PROLOGUE
THE LION AT THE GATE

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

—PRESIDENT REAGAN AT THE BRANDENBURG GATE, WEST BERLIN, JUNE 12, 1987

MOST OF HIS senior aides didn’t want him to say it. Indeed, they tried repeatedly to talk him out of it. You’ll embarrass your host, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl. You’ll anger and provoke Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom you’ve just started making progress on arms control. You’ll whip up false hope among East Germans—for surely the Berlin Wall isn’t coming down anytime soon. Besides, Germans have grown used to the wall. The ultimate reason: You’ll look naive and foolish, Mr. President.

“Virtually the entire foreign policy apparatus of the U.S. government,” Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson recalled, tried to stop Ronald Reagan from saying “Tear down this wall,” including Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, and the new national security adviser, General Colin Powell.¹ “Some Reagan advisers,” the New York Times reported without naming names, “wanted an address with less polemics.”² The State Department and the National Security Council (NSC) persisted up to the last minute trying to derail it; one meeting between Powell and White House communications director Tom Griscom was, participants say, “tense and forceful.”

Reagan had to intervene against his own advisers. Ken Duberstein, serving then as Reagan’s deputy chief of staff, has offered different accounts of how the conversation went, but the gist of it was like this:

REAGAN: I’m the president, right?

DUBERSTEIN: Yes, sir, Mr. President. We’re clear about that.

REAGAN: So I get to decide whether the line about tearing down the wall stays in?

DUBERSTEIN: That’s right, sir. It’s your decision.

REAGAN: Then it stays in.³

But even this wasn’t the end of the effort to deflect the president from his purposes. While Air Force One was in flight to West Berlin, State and the NSC sent by fax one more speech draft to the plane without the Berlin Wall line. It went into the trash.

Today Reagan’s personalized call to “tear down this wall” is recognized as the most memorable line of his presidency, and Reagan’s role in the surprising and swift end of the Cold War the most celebrated aspect of his statecraft. Some of the people who opposed the line and tried to stop it now claim to have written it and been for it all along.

The Berlin Wall speech is a perfect microcosm of Ronald Reagan’s entire political career. Reagan, the New York Times said in its news story about the Berlin Wall speech, “revived a long-dormant debate over the Berlin Wall” (emphasis added).⁴ “Long dormant” for whom? Perhaps for the Times and American liberals, but certainly not the people of East Germany. That’s precisely the point: Reagan revived lots of long-dormant debates great and small about our political life. Indeed, the dominant theme and focus of this narrative is to survey and tie together the massive number of arguments Reagan opened up on nearly every front of American political life.

The ruckus over the Berlin Wall speech highlights two important things about Reagan, one now more widely recognized, and one still obscure. The first is Reagan’s insight, which is now acclaimed even among liberals who disagree with his philosophy. The second key aspect of Reagan’s statecraft that emerges from his staff’s opposition to the Berlin Wall line, and many similar episodes throughout his presidency, is the extent to which Reagan battled not only with the Democratic opposition but also against the conventional reflexes of much of his own party and staff. Often, in fact, Reagan’s fights with members of his own party were fiercer than his fights with Democrats. And there was still a third faction he had to battle—the news media. It was not so much the media’s liberalism as its adversarialism, grown to gargantuan dimensions in the decade after Watergate. The conformist mentality of the media on stories large and small meant that objectively, as the Marxists used to say, the media served the interests of Reagan’s opposition.

These aspects of Reagan’s political story are directly related on multiple levels, but we should take stock of his insight and imagination first. Reagan’s insight always seemed to be married to an uncanny sense of timing. Throughout his presidency, and especially in his face-to-face meetings with Gorbachev, Reagan seemed to know when to press hard with provocative positions and when to strike a more irenic pose. Friends and critics alike have drained tankers of ink trying to decipher Reagan’s unusual habits of mind.⁵ His imagination and his penchant for analysis by anecdote are usually deployed for the purpose of denigrating his intelligence, which conveniently overlooks the fact that analysis by anecdote is the method of Plato’s dialogues. Modern social science tries to reduce thinking either to an orderly, replicable process of formal logic and quantitative models or to the context of a person’s life.

But insight doesn’t work this way. Insight, the philosopher Bernard Lonergan notes in his magisterial study of the subject, is reached “not by learning rules, not by following precepts, not by studying any methodology … [Insight] is a function not of outer circumstances but of inner condition, pivots between the concrete and the abstract, and passes into the habitual texture of one’s mind.” Insight is discovery, not deduction; it shares the same element of genius that creates great new art. “Were there rules for discovery,” Lonergan adds, “then discoveries would be mere conclusions. Were there precepts for genius, then men of genius would be hacks.”⁶

Certainly there is insight at work in Reagan that was missing from other leading anti-Communist figures of modern times, with the significant exception of Winston Churchill, who also thought the Cold War need not be a permanent condition.⁷ Lincoln wrote that all nations have a central idea, from which all their minor thoughts radiate. The same can be said of great statesmen. Churchill’s central insight was that the distinction between liberty and tyranny is real and substantial—a distinction too often obscured in modern social science or willfully avoided by pusillanimous politicians. Reagan’s central idea was a variation of Churchill’s—that unlimited government is inimical to liberty, certainly in its vicious forms such as Communism or socialism, but also in its supposedly benign forms, such as bureaucracy.

Thus there was a seamless quality to Reagan’s domestic policy outlook and his Cold War grand strategy. Many of the histories and biographies now appearing, however, obscure the fact that Reagan’s foreign policy and domestic policy were of a piece. As Reagan’s role in the ending of the Cold War has come into much sharper relief over the past few years, the epic nature of that struggle is causing us gradually to lose focus on most other aspects of Reagan’s presidency, in part because the philosophy behind Reagan’s domestic ideas remains as controversial today as it was then. Apart from the Cold War, the conventional wisdom is that Reagan’s presidency ranged from fiasco (such as his economic policy) to disaster (the Iran-Contra scandal), just as many historians judge Churchill’s pre-World War II career as largely a failure or disaster.⁸

This represents a willed narrowness of historical imagination. Reagan cannot be understood in such a compartmentalized way, and his acknowledged success in one arena—the Cold War—cannot be disconnected from his larger political genius, which extended to domestic affairs as well. That Reagan regarded statism as a continuum rather than as a dichotomous problem of East and West was made clear in his 1982 speech in Westminster, where he said: “[T]here is a threat posed to human freedom by the enormous power of the modern state. History teaches the dangers of government that overreaches—political control taking precedence over free economic growth, secret police, mindless bureaucracy all combining to stifle individual excellence and personal freedom.” Reagan’s conflation of “secret police” and “mindless bureaucracy” was no coincidence, as his next sentence made plain: “Now, I’m aware that among us here and throughout Europe there is legitimate disagreement over the extent to which the public sector should play a role in a nation’s economy and life”—in other words, I know you’re not all as freedom-loving as me and Margaret Thatcher—“but on one point all of us are united: our abhorrence of dictatorship in all its forms.”

The point is, the same principles that animated Reagan’s Cold War statecraft also directed his domestic policy vision. The domestic policy story is more diffuse and complex. Much of it turns on arcane aspects of legal and regulatory philosophy, cost-benefit analysis, and eye-glazing fiscal numerology. It lacks the personal drama of foreign policy and the Cold War against the Evil Empire. Reagan never stood in front of the Federal Trade Commission or the Environmental Protection Agency and said, “Mr. Regulator—tear down this rule!” But he figuratively had this attitude. One revealing diary entry from 1986 reads: “The villain in the case is the Fed. Drug Administration [he meant the Food and Drug Administration], and they are a villain.”

The fundamental unity of Reagan’s statesmanship asserted here necessarily opens up for debate the question of whether Reagan’s domestic record is commensurate with his foreign policy achievements. This question involves issues that historians have typically neglected but which lie at the fault line of partisan division today.

It became fashionable during the contentious presidency of George W.

Bush for some liberals to wax nostalgic about Reagan, but during Reagan’s time in office the Left hated Reagan just as lustily as they hated Bush, and with some of the same venomous affectations, such as the reductio ad Hitlerum. The key difference is that there was no Internet during Reagan’s years with which to magnify these derangements, and the twenty-four-hour cable TV news cycle was in its infancy. But the signs were certainly abundant. In 1982 Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in London held a vote for the most hated people of all time, with the result being Hitler, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Dracula.⁹ A Democratic congressman, William Clay of Missouri, would charge that Reagan was “trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.”¹⁰ The argument Reagan propelled to the fore in 1980 has not yet been resolved a generation later. In one sense, Reagan’s story is unfinished.

*  *  *

OF COURSE, POLITICAL argument is seldom finally resolved in America, as the persistence of die-hard sympathizers of Southern secession 140 years after Appomattox demonstrates. What can be discerned are clear turning points—realignments is the term political scientists and historians use—in political thought and party dominance. The political story of the 1980s, and the central focus of this narrative, is how the previously regnant liberalism and the Democratic Party reacted and adapted (or failed to adapt) to Reagan’s challenge, and second, how Reagan transformed the Republican Party in his own image.

The question of political realignment is nowadays controversial within academic opinion. Historians and journalists accept the idea wholeheartedly; political scientists are split.¹¹ Even those who embrace the concept agree that realignments have happened only a few times in American history: in 1800, when Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party obliterated the Federalist Party of John Adams; in 1860, when Abraham Lincoln’s new Republican Party displaced the Democratic Party and controlled the presidency for fifty-six of the next seventy-two years; and again in 1932, when FDR’s New Deal ended decades of Republican rule in Washington and established the Democrats as the dominant party for the next forty-eight years.

It was not at all clear in 1980 whether Reagan’s landslide victory marked the beginning of another such realignment. To be sure, many conservatives who had been talking of the “silent majority” for years thought Reagan’s election represented the breakthrough they had been predicting at least since Kevin Phillips’s 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority. Polls taken in the aftermath of the 1980 Reagan landslide showed Republicans pulling nearly even with Democrats on party identification among voters—a dramatic change from the period immediately following Richard Nixon’s resignation, when the proportion of voters who identified themselves as Republican fell to 18 percent in one poll. Republicans had temporarily occupied the executive citadel before (see Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon), but liberals understood these administrations to have been temporary aberrations. Besides, Eisenhower and Nixon governed domestically from slightly left of center.

Yet for all of Reagan’s dominance, Republicans failed to make much ground in the House of Representatives after 1980, confounding the realignment thesis and lending reassurance to Democrats that they were, after all, still the natural governing majority. As the half-life of the 1980 election wore off, voting preference polls began to show a comfortable Democratic advantage once again. This circumstance made it less obviously compelling to Democrats that they had to change in order to prosper with the voters—allowing the party to proceed in the condition the psychobabblists call denial. Meanwhile, the ambiguous situation unnerved many conservatives, who, even before Reagan’s presidency concluded, began to despair that Reagan and their cause had come up short.

The extent to which conservatives were frustrated with Reagan much of the time, particularly during his second term, is another aspect of the Reagan years that has receded from view. The categorical imperatives of ideological fervency are the lifeblood of party politics, but often distract from perceiving real changes and achievements. It is striking to compare Reagan, now the unchallenged conservative icon, with Franklin Roosevelt, the liberal icon, for both suffered from the contemporaneous disappointment of their ideological supporters.

An extended comparison between Reagan and FDR reveals a deeper aspect of political realignment that is usually not captured in the simple model of one party replacing another as the majority. Each man took on his own party and by degrees successfully transformed it, while at the same time frustrating and deflecting the course of the rival party.

This process occurred slowly and against much resistance. Like conservatives in the Reagan era, liberals during FDR’s time were often frustrated with him and thought the New Deal fell far short of what it should accomplish. The New Republic lamented in 1940 “the slackening of pace in the New Deal,” and also that “the New Deal has been disappointing in its second phase.” The philosopher John Dewey and Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Floyd Olson, among others, complained that the New Deal hadn’t gone far enough to abolish the profit motive as the fundamental organizing principle of the economy, and Socialist Party standard-bearer Norman Thomas scorned FDR’s “pale pink pills.” Historian Walter Millis wrote in 1938 that the New Deal “has been reduced to a movement with no program, with no effective political organization, with no vast popular party strength behind it, and with no candidate.”¹² Much the same kind of thing was said about Reagan at the end of his second term. Midge Decter wrote in Commentary: “There was no Reagan Revolution, not even a skeleton of one to hang in George Bush’s closet.” “In the end,” concurred William Niskanen, chairman of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, “there was no Reagan Revolution.”¹³

Liberal ideologues who despaired over the limits of the New Deal overlooked that FDR had to carry along a large number of Democrats who opposed the New Deal. Reagan similarly had to carry along a number of Republicans who were opposed to or lukewarm about his conservative philosophy. This problem would dog Reagan for his entire presidency. Influential conservative columnist Robert Novak would observe in late 1987: “True believers in Reagan’s efforts to radically transform how America is governed were outnumbered by orthodox Republicans who would have been more at home serving Jerry Ford.”¹⁴ Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield understood the challenge Reagan faced as early as 1980, observing, “The debate in American politics today, one can say with little exaggeration, is within the Republican party between those with ideas and the prudent distrusters of ideas.”¹⁵

Had it been within the power of the “prudent distrusters” of the GOP establishment in 1980, the party’s presidential nomination would surely have gone to Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, Howard Baker, Bob Dole, or John Connally before Reagan. By 1980 many Republicans in Washington could be considered victims of the political equivalent of the Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages come to sympathize with their captors. Having been in the minority for so long, many Washington Republicans had come to absorb the premises of establishment liberalism, preferring to offer a low-budget version of the Democratic platform.

Reagan’s dramatic landslide election in 1980, and the mandate it conferred, might be said to pose two problems: Democrats had to figure out how to oppose Reagan; Republicans, how to contain him. Even though GOP senators owed their newfound and much coveted committee chairmanships to Reagan’s coattails, old establishment bulls were distinctly unenthusiastic about the new president. Bob Dole and Pete Domenici, key senators on the Finance Committee, laid repeated roadblocks in the path of Reagan’s economic policy. Mark Hatfield, the new chairman of the Appropriations Committee, opposed Reagan’s proposals to cut social spending, eliminate cabinet departments, and privatize the Bonneville Power Administration (“over my dead body,” the senator roared). His fellow Oregonian Robert Packwood, chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, attacked Reagan as an obstacle to a Republican realignment. Charles Percy, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, openly criticized Reagan’s arms control diplomacy and often put holds on Reagan’s diplomatic appointees. Percy found ample Republican support from Larry Pressler and Charles Mathias. Several of these senators had contested Reagan for the GOP nomination in 1980 and were unchastened by their rout, chiefly because they thought themselves better qualified to sit in the Oval Office. Reagan once remonstrated Howard Baker: “Remember, Howard, I’m president and you’re not.”¹⁶

Much of the time these and other GOP senators acted as though they were in opposition; they shared little or none of Reagan’s partisan spiritedness, giving proof to Eugene McCarthy’s quip that the principal function of liberal Republicans “is to shoot the wounded after the battle is over.” Reagan noted this problem from time to time and expressed privately a high degree of contempt for Capitol Hill Republicans. In a diary entry in 1984, complaining about Hatfield’s opposition to an administration position on the budget, the president ruefully comments: “With some of our friends we don’t need enemies.” In another diary entry, Reagan refers to Lowell Weicker as “a pompous, no good fathead” and on a separate occasion complains that “Weicker had the gall to question me—I think I did him in.” More than once after a disappointing show of support from congressional Republicans, Reagan writes in his diary, “We had rabbits when we needed tigers.”

The party split in the Senate existed also in the House, where Reagan’s own political staff knew they couldn’t count on as many as twenty northeastern Republicans, though the more populist and freewheeling nature of the House enabled the insurgent conservatives greater latitude to assert themselves. On the other hand, Reagan received staunch support for his defense and foreign policy from Democratic senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, and populated his administration with important Democrats such as Max Kampelman, Eugene Rostow, and Jeane Kirkpatrick.

The lesson of FDR and Reagan is that remaking one’s own party can be more difficult than beating the opposition party in elections. Woodrow Wilson wrote that “if the president leads the way, his party can hardly resist him.” Perhaps, but the longer tenure in Washington of most House and Senate members, combined with the prerogatives of the separation of powers, feeds their intransigence. FDR grew impatient as his own party blocked his legislative agenda during his second term, and thus he attempted to purge the Democratic Party of anti-New Dealers in the 1938 election cycle. This gambit failed worse than his court-packing scheme and resulted in a Republican rout at the polls. (Democrats lost seventy-one House seats and five Senate seats in 1938.)

Reagan, whether by temperament or conviction or both, rejected any notion of leading a Republican purge. To the contrary, he replicated his two-front struggle against liberalism and establishment Republicanism within his own senior staff at the White House, resulting in the well-advertised split between the so-called ideologues and pragmatists. Lawrence Eagleburger, who served in Reagan’s State Department and later briefly served as secretary of state under President George H. W. Bush, observed early in Reagan’s first term that the administration resembled “a coalition government” more akin to what might be seen in a multiparty parliamentary government in Europe. Movement conservatives bristled at seeing the GOP establishment so well represented in Reagan’s inner circle, and, to be sure, the “pragmatists” were more adroit at infighting and using press leaks in attempts to alter Reagan’s course.

At the same time, movement conservatives and the media alike did not perceive how well this arrangement served Reagan, or indeed how it matched his California experience, where Reagan blended moderate Republicans from the campaign of his vanquished primary foe, George Christopher, alongside movement conservatives. Reagan tried to explain it, as in this exchange from a 1981 press conference:

QUESTION: There have been specific reports that your Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense are not getting along and that they argue in front of you. Can you comment on those reports?

PRESIDENT REAGAN: The whole Cabinet argues in front of me. That was the system that I wanted installed.¹⁷

In a manner that eludes many historians, political scientists, and reporters, the most successful presidencies tend to be those that have factional disagreement within their inner councils, whereas sycophantic administrations tend to get in the most trouble. Fractiousness in an administration is a sign of health: the Jefferson-Hamilton feud in Washington’s administration, the rivalry within Lincoln’s cabinet, and the odd combination of fervent New Dealers and conventional Democrats in FDR’s White House provided a dynamic tension that contributed to successful governance. Though the partisans of the distinct camps in the Reagan White House would be loath to admit it, their feuding probably contributed to better policy in many cases. An attempted Reaganite purge, of either the party or his own staff, might well have backfired and snuffed out the spontaneous slow-motion revolution within the party that was already under way, and which gained new momentum in the 1990s under the spur of figures such as Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich himself frequently expressed frustration with Reagan. “Ronald Reagan is the only coherent revolutionary in an administration of accommodationist advisers,” he complained in 1984. “The problem was that Reagan’s people were so excited by victory, they forgot they didn’t control the country. They didn’t control the House and they didn’t really control the Senate. They didn’t in fact have real power, but psychologically they acted as if they did.”¹⁸ At one White House meeting late in the second term, after Gingrich laid out complaints about important things the administration had left undone, Reagan put his arm around the young Georgia congressman and said in his typically gentle fashion, “Well, some things you’re just going to have to do after I’m gone.”

To be sure, the so-called pragmatist-ideologue split in the White House was reflected in the widely varying character of different agencies and cabinet departments. Where there was a concentration of movement conservatives, such as at the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Office of Management and Budget, there were substantial efforts to make fundamental policy changes and to tame the permanent bureaucracy. In departments or agencies that lacked a critical mass of ideologues, such as the Department of Education during Reagan’s first term, or the Department of Labor, there was little or no conservative reform.

Twenty years later, nearly every Republican claims to be a Reagan Republican, as Reagan has become the standard against which to measure Republicanism, just as FDR became the standard for two generations of Democrats. Many of the so-called pragmatists of the Reagan years are now in the political wilderness, and admit to having been had by the wily Reagan.

*  *  *

REAGAN’S ORGANIZATIONAL DISREGARD of the biblical injunction “be ye not unevenly yoked” (in the King James version) was only one aspect of his character, imagination, and political practice that observers found difficult to understand. Taking their cue in part from Reagan’s befuddled official biographer, Edmund Morris, historians and political scientists are increasingly drawing a veil over inquiries into Reagan’s innermost character, acknowledging that there was more to Reagan than they knew, but still conveying (if only tacitly) that he was something of a fluke. Despite the growing acclaim for Reagan, the standard line remains that he was personally “remote,” that the “real Reagan” somehow remained hidden and mysterious. “At his core,” the Washington Post’s Haynes Johnson wrote, “[T]here was something unknown or unknowable about Ronald Reagan.”¹⁹ This extends beyond his personal characteristics to his political thought process as well. Even some of Reagan’s ideological sympathizers follow this track. Midge Decter wrote in 1991, “It will, one day, take a truly gifted writer, perhaps a novelist, to solve the puzzle of such a man.”

Numerous observers have put forward compelling insights into this or that aspect of Reagan, but no one seems to feel capable of capturing the whole. Even Mrs. Reagan has validated this view, telling Lou Cannon in 1989, “You can get just so far to Ronnie, and then something happens.”²⁰ Much has been made of the withdrawal of children of an alcoholic parent, but it is also true that Reagan’s kind of reserve would be entirely unremarkable in a private citizen. We have become so accustomed to public figures and celebrities baring their souls to Barbara Walters that we find it odd when a prominent person disdains to do so, and unable to reconcile the spectacle of geniality and privacy. Although many of Reagan’s Depression-era generation embraced the baby boomer practice of emotional public introspection, there is reason to regard Reagan as a more authentic figure.²¹

The incredulity that a man with such extraordinary views and such an unconventional background could sweep to the pinnacle of power is testimony to the isolation of Washington, D.C., and the parochialism of the media and political class. The political class regards only official appointments and long tenure in elected office as genuine “experience,” and deprecates the way in which private participation in public affairs can prepare someone for high office.²² President Carter told an interviewer the day after the 1980 election that he had spent the first two years of his presidency as “a student,” and that Reagan “will have the same things to learn that I had to learn.” “No previous president of the United States,” Rowland Evans and Robert Novak wrote, “had so bizarre a preparation for political office.”²³

This is quite wrong, for the heterodox notion should be considered that Reagan was one of the best-prepared men ever to become president. By the time he was elected president, he had spent more than thirty years thinking about politics and participating in public life in a meaningful way, starting with his tenure as head of the Screen Actors Guild in the late 1940s during an especially politicized time. His travels in the 1950s on behalf of General Electric represent his period of serious self-education in politics—an underappreciated factor in Reagan’s saga that I have written about in detail elsewhere.²⁴

The important point to grasp is that Reagan approached politics from the standpoint of a citizen rather than as an aspiring politician or intellectual. In the abstract the American idea of self-government militates against a professional political class, even though it was understood at the time of the Founding that political leadership would be mostly an elite preoccupation. For every Adams, Lodge, Taft, Roosevelt, Kennedy, or Bush who rose to prominence on the basis of family background, there was a Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, or Clinton who rose from obscurity, reminding us of the essential egalitarianism of American political opportunity, and most importantly that Americans should never come to believe there is a fundamental distinction between citizens and rulers.

For the better part of the last century, however, advanced political opinion gradually formalized the view that contemporary government was an expert affair, increasingly remote from the comprehension of ordinary citizens. The enthusiasm for administrative government by expert elites was the root of our problems, Reagan thought. His stance as a citizen-politician in his first race for governor of California in 1966 was undoubtedly an effective posture, but it was just as undoubtedly sincere. Well into his presidency Reagan still self-consciously referred to the federal government as “they” rather than “we.”

Reagan understood instinctively that modern liberalism represented a rejection of the constitutional premises of self-government. Many liberals, following in the footsteps of Woodrow Wilson, explicitly attacked the American Founding and the Founders’ understanding of the Constitution as defective. Most contemporary liberals have little use for the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, James Madison, or even Thomas Jefferson, the father of the Democratic Party. When liberals are not actively hostile to the Founders and their way of thinking, they are uninterested. The usable political tradition for most liberals begins with Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Hence the core of Reagan’s political purpose was recovering an appreciation for the Founders’ understanding of the principles and practice of American government. This was central to his rhetoric to a much greater extent than it was to that of any other modern president of either party. Political scientist Andrew Busch conducted a content analysis of major presidential speeches from Lyndon Johnson through Reagan and found that Reagan cited the Founders three to four times as often as his four predecessors. Reagan mentions the Constitution ten times in his memoirs, often in a substantive way; Carter, Ford, Nixon, and Johnson mention the Constitution a grand total of zero times.²⁵ “We’re for limited government,” he said in his 1988 State of the Union speech, “because we understand, as the Founding Fathers did, that it is the best way of ensuring personal liberty and empowering the individual so that every American of every race and region shares fully in the flowering of American prosperity and freedom.”

Although the American Founding was central to Reagan, his conservatism was idiosyncratic and unorthodox, which may say as much about the condition of American conservatism in 1980 as it does about Reagan. The main line of modern conservatism, emanating chiefly from William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review, defined itself as “[s]tanding athwart history, yelling Stop!” This kind of conservatism, though intellectually rigorous, is too backward-looking and aristocratic for America, the land of immigrants, upward mobility, and constant transformation. The patriotism of traditional conservatism, though fervent, was often refracted through an old European lens. Though Reagan was a devoted National Review reader and friend of Buckley, he was not that kind of conservative. And while Reagan was the annual headliner for the Conservative Political Action Conference—the Woodstock for movement conservatives—he typically described conservatism in populist rather than ideological terms. George Will noted that “[Reagan] is painfully fond of the least conservative sentiment conceivable, a statement from an anti-conservative, Thomas Paine: ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ Any time, any place,” Will complained, “that is nonsense.”²⁶ That is the voice of traditional, Edmund Burke-style conservatism. It was not the idiom of Reagan; his belief in America’s dynamism was at the core of his optimism about the future, and that dynamism has profoundly unconservative effects at times.

Reagan’s constitutional statesmanship arrived at a necessary moment. Reagan came to office at a time when the nation’s self-doubt and pessimism about the future were at an all-time high, and this doubt extended to the very form of the nation’s government itself. The presidency, it was said, was an office inadequate for modern times. By implication, the Constitution was obsolete. The self-doubt about America’s prospects and her institutions essentially raised the question of whether constitutional self-government was still possible at all.

This represented a startling turnaround in the space of less than a decade. At the time of Richard Nixon’s resignation at the flood tide of Watergate, the prevailing sentiment, exemplified in Arthur Schlesinger’s best-selling book, was that we had most to fear from an imperial presidency. Four years of Jimmy Carter’s flailing led political elites to the opposite view, that the presidency, or the federal government in general, wasn’t nearly imperial enough.

The popular historian Barbara Tuchman expressed the thinking of the intellectual elite: “The job of President is too difficult for any single person because of the complexity of the problems and the size of government. Maybe some form of plural executive is needed, such as they have in Switzerland.”²⁷ U.S. News and World Report wondered: “Perhaps the burdens have become so great that, over time, no President will be judged adequate in the eyes of most voters.”²⁸ Columnist Joseph Kraft wrote on the eve of the election: “As the country goes to the polls in the 47th national election, the Presidency as an institution is in trouble. It has become, as Vice President Mondale said in a recent interview, the ‘fire hydrant of the nation.’” Newsweek echoed this sentiment: “The Presidency has in some measure defeated the last five men who have held it—and has persuaded some of the people who served them that it is in danger of becoming a game nobody can win…. [T]he job as now constituted is or is becoming impossible, no matter who holds it.”²⁹ Political scientists Robert Wright and Fred Greenstein wrote: “Recent history offers little cause for optimism about Ronald Reagan’s chances of governing the American people to their satisfaction.”³⁰ British journalist Godfrey Hodgson observed that Reagan “has aroused expectations that he cannot fulfill. Disappointment will turn into disillusionment, and excessive expectations will curdle into unreasonable resentment. That has happened, in one way or another, to each of the last half dozen presidents. Why should Ronald Reagan be an exception?”³¹

Many others concurred. Political scientist Theodore Lowi stated: “The presidency has become an impossible job … because the presidency has become too big, even for the likes of FDR.”³² Elsewhere Lowi wrote, “The probability of [presidential] failure is always tending toward 100 percent.” James MacGregor Burns, author of The Deadlock of Democracy, concluded: “The greatest problem of America in modern times is the despair and disillusion of thoughtful people with the apparent incapacity to solve our problems under an antiquated governmental system, booby-trapped with vetoes, and a purposely designed self-limiting division of power.”³³ Everett Carll Ladd wrote in Fortune magazine, “The experience of recent years strongly suggests that personal ability and character, while vitally important, are insufficient to assure success to a contemporary presidency. For the institutional setting quite simply has become adverse. A kind of ‘vicious circle’ of declining performance has been initiated.” The big question, for Ladd, was: “Can anybody do it?” Surveying the field of candidates who wanted to succeed Jimmy Carter, Ladd thought not, and worried about the implications: “The consequences of yet one more failure in this unique office would impose appalling stress on the whole political system.”³⁴ Like Tuchman, Ladd thought the office was no longer equal to the times. “The institutional resources available to the President, relative to what he is expected to do, remain seriously deficient.”

This was more than idle parlor talk. Congress considered a resolution to form a Commission on More Effective Government that would be charged with making “a comprehensive review of our system of government.” President Carter’s White House counsel, Lloyd Cutler, caused a stir with a widely noted article in the fall 1980 issue of Foreign Affairs calling for extensive constitutional reforms to make the presidency more powerful, including giving the president the power to dissolve Congress and call for new elections, as prime ministers can do in most parliamentary governments.³⁵ “We’re going to be having this same conversation about Ronald Reagan in two years’ time, or maybe one,” Cutler said after Carter’s rejection at the polls.³⁶ President Carter embraced the view of the feebleness of the presidency in his farewell address to the nation a week before leaving office in 1981, noting that the presidency is “at once the most powerful office in the world and the most severely constrained by law and custom …. Today we are asking our political system to do things of which the Founding Fathers never dreamed. The government they designed for a few hundred thousand people now serves a nation of almost 230 million.” Translation: Don’t blame me—I was hamstrung by this impotent office.

For the chorus of intellectuals and political elites who thought wholesale reform of the presidency and the Constitution was necessary, Reagan seemed the least likely person to reverse the perceived decay of the presidency, for the simple reason that most reform ideas required making the federal government more powerful, while Reagan called for making the federal government smaller and less powerful. Reagan’s electoral success supposedly confirmed the theme that our entire political system had slipped off the rails. Tuchman huffed that “[t]he methods we use today in presidential elections—image making, paid political advertisements and the like—lead to the wrong people winning office…. [P]eople of any quality and self-respect cannot take it” (emphasis added).

The highest measure of Reagan’s achievement is that after eight years of his presidency, the Iran-Contra disaster notwithstanding, all talk of the presidency as an inadequate institution had vanished into the mists, and has not returned. The National Journal polled presidential scholars in 1985, finding that a large majority thought Reagan had succeeded in “reviving trust and confidence in an institution that in the post-Vietnam era had been perceived as being unworkable.”³⁷ Charles McDowell, national political reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch and a regular TV presence on Washington Week in Review during Reagan’s presidency, said in 1986: “If somebody had told me in 1979 that Ronald Reagan by common consent would be ranked with Franklin Roosevelt as one of the two most important presidents of the century I’ve lived in, I would have walked away from such a trivial person, shaking my head and saying there’s no hope for any of us if anyone thinks that. And now I think that.”³⁸ The Washington Post’s Haynes Johnson offered a similar mea culpa: “I thought Ronald Reagan was the most ignorant major candidate I’d ever seen running for president. I misjudged him. I was wrong.”³⁹ Johnson, whose politics tilt to the left, added, “I think it was a healthy thing that Ronald Reagan was elected president.”

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EVEN IF THE depth of Reagan’s insight, personal virtues, and political achievement are gradually becoming recognized, he is still likely to remain the Rodney Dangerfield of modern American presidents—he gets little respect from the intellectual class and much of his political peer group. There is a large superficial reason for this: the gravity of the office has tugged noticeably at the facial features of all of our other recent presidents, but not Reagan. Dwight Eisenhower had a heart attack and a stroke during his time in office; Lyndon Johnson’s basset hound face drooped as Vietnam casualty figures soared; Richard Nixon’s jowls got jowlier; Jimmy Carter’s Cheshire cat grin disappeared beneath the furrows of worry and strain.

As Reagan became the oldest person ever to be president a few months into his first term, it was assumed that the physical exactions would be even more evident. Shortly after the 1980 election a Metropolitan Life Insurance Company study found that being president shortens a person’s life expectancy nearly as much as cigarette smoking—on average, by 3.9 years (or 5.2 years among twentieth-century presidents). Twenty-two of the (at that time) thirty-five deceased presidents had failed to live to their normal life expectancy. Reagan, Met Life projected, could expect to live another eleven years, to 1992.

Yet Reagan, seventy-seven years old at the end of two terms in office, seemed to show little physical wear and tear. His facial appearance was nearly as fresh and unruffled as the day he first arrived in 1981, despite having suffered a serious gunshot wound and two cancer surgeries. Reagan’s age-defying performance seemed to be evidence that it was all an act, just another Hollywood production. Surely if he had been fully “engaged” in his own presidency, the strain of the office would have shown up in his appearance. It is only as Reagan became the oldest living ex-president and new testimonials from his doctors came to light about his extraordinary fitness that we have begun to perceive that Reagan was as physically unique as he was mentally unique.

Reagan can be said to be like Edgar Allan Poe’s case of the purloined letter: the real Reagan was hidden in plain sight. This is certainly true from a purely historical and political point of view. Reagan’s ascent on the world stage is one of the most remarkable in history, and he will baffle and fascinate historians for decades to come. What Reagan said and did is more significant than whatever tangled subconscious aspects of his character may or may not exist at some obscure level. This narrative pays special attention to Reagan’s words—speech being the most basic political act, but one that too many modern political thinkers wrongly deprecate. Reagan did not mind being called the Great Communicator, so long as it was understood that, for him, what he was communicating outweighed how well or badly he did it. Lincoln too could have been known as the Great Communicator but for the fact that the aim of his words became the deed of the nation, thereby bestowing on him the higher title of the Great Emancipator. Reagan was too modest to have claimed for himself the title that the substance of his words and deeds point to: the Great Liberator. Yet that is the legacy he ultimately deserves—and not simply for winning the Cold War.⁴⁰

This is the story of how Ronald Reagan forged that legacy.