Reagan, the gifted communicator, was a speechwriter’s dream. Every public presentation resulted from a team effort between the President and the writers—neither would have been quite as successful without the other. Reagan had high expectations for his White House staff of writers and received extraordinary results from them. They were the ones who could really get into the soul of the man better than anyone else on the President’s staff. They often mined his own handwritten earlier writings for direction and stories, then followed his guidance, edits, and outlines carefully. He provided direction, inspiration, editing, and, finally, brilliant execution. He delivered the goods. He made the written word come alive.
Tony Dolan, the longtime and gifted Reagan speechwriter, said that “closer historical scrutiny of Reagan’s writing before the presidency, as well as the extent of his involvement in his presidential speeches, has revealed that he was more than merely a great communicator but also a man of ideas, a cerebral president.” Josh Gilder, another gifted writer for Reagan, commented that “Reagan’s presence was just—I don’t know—remarkable. We’d go in there all worked up over staff wars or the way the researchers weren’t doing their work. We might even have been worked up over something important for a change, like the Sandinistas or the situation in the Middle East. Then Reagan would calm us right down. He was sweet and serene.”
Many Presidents, especially George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, had used Biblical references, allusions, and quotations from inspired writers and thinkers liberally during their tenures. But we would have to go back to our first President and our sixteenth to find the same frequency with which the Bible was used in speeches given by the fortieth President. In The God Strategy, Kevin Coe and David Domke concluded that Reagan “altered the nature of religion and politics in America.” They found that until Reagan, Presidents had mentioned God in an average of 46 percent of all the speeches they gave. Reagan’s God and Bible references increased to a whopping 96 percent of all his speeches. As the critically important biographer Paul Kengor has written, Reagan’s faith was “fundamental to a presidency that, in Ronald Reagan’s mind, was undergirded by something far more profound than mere politics.” One reviewer of Reagan’s autobiography noted, “An American Life is filled with religious references. Time and again Reagan mentioned his deep trust in God and his frequent recourse to prayer.”
Why did this work for Reagan on a global stage? No other world leader at the time, with the exception of his ally Pope John Paul II, was speaking quite like Reagan. Why was he not at all reticent to so frequently employ parables, stories, and quotations from the Bible, as well as from great and classical patriots, thinkers, writers, and poets? One simple answer is that these were features of good speechwriting, and they effectively and eloquently supported important points he was trying to make. During his time in office, the Bible was more frequently referred to and studied in schools—even as literature if not for religious purposes. More people, then, were familiar with its time-honored teachings whether they were religious or not. These references worked exceptionally well for Reagan, because he was not only inspired himself by the quotations he was reciting and believed in, but it was a convincingly impersonal way for him to define himself personally. If you seek Reagan, here is where you will find him—right in the Biblical and patriotic quotes he used over and over again.
When he quoted from or referred to the Bible—which he did in almost every speech—it was as if he were speaking in the third person and partnering with the prophets and apostles whom he was quoting. This was an effective communication device that gave him the opportunity to shine by borrowed light. His references to these great ideas and thinkers made his speeches glisten. Moreover, in so liberally quoting from the Bible, he was talking with old friends, and he was in familiar territory, because he was a Bible student himself and familiar with the material—conceptually, practically, and literally. Again, if you want to get to know Reagan, just accept what he said on the public platform, through the voices of individuals he quoted, as the best and most accurate characterization of him.
Perhaps more significant, what we see happening through Reagan’s continual use of these Biblical references, as well as quotations from secular giants, was somewhat like an engineered construction project. He was laying the groundwork for a larger message that could sustain the specific foreign and domestic policy initiatives that would follow—and once people knew the overall design philosophy, they were ready for the specific engineering specifications. The building of the “message bridges” deployed by Reagan was in parallel to the policy developments going on to promote an effective Reagan doctrine at the State Department, the National Security Council, and especially the Pentagon, as well as other Cabinet agencies—and it paved the way for them oratorically.
Reagan was the standard-bearer, the advance guard. As early as his days as Governor of California, the media took notice of this element in him—of laying out a specific purpose based on values and then introducing his new policy proposals that pragmatically and thematically stemmed from these principles. Newsweek magazine even surprisingly described Reagan’s view of himself during those days as “God’s instrument.” I am sure few of their readers knew what to make of this observation or knew what to do with it in their assessment of him as a leader.
A specific example of the relationship between the bridge-building goals embedded in the broad themes in his speeches and of resulting policy was his plan of action for disarming communism and ending the Cold War. In this work, he was an effective strategist who was methodically and patiently building his case for the ultimate defeat of what he considered an inhumane ideology. During his first term and early in his second term, his growing knowledge and understanding of the Russian people and Russian culture and history, as distinct from the Soviet state, convinced him that they were really a peace-loving, God-fearing people despite the domination of the atheistic, all-powerful bureaucracy. This knowledge, at times quite distinct from the advice offered to him through officials in the foreign policy apparatus, gave him the confidence to assertively speak to the evils of the Soviet system every chance he had—despite the pushback and criticism he fielded from official quarters. Once he acquired this deeper and broader understanding about the Russian people, he was, in some respects, his own man when it came to what he would say about U.S.-Soviet relations and when he would say it.
This, of course, concerned people who thought they knew far more than Reagan did about the region and its future, and they ridiculed him for it—and this even included some in his own political party. In many ways they did know more; it was just not the knowledge Reagan thought would be useful to him in pursuing his own personal conquest over evil. Reagan ultimately proved them wrong at times by keeping his own counsel and running with his own instincts, which were fueled by what I believe he thought of as his mission or calling in life. This was brought into a more vivid focus after he survived the assassination attempt.
In his job as President, the biggest role of Reagan’s life, storytelling was no longer just a device to deter interest in him personally but was a way to soften the often muscular and assertive rhetoric he sometimes used in domestic and foreign relations, and a way to charm—and perhaps warm up—a relationship, or even start one. Reagan had his own seemingly unending arsenal of stories, and this was generously added to by friends and speechwriters over the years. Mike Deaver told me that his personal goal was to provide Reagan with one new story or joke every day. He took this so seriously you could find him on a constant hunt for new material. Reagan was a good customer, because he would roar at a joke or funny story, and for the serious ones he could be easily moved with emotion. Deaver was rarely deterred from offering Reagan an off-color story, either. Reagan relished those even though they could not be retold in public. In fact, his appetite for a good story created a sort of gridlock of people lining up to win Reagan’s favor by telling him one in hopes he had not already heard it before. I always felt insecure every time I was with the President alone and failed to use the opportunity to make him laugh through a good story. Nancy Reagan also jumped into the game. I remember listening to her on the phone with Mort Sahl, one of the most prolific comedians of the day, collecting stories—which she passed along to the President.
While both the Reagans loved to laugh, to entertain, and to be entertained, the President didn’t use storytelling just to entertain but most often to make a point, paint an illustration, or stake a position—in a nonthreatening but educational way—by letting someone else, the characters in the story, do the instructing. His use of this type of storytelling is legendary and often compared to the skill in telling parables—a gift from his mother, Nelle, the substitute lay preacher, and also from his dad, who had a bit of the Irish storyteller in him. An example of his use of parable can be found in the famous 1988 Guildhall speech, in which he used the story on which the famous film Chariots of Fire was based to illustrate the unbreakable bond between America and Great Britain:
“It’s a story about the 1920 Olympics and two British athletes: Harold Abrahams, a young Jew whose victory… was a triumph for all those who have come from distant lands and found freedom and refuge here in England; and Eric Liddell, a young Scotsman, who would not sacrifice religious conviction for fame. In one unforgettable scene, Eric Liddell reads the words of Isaiah. ‘He giveth power to the faint, and to them that have no might, he increaseth their strength, but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary.’
“Here, then, is our formula for completing our crusade for freedom. Here is the strength of our civilization and our belief in the rights of humanity. Our faith is in a higher law. Yes, we believe in prayer and its power. And like the Founding Fathers of both our lands, we hold that humanity was meant not to be dishonored by the all-powerful state, but to live in the image and likeness of Him who made us.
“More than five decades ago, an American President told his generation that they had a rendezvous with destiny; at almost the same moment, a Prime Minister asked the British people for their finest hour. This rendezvous, this finest hour, is still upon us. Let us seek to do His will in all things, to stand for freedom, to speak for humanity. ‘Come my friends,’ as it was said of old by Tennyson, ‘it is not too late to seek a newer world.’”
I personally encountered the powers of Reagan’s illustrative storytelling at the first official White House event I planned and presided over in 1981. It was a breakfast meeting in the Old Family Dining Room, the one rarely seen by the public, directly north of the much grander State Dining Room and facing Lafayette Park. This room was decorated in a regency yellow color and was often used as a serving pantry for state dinners and formal receptions—although it was a handsome and elegant room on its own. The guests included about thirty-five corporate and philanthropic foundation CEOs and community leaders.
After breakfast, Reagan started his remarks with a story about a very rich yet miserly old man who would never give anything to charity. He was visited one day by a delegation of a dozen or so community leaders who were urging him to become philanthropic—as the town’s United Way Campaign needed donations. Reagan continued:
“The old miser said, ‘And does the record show that I have an invalid sister and bedridden brother, and that my mother is in an institution and that my father is near death in the local hospital?’ Then an embarrassment filtered through the demanding guests who felt chastised that they had even come to press their neighbor for a donation at this time in his life, and they wanted to spring for the front door and escape. But the old man stopped them and, to their astonishment, went on to exclaim: ‘I never gave them any money, so why should I give you any?’”
That story brought the house down, but it also left an indelible picture of general shame that comes of not being philanthropic—the whole point of the breakfast meeting being to promote more giving and stir up more philanthropic activism. Reagan won the day, as he usually did, and this time through a humorous but meaningful parable.
Instead of focusing on himself when speaking publicly, Reagan always turned the spotlight on his audience. He usually honored them—proving the truth of the adage: “People will like you better if you tell them their virtues rather than their faults.” His love of America and his faith in Americans was often answered with respect from many of his fellow citizens of all political persuasions, and they often included the voices of those who disagreed with him politically and even disliked him personally. Reagan wanted his presidency to be not so much about him but about the country he served, its prosperity, its growth, its character, and its role in promoting free and democratic societies across the globe. It was on this basis that he launched his eight-year evangelistic tour promoting a view of the world as he saw it—governed by a Higher Power, with good ultimately prevailing over evil, and where men can live in peace and in freedom in law-abiding, democratic societies that protect the rights and freedom of the individual.
Reagan was a Sunday School teacher early in his life. In fact, even while a college student, he drove from Eureka College—itself a church-affiliated college—every weekend one hundred miles back to his hometown of Dixon, Illinois, to teach teenage classes at the First Christian Church. He didn’t just substitute-teach or fill in when it was convenient—he never missed a Sunday. It is surprising to many people to learn that Reagan had even taught Sunday School at all. It took an adventuresome biographer to unearth this fact years later, because Reagan rarely, if ever, talked about it once he reached Washington. In fact, though he was criticized for it, he rarely even went to church while in office and didn’t really seem to need church services—although on occasion he said that he wished he could be like a regular parishioner and be a part of a religious service. After the assassination attempt, increased security measures were in place, and visiting unsecured venues such as churches proved to be problematic; so, it was generally ruled out by the scheduling committee on which I served, and by Nancy Reagan herself—who was always fearful about her husband going anywhere that was difficult to secure.
To truly understand what made this enigmatic man, the fortieth President of the United States, tick requires something out of the ordinary. In order to define him accurately we have to shift our point of reference away from a strictly political context. Once we do that, we see a man who was basically and primarily spiritually minded or faith oriented; and by that I mean that he was a man motivated in everything he did by his overriding personal relationship with his God. Without this perspective of Reagan’s character, it is impossible to understand him and how and why he accomplished what he did during his eight years in national political office. This wasn’t just a segment or isolated compartment of his personality; his faith was the overwhelming influence on his thinking and actions. It was just the plain fact of how he developed as a human being—enormously influenced by his earlier days under the tutelage of his very religious and virtuous mother.
While an orientation to faith or a profession of faith is not uncommon for political leaders, for Reagan it was not an occasional dip into prayer on an as-needed basis. He did not dial up God as a crisis was about to occur and ask for divine intervention. Stated simply, it meant he lived life largely from a spiritual viewpoint rather than a human one. Through this lens he saw not only his own life but history as well—and this view grew even clearer, stronger, and deeper during his two terms.
I believe he did march to a different drummer than do most politicians, following the direction of a very specific voice familiar to him and rooted in his convictions, but not necessarily heard by those around him including his friends and family, officials, and advisors. There is an abundance of evidence to support the theory of his faith orientation, including the fact that his first twenty-three years of life were spent entirely in and around a church that stressed an applied Christianity based on a thorough understanding of Biblical truth and an active faith through good works. While he was growing up, the church was the principal frame of reference around which his life revolved. Those were his most important formative and grounding years. Some teenagers deviate from or at least test their religious upbringing and training. There is no evidence that Reagan ever did. He continued a strong commitment to his faith throughout his college years, including attending a church-affiliated school and being personally mentored by his pastor—who also happened to be the father of his longtime girlfriend, whom he expected to marry.
His diaries also detail and support this view with entries explaining why he was skeptical of and sometimes at odds with his government advisors. He would not compromise his values, although he would on occasion compromise purely on policy or legislative initiatives as necessary to reach political accommodation. From his spiritual perspective, the world was black and white. From his political perspective, there were shades of gray. This blend is how he made it work—how he must have justified compromise. Accepting this premise is indispensable to dissecting and understanding the quiet man often unreachable to those around him. When he was widely quoted—after the assassination attempt—as saying that he would devote the balance of his life to whatever Divine Providence wanted him to do, I believe that he was stating something that he had always felt about himself and his mission. It was just a convenient time for him to say it, and the assassination attempt also made it more poignant.
Suzanne Massie, the author of the classic book on Russia, Land of the Firebird, and Reagan’s personal, nongovernmental advisor on Russian culture from 1983 to 1987, remarked that in her seventeen almost exclusively one-on-one sessions with Reagan, he mostly listened, absorbed, probed, and then questioned. This made her somewhat uncomfortable, because she had to do most of the talking. Then when he had absorbed the details of the briefings she conducted, and compared them with the briefings he was receiving on Soviet affairs from official U.S. government sources, he would discuss the action he wanted to take. Once he reached this position and was ready to move forward, nothing would stop him. His was a deliberative process that was, in part, borne out in his meetings with Massie.
I experienced this myself in briefing Reagan. Once I finally related his disposition in White House briefings to his experience making films—that is, being directed to perform a film role—I could see why Reagan listened so carefully, intently, and was so focused. As an actor, he keyed in on the director, and then when the camera was rolling he jumped into his part and performed. After learning the script and following the director, Reagan made the character come to life. He used this technique in his role as President; however, as the leader of the free world, he was actually portraying himself, and his character was based on his own personal values and beliefs, and it worked—he came across as strong and in command. He put his trust in people who worked for him, and he was most always attentive to their direction. To me, this was a useful lesson in effective leadership. It requires not mindlessness but acute mindfulness, attentiveness, and confidence in the team directing you.
Reagan had both feet planted solidly on the ground, and yet at the same time he was metaphysically processing the dangers occurring on his watch. This caused him to view history and his place in it, as well as the historical events going on around him, in the context of a longer continuum and bigger picture. His unshakable beliefs, optimism, and dedication to service were contributors to how he processed world events. He had, however, both the requirements of his very public career to safeguard and the personal good judgment to keep the full range of his belief systems and faith almost entirely to himself. If he had publicly exposed more about his fundamental principles, or had an unbridled need to share more of his internal thought process, he would have never succeeded in Hollywood or reached the level of leadership he did on an international stage. He kept his personal faith life quiet. This decision ultimately accrued to his benefit.
Patti Davis remembered her father in an interview with Time magazine as “a man whose compassion for other people is deep and earnest, and whose spiritual life is based on faith in a loving God, not a vengeful one.” She later referred to herself as “the little girl who talked to God about everything because that is what my father did.” If Reagan had opened up publicly about the scope and nature of this spiritual dimension in his life, it could have been disastrous to his film and corporate careers, and it also could have been fatal to his political prospects. Hollywood was the perfect warm-up to running for political office, not only because it trained him to be effective in front of cameras but because it exposed him to a community in which, to be a success, you kept many of your personal opinions and beliefs almost completely out of sight—a discipline many politicians do not possess.
This is not to suggest that, though he usually kept his own counsel and measured his words, Reagan was not vocal in Hollywood. In fact, he did pay a price for his outspoken views about communism that resulted, at least once, in a serious threat to his own personal safety and even his ability to continue an acting career. At one time he was threatened with having disfiguring acid thrown on his face, and as a result he started carrying a handgun for his own personal safety. He also experienced this kind of backlash during his days as Governor, when he was challenged by angry mobs of students during the shutdown of the California State University System over budget cuts. This was ideal preparation for the opposition that would, at times, rage against him from opponents during his presidency.
Reagan expressed strong views in strong terms, but he did not engage in the merely emotional barrage of protests sometimes aimed at him. He would rarely be drawn into the contest personally, only in his role as an officeholder. This was typical of his handling of any form of strife or controversy. He was strong and confident but did not typically initiate or react to fiery exchanges. He let his lieutenants handle the skirmishes.
For example, decades later he would handle Gorbachev the same way when, rather than engage the Soviet leader in a prolonged or an angry fight, Reagan simply walked out of their second bilateral summit meeting at Reykjavik, Iceland. He did so over the Soviet leader’s persistent demand that Reagan give up his commitment to his signature Strategic Defense Initiative. In its immediate aftermath, the summit was declared a disaster for both men and a lost opportunity for improving bilateral relations.
It wasn’t long, however, before it was seen as a decisive win for Reagan. His walking out was calculated on his part, and it drew a definitive line beyond which he would not compromise. After two more summit meetings between the two leaders, the bilateral relationship between the U.S. and the USSR made significant progress, and the Soviet Union itself ultimately disintegrated. The Reykjavik summit, and how Reagan handled it, was a contributing factor. Reagan would not deviate from his principles even in the face of pressure to abandon SDI from many of his own advisors, from a whole host of ridiculers who even used SDI in comedy skits, and from those who wrote about SDI in plentiful editorials.
Reagan held many of his personal views close to his vest, and while it was a wise decision not to indiscriminately disclose these deeply held beliefs, he also paid a price by being misunderstood. This caution inhibited his progress on some issues. His political adversaries and even those who were not decided enemies had him labeled or defined as a person far from who he actually was.
For example, the Russian people for many years held a terrifying, trigger-happy, warmongering image of Reagan, because that was the only image their official news outlets would present—and it was a politically convenient image for them to promote. In fact, at times their streets carried colorful banners of Reagan depicting him as a warmonger and spreading anxiety through its citizenry. They were surprised later when they discovered the man they feared all that time was not fearsome at all. Even many Americans considered Reagan cold, indifferent to the plight of the disadvantaged, remote from those in need, and more attuned to the rich. This may have been a partisan contrivance, but it was not an accurate portrayal.
While he was not the only person in politics or in a leadership role who has carried a significant bearing of faith, Reagan was able to maintain a primarily spiritual disposition without exposing it in a way that would have opened him to ridicule. Some politicians who have, perhaps innocently or from religious fervor, exposed their faith too effusively have been isolated from the opportunities they might otherwise have been accorded in the political realm. Reagan did not generally allow his private faith and beliefs to be associated with political causes or to be used for political purposes, although he was unequivocal about his stance on conservative social issues. Reagan, though, could not be completely pigeonholed into the tinderbox where politics and faith can be a potentially lethal combination. Without question, however, his faith remained the most significant factor in the decisions he made and the actions he took. He said that in his own words. His faith was the bedrock of his character, and it cannot be discounted in assessing his political impact as a world leader.
Reagan often let those who represented his views—mostly historic leaders, thinkers, and writers the world had come to largely respect—speak for him. To this mix he added his pastors from the Presbyterian Church and a small select group of others he sent on special missions to carry his message. This was an ingenious approach. He put forward an agenda for the American people and then defended it mostly with the words of widely respected leaders and thinkers the world had largely accepted, and who were mostly notable individuals of earlier eras. This was a parallel strategy to the one in which he introduced and honored contemporary heroes at the annual State of the Union address before Congress and the American people via television. These heroes, their lives and actions, illustrated the points Reagan was attempting to make in this annual peroration in a more memorable and sometimes emotional way, and rather than drawing attention away from himself he actually gained praise and personal strength from it.
Reagan’s mixture of Biblical quotations with secular ones was famously in evidence in his references to the image of America as a “shining city on a hill.” The origin of the quote is Scriptural. In the Gospel of Matthew, Christ tells his followers in the Sermon on the Mount, “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.” Sixteen hundred years later, John Winthrop, the future Governor of Massachusetts, said to his fellow Pilgrims on landing in the New World, in secular words that echoed the Gospel, “We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.” Reagan was not alone in his admiration for Winthrop’s inspiring reference. Other Presidents, such as Adams, Lincoln, Kennedy, and Clinton, have invoked the “city on a hill” metaphor as well. Reagan often blended Biblical allusions and secular concepts in this context, such as when he said,
“The lamp of individual conscience burns bright. By that I know we will all be guided to that dreamed-of day when no one wields a sword and no one drags a chain.”
In another speech, this one at a Conservative Political Action Committee dinner in 1982, Reagan again combined religious and secular imagery when he said,
“Fellow Americans, our duty is before us tonight. Let us go forward, determined to serve selflessly a vision of man with God, government for the people, and humanity at peace. For it is now our task to tend and preserve, through the darkest and coldest nights, that ‘sacred fire of liberty’ that President Washington spoke of two centuries ago, a fire that tonight remains a beacon to all the oppressed of the world, shining forth from this kindly, pleasant, greening land we call America.”
Another important and unusual feature of Reagan as a global leader was that he had an impersonal disposition toward events and people. This was especially useful in bilateral and multilateral negotiations, where he sat at the table across from people with big personalities and large egos. His personal ego was not in the fight… just his set of principles. In fact, it would be hard to find a personal ego in Ronald Reagan at all. This is another crucially important concept to grasp about Reagan’s character and how it affected his relationships with many world leaders.
What I learned firsthand was that his impersonality or complete lack of personal ego or sensitivity was one of his greatest and yet most subtle strengths as a leader in public life. It was also one of his genuine weaknesses in his private and family life. It was exemplified by that hand-tooled, gold-embossed burgundy leather plaque that was hard for anyone who came into the Oval Office to miss, from cleaning people to heads of state. It sat front and center on his massive historic desk—“There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go, if he does not mind who gets the credit.” This lack of need for approval, acceptance, recognition, acclaim, or fame was one of the rare human qualities and secret ingredients in the impervious armor he wore, armor that was called his Teflon coating by the media. Untoward events and blame did not stick to him, because they did not generally offend him.
Before observing this quality firsthand in Reagan, I would have thought just the opposite was a true characteristic of great leadership—that people who are especially personable and personally sensitive would make the best leaders. Reagan showed me a different way. Being impersonal allowed him to make tough choices based on the principle of the situation rather than having the decision-making process clouded by personal consideration or attachment to people or sentimentality. Margaret Thatcher had this quality as well, and that was why she was called “The Iron Lady.”
I remember being in China with him on a state visit when he found out that he owed me some money—a very modest amount. I had taken his wife on a shopping trip for a set of pearls, something many tourists do. I had paid for the pearls, since Presidents and their wives don’t usually carry much money, if any. When he found out about it, he wanted to remedy that right away. I told him we had much more important things to focus on, much more important work to do. He wouldn’t hear of it. He insisted on our walking into his bedroom in the lavish State Guest House in Beijing, where he took out his personal checkbook. Still I protested that he shouldn’t be bothered with it at the time. “What was the exact dollar amount again?” he quizzed, and he quickly wrote out a check to repay the debt. (The ironic thing, of course, about checks from Presidents is that you never really want to cash them because of their possible future historic value!)
When we returned to Washington, he called me at home one night and asked me if I could find a bracelet for Nancy to match the necklace she had bought in Beijing. Even in an exchange as mundane and personal as that, he would treat you as if you were his best friend—and yet there was an undertone of impersonality or slight detachment about it that was difficult to describe. This quality, though subtle, was also felt and observed by many others, and it was apparently with him throughout his life. I believe it gave him his ability to deflect criticism, stay focused, and be a strong leader without complicating his own personality.
Reagan’s years working as spokesman for General Electric (GE) are especially important to consider in relation to his later role as a global leader and communicator. It was during those years that he was researching major public policy issues from different perspectives in order to build his own platform of political positions and ideas. He wrote all of his own speeches in longhand on yellow legal pads (a preference of his during the presidency as well), crafting and editing a message he could adopt as his own.
During this time, from 1954 to 1962, when he rode the train for GE because of his fear of flying, the speaker and his speeches were becoming synchronized. He always professed and confirmed his individual beliefs and values when discussing company and more general issues with factory workers and management alike. During this time he completed his migration from Democrat to Republican. He insisted on writing his own speeches and would not merely mouth the corporate policy that was handed to him. This practice allowed him to develop his independent views, and in his delivery of them he integrated his views with the message. This work was perhaps even more valuable to his preparation for the presidency than the staging and script reading that he did to prepare for the fifty-three motion pictures in which he performed.
The hundreds of handwritten GE speeches, discovered by Martin and Annalise Anderson, two acclaimed professors at Stanford University who had served Reagan in California and Washington, provide concrete evidence of Reagan’s thought processes and his personal writing ability. In his GE job he had no bank of ingenious speechwriters assigned to him, as he later did in the White House. In these handwritten speeches there was also evidence of actual research into facets and facts of the various issues he wanted to address in his GE talks.
A preview of the presidential brand he developed and honed during his GE days was debuted, to unexpected success, in a nationally televised and now iconic speech. He was selected to introduce Barry Goldwater, an old friend of Nancy Reagan’s family and candidate for President, at the 1964 Republican National Convention in Phoenix. The result was that Reagan, the conservative Republican, was officially launched into the national public arena. His political career was unexpectedly inaugurated at this convention. The content of his widely noticed speech formed the core of his own personal platform, which had been developed during his days on the road for GE. This speech was called “A Time for Choosing.”
In his book, The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism, Thomas W. Evans writes about the GE period in Reagan’s career this way: “Ronald Reagan developed a vision of America during his GE years. He learned to reduce his views to a few simple precepts… His methods of absorbing massive amounts of material, of writing and delivering his speeches, were unique. Perhaps the most persuasive statements confirming his education during his General Electric years come from the Reagans themselves. In her autobiography, Nancy Reagan wrote that ‘if you believe, as Ronnie does, that everything happens for a purpose, then certainly there was a hidden purpose in Ronnie’s job with General Electric.’”
Reagan himself referred to his GE years as his “post-graduate education in political science” and observed that “it wasn’t a bad apprenticeship for someone who’d someday enter public life.” He spoke of his “self-conversion” during these years, and that he ended up “preaching sermons” about his strongly held beliefs. His speechwriters at the White House admitted using the speeches of the GE years as the basis of some of their own drafts. During the General Electric days when he was thinking, researching, writing, and speaking, Reagan learned how to do what he would do as President—turn his beliefs, vision, and character into significant electoral victories and steer the course of history through persuasive leading and talking.
In the Reagan GE speeches his emerging ideology became clearer. In Schenectady, New York, in 1959 (as related to me by a nonagenarian friend of mine who was there), he said, “We have been told by economists down through the years that if the total tax burden ever reaches 25 percent, we are in danger of undermining our private enterprise system.” He continued to build his repertoire, and in 1961, he added what was perhaps obvious to many, although often left unsaid by politicians, that “the ideological struggle with Russia is the number one problem in the world.” By 1964, when drafting the Goldwater address, he borrowed from and built on his GE speeches when he said famously:
“I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down. Up to the maximum of individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism… You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least our children and our children’s children, will say of us, we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”
In this part of the speech he was publicly announcing his lifelong attachment to a metaphoric allusion to light and darkness.
At GE he could try out more conservative views and actually make the full transition from registered Democrat to Republican, a metamorphosis that was complete by the time of the Goldwater convention and the “Time for Choosing” speech in 1964. It was on those long trips—crisscrossing the country by train, visiting 139 GE plants in forty states, and speaking to more than 250,000 people at the factory gates—that he previewed viewpoints on public issues that he later put to use in official public service. The GE years actually readied him for national politics and gave him a platform—although at that time he could not have known what might lie ahead for him. GE offered him a fully financed (to the tune of a $125,000-per-year salary) period of message development and the time to carve his principles and beliefs in stone.
With the sponsorship of GE, he was getting good results in improved labor relations and goodwill for the company. Reagan had steady crowds at these speaking engagements, and during a period when he was away from home for weeks at a time, he wrote to Nancy that the crowds seemed genuinely interested in what he had to say. GE was increasingly proud of Reagan, and for his part he felt that he was really earning his yearly salary—which was an impressive sum at that time. But he was earning something else far more valuable to his future and ultimately for the world than his fee. The responses he got from the crowds on the GE trips provided him with invaluable feedback that resulted in constant refinements and edits to his presentations. Reagan would rework his speeches on the train and then try out a new line, story, or quote at the next stop.
Lem Boulware, a GE Vice President and the man who worked most closely with Reagan, wrote, “It’s the job of… every citizen—to go back to school in economics, individually in small groups and in big groups… to learn from simple textbooks, from organized courses, from individual discussions with business associates, in neighborhood groups… This was a summary of the process that became the education of Ronald Reagan, and as Reagan became increasingly a participant, this was the beginning of his role in the conservative revolution in America.”
Most anyone who worked for Reagan would say that once he reached the White House his beliefs were so strongly entrenched that he was mostly unmovable and stubborn when challenged on them. It was during these earlier career deployments, however, that he was changing, honing, refining, and improving various messages and approaches. This was a time for creating the principles he ultimately lived by, rules that he put into practice in public life during his two terms as Governor of California from 1968 to 1976 and then in his final job as President.
There is another possible cause for this obstinacy—a trait in evidence in his White House years but often overlooked. It was simply that he entered the ultimate spotlight when he was older than any other man who had gained the highest office. Reagan was sixty-nine when elected, and he served from the age of seventy almost to his seventy-eighth birthday. By comparison, George Washington (who, frozen in time, we think of as eternally old) was only fifty-seven when inaugurated, and John F. Kennedy was forty-three. Theodore Roosevelt was the youngest to assume the office of chief executive at forty-two. The President closest in age to Reagan was my own ancestor William Henry Harrison; elected at age sixty-eight, he was dead from pneumonia or sepsis within weeks of his inauguration!
Reagan frequently and famously joked about his age and used it to his advantage in self-deprecating ways. I think his age gave him a more mature and experienced point of view—or playbook—if for no other reason than because he had simply been at work longer and had more on-the-job experience than some other political leaders. He had been in front of the camera and in public speaking for more years than his competitors. This was a numerical leg up. He was not, at that stage of his life, about to give up the principles he had worked so hard for and had come to depend upon. Reagan had been an understudy for the role of a lifetime for much longer than most. Even his failed bid for the Republican nomination in 1976 gave him more seasoning and maturity, not to mention a better experienced team that helped put him over the finish line in his final win in 1980. In looking back, I did not really consider the Reagans’ age at all when either scheduling them or traveling with them. For me they were young and capable of anything—and yet this could not have been true. I remember going in back doors and up staircases with them. Out of sight of the public they preferred taking the steps two or three at a time and bounding up as fast as they could to keep in shape. We staff members and the Secret Service had to keep up. While the President was not a jogger or tennis player—preferring horseback riding, building fences, and chopping wood for outdoor exercise—I clearly remember his daily commitment to working out in the private gym that was installed in one of the two front bedrooms in the family quarters. He told me with pride that he had added muscle tone following the assassination attempt. His gym routine was a daily ritual that I often observed.
Reagan’s obstinate streak provided consternation to some on the White House staff, Cabinet officials, and bureaucrats who would, at times, ply him with plentiful reasons why he should moderate or alter his views or official position on one issue or another. Some officials rejected portions of his speech drafts and provided him with policy options that reflected more of their own views than his. I observed senior advisors, and even his wife, devise unique ways to reach Reagan with compelling arguments they wanted him to consider and even adopt. I also observed them trying circuitously to influence him or to convince him to change a strongly held position by going around him, avoiding direct confrontation—which they knew he would not like.
This was why the unique triumvirate of James Baker, Ed Meese, and Mike Deaver, as his most senior aides, was essential to protecting Reagan and to allowing him to be himself. Deaver and Nancy Reagan conferred every morning on the President’s disposition and his attitudes about various issues. They formed a close-knit team to sometimes urge him to change or moderate positions in ways they considered important to his legacy. This interplay between staff and the President’s spouse to influence his rock-solid views and opinions was a prominent part of the daily dynamics of the Reagan White House.
At times White House observers felt that Reagan was dominated by Nancy and that she was the real power in this political couple. Furthermore his opponents used Nancy Reagan’s perceived position of power to denigrate Reagan or to reduce his own power, replacing it with some of hers. From my vantage point of working for both of them, I could see that she was a hardworking, smart, fiercely loyal, and supportive spouse, yet I could also see that Reagan rarely yielded his position on policy issues to the First Lady. Reagan himself was not about to be controlled by anyone. She frequently stated the obvious that she alone had the last word at night and the first word in the morning with the President. There is no question that she influenced and may have moderated his position on certain issues, but he held tightly to the reins. In this way he was the decidedly dominant force between the two of them when it came to his work.
While Reagan did modify his views on some critical issues, or at least his manner in communicating about these issues, he always reserved judgment about what he thought was right. He was a staunch defender of people who worked for him, perhaps even unwisely—people such as David Stockman, his budget director, who ridiculed Reagan’s supply-side economic programs, and Labor Secretary Ray Donovan, who fell under criminal investigation for alleged illegal activities in the New York construction industry but was later exonerated. It was hard for him to actually believe a person could be ill intentioned—even though he had surely seen many unscrupulous people in his lifetime.
Reagan was wary of some bureaucratic policy makers, government officials, and others who offered their advice and tried to navigate his course for him from their own wheelhouse. He may have been naïve about some who sought to take advantage of him to build their own credibility. Nancy Reagan sought to shore up what she thought was her husband’s vulnerability on personnel issues by weighing in on Administration appointments, including ambassadorial posts and the firing of his second Chief of Staff, Don Regan.
Because Reagan was conflict averse and avoided head-on collisions with those who wronged him or those who needed to be disciplined, he rarely confronted the very people who might have plainly benefited from it. It took mounting pressure on Reagan from many quarters to move him to fire Regan, just as it had been difficult to fire Al Haig, his first Secretary of State. As journalist and biographer Lou Cannon wrote, Reagan’s “stubborn streak did not yield easily to the demands of staff or spouse,” especially “when a member of the Reagan team was under fire on a question of judgment or ethics from a White House official, the Democrats, the media, or a combination of the three.”
Reagan did not generally see or label people as bad, evil, or dishonest. He tended to just see the good in people—not some fantasy goodness—in a way that was practical and useful for him. I think he had spent so many years looking on the bright side of things that it was almost impossible for him to imagine a human being as malicious. That does not mean that he did not see and strenuously call out impersonal or political evil for what it was; however, he did not view evil as personal or see people as inherently or individually evil.
I sat with him a few times watching the evening news, up in the family quarters, which invariably included something about Reagan that was completely false and at least irritating. Yes, he could get angry in these circumstances, but I did not have the feeling he was blaming a particular reporter or that he was spiteful or hateful. What some might call passivity was actually a very practical tool of effective leadership, especially in negotiating with individuals who might not have been personally very likeable or who held unfavorable attitudes toward the United States.
As a result, France’s socialist President François Mitterrand, China’s Deng Xiaoping, and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, though they had serious political disagreements with Reagan, stated that they were drawn to him on a personal level. This was apparent to many of us, and, according to Lou Cannon, an official who attended meetings Reagan had with heads of state said, “Reagan the man, the politician, fascinated them. It was almost as if they were saying, ‘What does this man have that works so well for him?’ It was like they wanted to bottle it, take it home, and use it themselves.”
Reagan’s well-known rock-solid stance on issues also helped make him understandable to the public on a world platform. This was ironic, since for several years in the run-up to the election, he was characterized by his opponents as trigger-happy, shallow, unreliable, and changeable—to list words often used by journalists to describe him. In actuality, Reagan turned out to be one of the most stable and steady Presidents. The public always knew where he stood on an issue, because he repeated his position for them over and over again. During his eight years, the public was mostly focused on jobs, economic growth and security, taxes, and eliminating the threat of conflict with another superpower, the Soviet Union. These were obvious, though complex, issues for Reagan and his time. Within this economic and foreign policy climate, Reagan set the agenda and drove it for most of his eight years. That was the point of the “Theme for the Day” task force on which I served for a time—putting Reagan squarely in control of the agenda. The U.S. presidency held a heightened and uniquely powerful position in the world during those eight years, and he felt obligated to keep it there and use the power and the prestige he garnered to America’s advantage.
This known quantity aspect of Reagan, as well as his strength as a leader, was a plus in bilateral relationships with other heads of state and with the U.S. Congress as well. It must have been relatively easy for foreign leaders to prepare for meetings with Reagan, because his positions radiated out from his personal beliefs and were well publicized and documented. The dynamic situations in various regions of the world were sometimes more complex than his basic beliefs could address; however, they were the bedrock from which he developed more detailed and specific policy positions on issues as they arose. An example might be his response to Thatcher’s 1982 invasion of the Falkland Islands off the coast of Argentina. Thatcher sought and expected Reagan’s endorsement of her adventure, and she was surprised to find Reagan unwilling to condone her decision.
A central plank in Reagan’s foundational beliefs was the concept of American Exceptionalism. This did not mean, for him, that Americans were superior to people of other nations. It did mean that the ideals on which America was founded were absolutely superior and necessary for the promotion and protection of democracy throughout the world. This belief embraced the view that ultimately the U.S. government, as the most effective form of democracy the world has experienced, had the responsibility to help create free and open societies, promote and protect individual liberties, and help engineer a path to economic growth and stability for all peoples. He also believed that in so doing America also protected its own way of life against threats from foreign and unfriendly sources. This was the essential light Reagan was referring to when he spoke about the “shining city on a hill.” Reagan truly felt that if the light from these ideals were to extinguish or even to dim, the rest of the world could suffer.
Reagan remained unmovable in his belief that building up and maintaining a strong military while he conducted an assertive verbal indictment of the evils of communism would have its intended effect. While he played his role, the State Department and the Pentagon deployed specific and comprehensive diplomatic and military strategies and initiatives as part of his strategy. Nancy Reagan herself sought to soften the President’s rhetoric and encouraged an easing in his tone in ways she felt could contribute to a lasting thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations. While he was not unmindful of her entreaties, often made through third parties, he never abdicated what he saw as his principal responsibility to do the job in the way that would accomplish the greatest good—despite what others, including Nancy, thought he should do. He heard what those around him were suggesting, but he had his own plan and he would not be deterred in carrying it out. He was an independent man. He was a loner; he was willing to go alone on issues and language about which he felt strongly.
One example of Reagan’s singular focus—and also his foresight—was his proposal for a space-based missile shield to defend the United States. Reagan called it the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). His critics called it Star Wars. Those critics also called it reckless, unrealistic, too expensive, and a recipe for starting a nuclear war. But Reagan, as usual, stood by his vision, defied his critics, and used SDI as a key element in his arsenal to help bring down the Soviet Union. When Reagan refused to give up SDI at the 1987 Reykjavik, Iceland, summit with Gorbachev, his Soviet counterparts knew their country would never win the Cold War as long as Reagan was in charge. “Looking back,” Margaret Thatcher later wrote, “it is now clear to me that Ronald Reagan’s original decision on SDI was the single most important of his presidency.” She said that his “refusal to trade away SDI… was crucial to the victory over communism.” SDI was a specific tactic to fulfill a strategy of peace through strength.
In his presidential role, where clever storytelling could be useful, Reagan charmed many heads of state. This even included General Secretary Gorbachev, who described Reagan as a master storyteller, and who especially enjoyed Reagan’s tales of Hollywood. According to the author Frances FitzGerald, Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, “devoured the details” of Reagan’s Hollywood days, “his career in the movies, how movies were produced, how different directors worked, [and] how various stars behaved in real life.” They “seemed pleased to be in the company of someone who had known Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, and Humphrey Bogart.”
I know from my own experience that Gorbachev told the President he had watched old Reagan movies in preparation for their first meeting in Geneva. I found it hard to believe, though, that Raisa had that much interest, as I always found her lecturing or scolding Nancy Reagan about the value of the collective, communist way of life. She was, however, fascinated with the West, and she used her American Express card freely when visiting London and other Western cities; and yet she stayed true to her academic training as a college professor at Moscow University focused on the history and values of socialism.
Brian Mulroney, Prime Minister of Canada, and also a great storyteller himself, told me that Reagan came to life for him “in his stories, and they were always put to good use in our G5 meetings and elsewhere.” To him, Reagan was the master at using illustrations “to lead and to teach—without placing himself in the direct line of fire.” Margaret Thatcher, who was also on the receiving end of many Reagan stories, appeared to take them all in good humor. At his eighty-third birthday party in 1994, she admitted the importance of his storytelling. She said, “With that Irish twinkle and that easy homespun style, which never changed, you brought a new assurance to America… It was not only that you were the Great Communicator—and you were the greatest—but that you had a message to communicate. The message that had inspired the Founding Fathers, the message that has guided this nation from its birth—the essence of good government is to blend the wisdom of the ages with the circumstances of contemporary times—that is what you did. Not since Lincoln or Winston Churchill in Britain has there been a President who has so understood the power of words to uplift and to inspire.” Then Thatcher added, most strikingly, “Like Winston Churchill, you made words fight like soldiers and lifted the spirit of a nation.”