“The truth is that the Washington, D.C. he found is a brutal, insular, and dark place. That he accomplished what he did is, in retrospect, the wonder.”
It’s been thirty-five years since Ronald Reagan, whose birthday was last week, left the White House as one of the most accomplished presidents in the modern era – which means approximately half the U.S. population today was not alive during his presidency or too young to remember him.
That leaves the general knowledge of his two terms in office dependent on whom one reads or listens to. The left’s storyline on his presidency is mangled or made up by the astonishingly hostile and corrupt corporate media complex and the radical brigades that zealously guard our decomposing colleges, universities, and institutions.
There is nothing new in this, of course. The radical left (is there any other kind?) and mainstream media hated Ronald Reagan with a passion that burned in their breasts like a charcoal briquette – and does to this day.
Like all of us, President Reagan was shaped by his times. He grew up in a struggling household with an alcoholic father and a faith-filled mother during the Depression. With a partial football scholarship to Eureka College in Illinois and various jobs, notably as a lifeguard, he put himself through college and became a sports broadcaster after graduating. As an announcer for WHO radio in Des Moines, he would have to recreate the action that had already occurred using play-by-play telegraph wire for the Chicago Cubs and Big Ten football games. (He would quip years later that mixing fact with fiction was “great preparation for politics.”)
In 1937, Reagan auditioned for Warner Brothers (while in California reporting on a Cubs training camp) and signed a contract that began his 30-year movie career. In 1942 – he had joined the Army Enlisted Reserve in 1937 – he was called to active duty as a Captain in WWII. Due to his very poor vision, he was assigned to public relations and helped produce over 400 training and briefing films for the Armed Forces. He would later credit the war years for igniting his interest in world affairs, the growing communist threat, and his lifelong study of political philosophy.
I came to know Ronald Reagan in the mid and late 1970s through his remarkable three-minute radio broadcasts that went out on over 300 radio stations to an audience of 20-30 million. They contained tightly wrapped nuggets of political perspective, sage historical analysis, and unpretentious wisdom topped off with a distinctly defiant view of the prevailing political orthodoxy in Washington that he believed threatened the Republic.
These broadcasts defined Ronald Reagan uniquely and personally in the public mind – much like broadcasters Paul Harvey and Russ Limbaugh would do with their audience.
The media always tried to present Reagan as a good-natured dunce manipulated by the “smart” people. Yet he produced 1000 of these broadcasts, nearly 700 of which he penned himself. They document a man who was a fine writer, extremely well-read, thoroughly versed in history, and who had thought a great deal about domestic and foreign affairs. He had a clear grasp of his own on national issues and had many of his concepts and specific policies written out in detail. [Kiron Skinner, Annalise Anderson, and Martin Anderson gathered many of his handwritten drafts in their 2001 book, Reagan, In His Own Hand (here).]
By the time I first met Ronald Reagan backstage at a massive campaign rally in 1976, he had been the president of the Screen Actors Guild, twice the successful governor of California, and the commander of an army of informed revolutionaries in politics challenging the Washington status quo and then President Gerald Ford.
I cut my political teeth helping direct his campaign in West Texas in 1976 and again in 1980. In 1978, at his suggestion, I ran for the U.S. House, and later served in his administration in several positions. I was fortunate to meet with him numerous times in private, with small groups, at public events, and when he campaigned for me in 1978. Reagan was authentic – the same person when you were alone with him as he was in front of thousands. He was exactly the same man he appeared to be. And he was clearly in charge of his political destiny.
I (and many others) learned important lessons from him that I believe are as important today as they were nearly four decades ago when the American experiment was also in self-doubt and peril.
Perhaps they are timeless lessons.
First, know what you believe and believe what you know. And be ready, willing, and able to tell that story. I learned from Ronald Reagan that in politics, the narrative is everything. He could so compellingly explain to his fellow citizens the reality of economic consequences, the nature of evil, the noblest call of human liberty and dignity, and the Divine hand of the Creator in both our public and personal life because it was in his very soul.
He spent decades studying and conceptualizing his beliefs. So when he went before the public arguing that a bloated, government-run welfare state stripped human dignity out of individuals and left them to the least that is in them, not the best that liberty could afford them, Americans responded to the conviction and the truth of his narrative.
When he said that our problems are not caused by too little spending but by a predictable desire of a self-perpetuating bureaucracy to take from the individual and consume for themselves, the truth struck like a bell.
When he described the “Evil Empire” and its political offspring that sought to corrupt God’s sovereign gift and enslave a world to the dark worship of the state, free men and women knew instinctively that his narrative was beyond human truth.
And when he spoke of the gift of human life, it was not a piece of random matter, but a life handcrafted by God.
Today, we suffer the “sound-bite conservative” in the political world. Too many of our politicians are men and women of the moment. They throw around catchphrases like “free markets” and “free trade,” and “pro-life” like party favors. But in your heart, you know they are just spouting words they think you want to hear, not the truth you need to understand. They simply don’t have a whole narrative in their souls, and whatever they believe today can change by a poll tomorrow.
If the modern conservative movement wants to be persistently relevant – if we’re going to rescue our faith, our culture, our economy, and our liberty – then we will become studied expositors of the narrative. We will tell the American people why we believe what we believe. Not reluctantly, not apologetically, and not with one eye to the political calculus.
Ronald Reagan’s narrative spoke to the American spirit like a songbird sings to the world; he told the truth.
The second thing I learned from Ronald Reagan was to speak to the future, not the past. He was a very practical man. He indeed used historical and factual stories from the past as guideposts, markers, and warnings. But he led his fellow citizens with an optimistic vision of what God promised us we could be. The causal lightness that we took ourselves too seriously was always in his narrative, and with it, a streak of common sense and ingenuity that runs in the American character – because liberty revealed it in us. God’s grace invited it. Our natural humor welcomed it.
Men look better after the years pass. We forget the turmoil and anguish of George Washington’s trek across the frontier of the Revolution. We forget Abraham Lincoln’s foibles, mistakes, and dark moods. So, perhaps we shall paint a portrait of Ronald Reagan without some of the blemishes of his life and his presidency because we want to remember only the best of him.
The truth is that the Washington, D.C. he found is a brutal, insular, and dark place. That he accomplished what he did is, in retrospect, the wonder.
But blemishes are not what make great men and women. Ronald Reagan was without serious question one of the giants of the twentieth century. Quibble, as some will, that he didn’t do this or that he did do that. But we do him and ourselves wrong in the end not to celebrate his greatness.
2 comments
Spot on, Mike!
Bravo Sir !