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RONALD REAGAN: A STUDENT AND A STAR
“Reagan was better read and better educated than we were.”
—Robert Novak
More than a decade after his death and a quarter century after he left the White House, Ronald Reagan still looms large. Recent books about Reagan explore his leadership style, his faith, his days as spokesman for General Electric, his time in Hollywood—you name it. There are great biographies such as the trilogy from Lou Cannon, not-so-great ones like the oddly semi-fictional Dutch by Edmund Morris, and everything in between. You could fill a library with books about Reagan. My bookshelves are full of books about him. Why not? He was the greatest president of my lifetime and the only full-fledged modern “movement” conservative ever elected president. The Gipper managed to restore optimism in America after years of malaise. And he won the Cold War. Not bad for a graduate of tiny Eureka College whom former secretary of defense Clark Clifford once dismissed as an “amiable dunce.”
But a largely untold story is that Reagan observers were mostly blind to his intelligence and scholarship, a factor that, along with his relentlessly sunny demeanor, allowed him to repeatedly mystify friends and foes alike and win campaigns and public policy battles. Between 1976—the year he lost the Republican primary to the incumbent president, Gerald Ford—and his successful presidential bid in 1980, Reagan delivered daily radio messages, which he personally wrote (you can find them in the book Reagan, in His Own Hand). “These are earnest policy sermons,” David Brooks wrote in a New York Times book review. “Reagan covered everything from bilingual education to the Panama Canal to the political situation in Equatorial Guinea, engrossing himself in a level of detail that frankly surpasses that of almost all op-ed columnists today.” Brooks then continued, “In 1978, for example, he came across a speech the Yale law professor Eugene Rostow gave on the proposed SALT II arms control agreement. Reagan couldn’t do just one radio commentary summarizing and commenting on Rostow’s views. He did six, going through the arcana about mobile launchers, MIRVs, Minutemen versus MX missiles and so on.” This both dismantles the notion that Reagan was merely an “actor” reading a script and also serves to juxtapose his substantive commentary with the sort of “shock” radio format that came to define much of conservative talk radio in the twenty-first century.
The Education of a Would-Be President
Reagan’s political accomplishments were the result of a man who, for decades, took ideas seriously. Long before being elected president, he was boning up on policy and philosophy. During his General Electric days, “Reagan needed to keep his material fresh, so he would load steamer trunks full of books and news articles and read them in the long hours traveling across the country, rather than going to the Club Car to knock back drinks with the other businessmen,” says Reagan biographer Craig Shirley. “He traveled a long road from bleeding-heart liberal to populist conservative and an important part of that maturation process was his self-education—autodidact—on board those trains through all those years.”32 All that reading made a huge difference. And the good news is, he kept the books. Bearing witness to this fact, Lee Edwards, an unofficial historian of the American conservative movement, has recounted a 1965 visit he made to the Reagan home when Reagan was contemplating running for governor of California. At one point during the visit, Edwards availed himself of an opportunity to secretly peruse Reagan’s bookshelves.
“I went over and began looking at the titles,”33 he said. “They were history, biography, economics, politics. All serious stuff. I began pulling the books out of the shelves and looking at them,” Edwards attested. “They were dog-eared. They were annotated. They were smudged by his fingers, and so forth. This was a man who had read hundreds of books. It was clear that he had read them, had digested them, and had studied them,” he continued. “I knew right away, this was a thinking conservative. This was a man who loved ideas. He was comfortable with ideas and was able to take ideas and translate them into a common idiom.”
Indeed, Reagan not only consumed the ideas of great conservative thinkers but also adapted them for his authentically American worldview. What is more, it’s equally impressive that he never stopped welcoming such counsel from smart conservatives. One of the most significant turned out to be Representative Jack Kemp, then a backbench Buffalo congressman and a former NFL star quarterback who was the antithesis of a dumb jock. Shaped by a wealth of diverse life experiences, Kemp advocated an uplifting conservative philosophy that was at least partly the product of his experience with diverse Americans. Newt Gingrich once quipped that “Jack Kemp has showered with more black Americans than most Republicans have ever met.” And it was during the interregnum between Reagan’s failed 1976 bid and his successful 1980 run that Kemp introduced Reagan to an innovative policy idea called supply-side economics, a school of thought that argues that lower taxes broaden the tax base, sometimes resulting in more revenue, which clicked with Reagan’s innate optimism. Previously, Reagan, like the entire GOP, had been a “green eyeshade party”—pessimistic bean counters worried about deficits and balanced budgets. Those were fine things to be concerned with, but it also implied a zero-sum world where we were all fighting over limited resources. Thanks to Kemp, Reagan changed that paradigm, and the implications were huge. Who would have thought an ex-quarterback and a former actor would be among the GOP’s most significant politicians?
And Reagan’s interest in conservative philosophy and economics didn’t end once he became president, either. In his terrific memoir, The Prince of Darkness, reporter and columnist Robert Novak recalled how he and his partner, Rowland Evans, were taken aback during a meeting with Reagan in which the president dazzled them with his knowledge of relatively obscure economic philosophers:
Describing himself as a “voracious reader,” Reagan cited nineteenth-century British free trade advocates John Bright and Richard Cobden and twentieth-century Austrian free market economists Ludwig von Mises and Fredrick von Hayek. He also said, “Bastiat has dominated my thinking so much.” Bastiat? Rowly and I had to look him up. Claude Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850) was a French political economist who preached against protectionism and socialism. Later in the interview, Reagan talked about liberal clergymen who had been influenced by Reichenbach’s advocacy of big government taking care of the poor. Reichenbach? That sent Rowly and me back to the reference books to look up Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953), a German philosopher who belonged to the Vienna Circle of legal positivists. Reagan was better read and better educated than we were.
Reagan as an “Amiable Dunce”?
“Stupid is as stupid does,” the title character of the film Forrest Gump famously averred. This means worldly intelligence isn’t about the trappings of intellect, but instead, the proof’s in the pudding. If Ronald Reagan was stupid, then perhaps we should elect more like him?
This sentiment was captured well in a 2004 Washington Post column by journalist Howell Raines. “In 1981 Clark Clifford, the Democratic ‘wise man,’ entertained Georgetown dinner parties with the killer line that Reagan was ‘an amiable dunce,’” recalled Raines. “Twenty years later we know that Clark Clifford was charged in a banking scandal and the dunce ended the Cold War.”
Ultimately, Reagan’s accomplishments are why we even know about his brand of conservatism. Had he simply faded into that good night after his primary loss to incumbent president Gerald Ford in 1976—or had an assassin’s bullet strangled the conservative movement’s baby in the crib—history would have been completely different, and Reagan’s rhetoric, optimism, and intellect would have been largely lost to history. Or had Reagan’s tenure not been marked by peace and prosperity, he might have served as a warning, not a role model, for aspiring conservative thinkers and leaders.
This raises an interesting question: Although it is widely understood today that Reagan was a great or near-great president, why was he continually derided as an “amiable dunce” during his tenure? To be sure, diminishing the intellect of a powerful Republican was and still is standard operating procedure for Democrats. That explains part of it, but the other reason is that Reagan benefited politically from being underestimated. I’m not suggesting he was faking his everyman persona—although there is reason to believe he certainly magnified it.34
Even some members of his own administration grappled with understanding the man. For example Bud McFarlane, the national security adviser, once said of Reagan, “He knows so little and accomplishes so much.”35 Likewise, even friendly journalists (the few who weren’t inherently hostile to a Republican) were befuddled by Reagan. After a meeting with the president that yielded little news or insight, columnist Charles Krauthammer complained. “I don’t get it,” he told a Washington Post colleague as they left a White House lunch meeting together. “This is the most successful president of my lifetime, but he presents himself as a very simple man who’s sort of out of it. What’s going on?”
It’s worth noting that Reagan’s ability to feign this everyman persona was so effective that it confounded even those considered brilliant political observers. “It took me years to realize that that’s how he preferred to present himself,” Krauthammer, by then a conservative columnist, recalled.36 “And it was really a function of his strength. He had no need to show himself to be smart…and he just wanted to tell stories, deflect me, and charm me. And it was part of his persona.…He never had to show himself to be the smartest guy in the room.” Then, citing a famous Saturday Night Live skit that portrayed a shrewd and Machiavellian Reagan posing as a simpleton in front of the press, Krauthammer continued: “It’s wise to be underestimated. That was part of Reagan’s great political talent.”
So where did this talent come from? “Reagan, when he was in elementary or junior high school, figured out that the smartest guy in class is not the most popular guy in class,” explained journalist Fred Barnes, recalling a theory that had been bandied about by Reagan intimates.37 “Reagan realized he wanted to be the most popular guy…and Reagan fashioned this person who doesn’t appear that smart—but really a common man who fit in with the American people.…It worked marvelously, and got him elected.”
Much has been made about the fact that Reagan, being the son of an alcoholic, fell into the role of family peacemaker. And from his time as a lifeguard, to his days in Hollywood—where he was almost always cast as a hero—Reagan, unlike Barry Goldwater, clearly had a deep need to be liked. To some degree, he seems to have made a conscious choice to accentuate his likability at the expense of stressing his intellectual side. Electorally speaking, it was a brilliant decision.
Reagan’s Brand of Cosmopolitan Conservatism
Possessing an intentionally underrated intellect wasn’t the Gipper’s only secret weapon for political success. Reagan came to politics from Hollywood, which provided a cosmopolitan sheen that balanced his Midwestern upbringing and the Western cowboy image he assiduously cultivated. (In fact, the aforementioned nickname comes from Reagan’s portrayal of Notre Dame football player George “the Gipper” Gipp in Knute Rockney, All American.)
His days hosting a TV show called General Electric Theater were vital to his evolution from Democrat to Republican. Reagan toured GE’s 139 plants, where he met more than 250,000 employees, delivered speeches, and engaged in Q&A sessions with factory workers. His visits buttressed his populist appeal and served as a sort of extended focus group for understanding the plight of the average man. That is widely understood. Less understood—and perhaps more interesting for our purposes—is that Reagan’s time hobnobbing with Hollywood elites, starlets, liberals, artists, and even gays (Reagan was publicly opposed to the Briggs Initiative, also known as Proposition 6—which would have banned gays and lesbians from working in California public schools) contributed to his ability to talk intelligently and comfortably to a certain type of American cognoscenti with whom many conservatives would feel out of place.
In public, though, Reagan diligently downplayed his urbane side in favor of cultivating the “everyman” image. He campaigned for president by running against Washington, but once he became president, at least some of his success in office can be traced to his efforts to woo elected officials, as well as some of Washington’s upper crust. Chris Matthews recalled Reagan’s whirlwind courting of DC elites in his book Hardball:
The first thing Reagan did after being elected was attend a series of well-planned gatherings in the homes of the capital’s most prominent journalists, lawyers, and business people. The initial event was a party for the president-elect and his wife, Nancy, given at the F Street Club. The guests were the “usual suspects” of Washington political society; in other words, they were mostly Democrats. “I decided it was time to serve notice that we’re residents,” Reagan told the Washington Post’s Elisabeth Bumiller. “We wanted to get to know some people in Washington.” They went to dinner at the home of conservative columnist George Will, where they met Katharine Graham, publisher of the Post and bête noire of recent Republican administrations. Next, they attended a party thrown by Mrs. Graham at her home in Georgetown. All this sent a clear signal: the Reagans and their people had come to join Washington society, not scorn it.
Matthews, who worked for Reagan foes such as Jimmy Carter and Tip O’Neill before becoming a liberal MSNBC host, notes that Reagan’s “social courtship paid lasting dividends” for Reagan. And in what now sounds prophetic considering the obstructionism and gridlock in Washington (Hardball was written in 1988), Matthews laments, “The problem with new-breed pols is that in learning the skills of broadcasting they have forgotten the skills of schmoozing.” Schmoozing, of course, has a negative connotation—like the word networking—and evokes images of smoke-filled backrooms and back-slapping politicians who don’t stand for anything. But one man’s schmoozing is another man’s fellowshipping. And at least one cause of Washington’s current dysfunction is that politicians no longer build strong friendships and relationships with colleagues on both sides of the aisle—or the people who cover them.
Reagan wasn’t alone in using elite social currency to advance his conservative cause. From Austrian immigrants like Hayek to swashbuckling aristocrats like Bill Buckley, cosmopolitan conservatives have probably done as much to advance the cause as their more provincial counterparts, such as Tom DeLay, Jesse Helms, Robert Taft, et al. But just as Reagan intentionally downplayed his intelligence, he also downplayed his cosmopolitan background in favor of a more rustic image. For example, while there is little doubt Reagan liked to ride horses and cut brush at the Western White House, he and his team assiduously cultivated his rugged cowboy image. In 1966, a San Francisco reporter wanted to interview Reagan, then a candidate for governor of California. The idea was to get a glimpse of him at his ranch. But prior to the journalist’s arrival, Reagan aide Lyn Nofziger—who himself had been a reporter—noticed the future president was wearing English riding boots. Sensing this would make the candidate look effete, Nofziger sent Reagan back inside to put on some Western riding clothes. Thus the image of Reagan as cowboy was born.38 Nofziger’s gut was right. He was simply recognizing a deep-seated American affinity for the cowboy. Writing about Theodore Roosevelt in 1899, Harper’s Weekly39 declared, “[The American public] are fond of the picture of the man on horseback—whether he is riding after Spaniards or grizzlies or steers, whether he is a soldier, hunter, or ranchman.” Some things never change.
This penchant for playing up his cowboy image followed Reagan into the White House. For example, White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater wanted to release the list of nonfiction books he was devouring, in order to undermine the notion that all the president read was Louis L’Amour Westerns. Reagan wouldn’t allow it. “Reagan did not want to change and have people think that he’s some highfalutin guy reading books with a lot of footnotes,” Fred Barnes later speculated. The public kept on imagining Reagan was reading cowboy books.
The Great Communicator
It has become conventional wisdom that Reagan was a great communicator, but those who recall him as a folksy grandfather seem to forget that he earned the title of “the Great Communicator” not just with middlebrow relatability, but also with soaring poetic oratory. This thoroughly literate man used the full power of words to summon big ideas, transform the nation, inspire the world, challenge us and our enemies, and comfort a nation during some trying times.
Reagan’s rhetoric was not the sort of intellectual talk that lacks moral clarity. The man who averred, “Tear down this wall!” and called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” could hardly be accused of such a thing. By the same token, though, it wasn’t the sort of dumbed-down, red meat rhetoric that assumes we are a nation of rubes, either. Today, even the best politicians are usually skilled in displaying only one style of temperament. Some are masters at communicating indignation (Ted Cruz) or inspiration (Marco Rubio), but few can switch hit for a high batting average. Reagan was a master at both. He had Midwestern bona fides as a boy from Dixon, Illinois, who had worked in Iowa and toured GE factories—but who was simultaneously a movie star. He could play the populist card, and also appeal to our better angels. He could tell jokes and parables about average folks, but also quote poetry.
Some critics dismiss Reagan’s rhetorical skills by suggesting he was just an actor reciting lines—or by assigning much of the credit to his speechwriters, most notably the terrific Peggy Noonan. But all modern presidents have writers, and once a president delivers a speech, it is his speech. (One deserves credit for having the good sense to surround oneself with topflight writers who can capture his vision.) Reagan alone deserves credit for having put in the intellectual work required to develop a coherent political worldview. If writers could help fine-tune this philosophy to fit a specific occasion in eloquent fashion, so much the better. Nobody begrudged John F. Kennedy for surrounding himself with some of the best and brightest speechwriters.
One could write an entire book simply by culling Reagan’s oeuvre for greatest hits, but I’ll focus on two of my favorite speeches, each aimed at important occasions: the fortieth anniversary of D-day, and the Challenger disaster.
Let’s start with the D-day anniversary speech on June 6, 1984:
We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France. The air is soft, but forty years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon. At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, 225 Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs. Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion: to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns. The Allies had been told that some of the mightiest of these guns were here and they would be trained on the beaches to stop the Allied advance.…These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.
Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender’s poem. You are men who in your “lives fought for life…and left the vivid air signed with your honor.”
Note the vivid imagery: the “lonely, windswept point” and the “cries of men” and the “crack of rifle fire.” And note the use of poetry, in this case Stephen Spender’s words—something missing in most of today’s soulless, utilitarian, or technocratic political rhetoric. And note the original poetic flourishes: “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc.” At another event commemorating the anniversary, Reagan would share the story of a soldier who fought at D-day, and of his surviving daughter who was there in the soldier’s stead:
“Someday, Lis, I’ll go back,” said Private First Class Peter Robert Zanatta, of the Thirty-Seventh Engineer Combat Battalion, and first assault wave to hit Omaha Beach. “I’ll go back, and I’ll see it all again. I’ll see the beach, the barricades, and the graves.”
Those words of Private Zanatta come to us from his daughter, Lisa Zanatta Henn, in a heart-rending story about the event her father spoke of so often. “In his words, the Normandy invasion would change his life forever,” she said. She tells some of his stories of World War II but says of her father, “The story to end all stories was D-day.
“He made me feel the fear of being on that boat waiting to land. I can smell the ocean and feel the seasickness. I can see the looks on his fellow soldiers’ faces—the fear, the anguish, the uncertainty of what lay ahead. And when they landed, I can feel the strength and courage of the men who took those first steps through the tide to what must have surely looked like instant death.”
Private Zanatta’s daughter wrote to me, “I don’t know how or why I can feel this emptiness, this fear, or this determination, but I do. Maybe it’s the bond I had with my father. All I know is that it brings tears to my eyes to think about my father as a twenty-year-old boy having to face that beach.”
Here we have the blending of emotion with intelligence, of sincere appreciation that inspires but doesn’t pander. The unattained dream, “Someday, Lis, I’ll go back,” captures the human desire to return to the spot of our greatest sacrifice and our finest hour—and to pay homage to fallen comrades. These words mean so much more than the trite patriotic pablum that so often passes for political rhetoric. They genuinely inspire awe and respect for the solemn sacrifices required to maintain a free civilization.
I am reminded of a speech then candidate Barack Obama gave in 2008 about the power of rhetoric: “Don’t tell me words don’t matter. ‘I have a dream.’ Just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’—just words? Just speeches?” Putting aside the fact that Obama heavily borrowed the lines from Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, he was right. Words do matter. They inspire and instruct. It’s easy to dismiss words as superficial, but part of the job of a leader is to use words to inspire and teach and persuade.
Now let’s look at Reagan’s speech in 1986 on the day the Challenger exploded. It’s short, so I’m going to include the whole thing.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I’d planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans. Today is a day for mourning and remembering. Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss.
Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But, we’ve never lost an astronaut in flight; we’ve never had a tragedy like this. And perhaps we’ve forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle; but they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together.
For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we’re thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, “Give me a challenge and I’ll meet it with joy.” They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.
We’ve grown used to wonders in this century. It’s hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We’ve grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we’ve only just begun. We’re still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.
And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.
I’ve always had great faith in and respect for our space program, and what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don’t hide our space program. We don’t keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That’s the way freedom is, and we wouldn’t change it for a minute. We’ll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue. I want to add that I wish I could talk to every man and woman who works for NASA or who worked on this mission and tell them, “Your dedication and professionalism have moved and impressed us for decades. And we know of your anguish. We share it.”
There’s a coincidence today. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, “He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.” Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake’s, complete.
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved good-bye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”
The last line of the speech was surrounded by quotation marks because it comes from the first and last lines of John Gillespie Magee Jr.’s poem “High Flight,” a wonderful reference demonstrating both an interest in cultural literacy, and a respect for the audience’s intelligence.
To give you an idea of how far we’ve sunk since that speech, compare Reagan’s grand talk about the space exploration to the mockery that ensued when former Speaker and 2012 presidential candidate Newt Gingrich declared, “By the end of my second term, we need to have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American.”
“I am sick of being told we have to be timid, and I’m sick of being told we have to be limited to technologies that are fifty years old,” Gingrich said. And, for this, Gingrich was mocked. “If I had a business executive come to me and say I want to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I’d say, ‘You’re fired,’” Mitt Romney snarled in response during a debate in Jacksonville, Florida. Saturday Night Live made fun of Gingrich, too. Gingrich was encountering a phenomenon all too common in America today—a pessimism about reaching for the stars. What is more, this negativity might have been even more acute within the GOP, where doubts about our capacity to do great things were reinforced by concerns about budgets and a growing sense that we had to worry about keeping what we have—doing “nation building at home.”
Always optimistic, Reagan encouraged us to preserve our pioneer spirit. And during that moment of crisis, Reagan did about the only thing a political leader could do. He comforted us. He inspired us to believe that these lives were not lost for nothing—that they had purpose. He embraced the ongoing work of science and, invoking the explorer Sir Francis Drake, he reminded us of the thrill and romance of science—that the men and women who perished were modern-day explorers seeking to discover “the final frontier.”
The Reagan Legacy
“[Reagan] did not dislike intellectuals,” wrote Peggy Noonan (who crafted some of Reagan’s most poetic speeches) in a Wall Street Journal column that ran after his 2004 death.40 “His heroes often were intellectuals, from the Founders straight through Milton Friedman and Hayek and Solzhenitsyn. But he did not favor the intellectuals of his own day, because he thought they were in general thick-headed.” They weren’t the only ones. Sadly, the conservatives who followed could not duplicate Reagan’s delicate balance of intellectual and everyman optimism—or of populism and cosmopolitanism. Republicans have won some elections since, but the Reagan era marked the apogee of conservative governance. Reagan, in downplaying his intellectual side for political gain, might even have created some long-term unintended consequences, reinforcing the notion that conservatism—and its greatest champion—was unsophisticated.
Not to knock common sense, but it took Reagan more than good old-fashioned horse sense to fix America. And fix it he did. As Peggy Noonan noted in that same Wall Street Journal column, by the end of his presidency, “the Berlin Wall had been turned into a million concrete souvenirs, and Soviet communism had fallen. But of course it didn’t fall. It was pushed. By Mr. Know Nothing Cowboy Gunslinger Dimwit. All presidents should be so stupid.” Not bad for a graduate from Eureka College. Still, not everyone was satisfied.
In R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.’s 1992 book, The Conservative Crack-Up, the author laments that Reagan’s tenure didn’t leave the lasting mark that FDR’s presidency did. Whereas FDR’s presidency transcended politics and entered into nearly every institution of the culture—entertainment, academia, literature—Reagan’s presidency existed on an almost solely political plane. This, Tyrrell argues, is because the conservative intellectuals surrounding Reagan “were neither literary nor artistic” and thus, were not as interested in “affecting culture.” It’s hard to blame a guy who was busy winning the Cold War, but in the years since Tyrrell wrote that book, his criticism only looks truer. If we are to judge one’s performance—not merely based on what he did while he was in office, but also based on what happens after he leaves office (a high bar, indeed)—conservatives might rightly see Reagan’s presidency as the high-water mark for conservatism. But at the same time, at least some of what has followed can be attributed to the failure of Reagan-era conservatives to address the long-term cultural decay.