WASHINGTON — The Old Cowboy is gone. The oldest man ever to be
elected president lived on to be the oldest ex-president, and we
who were his friends and allies have lived on to hear him praised
in the media’s eulogies for his achievements and even for his
intelligence. That last item would have amused him. Though he
entered the White House an accomplished writer (the recently
published Reagan: A Life in Letters makes that clear), a
fairly erudite reader of history, philosophy, and economics, as
well as a companion to such luminaries as Milton Friedman and
William F. Buckley; his liberal antagonists through all eight years
of his enormously successful presidency remained adamant: Ronald
Reagan was a dolt. Do not despair George W!
From when I first broke bread with him as a college student
working on his tentative 1968 presidential campaign, to my last
melancholy goodbye in his California offices in the 1990s, he grew
to be the American conservative movement’s first president and one
of the twentieth century’s two greatest presidents. A great
president changes national policy either in the domestic sphere or
in the foreign policy sphere. As with Franklin Roosevelt, President
Reagan changed national policy in both spheres, bringing an end to
the Cold War and, at home, a prosperity that still endures. Now
friends and erstwhile critics alike are acknowledging that he
achieved all this through noble character and intellect. The Old
Cowboy was a great gentleman.
When first we met in 1968 his political advisers were testing
the waters for a presidential run, and I was asked to gather some
pretty girls from the Indiana University campus to greet him at the
Indianapolis airport. That was a political task worth undertaking.
The day ended with dinner at a local hotel. The California Governor
was surrounded by aides and Republican dignitaries with whom he was
at ease, but he came over to our table too. Governor Reagan was as
at ease with awkward students as he was with adults. He wanted to
express his gratitude to us. He did it with warmth, not the trashy
personal exuberance of present-day politics. He did not need to
look into our eyes and act like an adolescent to leave a mark. Even
in 1968 he radiated something special, a touch of class.
He was also a political genius. He had a gift that only the
great politicians have. Yes, he was eloquent. To be sure he could
work a crowd. Still that is not the stuff of political genius. He
had convictions and the courage to stand alone on behalf of those
convictions. He would through the years steadily coax his party and
his nation towards those convictions, but those are only the marks
of a great statesman, not of a political genius. What marked him as
a political genius was the gift of timing. “Do not rush
wildly at things” the Renaissance statesman, historian, and
philosopher Guicciardini advised in the sixteenth century while
chronicling King Ferdinand V of Aragon’s political genius, “do not
precipitate them, wait for them to mature in their own season.”
Before the Reagan presidency three supposedly gifted pols “rushed
wildly at things.” Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and
Jimmy Carter all attempted grand things and all came to ruin.
Drawing from the principles and policies of a conservative
movement that had been gestating since World War II, President
Reagan relied on his instinctive political timing to revive the
economy, pressure the Soviets around the world, and, with a massive
military build-up, bankrupt them. Even in today’s eulogies the
eulogists sniff that he left the economy with a huge deficit. They
remain ignorant of growth economics. The Reagan administration left
office with a vigorous economy growing so robustly that the deficit
was a shrinking percentage of GNP that in time would vanish. The
conservative movement’s first President was also the first
supply-side President.
President Reagan liked writers. During his presidency he would
call some of us from time to comment on our columns and to get
ideas from outside the White House. Once, during one of the
occasional periods when he was being accused of losing touch with
his conservative base, he called me at my Indiana office. He
insisted he was on course and when I suggested he call in some
conservative writers to exchange ideas he gave me the task of
gathering them. We met in the cabinet room with editors from
Commentary, National Review, and Policy
Review. The Old Cowboy held his own and told his aides he
wanted more of these egghead soirees. I did my best to keep him in
touch with writers and ideas and he always enjoyed the discussions,
especially on economics.
My most memorable salon with him came in July of 1988 when he
dined at my home with a dozen writers. Standing at my door in the
pouring rain with security helicopters overhead, a couple hundred
security men in and around the house, and his personal bartender at
work in the kitchen, he said, “Bob I’m sorry for all of this.” That
night he told us of the religious impulse he thought he had espied
in Russia and in Mikhail Gorbachev. Some at the table thought him
naïve, but he thought he had worked things out with the
Soviets. Midst the eulogies we often ignore how often he was so
alone in his perceptions even from other conservatives and how
often in his isolation he was the only one who was right.
Leaving office after years of economic growth and with American
security ensured, the fortieth President of the United States was
still abominated by his insensate critics. Columnist James Reston
catalogued the imperfections: “Reagan’s easy optimism, his amiable
incompetence, his tolerance of dubs and sleaze, his cronyism, his
preoccupation with stars, his indifference to facts and convenient
forgetfulness.” There you have it, Ronald Reagan, the Warren G.
Harding of his day. In death the estimates have softened, but not
completely. On MSNBC historian Doris Kearns Goodwin notes that
Reagan established an intense connection with the American people
thanks to television. Some earlier presidents have established it
too. She mentioned Harding, who I assume did it without television.
Professor Goodwin, an admitted plagiarist, overlooked policy and
ignored character.
