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Daniel Hannan, the outspoken English member of the European Parliament whose book, The New Road to Serfdom was just published, wrote in The Telegraph, UK a piece titled I’m starting to understand what made Ronald Reagan such a great president.
Hannon recently visited President Reagan’s ranch and writes about the “unaffected simplicity” of the ranch and the man. Pickerhead needs no more than that to take a stroll down memory’s lane. It is a pleasure to take a break from politics today and look back at the inspirational figure who revitalized conservatism and helped end communism.
We have Hannan’s article, and then we reprint many things written about Reagan in the weeks after his death in June 2004. Included are pieces by John Fund, Natan Sharansky Mark Steyn, Charles Krauthammer, Ann Coulter, Steyn again, Ken Adelman, Jeff Jacoby and we finish with the text of the Reagan’s October 1964 speech in support of Goldwater. There is also a link to a YouTube version of the speech.
Nothing demonstrates our attachment more than the 1965 membership card in the Republicans for Ronald Reagan you can see on the website by clicking on ABOUT which is located just above the sun’s reflection on the surface of the Potomac. Click on the card and it will enlarge.
Daniel Hannan, in the Telegraph, UK, tells of the modest furnishings at Reagan’s ranch.
…In other politicians’ homes, you find constant reminders of status: photographs with popes and monarchs, gifts from visiting statesmen, piles of books by famous contemporaries, cases of trophies and awards. But Reagan’s one-bedroom bolt-hole couldn’t be simpler. He painted and furnished it with his own hands, and enclosed it with a fence which he sawed from old telegraph poles.
The casual visitor wouldn’t guess that this had been the home of the leader of the free world, this the table where the greatest tax cut in America’s history was signed into law, this the telephone used to call the families of fallen American soldiers. Other than one or two historical works among the cowboy novels, the only political touch is the shower-head, which is in the shape of the Liberty Bell. Here, plainly, lived a man who was bien dans sa peau; a man who, unlike so many politicians, had nothing to prove. Mikhail Gorbachev, visiting the ranch, was distressed by how basic it was; Margaret Thatcher, by contrast, loved it, intuiting that it reflected the character of its inhabitant. …
…Reagan did, however, have an unaffected simplicity. He was a straightforward patriot, who refused to get distracted from his two big ideas: tax cuts at home, and the defeat of the USSR abroad. He succeeded on both counts, giving his country its longest period of sustained growth, and liberating hundreds of millions from Communist tyranny. …
…Reagan, more than any modern American leader, approximated the Founders’ ideal: a citizen president, who never allowed the magnitude of his office to turn his head and who, when his work was done, retired gratefully to the countryside…
In 2004, John Fund remarked on how Reagan, with Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, hastened the demise of communism.
…As the nation mourns Ronald Reagan we should also pause to reflect that in the space of 27 months between 1978 and 1981 three such extraordinary leaders–each with the belief that evil must be confronted–should have come to power. Together they changed the world.
…Few like to recall the feelings of resignation or even despair that many in the West felt in the 1970s as countries from Angola to Nicaragua became Soviet proxies. Mrs. Thatcher says that the West was “slowly but surely losing” the Cold War, and she eagerly embraced Reagan’s strategy to win it by becoming “his principal cheerleader” in NATO.
That strategy rested on six pillars: support internal disruption in Soviet satellites, especially Poland; dry up sources of hard currency; overload the Soviet economy with a technology-based arms race; slow the flow of Western technology to Moscow; raise the cost of the wars it was fighting; and demoralize the Soviets by generating pressure for change.
…Joseph Stalin once dismissed the Vatican’s influence by asking, “How many divisions does the pope have?” In the end, that didn’t matter. The pope and two stalwart Western leaders helped topple the entire Soviet empire without moving a single division across a border. As Reagan himself said in his 1989 Farewell Address. “Not bad, not bad at all.”
Natan Sharansky remembered how Reagan gave Sharansky and other dissidents hope when Reagan spoke the truth about the enemy that the free world was facing.
In 1983, I was confined to an eight-by-ten-foot prison cell on the border of Siberia. My Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan’s “provocation” quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth – a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.
At the time, I never imagined that three years later, I would be in the White House telling this story to the president. When he summoned some of his staff to hear what I had said, I understood that there had been much criticism of Reagan’s decision to cast the struggle between the superpowers as a battle between good and evil.
Well, Reagan was right and his critics were wrong.
Mark Steyn wrote about Reagan’s political courage.
…I once discussed Irving Berlin, composer of “God Bless America”, with his friend and fellow songwriter Jule Styne, and Jule put it best: “It’s easy to be clever. But the really clever thing is to be simple.” At the Berlin Wall that day, it would have been easy to be clever, as all those ’70s detente sophisticates would have been. And who would have remembered a word they said? Like Irving Berlin with “God Bless America”, only Reagan could have stood there and declared without embarrassment:
Tear down this wall!
- and two years later the wall was, indeed, torn down. Ronald Reagan was straightforward and true and said it for everybody – which is why his “rhetorical opportunity missed” is remembered by millions of grateful Eastern Europeans. The really clever thing is to have the confidence to say it in four monosyllables.
…“The Great Communicator” was effective because what he was communicating was self-evident to all but our dessicated elites: “We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around.” And at the end of a grim, grey decade – Vietnam, Watergate, energy crises, Iranian hostages – Americans decided they wanted a President who looked like the nation, not like its failed government. …
Charles Krauthammer commented on the vindication of Reagan’s policies.
…Reagan was optimistic about America amid the cynicism and general retreat of the post-Vietnam era because he believed unfashionably that America was both great and good — and had been needlessly diminished by restrictive economic policies and timid foreign policies. Change the policies and America would be restored, both at home and abroad.
He was right.
In the early ’80s, the West experienced a nuclear hysteria — a sudden panic about imminent nuclear destruction and a mindless demand to “freeze” nuclear weapons. What had changed to bring this on? Reagan had become president. Like George W. Bush today, the U.S. president was seen as a greater threat to peace than was the enemy he was confronting.
The nuclear freeze and the accompanying hysteria are an embarrassment that liberals prefer to forget today. Reagan’s critics completely misunderstood the logic and the power of his nuclear posture. He took a very hard line on the Soviets, who had broken the nuclear status quo by placing missiles in Europe. Backed by Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl, Reagan faced the Soviets down — despite enormous “peace” demonstrations throughout the West, including the largest one to date in U.S. history (New York City, 1982) — and ultimately forced the Soviets to dismantle the missiles and begin their overall retreat.
Rarely has a president been so quickly and completely vindicated by history. The Berlin Wall came down 10 months after Reagan left office. His policies of unrelenting toughness won the Cold War and brought a new peace. That is because Reagan understood that the key to peace was never arms control. …
Ann Coulter reminded us that the liberal tune hasn’t changed. Al-Qaeda will not be seduced, just as the communists were not seduced, by kumbaya speeches from the Left. This is something that the American people understand, just as Reagan understood.
…Reagan was a March hare right-winger. He had enough faith in the American people to know that as long as the facts were clear, they would rise to the occasion and be March hare right-wingers, too. As Reagan himself said, back in 1964: “Our Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues. They want to make you and me believe that this is a contest between two men … that we are to choose just between two personalities.”
…While Reagan had undeniable magnetism, what set him apart was that he had the courage to speak the truth and trust the American people. In the 1964 speech that launched his political career, “A Time for Choosing,” Reagan never smiled. …
…In the throes of the Cold War – still hot in Vietnam – Reagan forthrightly said liberals refused to acknowledge that the choice was not between “peace and war, only between fight and surrender.” …he said liberals tell us “if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to love us.” All who disagree with the “peace” crowd, he said, “are indicted as warmongers.” To this, Reagan said: “Let’s set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace – and you can have it in the next second – surrender.” …
Mark Steyn discussed Reagan’s stand on SDI.
…President Reagan did what politicians are always being urged to do: he took the long view. And, while Tony Blair and other CND unilateralists were insisting that the best way to make the world safe from annihilation was to surrender, Reagan understood that the surest method of neutralising any weapon is to make it obsolete. Why the Left should be opposed to ending the nuclear age is unclear. …
… On 14 July, science said an interceptor could shoot down an incoming missile. Science has yet to find anything proving a connection between the one-degree rise in temperature over the last century and that proportion of greenhouse-gas emissions for which Western industrial societyis responsible, nor anything to suggest that reducing greenhouse-gas emissions would reverse the modest warming trend. …
Twenty years ago, Ronald Reagan foresaw a missile defence shield. By contrast, John Cusack’s chums foresaw a global population explosion, the exhaustion of the world’s oil resources, and the melting of the polar ice caps. Whose crystal ball would you bet on? In Bonn this week the Rest of the World was meeting to ‘rescue’ Kyoto – not rescue their beloved planet, mark you; only one of their sacred texts, and even then there’s not exactly a stampede to join Romania in actually ratifying it. Meanwhile, 144 miles over the Pacific, the Pentagon blew a warhead out of the sky. So who are the fantasists and who are the realists?
No doubt Colin Powell and Condi Rice will be happy to assure the French, German and even the Canadian governments that if they are determined to ensure that their citizens remain vulnerable to nuclear attack, the Americans will not stand in their way. …
Jeff Jacoby had a wonderful eulogy.
…”The American sound,” Reagan said in his second inaugural address, “is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic, daring, decent, and fair.” Much the same could be said of Reagan himself. All week long, the accolades have emphasized the character and values that made him the man he was — his optimism, his patriotism, his self-deprecating humor, his moral clarity, his rocklike belief that freedom is the birthright of every human being, his willingness to call evil by its name, his faith in God, his sheer guts.
But one trait has gone largely unmentioned: His remarkable humility.
In her moving and affectionate account of the 40th president’s life, “When Character Was King,” Peggy Noonan says that when she really wants to convey what Reagan was like, she tells the “bathroom story.”
It occurred in 1981, shortly after the assassination attempt. Reagan was still in the hospital and one night, feeling unwell, he got out of bed to go to the bathroom. “He slapped water on his face, and water slopped out of the sink,” Noonan relates. “He got some paper towels and got down on the floor to clean it up. An aide came in and said: `Mr. President, what are you doing? We have people for that.’ And Reagan said, oh, no, he was just cleaning up his mess, he didn’t want a nurse to have to do it.”
That was Reagan: On his say-so armies would march and fighter jets scramble, but he hated to trouble a hospital orderly to mop up his spill. That humbleness, it seems to me, is a mark of Reagan’s greatness, too — and a key to understanding the outpouring of affection his death has unleashed.
In the WSJ, Ken Adelman shared this anecdote about Reagan’s vision.
…What I witnessed personally…was a leader of impressive skill and stunning vision.
The first epiphany came early in his administration, when we gathered in a formal National Security Council meeting in the Cabinet Room. Secretary of State Alexander Haig opened by lamenting that the Law of the Sea Treaty was something we didn’t like but had to accept, since it had emerged over the previous decade through a 150-nation negotiation. Mr. Haig then proceeded to recite 13 or so options for modifying the treaty–some with several suboptions.
Such detail, to put it mildly, was not the president’s strong suit. He looked increasingly puzzled and finally interrupted. “Uh, Al,” he asked quietly, “isn’t this what the whole thing was all about?”
“Huh?” The secretary of state couldn’t fathom what the president meant. None of us could. So Mr. Haig asked him.
Well, Mr. Reagan shrugged, wasn’t “not going along with something that is ‘really stupid’ just because 150 nations had done so” what the whole thing was all about–our running, our winning, our governing? A stunned Mr. Haig folded up his briefing book and promised to find out how to stop the treaty altogether. …
And we have the text of Reagan’s 1964 speech.
…Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.
And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.
This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down—[up] man’s old—old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course. …
You can watch Reagan’s 1964 speech about Goldwater here.