Edwin Meese III
BEFORE REAGAN
It has become common to speak of the “Reagan Revolution,” which rightly recognizes the remarkable transformation in American politics ushered in by President Ronald Reagan. But it is easy to miss what an unusual revolution it was. Interestingly, it was not a revolution achieved by force of arms, but a revolution accomplished by ideas. This revolution of ideas resulted from four different factors coming together: first, a movement; second, a message; third, a leader; and finally, a crisis. It was the confluence of those elements that enabled conservatives to reshape the American political landscape by bringing about what we now call the Reagan Revolution.
The remarkable success of the Reagan Revolution was the culmination of the modern conservative movement in America, itself a phenomenon of over half a century. Those of us who have thought a lot about the history of the conservative movement look at it unfolding in three phases. The first phase, which started immediately after the end of World War II, was its period as an intellectual movement. At that time many prominent scholars, here and abroad, became concerned about the drift toward socialism in the United States and around the world. Their thinking was that although the West had defeated the threat of the Axis powers, it confronted a new threat—an intellectual threat—to our material well-being and even our civilization itself. These scholars produced written works that were fundamental to the movement’s beginning. At the popular level, though, there was really only one regular conservative publication, Human Events, which started in the late 1940s.
Following this beginning of intellectual foment, the next important episode in the conservative movement was the advent of a new leader, Bill Buckley. Unlike the older scholars, Buckley introduced a new vigor and a new enthusiasm. He had just graduated from Yale, after having first served in the army. At Yale, he was the leader of almost everything: chairman of the Daily News, the most prominent position on campus; active in the political union; and chairman of the debating association. He was truly “a big man on campus.”
Buckley was also a genuine scholar. Right after he graduated from Yale, he wrote the book God and Man at Yale. If you were to pick it up now, you would find it remarkably applicable to academia today, particularly in respect to diagnosing its pathologies. He was prescient in detecting a drift in economics and political science toward socialism. Similarly, in religious matters, he anticipated a trajectory toward an antireligious disposition long before it was obvious to others who were at Yale at the time. Needless to say, his book did not receive enthusiastic agreement from the people running the institution at the time, particularly the Yale faculty and administration. It did, however, bring Buckley attention and prominence across the country—especially in the burgeoning conservative intellectual community.
Buckley accomplished many things that were important to the growing conservative movement. Perhaps most significantly, he started National Review, which has been the biweekly chronicle of the conservative movement from its inception to this very day. Among other things, it has engaged many top writers and provides an invaluable archive for those interested in conservatism.
Buckley was pivotal in the transition from conservatism’s first phase as an intellectual movement to conservatism’s next phase as a political movement. In 1960, he gathered a group of young conservatives, many of whom were involved with Young Americans for Freedom, at his home in Sharon, Connecticut. There they wrote the Sharon Statement, an exposition of basic principles and a manifesto of what modern conservatism should aspire to accomplish. This was a singular event; it went beyond simply thinking, talking, and writing about conservatism to outlining actual political action to guide a new breed of young activists.
Not too many years later, Barry Goldwater confirmed the conservative movement as a political movement when he ran for president in 1964. Though he didn’t win, his successful recruiting of young people for his campaign made him one of the most influential figures in the history of conservatism. Goldwater’s campaign coalesced and launched a cadre of movement conservatives, which endures today. These people worked on the Goldwater campaign and then continued to work together, staying involved in politics and in any number of small organizations. The principal national conservative political organization at the time was Young Americans for Freedom, but additional thousands of young people were all active in the conservative movement in their own way, in their own areas. It was this cadre that was absolutely critical to Ronald Reagan’s success when he ran for the presidency.
THE NASCENT REAGAN REVOLUTION
The third phase of conservatism in this country saw its transformation from a political movement into a governing movement. It started with Ronald Reagan in 1967 when he became governor of California. Conservatism was not talked about much in professional political circles at that time. There had been a number of other movements on the left in the early and mid-twentieth century—the Progressive movement, the New Deal, the Great Society—but it was uncommon to pair philosophy with actual governance from a conservative standpoint.
That is precisely what Ronald Reagan did as governor, and it was precisely what was needed: to show that conservative ideas worked in practice. Reagan inherited a government in California that was virtually bankrupt. His predecessor had, through a trick, which changed the method of accounting, enabled him in his final years to spend fifteen months of revenue during twelve months of spending. So the first challenge Governor Reagan faced was literally a half-empty treasury, lacking the funds to finish the fiscal year without borrowing. California, like most states, does not permit deficit spending, so Reagan was forced to raise taxes in his first year in office.
Now, for someone who had campaigned as a conservative and showcased the importance of keeping government within its budget, to have to raise taxes was a terrible blow. True to his conservative ideals, Reagan insisted that he was going to “cut, squeeze, and trim the government,” and if he was able to cut enough government spending to get it back within its revenues, he would refund any excess taxes. In other words, he would not sustain the tax increase as an instrument for government growth. And that is just what he did; in the course of his eight years in office, he administered three different tax rebates.
One reason Reagan was able to “cut, squeeze, and trim” was that he recruited top executives from leading businesses to serve for six months in the state government, finding economies and savings in every department and agency of the California government. Executives from the telephone company, for example, discovered ways to organize the state telephone system more efficiently and save considerable money. It cost the telephone company revenue, but its leaders were willing to do it for the common good. Other businesses, likewise, in their particular fields of specialty, were able to recommend similar savings.
One example illustrates the innovation and creativity that were so much a feature of Reagan’s governing. At the end of 1967, his first year in office, the Department of Motor Vehicles mailed out automobile license renewal forms—some three months in advance. The news media ridiculed the department, implying incompetence because license renewals were not due until March of the next year. Actually, the Finance Department had discovered that there was going to be an increase in the postage in January, so mailing the renewals early saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. When you consider the population of California, and the number of cars, you end up with a lot of stamp money.
Those kinds of practical steps revealed how a philosophy of thrift and responsibility could be transformed into a governing movement. Reagan proved that conservative ideas make sense, and that they actually work in practice. That is why his political career was so important in launching this new phase of conservatism.
The second major factor in Reagan’s success was his message, which was derived from the best conservative and classical liberal thinking throughout history.
He based his ideas on lessons from the Magna Carta, English common law, the writings of the Founders, the work of Tocqueville, and other documents from the early days of the American republic. Reagan synthesized all of this, and articulated a conservative message that shaped what we now call the Reagan Revolution.
In other words, ideas were very important. One remarkable thing about the Reagan Revolution is the way in which differing ideas—or differing ideas about conservatism—were brought together into a comprehensive philosophy and shaped a viable strategy. In Reappraising the Right, George Nash describes the conservative movement that came to power with Ronald Reagan in terms of having five distinct parts, five different “idea clusters” that came together under his leadership.
One idea cluster was made up of classical liberals and libertarians, who were very much concerned about the threat posed by the growth of the state. They were prepared to revisit the very idea of the welfare state, seeing it as a threat to individual liberty, free enterprise, and prosperity. Another idea cluster was what George Nash called the traditionalist conservatives; they were worried about the fact that the ethical norms and the institutional foundations of American life were being weakened at the hands of secular and relativistic liberals. They harked back to the basic principles that Bill Buckley had described in God and Man at Yale. A third group was made up of the anti-communist Cold Warriors, who were convinced that our country was increasingly imperiled by Marxism, and particularly by the Soviet Union. The fourth group was the neoconservatives, those former “liberals [who had been] mugged by reality.” They generally embraced idealistic goals but recognized that liberalism was not working and gravitated toward something else. One of the things that the Reagan Revolution did was to give them a place where they could find respectability, as neoconservatives. Finally, the fifth group was the religious right, principally interested in the moral life of the country, animated by the culture wars of the 1960s and ’70s. The Reagan Revolution succeeded in bringing all five of these strains together, and incorporated them into a common conservative message.
The third factor, of course, was the leader himself. You cannot have a movement without a leader—at least not one that is likely to succeed. The late Rufus Fears, a very insightful professor at the University of Oklahoma, has written a great deal about leadership, tracing it all the way back to the Greeks and Romans. He writes that the difference between a statesman and a mere politician is the possession of four qualities: a bedrock of principle; a moral compass; a vision of where that leader wants to go; and the ability to communicate that vision and gain adherents.
As a leader, Ronald Reagan, had all of these qualities. His principles really were those of the Founders, and they informed the way he served in office, as both governor and president. His belief in and commitment to free enterprise and individual freedom, as well as an insistent dedication to limited government, were the principles that characterized his governing of both California and the United States. His moral compass was clear; he was a man of great integrity, a man of great courage—both physical and moral courage—and also a man of great perseverance. Once he had set his goals, he would not give up; he would continue to work for them against all odds. He had an unmistakable vision for where the country ought to be going, a vision that emphasized a return to the foundational principles and ideas of the Founders. He espoused the view that a president must govern in accordance with that key concept in the Declaration of Independence, that the only legitimate government is one that governs with the consent of the governed. His distinctly American vision of a free society offered a powerful alternative to the great threat of communism and, particularly, the Soviet Union.
It is important to remember that Ronald Reagan was a man of ideas. He had read extensively; he had thought deeply about history and political philosophy. He was able to bring these intellectual and political strains together into a comprehensive conservative message because he had thought through them. The result of this theoretical synthesis was what George Nash described as a “grand coalition.” It provided a message, a philosophical foundation, to go along with the movement.
Reagan’s unique ability to communicate that vision and to engender confidence in the people of the United States was central to his leadership. He talked directly to the people, in language that was understandable and resonated with his listeners. He spoke as one of them, who shared the view of their problems and their aspirations.
He avoided political jargon or academic phraseology. Instead, he used down-to-earth examples and humorous anecdotes. He both informed and inspired, appealing to the heart as well as the mind. As a result, Reagan became known as the “great communicator”—one of the foremost political speakers in modern history. Nevertheless, in his characteristic self-deprecating way, he said it was not his ability, but the ideas he was expressing, that motivated his audiences.
THE CONVERSION OF REAGAN
It is important to keep in mind that in his early adult life, Reagan was a self-proclaimed liberal. On occasion he would even describe himself as a former “bleeding-heart liberal.” It may have been the result of his strong religious background; his mother was extremely devout, the kind of lady who would visit the jails, take food to prisoners, and help neighbors, and was constantly engaged in charitable works. Reagan followed that path as a young man. He was inspired by the idea that everyone should be his brother’s keeper. It took him a while to realize that when government is involved, far from helping you be your brother’s keeper, the government often strays outside its own realm, more likely to become your brother’s master and yours, too. That change in his approach to government and politics began to take place in the 1950s.
Even before that, however, his experience in Hollywood started him thinking about the contradictions of liberal philosophy. It began with his election as president of the Screen Actors Guild during the late 1940s. The Screen Actors Guild is one of several unions in Hollywood, including those representing cameramen, stage managers, grips, and other workers in the motion picture industry. Reagan was the leader of SAG at a time when the Communist Party USA, the internal Marxist party in this country, tried to take over the unions as a means of controlling the movies for propaganda purposes. Ronald Reagan led the actors and other union leaders in resisting the communists. It was a bitter conflict, with strikes, intimidation, and violence. But eventually the communist threat was defeated and industrial peace was restored to Hollywood.
That was how Reagan came to appreciate the reality of the threat of communism and began his thinking of how to overcome that threat. That education was invaluable; at the same time that he was encountering communism as a domestic threat, he was reading about the international aspects of communism. It happened that the lawyer for the Screen Actors Guild, a friend of Reagan’s, was an avid researcher and writer on international communism. He would pass along books like The Treaty Trap to Reagan, who would devour this information. Both his reading and his experience were seen to contradict his former liberal views.
In the 1950s, Ronald Reagan became the host of a popular television program called General Electric Theater. Part of his contract required that he visit General Electric plants during the week. Being a movie star—he’d starred by that time in fifty-one movies and was now a television star—he was quite popular. Over the course of ten years, he visited 137 GE plants, and during that period he talked with both workers and managers about their problems and concerns. He also read much of the material that GE was providing to its employees, including educational material on politics and free enterprise. This continued Reagan’s education about communism, socialism, the market system, and the threats to our political and economic systems. It was an important time for him, and had much to do with his transformation from a liberal to a conservative.
Reagan’s high public profile resulted in his becoming a very popular speaker. After he had given talks to the workers, he would be invited to service clubs and civic groups, to give talks on free enterprise. Soon various political figures, particularly conservatives, would ask him to speak on their behalf. Once when speaking in 1962, in the course of his speech, he remarked that he had been a lifelong Democrat but now was favoring this particular Republican candidate. During the questions that followed, one of the ladies in the back of the room raised her hand and said, “Mr. Reagan, you sound more like a Republican than you do a Democrat.” And he said, “Well, I guess my views have really gone in that direction. One of these days, if I find a registrar, I’ll reregister.” The lady said, “I’m a registrar, and I’ll see you after the meeting.” And so Ronald Reagan became a registered Republican.
I’ve indicated that Reagan read deeply, but it is difficult to overstate the extent of his intellectual preparation for governing. He read Bastiat’s The Law and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and he was fascinated with Whittaker Chambers’s Witness, in which Chambers described both the appeal of communism and communism’s failure. He even memorized parts of Chambers’s book that he felt were particularly poignant, and he would cite them by heart in his speeches. He read Human Events and National Review regularly, keeping up to date on the latest ideas in the conservative movement. His extensive reading was a very important preparation for governing.
Reagan always had a particular interest in the founding of this country. He was tremendously impressed by the biographies of the leading figures of the era. He was fascinated with what they did and how they thought, particularly their self-sacrifice for the cause, and their willingness to put aside personal interests—or even the interests of the states they represented—in order to create a new united nation, a United States of America. He was inspired by the kind of leadership that could produce the Declaration of Independence, the creed of freedom for our country, and the Constitution as the vehicle for implementing those principles.
In 1964, having been a fairly prominent speaker for some time, Reagan was asked by a group of businessmen if he would agree to speak on a national telecast on behalf of Barry Goldwater. He agreed; they raised the money so that it was funded separately from the Goldwater campaign, and he was given a prime spot on television. His speech was entitled “A Time for Choosing,” and in it he explained the principled conflict between liberalism and conservatism, and the implications of the outcome of that conflict for the country. He insisted that we had to choose, one way or another, between the freedoms and principles of the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution or endure a more powerful, more centralized government that would be a danger to our liberty.
The broadcast was a great hit. The group of business leaders were so impressed with Reagan’s remarkable ability to promulgate a vision persuasively that they asked him to run for governor of California. Reagan was initially dismissive: “They don’t want an actor for governor.” When they persisted, he told them that he would think about it, talk to people throughout the state, and see if their idea was valid. For about six months, he traveled around California, gave presentations, and took questions—in part, to demonstrate that he was capable of more than simply delivering scripted lines.
GOVERNOR REAGAN
The tremendous response he received from the people of California persuaded him to run for governor in 1966, even though it was against a very popular incumbent who was running for his third term. It turned out to be a nasty election—as a matter of fact, his opponent even ran a rather vicious ad showing a teacher talking to a little girl, remarking, “You know, it was an actor that shot Lincoln.”
Ronald Reagan defeated Pat Brown by nearly a million votes in 1966, and that started him on his political career. He had an impressive record as governor, erasing the deficit and putting sound fiscal policies into place. It was a period of great stress, but Reagan handled the upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s with good planning, good preparation, and effective personal involvement with average people, even including students. On one occasion he arranged a meeting in the state capital of the student body presidents of all the colleges in California. He used the opportunity to explain to the students the importance of the philosophical and political foundations of the country as well as the principles of freedom and individual responsibility. One of the student body presidents suggested that someone of Reagan’s generation could not understand the younger generation with so many remarkable innovations transforming life as they knew it. After all, the student pointed out, Mr. Reagan did not grow up with television, coast-to-coast air travel, or man walking on the moon. He implied that because Reagan and his generation didn’t have these new things in their youth, they were incapable of understanding young people today. Governor Reagan was unflappable. “You’re right,” he said, “my generation didn’t have those things. We invented them!”
When Reagan left the governorship in 1975, there was a groundswell of support for him to run for president in 1976, even though the incumbent, Gerald Ford, was running for reelection. Reagan took the unusual step of running against an incumbent president of his own party because of his dissatisfaction with two issues: the growth of the federal government, even under Republican presidents, and our flawed policy of détente with the Soviet Union. Reagan knew that the Soviet Union was cheating on the terms of international agreements and was continuing to pursue its expansionist ambitions while our leaders were complacent and allowed it to do so.
Reagan, of course, did not win the nomination. He came close, even to the point of contesting the nomination at the convention. But in many ways, it was probably a good thing that he wasn’t the Republican nominee. The country was probably not as ready for his ideas in 1976 as it would be in 1980. But he had sought the nomination by running explicitly to the right of the incumbent; as a result, he enlarged the cadre of conservative support that had started with Goldwater. The people who had worked in his 1976 campaign, particularly those who would become engaged in electoral politics, continued as conservative activists and expanded the conservative movement.
PRESIDENT REAGAN
How does one man stand out so much that even now, nearly a quarter of a century after he left office, he’s still the former president most talked about, even above more recent holders of that office? Clearly, part of it was his personal character. I am often asked what Ronald Reagan was really like as a person. I always answer that his most significant characteristic was his optimism and his cheerfulness. He was always upbeat; as he would say, he believed the glass was half full rather than half empty. He exuded that confidence and invigorated others with his optimism. As a result, he was able to inspire people to achieve more than they initially thought they were able to do. He was genuinely an inspirational leader as well as an intellectual leader and a very good executive.
This ability to inspire and motivate is most important in dealing with the last element involved in leadership—crisis. An aide to President Obama, Rahm Emanuel, was quoted as saying, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” In other words, a president has more opportunity to accomplish things in the midst of a crisis. Ronald Reagan was sworn into office at the height of arguably the greatest crisis facing the country in many years. Inflation in those days was 12.5 percent. Interest rates were 21 percent. This nation had a serious energy shortage; a person had to get up early in the morning to get a car into line at the local gas station because by 8:30 all the gas it had for that day would have been sold. The country had a serious unemployment rate, at one point as high as 10 percent.
We also had a crisis in foreign affairs and national security. There was the threat of communism; the Soviets’ potential for aggression was great. Two years before Reagan was inaugurated, they had marched with impunity into Afghanistan. They were using Cuban troops in Angola to subvert the government. They had a Marxist bastion in our own hemisphere, in Nicaragua, and they were trying to bring down the government of El Salvador. In addition, Reagan was very disturbed about the captive nations of Eastern and Central Europe that were under the heel of the Soviet Union. There was sustained oppression of the people in Poland and other countries, where the people were suffering under martial law and military dictatorships.
Compounding the problem was the fact that our military capability had deteriorated following the end of the Vietnam War, and we were at one of our weakest points militarily since before World War II. As was said at the time, there were planes that couldn’t fly for lack of spare parts, ships that couldn’t sail for lack of trained crews, and tanks and artillery that couldn’t maneuver for lack of ammunition or fuel. In the midst of increasing global instability, our military situation was extremely dire.
Further compromising national security was the country’s leadership position on the world stage. We were no longer as respected as we had been since the end of World War II, and the pundits were saying that capitalism had peaked, that democracy was as widespread as it was ever going to be, and that the wave of the future was socialism. Looking at what was happening in Africa, Asia, and even in Latin America, some commentators predicted that the United States also would be moving in a socialist and less democratic direction. Moral equivalence—the notion that freedom and democracy on one side and totalitarianism on the other were morally equal ways of governing—was an increasingly common posture among those postulating on foreign affairs. Not only had other countries lost confidence in the United States, but also many people here had lost confidence in ourselves and our institutions. Too many people felt that America’s best days were behind us and that we were a country in decline.
Whether or not the time was right for a conservative leader with a conservative message to mobilize the conservative movement, it was clear that the country was at a crossroads and needed what Reagan had promised. When he took office, he put into practice the principles that shaped his conservative message. They came straight from the best of the American political experience, particularly the founding, and they revolved around six major ideas: first, the importance of constitutionalism and the rule of law; second, preserving individual liberty; third, limited government (in accord with what the Founders had in mind when they wrote Article I, Section VIII, of the U.S. Constitution, where they identified specific enumerated powers for the federal government, beyond which it should not go); fourth, free market economics; fifth, traditional American moral values, with emphasis on religion and family as the moral foundations of a nation; and sixth, a strong national defense.
From these principles came policy. Reagan’s first act, for example, even before he left the Capitol at his swearing in, was to sign his first executive order, which abolished the price controls that had been hobbling our energy resources. In response to the economic crisis, he obtained through Congress tax rate reductions. When he took office, the top marginal tax rate was 70 percent. He cut that back as he implemented tax rate reductions across the board. He advanced regulatory reform, discarding unnecessary and burdensome regulations that were stifling business and industry. He worked with the Federal Reserve for stable monetary policies. He slowed the growth of federal spending. For the eight years he was president, the country saw the slowest increase in federal spending of any presidency since World War II.
He rebuilt the American military. The all-volunteer program of the armed forces was in jeopardy in 1980, and talk of resuming the draft was widespread. Reagan increased salaries, improved the budget, and raised the living standards of our military personnel. He gave priority attention to the people in the military and personally showed pride in our men and women in uniform. He rebuilt and expanded our strategic weaponry. He increased and improved our conventional weapons, modernizing our tanks, artillery, planes, and ships—eventually moving toward the goal of a six-hundred-ship navy. He invested in our intelligence system, developed our industrial mobilization capabilities, and launched an unprecedented initiative that was very important to him: finding a defense against strategic nuclear weapons. The Strategic Defense Initiative, which was an antiballistic missile program, is, of course, still going today.
Reagan dramatically revised our posture toward the Soviet Union. He did not shy away from the moral dimension of the conflict. He forcefully and confidently labeled those who live by oppressing others as “the epitome of evil in the world.” He called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” and excited quite a reaction. Many editorialists at places like the New York Times and so-called experts in the field of national security thought Reagan’s saying that was terrible and unnecessarily provocative. Much of the “striped-pants set” at the State Department was very upset. Reagan’s response was, “Look, they know they’re evil. The people that they’re oppressing know they’re evil. Why don’t we admit that they’re evil?” Reagan’s statement was more important than even many who supported him realized. More than irritating liberals who disagreed with him, it gave hope to those held captive behind the Iron Curtain that there was an American president who knew what the situation was, and was willing to speak the truth about it.
Reagan let it be known through Soviet ambassadors that any further Soviet aggression would be met by the free nations of the West—with military action, if necessary. What’s more, he worked with and encouraged freedom fighters in Angola, Nicaragua, Poland, and elsewhere to roll back prior Soviet aggression.
In this way, forthrightly defending the American commitment to freedom, and working with allied leaders like Margaret Thatcher, Reagan reestablished our position of world leadership as the United States regained the respect of other countries. At the same time, he revived the domestic American spirit through his powerful and persuasive addresses on television. He helped Americans to believe that our best days were yet to come, and revived that signature American can-do spirit.
Of course, as President Reagan’s attorney general, I would be remiss if I did not point out his work to rehabilitate American jurisprudence: the principle of constitutionalism and the rule of law. He took great pains to state the importance of judges ruling not on the basis of politics or their own personal convictions, but rather strictly on the basis of what the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress actually say. Separation of powers simply demands that judges not arrogate unto themselves the responsibilities of legislators or attempt to rewrite the Constitution. This became an inflammatory subject because the courts had strayed far from a constitutionally faithful path in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. President Reagan’s careful appointment of constitutionally faithful judges was extremely important and he buttressed his appointments with his arguments on behalf of judicial integrity and the rule of law. His personal advocacy provided the inspiration for those in the Justice Department who were committed to recovering a constitutional republic.
One of the axioms of the Reagan administration was that “personnel is policy.” The Reagan Revolution was embodied by the people who put President Reagan’s vision into effect. The kind of people a president appoints—their philosophy, their beliefs, their fidelity—determines how an administration will act. Moreover, Reagan believed that we should be a team. People could express differences of opinion, but once a decision was made, he expected them all to work together, carrying out and implementing those decisions. He invested a lot of time personally in crafting policy and didn’t allow people to come in and get a snap decision out of him in the Oval Office. He used the eighteen of us who were members of the cabinet as his primary forum for decision making. That way he benefited from many different points of view before making a decision.
Despite the fact that Reagan had a responsibility to govern, he did not give short shrift to conservatives in favor of bureaucrats. He involved conservatives in his administration, and he let members of the conservative movement know that he was one of them and that he appreciated what they were doing. Each of the eight years that he was president, he attended or gave a speech by television to the Conservative Political Action Conference so that these several thousand conservatives would know that he supported them and thought that what they were doing was important. Likewise, he awarded the Medal of Freedom and other presidential honors to conservative leaders for what they had done in service to the country.
Finally, he made it a point to get his views across to the country as a whole. He believed in the ideas he had read as a young man and was always eager to show that conservatism works, that it was something that people could embrace, and that it was the right course for the country. His speeches invariably communicated his conservative vision. He was a marvelously gifted speaker, but his speeches were inspirational to the country in large part because of the substance of that conservative vision. It was an essential part of his success.
In short, what Ronald Reagan did was best described by George Nash in his book Reappraising the Right when he said, “[Reagan] transmuted American conservatism from theory to practice. He gave conservatives a successful presidency to defend and a statesman to honor, and shifted the paradigm of political discourse for at least a generation.” We now know that the impact of the Reagan Revolution will be for much more than a generation. It is a vital part of our nation’s history.