Ronald Reagan: 1911-2004 - How he always left his detractors bewildered

By Lyn Nofziger -- Special To The Bee - (Published June 13, 2004)

When Ronald Reagan was elected president, liberal Democrats were quick to label him as a not-very-bright far-right-winger likely to get the United States into a nuclear war abroad while returning it to the Dark Ages at home.

Perhaps the kindest thing any prominent Democrat said of him at the time was when Clark Clifford, longtime adviser to Democratic presidents, called him "an amiable dunce."

For the most part, however, Democrats had difficulty understanding how he ever got to be governor of the nation's largest state, let alone president.

Reagan's victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980 astounded national Democrats as much as 14 years earlier his victory over Gov. Pat Brown had surprised those in California.

Neither Brown nor Carter ever got over it. Both had viewed Reagan as the easiest of the Republican candidates to beat.

And afterward neither ever figured out how the man Democrats like to refer to derisively as "a dumb actor" could defeat, on the one hand, a two-term governor who had been a competent and effective chief executive and, on the other hand, a president who was a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and was endowed, as his supporters were quick to admit, with a superior intelligence.

The fact is, Reagan was not only smarter than they gave him credit for being, but also he was a better and tougher candidate than either of them, one who made fewer damaging mistakes and was better able than either to rectify those he made.

Mistakes involving young children helped undo both Brown and Carter.

In Brown's case, his campaign prepared a half-hour film that included a brief segment showing him patting a little black girl on the head and chuckling, "You know, it was an actor who shot Lincoln."

Liberal Hollywood did not think it was funny. Actor Dan Blocker, who played Hoss in the television show, "Bonanza," indignantly resigned from Brown's campaign committee. Others inside and outside the movie industry thought and said he had gone beyond the pale.

In 1980 in the only Reagan-Carter debate, Carter said he had consulted his teenage daughter, Amy, on nuclear defense policy. Even Democrats thought there were more competent persons to go to for advice.

In the same debate, after Carter twice asserted that Reagan advocated policies that Reagan denied he stood for, Reagan smiled and said, "There you go again," effect accusing Carter of lying. Carter had no immediate response, the late October date gave him no time to recover from either booboo and Reagan trounced him in the general election.

While the attempt on his life by John Hinkley early in his first term gained Reagan the nation's and the world's sympathy, his early success in persuading a Democrat-controlled Congress to approve of major tax cuts won him little respect from the Democratic leadership. They charged his policies were hurtful to the poor, the elderly and every other Democrat-leaning constituent group and that he personally was cold-hearted, callous and even cruel.

They seemingly made those charges stick. They, along with stubborn unemployment, resulted in the Republicans losing seats in both the House and the Senate in 1982, even though during his first two years a raging inflation was brought under control, and record high interest rates fell significantly. It is noteworthy that these successes are usually ignored by Reagan's critics.

By 1984 the Democrats had learned that their "dumb actor" approach had no effect on the voting public, so they tried a new tactic, attacking Reagan, the oldest man ever to hold the presidency, as being too old.

Twice that year Reagan debated the Democratic candidate, former Vice President Walter Mondale. And in the first debate, to the Democrats' glee, he indeed came across as old and tired and Mondale emerged the clear winner. In the second debate, however, Reagan turned the tables on Mondale by lightheartedly promising "not to take advantage of my opponent's youth and inexperience."

Even Mondale laughed. And off of that one line Reagan not only emerged in the public eye as the winner but also assured the voters that he was not too old to be given a second term. In the election that followed he lost only Mondale's home state, Minnesota, and the District of Columbia.

Though Reagan's second term was seriously marred by the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal, overall his presidency by any objective evaluation was a success.

No, he did not do or get done all he had promised. And yes, some of what he did accomplish did not fit with his conservative rhetoric.

But, George Washington perhaps excepted, it is not possible to name a president who was a model of consistency, who was never swayed by political exigencies or by the need to get something done or by changing conditions.

Like all good politicians (Reagan never really viewed himself as a politician, but he was, in fact, an exceptionally effective one), Reagan was flexible. This does not mean that he kept a wet finger in the political winds to see which way they were blowing; it did mean he was perfectly capable of modifying or changing his position if conditions demanded.

And he had the rare knack of appearing consistent while being inconsistent, of reassuring his supporters while agreeing to things to which they were opposed and to which they were sure he was opposed also.

As governor he was adamantly opposed to adopting withholding of state income taxes.

"My feet are in concrete," he declared.

Nevertheless, when circumstances left him little choice he agreed to withholding and at a famous press conference wryly announced that "that noise you hear is the sound of concrete cracking around my feet."

There were other times, too, when the concrete cracked.

In his second year as president, only a year after pushing through a major tax cut program, he heeded the advice of his chief of staff, James A. Baker III, as well as that of several moderate Republican senators and pushed through, over conservative objections, a significant tax increase, believing naively a Democrat promise that for every dollar of taxes that was increased they would reduce spending by two dollars.

That, of course, didn't happen, and Reagan later regretted supporting the measure. "Trust but verify," Reagan discovered, applied not only to the Soviets but also to the Democrats in the Congress.

Reagan's most notorious and most inexplicable change of heart came when he agreed to supply arms to Iran in exchange for hostages, something he had vowed never to do. But though he was persuaded to admit it publicly, he said on several occasions afterward only that "they tell me" this was an-arms-for-hostages swap and in his autobiography, written after he left office, he wrote:

"To this date I still believe that the Iran initiative was not an effort to swap arms for hostages."

Unlike President Nixon before him and President Clinton after him, Reagan called for and then cooperated fully in the investigation that followed, acts which may well have saved his presidency.

Likewise, unlike either Nixon or Clinton, there was no guile in Reagan, no duplicity. Even when he was wrong he was sincerely wrong. His wife, Nancy, consistently said, "What you see is what you get." And she gets no argument from persons who worked closely with him over the years.

Jesse Unruh, an old political foe, remarked ruefully: "When Reagan tells a lie it comes across as the truth because he believes it's the truth." He added, "When the rest of us \[politicians\] lie everyone knows it because we know it."

In many ways Reagan was a different kind of president, not because of his philosophy or his knowledge but because of the kind of man he was. He was a person of great optimism; he believed in himself and in his country. And he believed in God. More than anything else it was this optimism and this faith that saw him through the darkest days of his presidency: the attempt on his life and the Iran-contra affair.

He devoutly believed that God had set this nation here between two oceans to be a shining city on a hill and a beacon of freedom to the rest of the world.

He believed there was nothing Americans couldn't do if they set their minds to it.

Unlike Jimmy Carter, who worried about a national malaise and fretted that perhaps the job of president had become too big for any one man, Reagan was absolutely convinced not only that he could handle the job but also that he could lead his country.

He was not a complicated man and he did not have a complicated vision for his country. He wanted a world that was at peace and one that was unthreatened by the expansion of Soviet communism. He did not believe in detente because he wanted a world in which all men were free, where millions were not held captive by their own governments.

He was never more serious than when he called on Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," the wall that split Berlin into a city that was half free and half slave.

He wanted a nation where government was the servant of its citizens, not their ruler, where taxes were low and government small. He wanted a country where government got out of the way and let its people go as far and rise as high as their aspirations and abilities could take them.

Was he an across-the-board success? Of course not. But he stood up to and stopped the expansion of Soviet communism and took the actions and inaugurated the policies that brought it to its knees two years after he left office.

Like every president since the end of World War II, he was unable to stop the growth of government and its encroachment into people's lives, but he never changed his mind about the need to do so.

And his supply-side economic policies and the spirit of optimism that he imparted to his fellow Americans resulted in the boom that ran almost uninterrupted from the early 1980s to 2000.

It is these few things that, despite the fits and starts that accompany every presidency and despite the never-ending effort by some to trash his record, that continue to make Reagan not only the most popular president to leave office but also that continue to increase the regard in which many historians hold him today.

His admirers may never get his likeness carved on Mt. Rushmore, but at the same time his detractors so far are having little luck painting him as the second-rate president they always hoped he'd be.