Thank you for inviting me tonight to your celebration, and thanks especially to Peter Kermani and to Barbara Davis. I've addressed many gatherings on the subject of Ronald Reagan and participated in a few panels on the presidency that focused on Abraham Lincoln. But I've never spoken to a Lincoln - Reagan dinner. I don't know how many such dinners there are: you have probably created a unique event. It's certainly an intriguing idea. Lincoln, who most historians rank as our greatest president, saved the Union and ended slavery. Reagan, who was once dismissed by academic historians but whose rankings have risen steadily as his accomplishments are assessed, restored the shattered public confidence of Americans in their government and played a decisive role in ending the Cold War and preserving freedom.
I lack credentials as a Lincoln historian. But my friend William Lee Miller of the University of Virginia, a good Democrat to be sure, is a student of Lincoln — I commend to you his excellent book, Lincoln's Virtues, which he subtitled "an ethical biography." He observes that Lincoln was not born on Mt. Rushmore, and in his book sets out to assess the moral qualities that made Lincoln, in Professor Miller's words, "among the most revered of the human beings who have ever walked this earth." He describes a moral boy who was kind to animals at a time when other boys on the frontier were cruel to them, a moral young soldier who during his service in the militia in the Black Hawk War at the age of 23 induces his fellow militia man to spare the life of an Indian who has stumbled into camp and is suspected of being a spy, and a moral politician who made mistakes and compromises but consistently advances the cause of freedom.
It is in this latter context that I would compare Lincoln and Reagan, whose contributions to freedom's cause in our time were decisive. I've called my talk tonight, Reagan's Contributions — and I include among them his contributions to his party, our country, and the world.
Professor Miller believes that it's necessary to appreciate the young Lincoln to understand the wartime leader who is now remembered as a sort of secular saint: "tall, homely, ready to make a self - deprecating joke, stretching higher than the greatest of his countrymen, an unlikely figure among the mighty of the earth." So, also is it useful to examine the early life of Ronald Reagan, who grew up in the state that calls itself the Land of Lincoln and whose boyhood still possessed definable links to that awful and necessary conflict we call the Civil War. Reagan was born on Feb. 6, 1911, in Tampico Illinois. He grew to manhood in Dixon, where an arch spanned Main Street in tribute to American soldiers who had died in Europe during the Great War, then known as the "war to end all wars" and now remembered as World War I. When Reagan was a boy, Dixon was home to veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic who had fought in the Civil War. He learned early in life that freedom is worth fighting for and that heroes are precious, but that war was not to be glorified. When he was 20, Reagan wrote a short story in which a war - weary U.S. soldier on the western front tells a comrade that this dreadful war will seem "worth fighting" only when it ends.
Reagan was an adventurous, athletic boy but with eyesight so poor that he couldn't seen a thrown football, much less a baseball, until it was right upon him. So he became a swimmer and a lifeguard. His early life wasn't easy. His father was an alcoholic. The family was poor. Just when the Reagans were beginning to get ahead the Depression struck, costing Reagan's father his shoe store and his brother his job in a cement plant. But Ronald Reagan, even as a boy, was incurably optimistic. In this he took after his mother, a quiet religious woman who nonetheless loved the theater and who taught Ronald, her younger son, that everything happened according to God's plan.
As it happened, Ronald Reagan's life was intertwined with many of the great communicative inventions that changed our lives in the 20th century — radio, moving pictures, and television. It seems, in retrospect, as if his achievements in these media came easy to him, but like Lincoln, he had many problems in making a go of it. Some said he was lucky, and perhaps he was, but luck was in part a product of persistence.
Are any of you baseball fans? I am. Although I was born in New York City, I grew up in the West. When I was 17 I had the good fortune of being one of two Nevada boys chosen to attend Boy's Nation in Washington, an event sponsored by the American Legion. Afterward, I took the train to New York City, where I was determined to see two of my heroes play. They were Jackie Robinson and Joe DiMaggio, and I saw both of them. At Yankee Stadium I sat in the centerfield bleachers to watch DiMaggio. He was this great, graceful man who made everything look so easy. But when I watched DiMaggio run for a fly ball from my close - up vantage point, I realized he was running very hard and that what he did so well wasn't easy at all.
Reagan's a bit like that. Everything was supposed to come easy to him, and he learned to joke about it. "It's true no one ever died of hard work, but I figure, why take the chance?" he once told a Gridiron dinner. In fact, he worked very hard. As a boy he worked 10 - 12 hours a day for seven summers on a treacherous section of the Rock River that runs through Dixon. Everyone's heard about the 77 people he saved from drowning. Few have paid attention to the fact that he also chipped and brought the blocks of ice for the park concession and cleaned up the stands at the end of his long day. He worked his way through Eureka College without any financial help from home and then helped his brother get through college, two. In a literal sense he was always his brother's keeper.
Reagan had a lifelong love affair with radio. When he graduated he landed a job with an Iowa station as a sports announcer. But he almost lost it because he didn't know how to read a commercial. He taught himself. He learned that if he could memorize the first paragraph, that the rest of the commercial would sound comfortable and natural when he read it. In time he became professional and smooth, but it was the product of considerable effort.
Then he went to Hollywood, that great dream factory, when it was the mass culture capital of the world and millions of Americans longed to be in the movies. Reagan became a movie actor. He didn't know the first thing about it—where to stand, what to do, how to kiss a girl, but he was a plugger, and he became quite good. On set he was so dependable that directors valued him. This reliability kept him longer than it should in the B - film division of Warner's, where said Reagan, they didn't want the films good they wanted them Thursday. In 1940, however, he broke through the B - film barrier as the doomed Notre Dame football player George Gipp and went on to have a successful film career, often playing, as Garry Wills put it, the heartwarming role of himself.
Reagan was also a union man. He served 22 years on the board of the Screen Actors Guild, including six years as president of the Guild, and he led his union in a successful strike against the major studios. When Reagan was president of the United States four decades later, he told me he considered this experience valuable background for the negotiations on which he was then embarking with Soviet leaders. When I asked him the most important lesson he had learned from his labor experience, he replied: "That the purpose of a negotiation is to get an agreement."
But that gets ahead of the story. Let's go back to Hollywood after the war, when Reagan's film career was fading. Television was then a dirty word to many film actors but Reagan made a successful transition into TV as host of General Electric Theatre, a top - rated show for many years. He also toured the country for General Electric, which turned out to be a valuable political apprenticeship. Again, he worked hard. Reagan was an average speaker at the beginning of this apprenticeship and a good one when it ended. That was typical. Reagan was sometimes uncertain in his beginnings, but he almost always finished well.
In politics he evolved, as Lincoln did. I'm sure that all in this room know that Lincoln spent most of his adult life as a Whig and that Reagan was raised a Democrat. He did not register as a Republican until 1962, when he was fifty - one years old. But it is fair to say that Reagan clung to the cause of individual freedom for most of his life and that this belief, as much as anything, led him into the Republican Party and eventually made him its leader.
Here is Reagan, in June 1952, delivering a commencement address to William Woods College in Fulton, Missouri. Reagan called the speech, written entirely by him, "America the Beautiful."
"I, in my own mind, [Reagan said] have thought of America as a place in the divine scheme of things that was set aside as a promised land. It was set here and the price of admission was very simple; the means of selection was very simple as to how this land should be populated. Any place in the world and any person from these places; any person with the courage, with the desire to tear up their roots, to strive for freedom, to attempt and dare to live in a strange and foreign place, to travel half across the world was welcome here. And they have brought with them to the bloodstream that has become America that precious courage, the courage that they and they alone…had in the first place, to this land, the unknown, to strive for something better than for themselves and for their children and their children's children. I believe that God in shedding his grace on this country has always in this divine scheme of things kept an eye on our land and guided it as a promised land for these people."
Reagan was a Democrat when he gave this speech, which was shortly before the Los Angeles County Democratic Central Committee declined to endorse him for an open congressional seat on the grounds he was "too liberal." So much for the acumen of the local Democrats, one is tempted to say, but Reagan's vision of America as a free society that drew its strength from the courage and bloodstock of its immigrants was then considered a liberal view. Liberals in those days celebrated the American "melting pot" rather than the diversity of its human ingredients. The genius of America was not that it perpetuated differences but that it obliterated them and created a new being: an American. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in a campaign speech, "All of our people all over the country—except the pure - blooded Indians — are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, including even those who came over on the Mayflower."
What shines forth in Reagan's commencement speech — which political scientist Hugh Heclo has called a sacramental vision of America— is his enduring commitment to individual freedom. This is the great constant of Reagan, an internationalist who opposed fascism and Nazism and communism and valued the friends of freedom around the globe. He ultimately came to believe that it was the Republican Party that best exemplified his values of freedom.
Nonetheless, there were Republicans as well as Democrats who did not take Reagan seriously when he first became a candidate for political office. Barry Goldwater had been demonized and buried in a landslide in 1964 despite a splendid speech that Reagan had given for him, and the strategists for the Democratic governor of California were confident that Reagan faced a similar fate. Governor Pat Brown liked to say that he had been doing great things for the state when Reagan was being upstaged by a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo.
Reagan never minded being underestimated. In this he resembled Lincoln, who understood that Americans prefer politicians who can poke fun at themselves and don't seem too big for their britches. I met Reagan in the summer of 1965, when he was an undeclared candidate for governor of California. When someone asked him what kind of governor he would be, he replied, "I don't know, I've played a governor," Reagan said.
This typical self - deprecating wisecrack contributed to a general view in the media and the California political community that Reagan was nothing more than a lightweight washed - up actor, congenial to be sure but with little to recommend him for public office. It was easy to underestimate Reagan, as Lincoln was once underestimated, for he was a deceptively amiable man with strong convictions and a set speech. Reagan rarely met a statistic he didn't like. Over the years, as a public speaker, especially on the road for General Electric, he had formed the habit of clipping items out of local newspapers and magazines — he particularly liked Readers Digest—and using them to illustrate the points he wanted to make. Some of these items were right and some weren't, but it was hard to get them out of Reagan's head once he had memorized them. He was, his friend, the Nevada governor and later U.S. senator Paul Laxalt said, "frighteningly retentive."
But Reagan had a moral compass, an unerring sense of the issues that moved voters, that commitment to freedom of which I've spoken, and an ability to connect with people. He routed Pat Brown by nearly a million votes and faced up to the challenge of being governor. It wasn't easy, for Brown had bequeathed Reagan a huge deficit and Reagan and his new team were, as his communications director, Lyn Nofziger, put it "novice amateurs." Mr. Reagan didn't just waltz into the governorship and play it like a movie role. But he learned—as in every endeavor of his life. He was an achiever who wanted to do the right thing, and the successes of his second term in welfare reform and tax relief — compromises achieved in negotiations with Democratic leaders — demonstrated his commitment to effective government.
I had the privilege of covering Reagan as a reporter during his learning period as governor. My latest book, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power, is an attempt to describe what he did without painting the lily, and it wasn't always pretty. Even his cheerleaders will wince at the way that novice Governor Reagan went about reducing the population of the state's mental hospitals. But Reagan restored order to the state's campuses when it was needed and he also raised the budget of the university. I hope his detractors will notice that and notice, too, that Governor Reagan saved the wild rivers of northern California and stopped the Nixon administration from constructing a trans - Sierra highway that would have bisected the John Muir Trail. These achievements that are largely ignored by the Left, which routinely depicts Reagan as a foe of the environment. Curiously, they are also sometimes ignored by conservatives, some of whom seem unaware of Reagan's environmental record as governor.
My book also recounts Reagan's first three tries for the presidency. Again, we see a person who learns from his mistakes. Reagan tried and failed in 1968. He tried and failed in 1976. He tried and won in 1980—and of course, he was reelected, almost by public acclamation in 1984. In his persistence in defeat Reagan is reminiscent of Winston Churchill, who said: "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never; in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in."
Devotion to the cause of freedom anywhere is devotion to the cause of freedom everywhere. Lincoln demonstrated this in the Civil War; Churchill in his brave stand against the Nazi forces at a time when all civilization was threatened. And I would argue that Reagan, too, established his greatness in freedom's cause by standing up to the Soviet Union and promoting policies that contributed to its collapse.
Let me say as an aside here that Reagan did many other important things on which I will not dwell tonight. American optimism was at low ebb when he came into office in 1981; he said that wanted to make Americans believe in themselves again, and he did that. Economists and historians still quarrel about the impact of the Reagan tax cuts but there is no question that they contributed to what became a long economic boom. Reagan proved an anchor and an inspiration for the Republican Party, one of the reasons you are right to celebrate him tonight. George Bush, his vice president, became president. George Bush's son is president today. Michael Barone has made the point that there were more New Deal Democrats in the Senate in 1985 than at any time in FDR's life, and there are more Reagan Republicans in Congress today than there were when Reagan was president. That would please Ronald Reagan.
But what would please him more is the worldwide march of freedom. Reagan came into office believing that it was necessary to mount a major defense buildup to bring the Soviet Union to the bargaining table where the United States would negotiate from a position of strength. I remember that when he came to The Washington Post in June 1980 and said as much, he was asked if his proposed policies wouldn't lead to a more intense arms race. Reagan essentially said yes, to the horror of an aide who had accompanied him to the lunch, but Reagan added that the Soviets would be frightened by the competition and would negotiate because they couldn't compete with us economically. How he knew that I don't knew. The typical view of the time, conservative or liberal, was that the Soviet Union was ten feet tall. Reagan knew better.
By now it will be a familiar theme to you that Reagan, as president, struggled at first. Congress gave him the buildup he wanted, or most of it, but the Soviets were in no mood to negotiate. Reagan was faced with a series of geriatric Soviet leaders. Later, he would say, that they just kept dying on me as if, somehow, they were doing that on purpose to frustrate him. In his first presidential term, Reagan said some harsh things about the Soviet Union, most of them true. Some Soviet leaders were even harsher in response. One of them compared Reagan to Hitler. But when Michael Gorbachev, beginning with the Geneva summit in 1985, sat down with Reagan he learned to appreciate Reagan's candor and commitment. Together, they followed a path that led to the signing of the first treaties of the nuclear era that reduced the arsenals of the superpowers and put us on the path to the end of the Cold War.
In February 1993, the Princeton Conference on the End of the Cold War brought together nine leading former U.S. and Soviet diplomats. While they differed on some details, they agreed that the Cold War had not ended automatically. All the participants gave credit to Reagan and Gorbachev, none more eloquently than Alexander Besstmertnykh, who had been the deputy Soviet foreign minister in the crucial last years of the Reagan administration. "As for the common things," he said, "I would say that those two men were very idealistic. They each had their own ideals, which they had tried to follow all through their lives. Their ideals were not similar, but the dedication to those ideals was similar. They both believed in something. They were not just men who could trim their sails and go any way the wind blows…this is what they immediately sensed in each other, and why they made good partners."
Bessmertnykh scoffed at opinions in "the American press" after Reykjavik that Reagan had fallen short as a negotiator. "It was not true at all," he said. "Reagan handled negotiations very, very well. He might not have known all the details. He used little cards when he would come to details. He didn't like the formal part of negotiations…He would try to rush through this formal part, and then he would throw away the cards and then he would start talking the direct way. I was across the table at all the summits and followed this president for all those years, and I personally admired the man very much. He was a good politician. He was a good diplomat. He was very dedicated. And if it were not for Reagan, I don't think we would have been able to reach the agreements in arms control that we reached later, because of his idealism, because he thought that we should really do away with nuclear weapons. Gorbachev believed in that. Reagan believed in that. The experts didn't believe, but the leaders did."
Reagan did not, of course, single - handedly end the Cold War nor would he ever have made such an immodest claim. Many people played a role, certainly including Gorbachev, and certainly Reagan's staunch ally, Margaret Thatcher, and certainly the brave people of Poland and other countries that had been under the Soviet yoke. But the determination of commitment of individual leaders can often make the crucial difference—as Abraham Lincoln demonstrated and does Ronald Reagan. Writing about his achievements in his final month in office, Margaret Thatcher said that Ronald Reagan had "achieved the most difficult of all political tasks: changing attitudes and perceptions about what is possible. From the strong fortress of his convictions, he set out to enlarge freedom the world over at a time when freedom was in retreat—and he succeeded."
I believe it this is a judgment that will endure. Ronald Reagan casts a long shadow, but it is a bright shadow of freedom to which he committed himself throughout his life. We who gather here tonight — and all free people anywhere - are in his debt.
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