by Henry Olsen
Stockman proclaimed loudly that he “joined the Reagan Revolution as a radical ideologue.”78 He had searched his whole life for an all-encompassing worldview that made sense of all things, passing through a Marxist phase in college before settling on supply-side libertarianism.79 His new ideology preached the virtues of a dynamic capitalism and minimalist government, “a spare and stingy creature which offered even-handed public justice but no more.”80 He came at his beliefs from a different source, but Stockman’s ideology preached the same thing as Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative and the early anti-Eisenhower conservative movement.
Like Goldwater, Stockman believed that he—with the exception of pro-entrepreneurial measures like supply-side tax cuts—had come to Washington to cut government, not improve it. The Reagan Revolution he sought to lead required a “frontal assault on the American welfare state.”81 That meant such things as an end to subsidies to farmers and businesses, an end to welfare for the able-bodied, and an end to permitting people to collect more in Social Security benefits than they had contributed in taxes.82 Americans as a whole were “getting more than they deserved, needed, or owed.”83 He meant to cut them off from the government that had helped them since the New Deal.
Stockman believed Reagan should have led the fight for this revolution from the start. But what’s telling is not that Reagan didn’t support this, it’s Stockman’s rationale for why he did not. Reagan, he wrote, was “too kind, gentle, and sentimental. Despite his right-wing image, his ideology and philosophy always took a back seat when he [learned] some individual human being might be hurt.”(Emphasis added.)84 Stockman, like other disappointed conservatives, and most liberals, assumed that Reagan in his heart was as antigovernment as he and Barry Goldwater were.
We have seen that Reagan never endorsed the view of minimalist government that Stockman, Goldwater, and today’s libertarians and libertarian-conservatives advocate. From the moment he stepped onto the stage as a conservative speaker, Reagan made clear that he supported government measures that offer genuine help to people with legitimate need. He did not abandon his ideology when he saw that people would be hurt; his entire philosophy was informed by that fact from the outset.
Stockman’s views on Social Security benefits demonstrate this in spades. His principle of “no more benefits than you put in” would mean Social Security was little more than a forced savings program. If you were poor or part of the working poor, you would get very little in terms of benefits. You would remain poor, perhaps even poorer, in “retirement” in Stockman’s world even with these “benefits.” But preventing “poverty by reason of old age because of unemployment,” as he put it in the “Time for Choosing” speech, was exactly what Reagan believed Social Security was supposed to do. Reagan wanted those better off to provide those worse off “through no fault of their own” with “comfort, and even a few luxuries” in their old age—and he wanted to tax the rich to make sure the deserving poor got their benefits.
Reagan and Stockman ultimately disagreed on principle. Reagan believed that you deserved a certain minimal standard of living so long as you contributed according to your ability. You deserved that “help” because you were a human being living in America. Stockman believed you deserved only what you could compel others to give you in a free-market exchange. If you were neither talented nor fortunate enough to be able to afford a comfortable retirement, you did not deserve it—and thus should not get it.
It’s no surprise that Stockman so fundamentally misunderstood Reagan. He had held him in contempt at the outset of the 1980 campaign, saying he believed Reagan to be a “cranky obscurantist” and an “antediluvian.”85 He identified Reagan’s “political base” with “every kook and fringe group that inhabited the vasty deep of American politics.”86 That included the social-issues conservatives of the New Right, “the Bible-thumping creationists, the anti-Communist witch-hunters, and the small-minded Hollywood millionaires to whom ‘supply side’ meant one more Mercedes.”87 Stockman was, if it were possible, even more unfamiliar than the liberal was with Ronald Reagan, his views, and the people who loved him.
But even those familiar with Reagan’s views could be surprised at what he did. Reagan’s dealings with Gorbachev are the primary example of this, as even personal friends who had known him for decades were shocked when the virulent anti-Communist shook hands with a Communist leader to eliminate American weapons that had helped hold Soviet expansion in check.
Reagan always noted that every Soviet leader had reiterated the goal of worldwide Communist domination, and that their actions in fomenting revolution and spreading their ideology showed they were serious. Thus he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,”88 and even joked before a nationwide radio address that “I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”89 While he sought to engage the Soviets in arms-control talks to discuss significant reductions in nuclear weapons, none of these leaders seriously engaged his proposals. The world thus continued to watch what it had watched for seventy years, a Soviet Communist leadership that steadily and aggressively marched toward what it said history itself dictated, the installment of worldwide Communist rule.
Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in early 1985. Gorbachev was different from prior Soviet rulers: young (fifty-four years old when he took power), sunny in temperament, and well dressed and familiar with Western ideas. He was the first Soviet leader to have been born after the Communist Revolution, and from the outset he preached change rather than continuity. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Reagan’s philosophical soul mate, had met him in 1984 and famously declared “we can do business with him.” Reagan was eager to find out if he could too.
Reagan started by sending Vice President Bush to Gorbachev’s predecessor’s funeral with a letter inviting the new leader to a summit meeting in Washington. Gorbachev turned him down, as expected, but “expressed less hostility than I had come to expect from Soviet leaders.”90 Despite that, Reagan was not yet sold that Gorbachev was truly “a different sort of Soviet leader.”91 He didn’t begin to come to that conclusion until he met him face to face in Geneva, Switzerland, that November. After spending some time alone with him by a roaring fire (Reagan, ever the FDR devotee, called this a “fireside chat”92), he decided that Thatcher had been right and he could talk with Gorbachev. Most important, he later noted,
not once during our private sessions or at the plenary meetings did he express support for the old Marxist-Leninist goal of a one-world Communist state or the Brezhnev Doctrine of Soviet expansionism. He was the first Soviet leader I knew of who hadn’t done that.93
This was the first set of new facts that the principled Reagan would note to chart a new path to his old course, replacing the Soviet Union with a regime that respected human dignity and freedom.
Reagan continued to get new facts in early 1986 that gave him further hope that the decades-old conflict could be turned around. The Soviet economy had started to sputter, perhaps shocked by the massive collapse in world oil prices that occurred between November 1985 and February 1986.94 The Soviet Union was heavily dependent on revenue it gained from selling surplus oil abroad to pay for the grain and other imports it used to offset its nonmarket economy’s inefficiencies.95 These economic problems were quickly followed by the unexpected nuclear disaster at a nuclear power plant in the Soviet city of Chernobyl.96 Poor design and an incompetently administered stress test sent radioactive material into the ground and the air, the latter spreading contamination throughout Western Europe. Reagan continued to press Gorbachev to meet and pushed nuclear negotiators to find common ground on a verifiable treaty reducing nuclear-armed missiles. A proposal by Gorbachev led Reagan to agree to meet him in Reykjavik, Iceland, to see if a deal might be concluded.
Reykjavik proved to be an unsuccessful, yet important, summit. Gorbachev and Reagan nearly agreed to a landmark treaty to dramatically reduce strategic and intermediate-level nuclear missiles,
and Gorbachev volunteered to reduce the Soviets’ conventional military to offset desired reductions in tactical nuclear weapons.97 But he insisted that Reagan agree to stop American research into a defense against ballistic missiles. Reagan was not willing to do that, arguing that this “was an insurance policy to guarantee the Soviets kept the agreements.”98 Reagan offered to share the fruits of the research to the Soviets to prove the United States had no intention of using this defense in an offensive manner, building an impregnable shield behind which it could launch a devastating first strike on Russia.99 When Gorbachev refused to budge, Reagan angrily stormed out of the meeting.
Many conservatives distrusted Reagan’s outreach, but he saw things differently. He noted that Gorbachev was trying to change the Soviet system. Gorbachev had started to encourage private ownership of businesses (perestroika) and to reduce internal repression and interference in the affairs of other countries (glasnost). Reagan had always believed, as the Westminster speech showed, that the Soviet Union would have to do this or fall because of internal dissent. As he noted these developments he moved forward with private diplomacy to reengage with Gorbachev.100 He maintained public condemnation of the Soviet system, telling Gorbachev in an address before the Berlin Wall to “tear down this wall!”101 The Wall stayed up, but behind the scene the walls were starting to crack. Reagan received word while he was accompanying his wife at his mother-in-law’s funeral that the Soviets were willing to discuss the Reykjavik measures without insisting on the Americans’ elimination of missile defense research.102 By December, the old Cold Warrior sat in the White House to sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, pledging both sides to eliminating an entire type of nuclear weapon from the globe.
Conservatives had been suspicious of this development for months. In May, Reagan’s close personal friend William F. Buckley Jr. published an issue of his influential magazine, National Review, condemning what the cover called “Reagan’s Suicide Pact.”103 Buckley’s disapproval did not go away despite many private discussions with Reagan.104 Reagan moved to reassure other conservatives, telling the New Hampshire newspaper publisher “Nackey” Loeb that “the evil empire is still just that.”105 He said that Gorbachev was sincere about glasnost and perestroika and that he truly was different although still a solid Communist.106 Reagan was impressed that the head of an officially atheist state had twice referred to God in their private meetings107 and by Gorbachev’s failure to reaffirm “the Marxian concept of a one-world Communist state.”108
Whatever their private misgivings, conservative senators quickly fell in line. The treaty was ratified in May, opposed only by a few ultraconservatives, including North Carolina senator Jesse Helms.109 Thus, the man whose support in the 1976 North Carolina primary did more than any other person’s outside the Reagan campaign itself to save the Californian’s flagging hopes became in the end yet another ultra who found Reagan wasn’t the man he had thought he was.
We will never know if conservative fears about Gorbachev, that he or a successor might renege on the treaty or invade Western Europe once American missiles were destroyed, would have come to fruition. Gorbachev was prepared to use the domestic power the treaty gave him to test Reagan’s premise that a free people would never choose communism. Within two years, he would find to his dismay that Reagan had been stunningly right.
Gorbachev first removed Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1988 and 1989, the first time Soviet troops had retreated since World War II. He then announced that the Soviet Union would not use its military to prop up satellite regimes in Eastern Europe, and he allowed mass protests within the Soviet Union to occur without repression. Reagan thought the latter development confirmed he had been right about Gorbachev, telling his old friend and colleague the former California senator George Murphy as much in a letter in July 1988.110 But 1988 was only the spark that lit the Soviet empire ablaze.
Poland was the first to go. By April 1989 the Polish Communists had agreed to partially free elections with the anti-Communist trade union Solidarity. Solidarity won every seat it was eligible to compete for in the June election, and by fall a non-Communist was prime minister. By September the Hungarian Communist party had agreed to free, multiparty elections to take place in 1990.
The most important and symbolic revolt occurred in the Soviet-occupied portions of Germany, known as the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. Tens of thousands fled the country by the fall of 1989, and thousands more took to the streets to demand change. By November 9, 1989, the East German regime had seen enough. It opened the border with West Germany directly, and East German citizens started to tear down the wall that Reagan had asked Gorbachev to dismantle just two years earlier.
The final nail in the Soviet coffin was hammered into place in Czechoslovakia. Inspired by their neighbors, hundreds of thousands of Czechs surged to Wenceslaus Square in the center of the capital of Prague. Czech Communists caved in quickly, forming a coalition government with non-Communists in late December.
I will never forget where I was on December 30, 1989. I was in Munich, Germany, that morning on my first trip to Europe. I can read German, and so as I was in the main train station headed to Regensburg I looked up at the electronic bulletin board that flashed news headlines. There I saw it: the Czechoslovaks had appointed non-Communists to lead the interior (police) and defense (army) ministries. For the first time since Vladimir I. Lenin had seized power in 1917, a Communist government had given up control of the guns. Reagan had been proved right. The Cold War was over.
I often think about that day as I have furthered my understanding of Reagan. I have come to learn that the deepest political belief he had was a love of individual human beings and a belief that each person is capable of living a life of dignity and worth. Many of us mouthed those words, but we remained caught in ideological webs of our own spinning, seeing only left or right. He, however, saw neither left nor right, but only up or down. He saw that human beings may differ on much, but the love of self and the love for others are parts of the human soul that cannot be removed no matter how powerful a government becomes.
I was surprised decades later when I saw the epitaph he had chosen for his gravestone proclaiming his belief in the “purpose and worth in each and every human life.” But I should not have been. That was what he had been telling us all along, from his early days as a New Dealer to his mashed-potato-circuit days refining his views to his life as governor and then as president. We are capable of self-government, he told us. We can choose to restrain our greed while we feed every person’s need. We can choose, as British prime minister Theresa May recently said, to “reject the ideological templates provided by the socialist left and the libertarian right.”111 We can choose to do this, because we are human beings and because we are Americans.
Reagan often told his audiences that they faced a “time for choosing” and a “rendezvous with destiny.” The truth is that every generation of Americans, every generation of conservatives, faces times for choosing and rendezvouses with destiny. That is because self-government is a constant choice: we must always choose to feed the better angels of our nature and restrain the demons of greed and faction. We Americans, we conservatives, we Republicans: we all face this time for choosing today. Our national politics is riven by deep disagreement and partisanship, but all that sound and fury is not about nothing. It is simply we, the people, trying to decide how best to interpret our national principles in light of the challenges we face today as individuals and as a nation.
We conservatives and Republicans have a particular choice ahead of us because too often we have chosen to often ignore Ronald Reagan’s real political and intellectual legacy. We have too often implemented his specific words while ignoring or forgetting the spirit behind those words. Too often we have behaved as political Pharisees, following the letter of the law while losing sight of its spirit.
We have reached the end of our examination of the real Ronald Reagan. The next, final chapter
will look at how we conservatives and Republicans lost our way by forgetting him and how we can find it and him again. The election of Donald Trump has led many to conclude we are witnessing the de-Reaganization of the Republican Party. In fact, it is just the opposite. The spirit that Trump awakened and the constituency that spirit attracted is essentially the same in each case as that Reagan communicated and attracted. Trump’s election gives the conservative movement and the Republican Party its last, best hope to finally build Reagan’s New Republican Party and once again make America a shining city on the hill.
Chapter 8
The Time Is Now: Reagan
Ronald Reagan left us in 2004 when his soul “slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”1 His spirit, however, remains with us today. Just as Democrats wrapped themselves in the mantles of FDR and JFK for decades after their untimely deaths, so too do Republicans today all seek to run as Reagan’s true heir. Even President Obama understood that we live in Reagan’s shadow, telling his fellow Democrats that “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America.”2
Unfortunately, for most of the time since Reagan’s departure conservatives and Republicans have been wearing the wrong mantle. Conservatives and Republicans thought Reagan had given them a cookie-cutter formula—cut taxes, promote traditional morality, maintain a strong defense—rather than a deep conservative philosophy. They left the most crucial element of his appeal behind: the love of average Americans and the willingness to always use government to express their values. Republicans and conservatives spoke his words, but they did not carry his tune.
The result was that the Republican presidential nominee has failed to win a majority of the popular vote in six of the last seven elections. That is the GOP’s worst showing since the party was created in 1854. It has won unprecedented strength in Congress and the states, but that has largely been a result of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party consistently pushing an updated version of the Henry Wallace, government-centric, 1948 Progressive Party agenda. Big Republican wins have always come when a Democratic president or nominee expresses those unpopular values. When Democrats try to challenge for FDR’s mantle by running even slightly toward the center, they have continued to win in the post-Reagan era.