American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The Framers had shown remarkable flexibility and responsiveness to the public as well, especially when it became clear that delegates to the state ratifying conventions in 1787 and 1788 would approve the new charter only if the Constitution makers guaranteed that consideration of a Bill of Rights would be one of the first duties of the new Congress. That Bill of Rights, drafted by James Madison in the summer of 1789, endorsed by Congress that fall, and ratified by the states between 1789 and 1791, became the crownpiece of the Constitution. Its enactment also meant that celebration-weary Americans would have to gird themselves for another series of bicentennial commemorations from 1989 through 1991.

  New Yorkers who liked celebrations were in luck. Manhattan was where Madison had drafted the noble statement and where Congress had been sitting when it passed the proposed amendments. Indeed, New Yorkers had already held their celebration of the Bill of Rights in 1986, when they had seized on the centennial of the erection of the Statue of Liberty to stage a great weekend festivity, amid a swarm of old sailing ships in New York Harbor and a spectacular display of fireworks in the evening.

  The celebration revealed a deep hunger on the part of people to return to the past, to touch and savor it. Liberty Weekend, designed to stress the great statue’s welcome to immigrants, turned into a preview also of the Bill of Rights commemoration, as orators, pundits, and plain people explored the deeper meanings of freedom as the central value in American life and history. The celebrations took on a poignant aspect as speakers conjured up memories of the illustrious leaders of the past such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, devotees of liberty like Tom Paine and Patrick Henry. Two hundred years later, was there a single leader who could be compared with these men? What had happened to that fierce devotion to liberty? Could Congress formulate, would the states ratify, would the people approve a 1989 Bill of Rights as bold and sweeping as that drawn up two centuries earlier?

  That weekend, while President Reagan and other dignitaries paid homage to the restored and relighted Miss Liberty, a score of panelists— women’s leaders, trade unionists, educators, the mayor of the city—met in a hotel on Broadway to debate the next hundred years of freedom. The future of individual liberty seemed safe in the hands of panelists who had passed in front of garish, X-rated movie houses to enter the hotel but rejected censorship of pornography, who were concerned that their children could buy rock records with sexually explicit lyrics but favored identifying the contents rather than banning them. After New York’s Mayor Edward Koch complained that women had complained when his minions had placed signs in bars warning pregnant women against drinking, NOW president Eleanor Smeal asked not that the signs be taken down but rather that other signs be posted warning men against drinking and thus endangering babies while driving home.

  When the question shifted from the protection of individual liberty against government to that of the advancement of freedom through government—that is, from “freedom of speech and religion” to “freedom from fear and want”—the conferees became far more divided. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz and head of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, sharply posed the issue of social and collective freedom when he called on America to open its doors to anyone who wanted to enter, for economic as well as political reasons. We are all free only to the extent others are free, he said. The discussion turned to equality as inseparably linked with liberty. Could the American constitutional system not only protect liberty but broaden social freedom and deal with the nation’s enduring inequalities?

  Some of the conferees answered that the system worked, or at least could be made to work. However fragmented and stalemated, it could at least fend off arbitrary governmental intervention, and at the same time could be used as a positive means for expanding economic and social freedoms. Other conferees were doubtful. The system was too slow, too ponderous, too exposed to control by economic and social elites. Still others believed, though, that great leadership of the quality of Jefferson and Lincoln and EDR might make the system work. If anyone at the conference thought morosely about the state of the current leadership in both parties, no one wanted to mention the matter on a pleasant Fourth of July weekend of happy celebration.

  Republicans: Waiting for Mr. Right

  Few at the Liberty Weekend conference would have offered as a model leader the man who a few miles away was hailing the renovated Miss Liberty in a speech filled with his usual pieties and banalities. Even though Ronald Reagan had twice won both the governorship of California and the presidency of the United States, many in the press and academia still viewed him as merely a rigid ideologue whose hard-core conservatism was cushioned by a relaxed, easygoing manner and prettified by disarming, even self-deprecating, jokes and anecdotes. It was easy to compare his mind, as Harding’s had been compared, to stellar space—a huge void filled with a few wandering clichés. Or to picture, as Garry Trudeau had in his comic strip, an intrepid explorer pushing through the tangled filaments of the President’s brain in an effort to discover how—or whether—it worked.

  Even after his six years in the White House spotlight, many President watchers were still misjudging Ronald Reagan. They did not see the committed political activist and strategist behind the façade. They saw the Reagan who appeared on the screen, an “aw shucks” old boy, with bobbing head, face turning and smiling, shoulders rising and falling—a showcase of ingratiating body language. They heard that long-honed voice over the radio every Saturday, easily rising and receding, alternating between mellowness and intensity, hovering at times “barely above a whisper,” Roger Rosenblatt wrote, “so as to win you over by intimacy, if not by substance.” They chuckled at the perfectly timed joke or anecdote or observation. Many of his stories turned out to be untrue even during his presidential years, when at least his speech writers should have been more careful, and his misstatements and tall tales were numerous enough to be collected and published in book form.

  But few appeared to care when Reagan was found out, contradicted, refuted. “There he goes again,” the public seemed to smile indulgently. It took a long time for President watchers to understand that Reagan was not a man of details, specifics, particulars. Theodore White had called him a man more of ideas than of intellect, but he proved to be a man less of ideas than of stances, shibboleths, stereotypes. He was a strategist rather than a tactician, a hedgehog who knew one big thing, in Herodotus’ famous phrase, rather than a fox who knew many little things. What Reagan had known in the 1960s was that he must and could rid the Republican party of its liberal elements, marry the GOP to the burgeoning conservative causes and movements, fight off the far-right extremists, reunite Republicans around a clearly conservative doctrine, mobilize disaffected Democrats and blue-collar workers behind a Reagan candidacy, denounce the Russians—and win.

  In retrospect this strategy would seem obvious and even easy, but it had not so appeared at the time. The dominant image in the minds of Republican party politicians in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the crushing Goldwater defeat of 1964. Never mind the excuses—that no one could have overcome the Kennedy remembrance that year or outbid LBJ as peace leader. The practical pols knew their history—a moderate Eisenhower had won in 1952 and 1956, Nixon with his conservative, red-baiting image had lost in 1960, a “new Nixon,” bleached and smoothened, had won in 1968, and any solid right-wing candidate, no matter how attractive personally, would yield centrist voters and hence presidential elections to the Democrats. It was this Goldwater syndrome that Reagan had to overcome if he was to put himself at the head of the GOP and take it to victory.

  In the mid-1970s, however, many conservatives were by no means convinced that the Republican party could be their ticket to power. To them the GOP seemed irretrievably in the hands of Gerald Ford and his Vice President-select, the hated Nelson Rockefeller. Ford had been in the White House for hardly half a year when the American Conservative Union and Young Americans for Freedom jointly sponsored a conference at Washington’s Mayflow
er Hotel to consider forming an independent party to challenge both the GOP and the Democracy. Enraptured by the vision of a new conservative party that would unite rural Southerners and northern blue-collar workers, they urged Reagan to lead the effort. He gave his answer in a banquet speech before a packed ballroom. After winning cheers for a denunciation of the Ford policies, he dampened the fire-eaters by demanding, “Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party . . ,?”—a committedly conservative GOP.

  Reagan would wait—but the movement conservatives would not let him wait. In mid-June 1975, only four months after the Mayflower conference, a group of conservative leaders, including mail-order entrepreneur Richard Viguerie, columnist Kevin Phillips, Colorado brewer Joseph Coors, several supporters of George Wallace, and a cross section of conservative organization leaders, confronted Reagan at a private dinner. Phillips led the attack, asserting that the GOP was falling apart just as the Whigs had divided and collapsed in the 1850s, that it was time for a new conservative party that could overcome both Democrats and Republicans in a three-party battle, that Reagan must make a direct bid for the Wallace backers and hence must break whatever ties he had with Republican liberals and even Republican moderates. A free-for-all followed. Some in the group told Reagan harshly that he lacked “fire in his belly” and was dawdling while Ford picked up conservative support for the approaching 1976 campaign. Viguerie, arguing that the GOP had become “unmarketable,” urged the governor to unite conservatives and independents in a New Majority. Then Reagan told them his decision—he would fight Ford for the Republican nomination; as the Republican nominee he would unite conservatives, independents, and conservative Democrats in a broad coalition; and if necessary he would propose that the Republican party change its name. In effect he would transform the GOP or, failing that, abandon it. Half persuaded, and lacking any alternative candidate of national standing (Wallace was still disabled by his gunshot wounding in 1972), the conservatives could only assent. Reagan soon demonstrated that he did have fire in his belly by taking Ford on in the 1976 presidential primaries despite pressure from many GOP leaders to wait his turn. He proved his commitment when he returned to the fray in 1980 as an unrepentant conservative and Republican, and then after winning both the nomination and the election, made clear that he would govern as a conservative, and as head of a conservative Administration.

  The media for the most part interpreted the outcome of the 1980 presidential election as a repudiation of Carter rather than a victory for Reagan. Soaring prices, astronomical interest rates, the President’s apparent scolding of the American people in his “malaise” speech, his long agonizing months of being held hostage to the hostage situation in Iran—all these and much else were cited as proof. This view of the election outcome, however, revealed the bias of some liberals, who refused to believe that any authentic, outspoken conservative could win the presidency of the United States—the Goldwater syndrome at work. In fact, Reagan won the election by persuasive appeals to the right-wing vote and to disaffected independents, full exploitation of the remarkable direct-mail and fund-raising apparatus of the Republican national party, and his skillful coalition building between GOP regulars and movement conservatives, as reflected in the choice of George Bush for running mate.

  Then, to the astonishment of many, especially of Democrats who had become accustomed to their winning candidates reneging on promises of peace and reform within a year or two of coming into office, Reagan began to govern just as he had promised—as a conservative. He promptly appointed a conservative cabinet headed by Alexander Haig as Secretary of State, and ordered a freeze of federal hiring of civilian employees. Then, after recovering from a near-fatal assassination attempt, he repudiated Carter’s human rights approach, crushed striking air controllers and their union, called the Russians names, and engaged in a variety of symbolic acts that left no doubt that he was a conservative who meant it.

  Reagan had shrewdly recognized—or perhaps had simply sensed intuitively—that he should move ahead strongly in domestic economic policy even at the expense of dramatic initiatives abroad. Tax policy offered the best opportunity to redeem his campaign promises and publicize his departure from “discredited” New Deal policies of Carter and his Democratic predecessors. Working closely with congressional leaders, Vice President Bush, and the Republican Senate, the Administration pushed its legislative program of cutting personal income taxes across the board over thirty-three months; reducing the maximum tax on all income from 70 to 50 percent; indexing tax rates to soften the impact of graduated income taxes on rises in personal income; reducing the maximum tax on capital gains from 28 to 20 percent; liberalizing deductions for contributions to individual retirement accounts; lowering estate and gift taxes; providing business with tax breaks. The tax reductions were tied closely to a package of budget cuts that slashed toward the heart of the New Deal, Fair Deal, and Great Society domestic programs—education, health, housing, urban aid, food stamp programs, the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and even federal subsidies for school meals—but never never never defense spending.

  The Reagan Revolution was underway. The head revolutionary spurred his troops on television, in speeches to joint sessions of Congress, in huddles with key senators and representatives, in trips out into the country. Revolutionary fervor needed a doctrine, and this took the form of the supply-side theory that lowering taxes would produce prosperity by giving producers more capital for production and giving consumers more money for consumption. Savings, investment, and growth would be stimulated, the budget ultimately balanced through growth in the tax base. For all-out supply-siders, these were at the heart of a much wider program, described later by Reagan’s budget chief, David Stockman, as a “whole catalogue of policy changes, ranging from natural gas deregulation, to abolition of the minimum wage, to repeal of milk marketing orders, to elimination of federal certificates of ‘need’ for truckers, hospitals, airlines, and anyone else desiring to commit an act of economic production. It even encompassed reform of the World Bank, and countless more.” All of this was designed to overcome the stagflation of the late 1970s.

  Since the House of Representatives had remained in Democratic hands in the 1980 election, it was imperative that the President bring around a large segment of the opposition. In a House vote on his crucial budget bill within four months of his inauguration, sixty-three Democrats—over a quarter of the Democracy’s House membership—broke ranks to support the Administration. Many of these were from the South and West—an exciting hint of the possibilities of a future party realignment. No President since Roosevelt, Time opined six months after Reagan’s inauguration, had “done so much of such magnitude so quickly to change the economic direction of the nation.”

  The euphoria was not for long. During late 1981 and 1982 the economy plunged into recession. Once again the media headlined stories of bank failures, farm closures, bankruptcies, desperate family and individual crises. The jobless rate rose to over 10 percent, the highest since the great depression of the 1930s. The hard facts threw the White House economists and their colleagues outside into disarray. The supply-siders defended themselves with the classic explanation of dogmatists who fail—their program had not been tried hard enough, or long enough, or this or that vital ingredient was missing. Stockman was now mainly concerned that future Reagan budgets would be more and more out of balance in a recession situation. Republican party leaders feared that the GOP would be tagged with another “Hoover depression.”

  And Reagan? The President had now fallen into a severe political and intellectual bind. He had not been able to balance the budget—politically he dared not cut Social Security and other major safety-net spendings, viscerally he not only opposed cuts in his planned military buildup but also wanted a huge boost in defense spending. And in the end he still confronted Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill’s power base in the House. Doctrinally he remai
ned absolutely rigid in the face of his failure. Time and again emergency budget meetings in the Oval Office were trivialized as the President retreated into anecdotage about timeserving bureaucrats or wasteful projects. Stockman noted that when Pete Domenici, a Republican senator friendly to the White House, confronted Reagan with the need to raise taxes, the President jotted down notes during the presentation but only in order to rebut it.

  “Damn it, Pete,” he said, “I’m just not going to accept this. This is just more of the same kind of talk we’ve heard for forty years.”

  It became clear during that first year that Reagan the campaign and electoral strategist was a different man from Reagan the head of government. The grand coalition builder, who had spoken from the stump in pieties and platitudes that united people, now proved himself unable to think in terms of the hard policies and priorities that linked the overall values to day-to-day governmental choices and operations. Stockman complained of Reagan’s habit of castigating spending in the abstract while he shrank from the “real bullets” he would have to face politically if he took on the welfare state’s gigantic entitlement programs. Few in the White House pressed their chief to make fundamental strategic choices; rather they echoed his dogmatics or lobbied for some pet solution of their own. As Ralph Nader noted in a preface to a study of “Reagan’s ruling class,” the people around the President showed a remarkable sameness of “attitudes, ideologies, and even styles of thinking and explaining.” Not for Reagan was FDR’s penchant for peopling his Administration with challenging intellectual eclectics.