Three people won the Cold War, dismantled the Soviet empire and eliminated Communism as a malevolent world force: Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. They worked in unofficial concert and we shall perhaps never know which of the three was the most important. John Paul effectively undermined the Evil Empire (Reagan’s phrase) in its weakest link, Poland, where the process of disintegration began. Margaret Thatcher reinvigorated the capitalist system by starting a worldwide movement to reduce the public sector by a new term, “privatization,” and by destroying militant trade unionism. Reagan gave back to the United States the self-confidence it had lost, and at the same time tested Soviet power to destruction. All were heroes, each in a different way.
Reagan interested me the most because he created an entirely new model of statesmanship: well suited to a late twentieth-century media democracy. And he was hugely entertaining to watch in action. He endeared himself to me the first time we met by getting flustered, glancing at the six-by-four cue card he always kept in his left-hand suit pocket, and saying: “Good to see you again, Paul.” The second time he shook hands with me in front of a battery of press photographers (I still have the picture) and whispered: “Don’t look at me—look at the cameras.” Good advice from an old pro. Reagan did not try to smile all the time, like many American politicians. He never smiled at nothing. His smile was an event with meaning, which preceded or followed a joke. Usually he was serious. Government, he seemed to say, was a serious business. So serious we’re inclined to take it too seriously. Then would follow a joke, and a laugh. But even when emphasizing the seriousness of it all, Reagan never gave the impression of being nervous, or gloomy, or worried. He was at ease with himself. I have never come across a person, certainly not in public life, who was so thoroughly and fundamentally at ease with himself. By that I do not mean casual or flippant or devil-may-care: he was none of those things. But he was relaxed, unharassed, quietly confident in anything he had to do. And, being like that, you did not have to dig very deep to find happiness. He was a happy hero. He liked, and tried, to communicate this happiness, and normally succeeded. He made me think that happiness ought to be part of the equipment of a hero, even though it usually isn’t.
The United States which Ronald Reagan took over early in 1981 was not at ease with itself. Indeed, it was deeply unhappy at a public level. The strong presidency of Richard Nixon had been destroyed, leaving a vacuum of power. Into that vacuum stepped, insofar as anyone or anything did, a divided and leaderless Congress, abrogating to itself by law or in fact duties which rightly belonged to the executive branch. President Jerry Ford did nothing to stop this unconstitutional larceny. He had never been elected and did not have a sense of rightful authority. He was not at ease with himself—far from it—but he was easygoing, diffident, amiable, anxious to avoid rows that might end in a challenge to his credentials. His successor, Jimmy Carter, was a natural one-term president at a meager time, who found it impossible to strike a national note. Both men ran a low-key presidency, stripping both the White House and its internal motions of any element of grandeur. Ford stopped the Marine band playing “Hail to the Chief” when the president arrived. Carter let it be known that he worked in the Oval Office in a sweater, and he encouraged his staff to “dress down” (the first time the phrase was used). All ceremony associated with the White House and presidential movements was cut to the minimum. Gradually the heart of American government acquired a slipshod air. Ford was a non-hero, Carter an anti-hero. “Jimmy,” as he liked to be called, despised heroics, or said he did, and anyway, was incapable of them. His was a painfully unheroic presidency, culminating in a humiliating disaster to American arms in Iran.
From the start, Ronald Reagan reversed this process of American self-effacement. In his eight years as governor of California, he had raised the administrative profile of the state with the world’s eighth-largest economy above the usual seedy city hall level. Now, entering a new role, he determined to play it to the full. He had the best of all precedents in stressing the formality and even the grandeur of the most important elective office in the world—the example of George Washington. He also had an able and enthusiastic assistant, in the shape of John F. W. Rogers, the young official in charge of White House protocol and ceremony. Rogers was an expert on everything to do with presidential history and all that was most seemly. He provided the costume and sets, as it were, for the Reagan presidency. Back came the solemn band music and especially “Hail to the Chief.” Back came the Herald Trumpeters, from the U.S. Army, an institute created by General Eisenhower in his White House term. A special ceremonial fanfare was created for them entitled “A Salute to a New Beginning.” Under Reagan’s benign approval, Rogers rewrote protocol for all White House formal occasions, stressing ceremony, even redesigning the bunting used on presidential platforms. There was huge reviewing of troops by the president personally. All visitors, especially heads of state and government, were now suitably greeted. The internal dress code of the White House went back to “smart”—suits, ties, white shirts. So Reagan began his rule by putting back the clock in a visible, audible way.
It should not be thought that Reagan’s political heroism was entirely histrionic, though the theatrical element was of great importance in its success. But it could not have succeeded at all if Reagan had not been such a deeply serious man. He had certain core beliefs in which he passionately believed, from which he could not be budged, and which had a bearing on all he aspired to do. They were essentially moral beliefs, to do with justice, honesty, fair dealing, courage and what he would call “decency.” In political terms they translated into standing up to the Soviets and matching them—if possible, outmatching them—in weapons; cutting taxes; freeing Americans from unnecessary burdens; and enlarging freedom whenever consistent with safety and justice. There was no shifting Reagan on these matters. He clung to his core views with extraordinary obstinacy. They were, by and large, right, and he could communicate them with extraordinary skill.
After nearly sixty years of writing history, and also of observing contemporary history makers in action, I am convinced that successful government depends less on intelligence and knowledge than on simplicity—that is, the ability to narrow aims to three or four important tasks which are possible, reasonable and communicable. Reagan had that formula, and the fact that he did enabled him to be a success, and a true hero, with few if any of the qualities which most constitutional experts would have rated indispensable.
Reagan was superficially, and also profoundly, ignorant. He did not seem to know how bills were put together or passed through Congress, or how the entire budget process took place. He had little education, and no desire to acquire much more in a general sense, at any rate through books. He was intellectually lazy, and he did not read one word of the carefully prepared briefing book on the eve of the world economic summit in 1983. When upbraided by James Baker he said calmly: “Well, Jim, The Sound of Music was on last night.” The man who wrote the best book about his presidency, Lou Cannon, calculates that during his presidency he spent more time watching movies than doing anything else: he saw 356 at Camp David alone. Most of his history he derived from old Hollywood epics. Science fiction, or what General Colin Powell called his “little green men,” was particularly real to him, one reason he opted for the Star Wars policy and defended it so stubbornly. It turned out to be one of his most successful initiatives, doing more than any other to break the will of the old Soviet regime to compete with America on advanced military technology. He had such insights, which were almost metaphysical. They were supplemented by nuggets he dug out of Reader’s Digest and an inflammatory right-wing publication called Human Events, which aides tried to keep out of his hands.
He puzzled his staff. Sometimes he displayed extraordinary scraps of knowledge about obscure events. Sometimes he believed in fantasies, such as that the United States really had much larger hidden oil reserves than the whole of the Middle East. At other times he appeared incapable of speaking coherently about the simplest matters without reference to the cue cards in his left pocket. In some ways he was ill-equipped to run anything, let alone the mightiest nation on earth. He was nearly seventy when he got to the White House, and three months later an assassin’s bullet just missed his heart. He was deaf and sometimes could not hear what his staff was telling him, even with the volume of his hearing aid switched right up. He was known in showbiz as “a quick study,” and as a rule learned his lines well. As a B-movie actor, and a successful and reliable one, he had been a stickler for strict studio discipline, disliking people who were late on the set as “disruptive” and “unprofessional.” He believed in learning lines and following the script, and obeying directions, so that in some ways his staff found him very compliant and easy to work with. But when tired, as he often was, especially after lunch, he got things wrong. He told a fund-raising meeting: “Now we’re trying to get unemployment up, and I think we’re going to succeed.” He confused names and faces. He thought his own secretary of commerce was a visiting mayor. He believed Denis Healey was the British ambassador. He addressed the Liberian president Samuel K. Doe as “Chairman Moe.” But if he got the details wrong, he always got the mood right. It was rare for a visitor to the White House to go away unhappy, even if he got nothing that he wanted. Reagan was perhaps the most accomplished of all presidential performers, outdistancing that magician Franklin D. Roosevelt. He deliberately drew on his theatrical skills, as well as using them unconsciously. He said frankly: “There have been times in this office when I’ve wondered how you could do the job if you hadn’t been an actor.”
Reagan had two endearing characteristics which were also important to his success, and to his heroic status. First, he was genuinely modest. He had come from nowhere and had a perfectly proper pride in the things he had done, but he never pretended to be bigger than he was or know more than he did. He was not afraid to ask elementary questions. He asked for places to be pointed out to him on the map. “Where is Sri Lanka? Is that how you pronounce it?” “Who was this Atatürk?” “What was the Balfour Declaration?” He asked questions like “Why are the Blue Ridge Mountains blue?” and “Where did the English language come from?” “What was funny about The Divine Comedy? Why did they call it that?” Asking simple questions sometimes requires courage, but a man running a big, complex government needs to ask them.
Reagan did not pretend to know all about government. He never took refuge in its mysteries, though, God knows, they were often mysteries to him. He adopted an old trick of Andrew Jackson’s, to distance himself from its processes. He referred to it always in the third person, thus ranking himself firmly with the “we” as opposed to the “them.” Like Lincoln, he communicated with the people by a kind of cunning simplicity. Of course he did not have a powerful analytical mind like Lincoln’s. He would never have been capable of the kind of sustained argument Lincoln produced in his great 1858 Douglas debates, or the sublime, deeply felt rhetoric of the Gettysburg Address. For the grand occasion Reagan had to have his lines written for him. But just occasionally he had the Lincoln touch. “The big decisions are simple,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they’re easy.”
Where he resembled Lincoln was in his use of humor. Each knew humor was important in ruling, but each was sui generis in the way to employ it. Lincoln usually elaborated or invented his jokes, which might be subtle and complex—often thoughtful—and he used them as Christ used parables. Reagan used jokes as a substitute for logic and intelligence (and factual knowledge). It was part of his strategy for sidestepping arguments requiring exact information. He worked through metaphor and analogy, and humor. He did not possess, like Mae West, an immense baggage train of twenty thousand jokes, written by him or accumulated over many years. But he did have a stock of one-liners, about two thousand of them, which could be made to fit virtually any situation that confronted him as president.
He used jokes in the first place to put people at their ease. Laughter is the great reassurer and the great equalizer. A good example occurred when he was sitting in a helicopter next to a very nervous woman staff member, as it flew low over Washington. He said: “That’s Arlington Cemetery. How many dead are there?” “I just don’t know, Mr. President.” “They all are.” The tone of voice, the timing, was perfect, as always. Whether Reagan invented the joke, and this was the first time he told it, we cannot know. He certainly could invent jokes. When, immediately after the attempted assassination, and he was in considerable pain and was wheeled into surgery, he said to the anxious team of doctors: “I hope you’re all Republicans.” And when his wife was first allowed to be at his side: “Honey, I forgot to duck.” (This was the use of an old 1930s catchphrase.)
No politician ever told stories (his or others) better. Lincoln’s were shrewder and more original, but Reagan’s were just as effective, perhaps more so because the tone and timing were more professional. He could get a laugh out of nothing. He destroyed Jimmy Carter with one quiet remark, after a characteristic Carter tirade: “There you go again.” Most of Reagan’s political one-liners centered on economics. He knew little about the subject and told jokes not so much to hide his ignorance as to share it with others. “Government does not solve problems. It subsidizes them.” “Economists are people who see something works in practice and wonder if it would work in theory.” “A recession is when the next guy loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. Recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.” Sometimes a Reagan one-liner enshrined a profound truth: “I’m not too worried about the deficit. It’s big enough to take care of itself.” I witnessed Reagan’s first use of this joke, and the double take as those listening grasped its meaning.
One of the most dangerous things anyone can do, especially a politician, is to tell jokes against himself. For a clever, secure, witty person, who moves in sophisticated society, it is a tempting thing to do, but almost invariably damaging, since the admissions are taken out of their warmhearted context and used against you later. The great Lord Curzon was a notable victim of this endearing propensity. Reagan was the only politician I have ever known or heard about who not only told stories about himself, but used them deliberately and systematically to disarm criticism. His advanced age, his laziness, his stupidity, his ignorance and his general unfitness for office were all turned by him deftly into jokes. He thus took the detonator out of the most telling criticism before it could be fired. Indeed, he turned his weaknesses into virtues. Thus, on his age, he loved to explain how wage and price controls by government had never worked ever since they had first been tried under the Roman emperor Diocletian, adding: “I’m one of the few persons old enough to remember that.” He emphasized his mental limitations by autographing old photos of himself when he was acting with Bonzo the Chimp, putting below his signature: “I’m the one with the watch.” He turned self-deprecation into an art form by adding a dimension of gentle humor, turning defects into assets and persuading people he had the priceless gift of self-knowledge and self-criticism.
This was part of his way of bringing himself down, or the public up, to his level of importance, and so making a popular dialogue not only possible but easy and genial. Americans demand of their president both stature and a certain egalitarianism, both greatness and conviviality, no easy combination. They want to shake warmly the hand that, in national contexts, they want raised in admonition, warning and command. With his jokes, Reagan brought people to him while still keeping them at a respectful distance. No one—some said even his wife Nancy—got really close to him. His staff was warmly appreciated, but then, in the natural course of events in politics, discarded with grateful thanks, and without a pang, forgotten as swiftly and completely as last week’s briefing.
A term applied to Reagan was “warmly ruthless.” He was agreeable always and at times spectacularly charming. There is a telling memoir about him by his chief of protocol, Selwa “Lucky” Roosevelt, which shows the charm in action. For instance, when he reappointed her for his second term he sang to her the delightful song from My Fair Lady: “I’ve grown accustomed to your face.” But she also provides a vivid account of the destruction of General “Al” Haig, when that important and self-important official had outlived his usefulness. Reagan’s favorite remark to his cabinet was: “We’re here to do whatever it takes.” That was not, as some thought, a meaningless remark. It meant that in the last resort, nothing and nobody was sacred. Reagan was always ready to discard a member of the cast if he or she got in the way of the performance. The show was what mattered. He did not mind abuse. That was just the critics having their say, the reviews, as it were. What really mattered was the box office, expressed in terms of votes and public approval or disapproval of his actions. The show had to go on, and he had to carry the public with him, to rebuild American self-confidence and clout in the world so he could make it a better and safer place. He did all these things. The Reagan presidency became a hit. It ran the full eight years with growing success, and continued to resonate afterward, as an exemplar of what a presidency should be in an ideal world. But, like all careers of heroism, it was a bit of a show. Reagan’s characteristics, the jokes, the benevolence, the all-American friendly hugs and squeezes and joshings were absolutely sincere. But it was acting all the same.
Margaret Thatcher worked very closely with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The Anglo-American alliance was never stronger than at that time, or the “special relationship” closer. They saw eye to eye on all the big international issues, and each tried to run the same kind of government at home. Thatcher, like Reagan, believed in three or four big things very strongly and both backed up their beliefs with unlimited willpower. Each proved, over and over again, that will is all-important in running a country and, in combination with a few central principles which are just, is a sure recipe for success.
Yet they were very different people, and made quite different heroes. To begin with Reagan was a very masculine man, and Thatcher a very feminine woman. She was so resolute, and occasionally so fierce, that commentators who did not know her tried to invest her with masculine characteristics. Nothing could be further from the truth. Thatcher was not only a woman to her innermost core, she loved it. I have seldom met a woman who enjoyed being a woman more. She invariably took full advantage of any feminine privilege going, from tears to tantrums, while at the same time grabbing any rights denied to women which were hers as prime minister. She loved men. Given a choice, she would always prefer being with a man to being with a woman. This manifested itself in small things, like receiving guests in a reception line. She would shake a man’s hand properly. If the next in line was a woman, she would use the outstretched hand as a lever to swing the woman out of the way, so she could get to the next man. She would be civil, as a rule, to a woman who was important in her own right. But wives got short shrift.
Shortly after she became leader of the Tory party, she was a guest at a big dinner given by Woodrow Wyatt—thirty people perhaps. Her husband was not there. When the time came for the ladies to retire from the dining room, as they did in London in those days, Wyatt, a brash and shameless man, said in a loud voice: “Margaret, as you have just become, entirely on your own merits and through your own efforts, head of one of the great parties of the state, I think you should be allowed to remain with the men, at any rate for a time.” One or two feminists stormed out at this juncture. Most women, even then, would have taken Wyatt’s provocative remarks as a challenge to take him down a peg. But Thatcher was delighted. She moved to the end of the table where the men were congregating and called for a whiskey and water (her invariable after-dinner drink). Moreover, she did not stay “for a time.” She stayed over an hour, until she felt she wanted to go home (to work, of course), and then went straight from the dining room to her waiting limo. By the time Wyatt called out, “Shall we join the ladies,” she was gone.
Thatcher hated feminism. But she was not above playing the feminist card when it suited her. Equally, she hated the realm of humor since it was tricky ground for her, or she thought it was. This was another way in which she differed totally from Reagan. Her jokes were few and they tended to be somber, with a touch of bitterness. The idea of ruling through jokes, as Reagan did, was incomprehensible to her. Yet all generalizations about Thatcher tend to be faulty. She, like Reagan, was sui generis, and her behavior was never entirely predictable. In fact I once heard her make a feminist joke with stunning success. It was the fiftieth-anniversary dinner of Britain’s leading economic think tank, and five hundred people, all men, had sat through a many-course, slowly served dinner, and were now listening to a series of speeches. Thatcher, prime minister, busy and overworked, had to wait until nearly midnight before being called to speak. She was livid, and I did not blame her. So was I, after two hours of all-male self-congratulatory prosing. She began: “As the tenth speaker and the only woman, I have this to say: the cock may crow but it’s the hen who lays the egg.” I laughed long and loud, then suddenly realized I was the only one who thought it funny. The rest of the room sat in stunned silence.
Thatcher was a woman first. I don’t recall ever seeing her wear trousers. She took more trouble over her hair than any other woman I have met. It was gold, very fine, very soft. When washed, combed and set it was magnificent. But it could come crashing down in ruin. She took immense care that this did not happen. The year after she became party leader, she and I were both invited to address the Institute of Directors at its immense annual meeting in London’s Albert Hall. The dressing rooms there are below the platform, and when we joined up to make our appearance we found we had to ascend a staircase down which the air rushed as if through a wind tunnel. “My god!” said Mrs. Thatcher, “My hair has had it.” “No!” said I. “Follow me. I will spread myself and you must crouch down immediately behind me.” So we slowly advanced up the windy steps, like a two-headed creature, I expansive, she crouching down. On emerging, the wind-tunnel effect ceased, and she stood up, a dazzling figure, her hair perfect. “My savior!” she said to me.
She had beautiful skin, of peaches and cream, and she made herself up, lightly but effectively, with extraordinary skill, and speed. Her clothes were always fresh and immaculate, with a lot of white and royal blue. Her blouses were impeccable. Her seams were always straight, her skirts neat and perfectly in place. Whatever the time of day, however heavy the workload, in all weathers and climates, there was never the smallest sign of untidiness or disarray. She was a bandbox woman. As prime minister she was always well attended and surrounded by clever and helpful attendants, such as Carla Powell, wife of her chief foreign affairs aide, Charles Powell, and a hairdresser came to number 10 every morning. But she had always been perfectly turned out, even at Oxford, when she was Margaret Roberts of St. Hugh’s College. Most girl undergraduates were scruffy or mousy, in hand-knitted woollies. But she was already perfectly groomed on all occasions when I saw her. It was a part of her nature. She was neat, clean, orderly, never flurried or breathless, in command of herself and her personal space, a prosaic poem of organized womanhood, ready for duty at all times.
Thatcher’s sex was a huge disadvantage to her in her political career. The House of Commons has always been a deeply male place. It evolved out of a medieval building called St. Stephen’s Chapel, and there is even something monkish about it, certainly something that seems to say, “Women are not welcome here.” Though women eventually got admittance (in the 1920s), for most of Thatcher’s career there were never more than thirty or forty of them in a body of over six hundred, and they always seemed anomalous in her day. The Commons is a rude and ill-bred place, with a continuous hubbub only occasionally silenced by the speaker. For a woman to make herself heard above this susurrus of sound is always difficult. If she fails to raise her voice, she is treated as inaudible and simply not listened to. If she raises her voice, the result is displeasing and she is soon described as “strident.” Thatcher had to cope with this word “strident” all her career. Her voice, indeed, was the least satisfactory thing about her. It was not the voice of a heroine and could easily become the voice of a harridan. When she was entirely relaxed, her voice was perfectly acceptable. But she was rarely relaxed. Early in her public life, she developed a habit, presumably to make herself heard in the Commons, of placing heavy stress on too many words and syllables in her discourse. This had disastrous consequences, and made it impossible for her even to figure as an orator. Worse, she carried it into ordinary conversational intercourse and that made a long exchange with her (for me at least) almost unendurable. This heavy stressing went with a certain lecturing tone, which added to the agony of listening to her, particularly if her material was familiar, or even threadbare. The contrast with Reagan’s voice and tone, always pleasing and often enchanting in its deft conveyance of humor, irony and persiflage, could not have been greater. Once or twice, when helping Thatcher with a speech, I tried to give her an elocution lesson, especially in getting the stresses right and in producing more varied and lively speech rhythms. I must say, she was very anxious and willing to learn, as she was in everything, if she thought her instructor knew his business. She was essentially modest (like Reagan) and tremendously keen to make herself more proficient in doing things. Nor did she have to be told anything twice, ever. She had begun her adolescence as a keen, superindustrious scholarship girl, and all her life she was an apt pupil. People said she did not listen. But that happened only when she had a low opinion of the talker. If she thought what was being said worth hearing, she not only listened hard but, on occasion, whipped out a little book from her handbag and took notes. No one was ever keener on acquiring knowledge, and correcting her faults and deficiencies. But changing a person’s way of speaking is a long and difficult business, and we never had enough time together to make much progress.
Thatcher’s pile-driver voice was one reason I never wanted to spend much time with her despite the fact that I was desperately anxious for her policies to succeed and did all I could in my writings to help her. She also had an irritating habit of feeding you back your own ideas. For instance, I told her once: “There are only three things a government must do because no one else can: external defense, internal order and running an honest currency. There are thousands of other things a government can do, and often does. But remember: the more optional things it does, the more likely it will neglect the three essentials.” Thatcher liked this so much she wrote it down in her handbag notebook. But, lo and behold, some time afterward, when we were discussing roads, she came out with: “Remember, Paul, there are only three things a government must do…” and the whole rigmarole was repeated. In many ways Thatcher was a compendium of annoying habits, whereas Reagan was a compendium of pleasing ones. On the other hand, Thatcher was a good, kind and gentle creature, wonderfully considerate to her staff, always thinking of other people and doing things for them, unasked, and never cross if she got no thanks. When I told her that the Irish prime minister, whose wife was paralyzed but would not allow a live-in servant, was having to do his own laundry, she said, impulsively: “Oh, but I could go over from time to time and do it for him.” Then, wistfully, “But it wouldn’t do, would it?” When she went to China, and my old friend George Gale, who was covering the visit, got helplessly drunk on some sinister Chinese liquor, Thatcher put him to bed in his hotel room. Afterward she joked to me about this, and eventually I told George, who was wholly unaware of her benevolence. He thought for a few moments and said: “So that’s why I found my clothes so neatly folded the next morning. I thought the Chinks had done it.”
It is important to stress that Thatcher had a warm, kindly inner core—she was, quite simply, bighearted—because it was a side of her most people never knew existed. The great majority of heads of government, in my experience, are hardened egoists, corrupted by exercising power even if not already corrupted by getting there. The few exceptions, like Harold Wilson or Willy Brandt, tend to be weak men. To combine generosity and unselfishness with tremendous will is almost unknown, but Thatcher did, and this gave an extra dimension to her heroism. But the public, and indeed most politicians, saw only the hard, harsh, outward glitter of her battle armor. She was divisive. You either admired her enormously or detested her. This was quite unlike Reagan, a supreme egoist at the core, who inspired (an often reluctant) affection with every gesture and inflection of his voice, every aside, and who was an extraordinarily difficult man to dislike, as his opponents found. As for enemies, he never had one for long. But Thatcher tended to turn opponents into enemies, and critics into dedicated pursuers. I have an uneasy feeling, too, that she did not much mind being hated, especially by those she classified as “them,” took it as part of the business of governing, and almost as proof she was on the right lines.
This propensity to arouse dislike was a serious liability, gave her hold on power always a precarious element and explains why a small group of bitter men within her party were able to dislodge her comparatively easily. On the other hand, to hold power, continuously, for nearly a dozen years, is extremely rare in British politics, and to use that tenure to accomplish fundamental changes, as she did, is rarer still. She was a born ruler, and it was a word she did not feel too shy to use. She once said to me: “I love ruling.” She was also a lucky politician. The importance of luck, like the importance of humor, in politics, has been insufficiently investigated by those who write on the subject. But it is crucial. Thatcher was lucky. First, she had excellent health throughout her period of office. Second, she had been unusually lucky in getting a safe seat in North London. This saved a lot of time and energy. Third, her career in the Commons and her first steps on the ministerial ladder were marked by unusual strokes of good fortune. She got into the cabinet without making any enemies and without acquiring any awkward ideological baggage. Her capturing the leadership was a pure stroke of luck. The head of her section of the party when Ted Heath’s hold on power began to slip was Keith Joseph, a gifted man whom Thatcher hero-worshiped, but who was nervous and eccentric and (I am sorry to say because I liked him too) a coward. When the time came to stand against Heath for the leadership, Joseph had a sudden spasm of funk, and pulled out. Thatcher found herself morally obliged to stand in his place, as an emergency candidate, only to discover that Heath was even more unpopular than was thought. Thus she won easily, without acquiring any reputation for pushy ambition or giving any hostage to fortune.
Her luck continued. Throughout the 1970s, public hatred of the trades unions had been growing in Britain as they ruthlessly but stupidly abused their legal powers and immunities. They destroyed the Wilson government in 1970, the Heath government in 1974 and then, in a final act of folly, they effectively destroyed the Callaghan government in the winter of 1978–1979. That precipitated Thatcher into office, in May, with a national mandate to cut the unions down to size. This she proceeded to do, with all deliberate speed and with decisive will—again, assisted by the unions themselves, who proceeded to fight two pitched battles against her, over coal and printing, battles they were bound to lose and with public opinion massed against them. I say “bound to lose” only with Thatcher as their opponent. With any other prime minister, it was by no means certain they would have lost. As it was, they enabled her to assume a heroic posture and rid the country of an unpopular scourge, once and for all. And, to cap her good fortune, a pack of idiot dictator-generals in Argentina seized the Falkland Islands and gave Thatcher the opportunity to fight a dramatic and popular war of liberation. Here again, the outcome was by no means sure. But as with the union wars, the episode gave Thatcher the opportunity to display the courage, willpower and resolution against men it was easy to hate. Thatcher was lucky in the stupidity and loathsomeness of her public enemies.
These hard-fought but straightforward and popular victories gave Thatcher the impetus to proceed in her real purpose of reducing the size of the public sector in Britain and so creating space for the entrepreneurial economy in which she strongly believed. Like Reagan, she had three or four strongly held core beliefs. But she was, unlike him, highly educated, intellectually disciplined, clear thinking and methodical. She had degrees in chemistry and law—unusually. She was widely read. She had taken in the teachings of political economists like “Fritz” Hayek, Karl Popper and Milton Friedman. She was not an intellectual. She certainly did not think that ideas were more important than people. She was not really an ideologue, more an empiricist. Her program of “privatization” evolved naturally from the mess she inherited. But, as it evolved, she saw its ideological attractions and put it in a context of theory, as it were. Thus it appealed to thinkers of the center and right all over the world, and was copied in over fifty countries. “Thatcherism” became the most popular English intellectual export since Keynesianism, which it effectively replaced.
The success of Thatcherism as a world force was also a success for capitalism itself. It gave supporters of the market system a huge burst of self-confidence, after a decade of doubt, and it was this, perhaps, as much as any other factor, which undermined correspondingly the self-confidence of the Soviet oligarchies. It was the consciousness of collectivist failure in the face of a resurgent and eager capitalism which led Gorbachev into his self-destructive attempt to “reform” Communism. This, then, was Thatcher’s principal contribution to the overthrow of the Evil Empire, which could not, I think, have been accomplished without Gorbachev’s nervous tinkerings. But of course at all stages Thatcher was busy stiffening the will of the Americans to be resolute over strategic weapons and to resist any nonsense from the Soviets, or anyone else. It was of immense value to Reagan to have in London a fervent supporter and ally who could always be counted upon to give him moral support, sensible advice and real friendship. It made a lot of difference to his own self-confidence. And of course the help was reciprocated. Reagan was invaluable to Thatcher both psychologically and materially during the tricky Falklands recovery operation. Thatcher’s stiffening of American backbone continued after Reagan’s departure. It was she who insisted that Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait had to be reversed. And had she still been in power when Operation Desert Storm took place, she would never have allowed Saddam Hussein to be let off the hook but would have obliged George Bush Sr. to replace his regime. Thus the second Iraq war would have been avoided. But such hypothetical speculations are useless, and painful.
Thatcher was the only British leader since Churchill to have a perceptible influence on world events, both directly and through her high standing in Washington. Her claim to heroic status is unquestionable. And she liked heroes herself. She tended to see the world in black-and-white terms, and to label the current cast “goodies” and “baddies.” She picked up the old White’s Club bar term “wets” and applied it fiercely to those who lacked the guts to follow her in her adventures. She loved those who wholeheartedly committed themselves to a resolute course of righteous action. That was why she loved Pope John Paul II, the third member of the blessed trinity of heroes who destroyed the Communist monolith. I shall always regret the mischance which prevented Thatcher and myself going to see the pope together. It was after she left number 10 but while John Paul was still at the height of his energy. Thatcher and I were in Rome for the opening of a hotel restored by our friend Olga Polizzi. An interview with the pope had been arranged, but he postponed it at the last moment in order to finish his encyclical on sex, which he regarded as one of the most important things he had ever written. Instead he invited us to a private showing of the Sistine Chapel. So Thatcher and I went around it together, and we promptly got into a furious argument about whether Michelangelo was a homosexual or not. Thatcher enjoyed arguments, and so do I. But the Italian officials and monsignori could not distinguish between a noisy argument and a quarrel, and cowered in fear and horror.
John Paul II may have been the most important of the blessed trinity because he understood the Soviet empire on the ground in Poland. By giving his moral and, to some extent, physical support to the trades union movement of Lech Walesa, and by making himself the active spiritual leader of the united Polish people, he undermined the empire fatally. Once his ghostly leadership on the actual soil of Poland was firmly established, there was never any possibility of Soviet imperial rule reestablishing itself without a bloodbath of a kind not even Brezhnev would have been prepared to face, and all his successors funked totally. In many ways it was the most impressive display of papal political power since the time of Innocent III in the early thirteenth century, and gave the true answer to Stalin’s brutal (and foolish) question: “How many divisions has the pope?”
However, I don’t intend to dwell at length on John Paul because he inhabits the borderland between the heroic and the saintly, and this is a book about heroes, not saints. I first glimpsed him as he was about to enter the conclave which elected him, and he was pointed out to me as papabile. He seemed then a formidable physical presence rather than an ethereal one, a man of rugged, sturdy limbs and considerable muscular power, who had kept himself in trim by skiing and mountaineering. But, invested with papal authority and the charisma which goes with this unique office, he rapidly acquired an extra dimension of personality and his appearances became epiphanies. Thus I saw him at the height of his spiritual grandeur when he came to Canterbury to pay tribute at the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket, a man he resembled in more than one respect. He appeared to dwarf the large cluster of dignitaries, lay and ecclesiastical, who surrounded him, as though he came from a different species. I gazed down at him, from my superb seat high in the vault of the sublime cathedral, with wonder and awe. No other man I have seen ever emitted such radiance.
As a man, as an ecclesiastical statesman, John Paul possessed three qualities which can truthfully be described as heroic. First, from the outset of his pontificate he showed a willingness to take on a monumental task. During that disastrous decade, the 1960s, when so many institutions began a course of self-destruction, the Vatican also succumbed. Pope John XXIII, with the best intentions, and out of the sweetness and innocence of his nature, summoned the Second Vatican Council, and bid it “open windows” and renew the Church. Then he died before he could supervise its entire deliberations and rein in its consequences. Under his successors, especially the saturnine and accident-prone Paul VI, the post-councilian juggernaut of change got completely out of control. It was John Paul’s historic and divine mission to get the Church back under control, an enormous and frightening task, which he set about with enviable courage, fortitude and determination. I have already described what he did in an earlier book, and here all I would say is that by persistence over the long haul and by the obstinacy of a St. Jerome in the desert, he did the job, and left the church not only stable and at rest but ready to appoint an admirable successor.
John Paul’s second heroic quality was the purity of his behavior. By this I mean the way in which he carried through a singularly difficult transformation of a complex institution, involving a good deal of political maneuvering and skill, and delicate (occasionally forceful) handling of senior individuals, without any sacrifice of principle or descent into unworthy tactics. I never heard him accused of behavior which would not have passed muster at a synod of moral theologians. Bearing in mind the skull-duggery traditionally associated with the internal affairs of the Vatican, this is a remarkable record. It is not that John Paul had no critics. On the contrary. In some ways he was a divisive figure, like Thatcher. Many liberal Catholics hated him and opposed him bitterly in the journals to which they had access, or controlled. But it was his aims they objected to, not the methods by which he secured them, which were always straightforward and honest.
Third was John Paul’s singleness of purpose. He was heroic in his simplicity, which went hand in hand with great intellectual sophistication, profound knowledge and flexibility of argument. He never allowed himself to be deflected from his restorative program, which he pursued steadily and tenaciously throughout his long pontificate. He had, it seemed to me, a strong sense of priorities, an unfailing ability to separate the essential from the peripheral, and to keep to the point, obliging others to do likewise. His intellect was burly, gripped hard and never relaxed until the job was done.
Finally, his death was heroic. It was the bona mors raised to a monumental level. He showed us all, including future popes yet born, how to die. He worked, ruled, read and, above all, prayed right to the end. He never gave in. There was no surrender except, finally, to the imperious summons of his maker. He remained the vicar of Christ so long as there was breath in his body. Those last weeks of a dying pope, followed by a funeral which might have been managed by Michelangelo, will remain in the memory as a heroic episode in itself. We expect popes to be saints, not heroes. But John Paul was both.