off a chain reaction that would change history.
1964–1976: Igniting a Populist Prairie Fire
Barry Goldwater was a candidate unlike anyone the nation had ever seen—the college dropout and Arizona senator was devoted not so much to party as to principles. Conservative writer Patrick J. Buchanan, then a young editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, would later brand Goldwater “the first great modern conservative of the modern era.” My parents were volunteers for Goldwater in Connecticut. Like he, they were staunchly anticommunist, socially conservative, opposed to excessive foreign aid, and thought government had gotten too powerful since the New Deal. The Goldwater campaign was a formative experience for them—even though neither worked on a campaign again, they were more convinced after Goldwater that the worst things that had befallen the GOP could be traced back to the “Rockefeller Republicans,” whom they regarded as little different than Democrats.
In 1964, Reagan served as the cochairman of Barry Goldwater’s ill-fated California campaign. The relationships he forged in that role proved useful in his future political endeavors. But it was Ronald Reagan’s delivery of his televised “A Time for Choosing” landmark speech in support of Barry Goldwater for president that put him on the national political map. The address, which is now known affectionately as “The Speech,” moved American conservatism out of the rafters and onto the main stage of politics. In it, he planted the seeds for a revolutionary, populist approach to governance.
Reagan began the speech by pointing out his shift in political parties. His principles hadn’t changed, the Democrat Party had. “I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines.”
He then made it clear that the established order’s doctrine of endless war weakened America. “As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely.”
Next, Reagan dropped the rhetorical hammer on the governing class of political elites and issued a clarion call for national sovereignty:
And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.
This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
Goldwater lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson. Johnson won 44 states to Goldwater’s six. The popular vote was equally lopsided, with LBJ beating Goldwater by a whopping 61 percent to 39 percent—a drubbing by any standard. Among the GOP’s Old Guard there was a sense that now that the “kids” (conservatives) had had their fun, the “adults” (Republican Establishment) would be back in charge and running things for the foreseeable future.
Despite Goldwater’s historic defeat, Ronald Reagan’s speech had been a hit. Soon, California Republicans had recruited him to run for governor. In 1966, Reagan defeated California’s political “Goliath,” incumbent Democrat governor Pat Brown Sr., in a state with more registered Democrats than Republicans. As California’s governor, he broke the mold by shrinking government, cracking down on lawlessness, getting people off of welfare and back to work, and slashing taxes. When his state’s budget ran a $100 million surplus, then-governor Reagan told his finance director Caspar “Cap” Weinberger—who would later become his secretary of defense—that he wanted to give the surplus back to the people; it was their money in the first place. (Did you hear that, Washington?) Weinberger said that sounded great but it had never been done before. “Well,” said Reagan, “we’ve never had an actor for governor before either.”14
Allowing Californians to keep more of their hard-earned money was popular, but many of the other choices he made as governor were not. Although vehemently criticized for his decision to slash spending from California’s bloated education budget, Reagan persisted. “I didn’t come up here to get reelected,” he was known to tell the party apparatchiks who warned that he was hurting his chances at reelection.15
Voters in both parties had grown accustomed to politicians whose primary goal was maintaining their vice-like grip on political power. Reagan was different. He built up his political capital so he could spend it on conservative policies that returned power to the people of his state. It was an honest approach to governing that voters found refreshing. In many ways, Donald Trump’s bluntness evokes a similar level of authenticity; his brawler style is clearly about driving home his populist principles, not pandering to boost his personal popularity. Reagan’s approach was more polished than Trump’s. But like Reagan, Trump speaks bold truths, regardless of the polls.
Still, Republicans at the time lacked a nationally viable example of a conservative-populist who had cracked the code on how to communicate populism in ways that could win a presidential election. Then in 1968, midway through Ronald Reagan’s first term as California governor, Richard Nixon energized the Republican Party with a broad-based populist message that captivated the working class. We don’t usually think of Nixon as a populist, but as a staunch anticommunist whose presidency included liberal social policies and a globalist China policy. Yet Nixon’s campaign style and oratory often evinced strong populist appeals. As a young man growing up in a hardworking Quaker household of modest means, Nixon gravitated toward populism’s concern for the plight of working people and a rejection of elites. As he put it in his White House diary, he opposed the “American leader class” who “whine and whimper” and instead sided with “labor leaders and people from middle America who still have character and guts and a bit of patriotism.”16 His populist 1968 campaign, therefore, spoke to working Americans who played by the rules but had been left behind by Washington elites.
In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Miami, Nixon vowed he would restore law and order and would fight for “the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans—the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators.” As Nixon said, “They are good people, they are decent people; they work, and they save, and they pay their taxes, and they care.”17
After winning the presidency, Nixon declared that government must heed the will of the “silent majority”—the everyday Americans who play by the rules, pay the taxes, love their country, and quietly earn a living. It was an iconic and enduring phrase that had originally been coined by populist legend and Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan.18
The Nixon administration also took big media to task. Nixon’s first vice president, Spiro Agnew, blasted the TV networks for being “a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government. . . . the airwaves do not belong to the networks; they belong to the people.” He excoriated them as an “effete corps of impudent snobs”—a line also penned by Buchanan. Indeed, every Republican president since Nixon has had to contend with a hostile press, but liberal media have been particularly nasty toward populists.
Then the Watergate scandal engulfed the nation and destroyed the populist promise Nixon had created. As Pat Buchanan lamented, Watergate was “the lost opportunity to move against the political forces frustrating the expressed national will” and squandered the chance to win “a political counterrevolution in the capital.”19 The scandal ended with Nixon’s resignation, but not before he had shown the GOP how to craft a people-centered message capable of attracting massive national support. Indeed, his 1972 reelection landslide campaign over Democrat George McGovern swept every state except Massachusetts and received over 60 percent of the popular vote.
In the aftermath of Watergate, Republicans spent years wandering in the wilderness until Ronald Reagan led them out by mobilizing the conservative-populist movement against big government with an anti-Establishment insurgency of his own. After two terms as a Republican governor of the most populous state in the union (and one of the most progressive), Reagan left office shortly after Nixon’s resignation. Unlike Nixon, Reagan exited on a wave of popularity. He was so popular, in fact, that conservatives clamored for him to do something crazy: mount a serious primary challenge to the incumbent president, Gerald Ford.
When Ford became president upon Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974, GOP elders had hoped putting the presidency in the steady hands of a reliable “party man” would stabilize the Watergate fallout for Republicans. But conservatives opposed Ford’s selection of liberal Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president (ergo the term “Rockefeller Republican”). Indeed, far from moving the party and nation toward conservatism, members of the movement viewed Ford’s policies as a continuation of Nixon’s globalist views on international affairs and his strategy of Soviet appeasement.
Enter the Gipper. Reagan’s 1976 decision to make a serious run against President Ford was more than a long shot. No sitting president had lost his primary nomination in nearly a century. What’s more, Reagan “was opposed by nearly every state organization,” recalls Craig Shirley. “He had practically no editorial support”—a harsh reality Donald Trump’s anti-Establishment campaign experienced as well.20
Party leaders were irked by Reagan’s decision to run. President Ford was furious. Before he announced his candidacy, Reagan called the president to alert him of his decision, and to extend his best wishes for a competitive race. Ford was having none of it, and recalled the icy phone call in his autobiography:
“Hello, Mr. President,” Reagan said, and then he came right to the point.
“I am going to make an announcement, and I want to tell you about it ahead of time. I am going to run for President. I trust we can have a good contest, and I hope that it won’t be divisive.”
“Well, Governor, I’m very disappointed,” I replied. “I’m sorry you’re getting into this. I believe I’ve done a good job and that I can be elected. Regardless of your good intentions, your bid is bound to be divisive. It will take a lot of money, a lot of effort, and it will leave a lot of scars. It won’t be helpful, no matter which of us wins the nomination.”
“I don’t think it will be divisive,” Reagan repeated. “I don’t think it will harm the party.”
“Well, I think it will,” I said.21
President Gerald Ford entered the Republican primary with a political wound. That’s putting it charitably. Ford’s pardoning of President Richard Nixon had crippled his candidacy in ways that ultimately cost him the 1976 presidential election. Still, despite Ford’s obvious weaknesses, the GOP Establishment trashed Reagan the instant he entered the race. Richard Nixon said “Ronald Reagan is a lightweight and not someone to be considered seriously or feared in terms of a challenge for the nomination.”22 And Republican Illinois senator Chuck Percy viewed a Reagan presidential nomination as the equivalent of political suicide for the Republican Party: “A Reagan nomination, and the crushing defeat likely to follow, could signal the beginning of the end of our party as an effective force in American life.”23
Percy turned out to be as accurate as NeverTrump leader and Weekly Standard editor-at-large Bill Kristol was during the 2016 cycle. Yet the only thing the ad hominem attacks and intellectual snobbery managed to do was lower expectations for Reagan—a mistake the “smart set” later replicated with Donald Trump.
President Ford started the 1976 Republican primary strong, but from the beginning there were signs that Reagan’s fierce anti-Establishment message, combined with his muscular foreign policy stance of doing away with détente and strengthening American sovereignty, were going to give the Establishment major heartburn.
On November 20, 1975, Ronald Reagan launched his presidential campaign with a heat-seeking missile of a populist speech. “Government at all levels now absorbs more than 44 percent of our personal income,” said Reagan. “It has become more intrusive, more coercive, more meddlesome, and less effective.” He then honed in on the core problem. “In my opinion, the root of these problems lies right here—in Washington, D.C.,” said Reagan. “Our nation’s capital has become the seat of a ‘buddy’ system that functions for its own benefit—increasingly insensitive to the needs of the American worker who supports it with his taxes.”
That last sentence is rhetorical dynamite. Reagan pinpointed how corrosive bipartisan cronyism eats away at the people’s power. Notice he didn’t say “the citizens” or “voters”—no, Reagan made a specific appeal to the “American worker,” whom he believed had been ignored. (Sadly, the problem didn’t go away after Reagan and grew worse in subsequent decades.)
He continued: “Today it is difficult to find leaders who are independent of the forces that have brought us our problems—the Congress, the bureaucracy, the lobbyist, big business, and big labor.” It’s hard today to appreciate how unorthodox a statement that was in 1975. For one thing, criticizing “big business” was considered political heresy. Recall again that these were the days when liberal, blue blood, country club Republicans possessed outsized GOP influence. And more importantly, Reagan redefined strong leadership as something “independent of the forces that have brought us our problems.” And what were those forces he believed had usurped the people’s power? Large institutions packed with unaccountable elites.
Then Governor Reagan revealed the solution: “If America is to survive and go forward, this must change. It will only change when the American people vote for a leadership that listens to them, relies on them, and seeks to return government to them. We need a government that is confident not of what it can do, but of what the people can do.”24 At every turn in his short speech (just 557 words), Reagan reinforced the idea that “the people”—not bureaucrats—must remain the arbiters of government power. Is it any wonder populists flocked to Reagan’s cause?
Still, despite the power of his announcement speech, the GOP Establishment continued to scoff and dismiss Reagan as little more than a nuisance, a former B actor who was trying to resurrect the corpse of conservative populism that had been buried when Goldwater lost in a landslide 12 years earlier. Goldwater’s loss was supposed to be the conservative movement’s tombstone. Instead, it became a touchstone. Again brushing aside the doubts of the “experts,” Reagan and many of the conservative stalwarts who had worked on that campaign refused to give up the dream of overturning the liberal policies that had been borne out of the New Deal. “We’re Americans and we have a rendezvous with destiny,” Reagan said in a March 31, 1976, campaign address. “We spread across this land, building farms and towns and cities, and we did it without any federal land planning program or urban renewal.” But now, Reagan said, “a self-anointed elite” in Washington “practice government by mystery, telling us it’s too complex for our understanding. . . . Tell us what needs to be done. Then, get out of the way and let us have at it.”25
First up, New Hampshire. Reagan suffered one of the closest primary defeats in the state’s history at the time. Out of the 108,331 votes cast, Ford beat Reagan by just 1,317 votes. The Ford campaign hoped the painful loss would make Reagan pack up and go home. It did the reverse; it emboldened him. “I truly believe that the closeness of the New Hampshire loss made him more confident that all he needed was his message and the right moment,” recalled Reagan strategist and pollster Dick Wirthlin.26
The Reagan campaign’s moment wouldn’t come until they had lost five consecutive primaries and crawled into North Carolina moribund and broke. On the campaign trail, Reagan routinely blasted President Ford and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for a weak and feckless foreign policy.
“Henry Kissinger’s recent stewardship of U.S. foreign policy has coincided precisely with the loss of U.S. military supremacy,” Reagan said. “Under Messrs. Kissinger and Ford this nation has become number two in military power in a world where it is dangerous—if not fatal—to be second best.”27 Far from being a call for military interventionism, Reagan’s populist foreign policy was premised on the belief that the surest path toward peace and security was to maintain a level of military strength and dominance that protected U.S. sovereignty while deterring the nation’s enemies by assuring their inevitable destruction.
In one particular stump speech Reagan tried out a new angle of attack by hitting President Ford for his administration’s intention to hand over ownership of the Panama Canal to the government of Panama. With our humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam still fresh in voters’ minds, this seemed like yet another instance of American retreat and another wound to our national psyche. As usual, the GOP Establishment was out of touch and couldn’t understand why the people would see it as another sign of waning national sovereignty. But Reagan did understand. Sovereignty is an issue that galvanizes the populist movement. Without it, the people cease to have control over their own country.
“We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and we’re going to keep it!” was Reagan’s legendary line about the Canal giveaway. (The line was so good, Senator Ted Cruz repurposed it in a 2016 speech on President Obama’s decision to shut down the Guantànamo Bay detention camp).28 Reagan’s campaign decided it was worth spending the money it would cost to broadcast the speech highlighting Ford’s Panama Canal debacle. The response was overwhelming. Phone lines at the Ford campaign headquarters lit up with calls from angry voters demanding to know why President Ford was giving away the Panama Canal, a charge his campaign denied.29 Reagan not only won his first primary state, he beat President Ford by 10 points.
He went on to rack up victories throughout the South, West, and Rocky Mountain states, including two of the biggest delegate jackpots in Texas and California. Ford won victories across the Northeast, Rust Belt, and Florida. By the time Republicans gathered for their national convention that August in Kansas City, Missouri, no one knew what would happen. Back then, presidential conventions actually meant something more than a four-day infomercial for political parties. Ford had won 27 states, Reagan 24. When the 2,257 delegate ballots were finally tallied, Gerald Ford beat Ronald Reagan by just 117 votes.
When President Ford took the stage to declare victory, he did something unexpected. He called Ronald Reagan down from the upper deck seats of the Kemper Arena to speak. Reagan’s totally impromptu speech rocked the house—and made more than a few Republicans think they had nominated the wrong man. “We must go forth from here united, determined that what a great general said a few years ago is true: There is no substitute for victory,” Reagan said from the rostrum. Reagan had upstaged Ford, even in defeat. As California state senator H. L. Richardson told the Los Angeles Times during the convention: “Reagan could get a standing ovation in a graveyard. Ford puts you to sleep by the third paragraph.”30
On the outside, the Gipper projected his usual happy warrior demeanor. The so-called “experts” believed Reagan’s political career was finished. And just as had happened 12 years earlier with the Goldwater defeat, the Establishment hoped that Reagan’s loss would wash the nascent populist movement away with it. Instead, it motivated supporters to keep trying even harder.
“The Republican Party, absent the 1976 contest, would most likely have remained a moderate ‘Tory’ party that never becomes a majority governing party,” said political scientist and Reagan alum Dr. Donald Devine. Reagan biographer Craig Shirley agrees. “Without Reagan’s 1976 campaign, Americans would not have witnessed the reordering of the two major political parties and the shift in our political universe, with one party becoming predominately conservative and the other predominately liberal.”31
Before Reagan left the Kemper Arena, he huddled a few hundred members of the California delegation and his closest campaign staff together and delivered a second, far less known off-the-cuff speech. In it, Reagan foreshadowed the future by reciting the words of an old Scottish ballad. “I will lay me down and bleed a while. Though I am wounded, I am not slain. I shall rise and fight again.”
A Certain Sound
It would have been understandable if Ronald Reagan’s story had ended here. He was 65 years old when he lost to Gerald Ford. Moreover, he had already lived the American Dream. A kid from nothing hit it big in Hollywood, appeared in over 50 films (watch Knute Rockne, All-American and Kings Row with your family), found and married his beloved Nancy, enjoyed a successful television career, and won two terms as California governor—not a bad run by anyone’s standards.
But Reagan’s dreams were much bigger than all that. Not for himself, but for America. There was more wood to chop, more work to be done. “He wasn’t in it for ego,” wrote Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan. “He was actually in it to do good.”32
In the second speech of his ill-fated 1976 presidential run, Reagan had said this: “There’s a passage in the Bible that says, ‘If the trumpet gives an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?’ [1 Corinthians 14:8] Well, just to make sure no one mistook the sound of the trumpet, I took it to Washington this morning to announce my candidacy for the presidency. I chose Washington because it is such an intimate part of our troubles: inflation, recession, unemployment, bureaucracy, and centralized power.”33
Reagan’s trumpet never made an uncertain sound. His values and vision were unwavering. The populist movement he led was rooted in the firm belief that Americans must always come first. He also knew that nothing changes if patriots are unwilling to do the heavy lifting of history. So he rode to the sound of the guns, which meant marching his populist revolution to Washington—the place where, as he put it, so many of “our troubles” reside.
Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?
After four years of President Jimmy Carter, the nation was reeling from a rudderless Cold War foreign policy, rising unemployment, soaring inflation, crushing taxes, byzantine regulations, dependency-breeding welfare policies, and a smug Washington elite who harbored utter contempt for the values of everyday working people. It was so bad, even Carter acknowledged the nation’s downward trajectory in his infamous July 15, 1979, “Malaise” speech. Carter never uttered the word “malaise” in his address, but what he said was in many ways worse. “It’s clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper—deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession,” President Carter said. “I realize more than ever that as President I need your help.” As if that weren’t alarming enough, Carter went on to issue an ominous warning: “The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.”34
Foreign affairs were even worse. Americans were furious that our countrymen were being held hostage by the Iranians. Hard hats kept a tally of the passing days—444 before Reagan secured their release—on a construction platform in New York City. The Iranian hostage crisis was a humiliating display of weak presidential leadership in the face of foreign aggression. Then the first week of January 1980, President Carter addressed the nation and announced that the Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan, a development that threatened to “further Soviet expansion.” Carter’s solution? Beg for the help of the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. It was precisely the kind of weak, sovereignty-squelching deference to global institutions populists vehemently opposed. And it further paved the way for Ronald Reagan’s populist revolution.
To restore America, though, Ronald Reagan first had to win a hotly contested GOP primary that included favorites of the Old Republican Guard, including: former CIA director George H. W. Bush, Kansas senator Bob Dole, Senate minority leader Howard Baker of Tennessee, Illinois congressman Phil Crane, liberal Illinois congressman John Anderson (who later ran as the Independent candidate in 1980), and former Texas governor John Connally. Just like his 1976 primary run, Reagan encountered immediate opposition from within his own party.
“People on our side of the spectrum in 1980, we thought [Reagan] was a nutcase,” said David Lucey, son of Anderson’s running mate Pat Lucey.35 Republican national Conservative Caucus chairman Howard Phillips said “some (of us) suspect that Reagan is only a script reader, not a script writer.” And many questioned whether Reagan’s age (he would turn 70 shortly after Election Day) meant he lacked the stamina to be commander in chief. A Wall Street Journal column claimed that Reagan’s “lackluster” speeches and “aloofness” had “revived feelings that Mr. Reagan is too old and too indolent for the nation’s top job.”36 The age issue became a constant refrain throughout the race. Reagan’s youthful demeanor and good looks helped mute the attacks, but they still got to him. “What am I supposed to do, skip rope through the neighborhood?” Reagan said to reporters.37
Despite the barbs, Reagan stuck to the same conservative principles he always had: return power to the people, reduce the size of government, maintain peace through strength. Then on January 21, 1980, the day of the Iowa caucuses, Bush pulled off a surprise victory and beat Reagan by just 2,182 votes. The loss rattled the Reagan campaign. Time called it a “jarring defeat” and said it “prompted many of his followers to wonder whether he could ever make a comeback.”38 The February 26 first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary would test Reagan’s mettle.
Three days before Granite State voters went to the polls, Reagan put on a legendary rhetorical performance at the Nashua debate moderated by the Nashua Telegraph newspaper’s executive editor Jon Breen. The Reagan campaign had agreed to cover the cost of the debate when the Federal Election Commission said the paper could not pick up the tab. At the beginning of the evening, Breen interrupted Reagan.
“Would the sound man please turn Mr. Reagan’s mic off for the moment?” said Breen.
The crowd howled in protest. Reagan shot up from his seat and grabbed the microphone.
“Is this on?” Reagan asked. As Reagan tried to speak, the moderator interrupted him again. “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!” thundered Reagan.
The crowd screamed and cheered. Even the four Republicans on stage clapped. Reagan had even mispronounced the moderator’s name and called him “Mr. Green” instead of Mr. Breen. But it didn’t matter.
As The Washington Post later reported, Reagan “stole the show while Bush seemed not to know quite what was going on.” Afterward, Bush press secretary Peter Teeley tried to soften the blow to his candidate with dry humor. “The bad news is that the media is playing up the confrontation,” Teeley told Bush. “The good news is that they’re ignoring the debate, and you lost that, too.”39
Reagan went on to win 44 primary contests to Bush’s seven. But not before Bush called Reagan’s economic plan “voodoo economics.” Bush trashed Reagan’s supply-side economic philosophy that cutting taxes raises, not lowers, total revenues. It should have been an omen to Republicans. When Reagan tapped Bush as his vice presidential running mate, many voters dismissed the line as a sharp elbow thrown in the heat of political battle.
During his general election matchup against President Carter, Reagan’s populist message emphasized his fundamental trust in the people versus elites. As he put it in his July 17, 1980, acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Detroit:
Back in 1976, Mr. Carter said, “Trust me.” And a lot of people did. Now, many of those people are out of work. Many have seen their savings eaten away by inflation. Many others on fixed incomes, especially the elderly, have watched helplessly as the cruel tax of inflation wasted away their purchasing power. And, today, a great many who trusted Mr. Carter wonder if we can survive the Carter policies of national defense.
“Trust me” government asks that we concentrate our hopes and dreams on one man; that we trust him to do what’s best for us. My view of government places trust, not in one person or one party, but in those values that transcend persons and parties. The trust is where it belongs—in the people.40
Any conservative leader who wants to know how the GOP Establishment in subsequent years ran Reaganism off the rails and how to get us back on track need only read the above passage from Reagan. For years, Establishment Republicans yelled “Trust us!” and then did everything in their power to thwart the people’s will. On trade, immigration, government spending—you name it, the Establishment repeatedly tried to cram unpopular and unwanted Donor Class–directed policies down our throats.
The term “Donor Class” refers to the elite group of the nation’s wealthiest and most active political contributors. Some of these individuals are well-known, such as George Soros on the left and the Koch brothers on the right. But most are unfamiliar to the majority of Americans. Some donors give millions of dollars to political causes out of a deep and sincere patriotic desire to see their favored candidates prevail and the country improved. Others, however, view their donations as a down payment on policies that will enrich their businesses, regardless of the impact they will have on the people. Immigration amnesty, for example, is supported by many wealthy Republican donors who desire cheap labor that fattens their bottom lines.
Aiding them in this effort are often members of the Political Class, a coterie of well-connected and overpaid consultants and “professional” think tank “scholars” beholden to the edicts of the Donor Class. Major ideological nonprofits rely on Donor Class contributions. Not surprisingly, their “research” and “studies” often reflect the issues donors care most about. Likewise, political consultants also make big bucks creating advertisements and issue campaigns for candidates and causes that members of the Donor Class support. All of this contributes to a system that favors elite interests over those of the working class—something Reagan fought against throughout his career.
Reagan’s belief in the people represented a stark contrast with the big government failures Jimmy Carter’s policies produced. During the first and only presidential debate between Carter and Reagan, the Gipper told Americans to ask themselves a fundamental question: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” If not, Reagan suggested voters should consider voting for him. Why? Because as governor of California, “we did give back authority and autonomy to the people,” he said.
There was also another critical issue that arose during that debate, one that hit home with me even in my youth: the Iranian hostage crisis.
Long after my mother went to bed, during my four years at Glastonbury High School, I would be up doing homework in my bedroom, usually with the TV on in the background. My dad had given me an old small black-and-white set that was propped up on an antique school chair from the late 1800s, next to my bed. When ABC’s Nightline started in March of 1980, I was ecstatic. I loved Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show, but this program was something different. Anchored by Ted Koppel, unlike traditional newscasts, it focused on the biggest story of the day—at that time, the Iranian hostage crisis, in which 52 diplomats and soldiers were paraded in blindfolds for the world to see. It was heartbreaking humiliation at the hands of the rabid supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini. I remember hearing “America Held Hostage. Day . . .” every night. How can this be happening? I wondered to myself, We are the United States of America!
Carter’s attempt to rescue the hostages in April 1980, called Operation Eagle Claw, was an abysmal failure. Eight American servicemen died. This embarrassing ordeal hung like an anvil around the neck of the Carter campaign. It translated into one overriding message: weakness. When Reagan won the election in a landslide, I felt hopeful he could do something to help free our hostages.
Then in his very first hours on the job, the news broke on Inauguration Day that the hostages had been released. I was headed to varsity basketball practice when it happened. All of us on the team were high-fiving each other. “The Reagan Effect,” I proclaimed confidently.
But this was only the beginning. Reagan did much more than wax eloquent. He fought and won historic brass knuckle policy battles in Washington that reordered the political universe.
Money Is Power, So Give It Back!
Economic populism rests on a simple axiom: if “money is power,” as the old saying goes, the more money workers are allowed to keep, the more empowered they grow. Ronald Reagan believed that no one knows better how to spend your money than you do. Your wealth is your property; the government doesn’t have a boundless right to confiscate it. He also believed that high tax rates squelch investment, work, and total revenues.
It wasn’t just Reagan who understood this; President John F. Kennedy believed it as well. “In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues too low, and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now,” Kennedy famously said. By 1980, top tax rates in America stood at a staggering 70 percent.41 On July 29, 1981, Congress approved President Reagan’s 25 percent across-the-board tax cut known as the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act.42 When the bill cleared the House 238–195, veteran Chicago Democrat congressman and the chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee Rep. Dan Rostenkowski picked up the telephone and called President Reagan. “Well, Mr. President, you’re tough,” said the old Chicago pol. “You beat us. . . . It means you’re working at your job.”43
Reagan wasn’t finished. In 1986, he came back and cut taxes even more. He created two tax brackets—15 percent for the middle class, 28 percent for top earners—and closed tax loopholes. The economic results were dramatic and long-lasting. “The American economy grew mostly between 4 and 5 percent annually for over 25 years,” said economist Larry Kudlow, who served as the associate director for economics and planning in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during President Ronald Reagan’s first term.44 The 1981 success of the 25 percent cut spawned bipartisan support for the 1986 cut. So much so that the measure passed the Senate 97–3.45 In politics, everyone loves a winner; success begets success.
“I knew my ideas were working when the media stopped calling it Reaganomics,” Reagan liked to say.46
Reagan’s economic agenda put millions of Americans back to work and put real money back in the pockets of working people. Inflation cratered and per capita real disposable income jumped 18 percent from 1982 to 1989, a standard of living increase of nearly 20 percent. Between 1984 and 1989, the poverty rate fell every single year.
Legendary Reagan economist Art Laffer (of Laffer Curve fame), who served as a member of President Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisor Board and helped devise Reagan’s tax cuts, said this about the Reagan economic boom:
We call this period, 1982–2007, the twenty-five year boom—the greatest period of wealth creation in the history of the planet. In 1980, the net worth—assets minus liabilities—of all U.S. households and business . . . was $25 trillion in today’s dollars. By 2007, . . . net worth was just shy of $57 trillion. Adjusting for inflation, more wealth was created in America in the twenty-five year boom than in the previous two hundred years.47
It’s easy to see why President Reagan tapped Professor Laffer as his economic guru; Laffer is as smart as they come. Of note, when all the “experts” and pollsters were predicting a Donald Trump defeat, Laffer stunned—and outsmarted—everyone by predicting months in advance that Donald Trump would win easily.48 Laffer has touted Donald Trump’s Reaganesque tax policies and says that, if implemented, they will lead to economic “nirvana” in America.49 Let’s hope he’s right (again). President Trump’s tax plan would shrink the current seven tax brackets into three: 10 percent, 25 percent, and 35 percent. It would also double the standard deduction, repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax, repeal the death tax, and “eliminate most of the tax breaks that mainly benefit high-income individuals,” except for “home ownership, charitable giving, and retirement savings.”50
Working-class Americans today could sure use another economic jolt after eight lugubrious years of the Obama economy. Here’s hoping Congress can get its act together and pass significant tax relief consistent with President Trump’s proposals.
Peace through Strength
Progressives trashed Reagan throughout his presidency as an unstable Cold War “cowboy” with a trigger-happy finger hovering over the nuclear red button. “Ronnie RayGun,” they used to call him. As usual, they had Reagan all wrong. He was a lover of peace who believed in good and evil. Above all else, Reagan’s goal was to protect Americans. After witnessing decades of escalating Cold War tensions, Ronald Reagan set out not to end but win the battle with Soviet communism. When he was asked what his Cold War strategy was, Reagan responded with his hallmark clarity and confidence: “We win; they lose.”
Populists supported Reagan’s Cold War strategy because they knew Soviet communists sought global domination. Again, the canard that the populist movement is isolationist is just that—a fallacy. Populists believe military responses are warranted when American interests are threatened. Put simply, you can’t empower people if you allow them to be killed or captured by hostile enemies. What was so brilliant about Reagan’s populist foreign policy approach was that he found a way to apply maximum winning leverage against the Soviet Union without bloodshed.
In the end, even his harshest critics were forced to concede that he accomplished what he set out to do. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” he thundered in front of the Brandenburg Gate. It was a vision he had the very first time he traveled to Berlin in November 1978. Outraged and appalled by what he saw, Reagan turned to Richard Allen (who would later become his national security adviser) and said, “We have got to find a way to knock this thing down.”51 And soon he did, faster and more peacefully than anyone dreamed. As liberal lion Ted Kennedy put it after Reagan’s passing, “On foreign policy he will be honored as the president who won the Cold War.”52
How did he do it? And why? The answers are critical for the conservative-populist movement’s commitment to maintaining national security in a dangerous age.
Go back to the beginning. Soviet communists had long articulated their desire for global domination. It wasn’t just rhetoric; they had backed it up with a massive amount of blood and carnage. Reagan was alive throughout Joseph Stalin’s 30-year rule. Stalin’s Great Terror (sometimes called the Great Purge) to consolidate power by exterminating dissidents and rivals through execution and internment in the slave prison camps known as the gulags claimed millions of lives. The tyranny and brutality made such an impression on Reagan that in 1950 he joined a group called the Crusade for Freedom to liberate the slaves of communism and to thwart Soviet expansion. When communists in Hollywood began muscling their way in to seize control of Hollywood trade unions, Reagan fought back at great risk to himself and his family.53
Faith in God was at the center of Reagan’s determination to defeat communism. Communists were waging a war on religion and he knew it. “Communism begins where atheism begins,” said Karl Marx. Similarly, Vladimir Lenin wrote in 1913 that “There is nothing more abominable than religion.”54 That was a view whose spread Reagan would not allow.
From the start, Reagan believed that the idea of mere containment, or détente—the accepted “realist” approach pursued by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger—was a strategy that was fatally flawed. Reagan’s strong stance against Soviet appeasement infuriated the Establishment. Leave well enough alone, they yelled, Soviet communism is here to stay and isn’t going anywhere. Reagan wouldn’t listen. As even The New York Times was forced to concede after his death, “Mr. Reagan’s stubborn refusal to accept the permanence of communism helped end the Cold War.”55
How did he do it? By announcing in March 1983 the beginning of a little thing called “Star Wars,” formally known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The so-called “experts” in Washington thought it was nuts, but Reagan threw down the gauntlet in an arms race with the Soviet Union by declaring that the United States would pursue the technological development of a “peace shield”—a missile defense system that could knock down incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). It was part of his dream to render nuclear weapons useless, thereby increasing peace and security. But it was also a deft move to hasten the fall of the USSR by drawing the Soviets into a high rollers arms race that the already-rickety Russian economy could never win.
For added leverage, President Reagan announced two years later that once SDI was built, and once the Soviets had agreed to reductions in offensive weapons, the United States would be willing to give the Soviet Union the technology to create an SDI system of their own. In October 1985, during an interview with the BBC, President Reagan was asked the question directly:
BBC: But the Russians, presumably, would have to make their own SDI. You wouldn’t offer it to them, would you, off the shelf?
President Reagan: Why not? . . . I would like to say to the Soviet Union, we know you’ve been researching this same thing longer than we have. We wish you well. There couldn’t be anything better than if both of us came up with it. But if only one of us does, then, why don’t we, instead of using it as an offensive means of having a first strike against anyone else in the world, why don’t we use it to ensure that there won’t be any nuclear strikes?
The BBC interviewer could hardly believe his ears. He tried once more.
BBC: Are you saying then, Mr. President, that the United States, if it were well down the road towards a proper SDI program, would be prepared to share its technology with Soviet Russia, provided, of course, there were arms reductions and so on on both sides?
President Reagan: That’s right.56
The Kremlin was terrified. The reason was clear. The Russians knew darn well—just as President Reagan did—that they didn’t have the rubles to go toe-to-toe in an arms race to build Star Wars. And even if America did agree to share the technology, what good would that do if they lacked the money to build and maintain it? I can “give you” the plans to build a fortress, but if you don’t have the money to build a fortress, what good are the plans? Worse, if your enemy (the United States) does have a fortress (SDI), and you don’t, your enemy is guarded by a shield of security and you are left naked and vulnerable to attack.57
The Soviets knew they had to kill SDI somehow. They made their move in 1986 during Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan’s historic summit in Reykjavík, Iceland, to broker a deal to drastically reduce each country’s strategic missiles. Gorbachev promised Reagan the moon: he would agree to eliminate all ballistic missiles. But there was a catch. Gorbachev looked at Reagan and said, “This all depends, of course, on you giving up SDI.” That was the moment Reagan became livid. It was also the moment Reagan knew just how deeply the Russians feared SDI. Reagan turned to George Schultz and said, “The meeting is over. Let’s go.”
That was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. As former Soviet spokesman Gennady Gerasimov later admitted, “Reagan bolstered the U.S. military might to ruin the Soviet economy, and he achieved his goal. Reagan’s SDI was a very successful blackmail. The Soviet Union tried to keep up pace with the U.S. military buildup, but the Soviet economy couldn’t endure such competition.”58
As for the SDI system itself, Reagan wasn’t bluffing. We really did spend tens of billions of dollars developing the technology. “Indeed, technologies developed under SDI contributed to ballistic missile capabilities the United States has today,” note former Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint and vice president James Carafano. “Moreover, SDI research produced innumerable benefits beyond missile defense: cheaper and more capable computer chips, optics equipment, and specialized materials that businesses and consumers now take for granted.”59 It was all part of Reagan’s strategy to maintain “peace through strength.”
Some have argued that Reagan’s military buildup cost too much money. Others say it was a small price to pay to win the Cold War, liberate millions from communism’s murderous grip, and keep America safe in a nuclear age. One thing is certain: even Reagan’s critics concede his Cold War victory defied all the odds. “Against waves of ‘expert opinion,’ he pursued his belief that the Soviet Union would crack under the pressure of an accelerated arms race, and he lived to see the Soviet empire crumble and a degree of freedom and democracy come to Russia itself,” wrote liberal Washington Post columnist David Broder.60
The underreported part of Reagan’s strategy against the “Evil Empire” was his alliance with Pope Saint John Paul II. Reagan and the pope had survived assassination attempts only six weeks apart in 1981 and felt they had been spared for a larger purpose. Each saw a common enemy in the communist menace. Reagan relied on John Paul’s spiritual power, and he shared military intelligence with the pope—data critical to the resistance in Poland. The Solidarity movement—a populist uprising led by a humble electrician, Lech Walesa—and the deep faith awakened by John Paul’s visit to his homeland in 1979 would weaken the grip of the Soviets in Poland and start the fall of communism.
As she often did, the Iron Lady, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put it best: “Ronald Reagan had a higher claim than any other leader to have won the Cold War for liberty and he did it without a shot being fired.”61 For those with eyes to see, this bold approach bears striking similarity to President Trump’s engagement with the world’s great religions during his first foreign trip in 2017. Only the goal this time is peace in the Middle East.
Speechwriting in the Reagan Administration
During Reagan’s second term I was blessed to have a bird’s-eye view of history as a young speechwriter in the Reagan administration. Washington was totally new to me. Frankly, I had no idea what I was getting into, but even in the era of Iran-Contra and the Bork hearings, for a young conservative like myself, it was a dream come true.
I started off in 1986 as the speechwriter for Undersecretary of Education Gary Bauer during William Bennett’s tenure as secretary. Bauer was a strong Christian conservative with a big heart and a keen understanding of the Reagan Revolution. Years later, he told me he hired me because of my work as a conservative student journalist at the infamous Dartmouth Review.
Bill Bennett’s young staffers were, like myself, all recent college grads. My new colleagues were exceptionally bright and dedicated. Speechwriters like Gene Scalia, John Cribb, Julie Cave, Bill Armistead, Pete Wehner, and I all hung out together. We were young and single, so after work it was softball on the Mall and maybe a beer (or two). Those were fun days. We were Reaganites, and we believed we were part of something big.
Being in Washington also afforded us the chance to meet fascinating figures outside the administration. My then-boyfriend Dinesh D’Souza and I had breakfast in the summer of 1986 with Edward Teller, the physicist who was known as the “father of the Hydrogen bomb.” We met near my office, at Vie de France bakery, which was right near the subway stop for the U.S. Department of Education. A short, stooped-over man with big bushy gray eyebrows, he told us riveting stories in his thick Hungarian accent about his time at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, working with J. Robert Oppenheimer. With colorful details and the passion of a scientist a half-century younger, he shared some of the personal dynamics that made the World War II Manhattan Project work even more challenging, along with how he successfully lobbied President Harry Truman on the urgent need to develop the H-bomb. Teller was a staunch advocate of America’s nuclear weapons program and a supporter of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which we had covered closely at The Dartmouth Review.
At age 78, Teller was unrepentant about his exile from much of the scientific community after his public falling out with Oppenheimer. (Dinesh recalls that he was frustrated that Oppenheimer and others treated him like some kind of “Dr. Strangelove.”) Through the hour-and-a-half-long breakfast, he railed against the no-nukes movement that sought to, as he described, “fully neuter the United States military” and thus make the world “ripe for Soviet expansionism.” The nuclear test ban movement was, in Teller’s view, a woefully flawed concept that benefited everyone but us. The stalwart anticommunist thought such bans would ultimately make America more vulnerable because they made defensive weapons systems more difficult to design. It was a fascinating meeting to say the least.
Another fun meeting took place at the Hay Adams hotel in 1987 when former president Richard Nixon ate breakfast with me, Dinesh, and seven members of the current and former Dartmouth Review staff. Wall Street Journal editorial writer and Review founder Greg Fossedal arranged the gathering. Nixon talked about the importance of presidents pursuing a policy of “tough détente” wherein a president negotiates from a position of strength while keeping U.S. interests in mind. He was also somewhat critical of President Reagan (something that apparently had never changed over all those years). In particular, he viewed Reagan as too “idealistic” and not sufficiently realistic.
Dinesh reminded me of the awkward moment when Watergate came up in the discussion. Someone asked how it compared to Iran-Contra. Nixon quipped sarcastically that Reagan was getting away with Iran-Contra only because people thought he was dumb—the implication being that Nixon didn’t have the option of playing dumb during Watergate because people considered him too smart. His comments seemed to confirm what I had long heard—despite Nixon’s role as a conservative-populist pioneer, he had always harbored envy of Reagan for receiving the lion’s share of credit for the populist movement’s success.
The high point of my speechwriting experience came when Gary Bauer was transferred to the White House to work as assistant to the president for Policy Development. He couldn’t bring his entire staff with him, so I was relieved—and honored—to make the cut. When I called my mother to tell her, she was over the moon. “I knew it!” she said, ever the proud parent. “So when are you going to talk to the president?”
Over the years, my mother would remind me how blessed I was to have had this experience. As usual, she was right. Later, friends told me she would brag endlessly that “my daughter worked with President Reagan,” as if I was in and out of the Oval Office 10 times a day.
Whether she was right about every aspect of my job wasn’t important. She got the most important part right. America is a place where a girl from Glastonbury, Connecticut, the daughter of a waitress and carwash owner, could end up working at the White House.
Lessons from the Revolution
In his 1980 victory, Reagan converted Democrats not by adopting Democrat views but by convincing them that conservative-populist solutions offered the only hope for American renewal. We need to do that same thing again.
To be sure, Reagan wasn’t perfect. Yes, he signed the Simpson–Mazzoli Act, granting amnesty to a limited number of “illegal aliens” (a term used by Reagan in his signing statement on the bill). But he did so in the expectation that, going forward, our laws would be enforced. They weren’t. The Iran-Contra saga and his failure to shrink the size of the federal government also come to mind.
But then there are the historic achievements: some of the biggest tax cuts in American history, the creation of over 18 million jobs and unprecedented wealth, a renewal of American pride and patriotism, commonsense trade policies, the defeat of Soviet communism, and the winning of the Cold War.62 His accomplishments were so great, Americans rewarded his legacy by electing his vice president as the nation’s next commander in chief (no sitting vice president had been elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836). Halcyon days, indeed.
For me personally, and for many of us who had entered the Reagan administration barely out of college, Ronald Reagan inspired us to devote our careers to the conservative movement. We were young and idealistic and loved President Reagan for having the courage and vision to wear down the Soviets and lift up the economy. We loved how he loved America—it was infectious. Looking back at photos of our 1984 college election night party at the Hanover Inn in New Hampshire, everyone seemed to glow. And it wasn’t just the beverages we were imbibing. We realized we were blessed to be alive during one of the great moments in American history and to have a leader who understood that those three famous words—We the People—weren’t just poetry, they were purposeful.
But Reagan’s legacy only means something if we keep it alive by adhering to the principles that culminated in the largest-ever landslide presidential victory in American history. The same populist spirit that fueled Reagan’s rise is finally back again today. That it was allowed to dim in his wake is an important cautionary tale of the fragility of movements and the need to maintain them, and it is a story that urgently needs to be told. Sadly, some conservatives took a dangerous detour during the next three presidents and thrust us into a bizarre world of globalization, wars based on idealism and nation-building, and intense hatred toward the very voters who accounted for the Reagan coalition in the first place. Indeed, it was only in the last several years that many of us who joined the movement in the 1980s and thought we were all fighting for the same cause learned that wasn’t the case at all.
It is also important to remember that during Reagan’s rise and presidency, he and those who followed and supported him were excoriated and ridiculed. Academia, the Establishment, media, the so-called “experts”—they all spent a lifetime trashing and attacking him and his supporters. The left’s penchant for labeling anyone and everything they dislike as “racist” is hardly new. The race card has been their go-to move for decades. As early as 1976, Hubert Humphrey dubbed Reagan’s governing philosophy a “disguised new form of racism.”63 Even at his death on June 5, 2004, some progressives vilely marked his passing with celebration. Progressive cartoonist Ted Rall said, “I’m sure he’s turning crispy brown right about now.” And a gay activist declared that he would “spend eternity in hell.”64
Thankfully, the haters were part of a tiny minority. The rest of America mourned Reagan’s death and celebrated his life. Many of us who were at Washington’s National Cathedral that day were in tears for much of the 90-minute service. Saying good-bye to President Reagan meant so many different things to people, for different reasons. Thirteen years after Reagan’s passing, conservatives in the United States and, indeed, across the globe still cite him as their compass. It may seem unkind to note, yet it is inescapably true, that few GOPers today run as “Bush Republicans.”
Reagan’s death didn’t just mark the end of a political era, it marked the metaphorical end of our youth. The political memories of my own childhood included watching Dan Rather’s reporting on the Vietnam War, long gas lines, 18 percent interest rates, and the Iranian hostage crisis. Reagan had felt like springtime after a bitter, long winter. By the time the horse-drawn caisson carrying Reagan’s body was slowly making its way down Constitution Avenue to the U.S. Capitol, conservatism was entering a new season under George W. Bush, the son of his vice president.
History stops for no one—not even a giant like President Reagan. Technology advances, new issues arise, and those of us who were young in the 1980s felt the duty to help govern this nation in his wake.
As for me, after I left the Reagan administration in the fall of 1988, I headed to law school at the University of Virginia. My calling card on campus was the license plate on my little black 1983 Honda Civic hatchback. It read: FARRGHT. I knew President Reagan would appreciate the humor.