“What I would really like to do is to go down in history as the
President who made Americans believe in themselves again.” —Ronald Reagan
Before he became an icon, Ronald Reagan was a paradox: a complex man who
appeared simple, at once a genial fundamentalist and a conservative
innovator. As America’s oldest President, he found his most fervent
supporters among the young. The only divorced man to occupy the Oval Office,
Reagan as President rarely attended church. He enjoyed a relationship with
his own children best described as intermittent. Yet his name was synonymous
with traditional values, and he inspired millions of the faithful to become
politically active for the first time. During eight years in the White
House, Reagan never submitted a balanced budget or ceased to blame Congress
for excessive spending. He presided over the highest unemployment rate since
World War II and one of the longest peacetime booms ever.
It was hard to know what about Reagan, who was elected in 1980 as a
bristling anti-communist, offended the foreign policy establishment more:
his harsh rhetoric consigning the Soviet Union to the ash heap of history or
his scorn for the prevailing doctrine of mutually assured destruction. State
Department bureaucrats who tried to censor his speeches, most notably his
1987 Berlin ultimatum to Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” threw
up their hands when Reagan proposed to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether.
Even among his White House staff, admiration for the President’s
achievements was mingled with a faint whiff of condescension. “He knows so
little and accomplishes so much,” marveled Robert McFarlane, the third of
Reagan’s six National Security Advisers.
For decades to come, students of the Reagan era will debate Margaret
Thatcher’s assertion that her American ally won the Cold War without firing
a shot. Nearly as intense is the argument swirling around the
arms-for-hostages deal known as Iran-contra, a bizarre enterprise
born of administrative neglect, wishful thinking and Reagan’s all-too-human
desire to rescue his countrymen brutalized by their Middle East captors.
Under more benign circumstances, Reagan didn’t hesitate to poke fun at the
supposed confusion in his White House, conceding, “Our right hand doesn’t
know what our far right hand is doing.” That he could laugh at himself was a
source of reassurance to Americans who had lived through a series of failed
or tragically shortened presidencies. Not the least of Reagan’s
accomplishments was to refute popular doubts, widespread in 1980, that the
office had grown too demanding for any one individual to master.
By his own acknowledgment, Reagan arrived in Washington with a script.
Indeed, by running in 1980 on a clearly articulated platform of less
government, lower taxes, fresh incentives for entrepreneurship and a massive
military buildup to counter Soviet expansionism, he could legitimately claim
an electoral mandate for what he called his New Beginning. The actor in
Reagan instinctively understood that successful leaders don’t just speak to
us; they speak for us. Certainly, no one who heard his husky-voiced tribute
to “the boys of Pointe du Hoc” 40 years after they scaled the walls of
Hitler’s Fortress Europe is likely to forget the experience. But it was in
unscripted moments, far more than any of Michael Deaver’s
made-for-television stagecraft, that Reagan showed his essential self. Above
all, on March 30, 1981. In taking an assassin’s bullet and cracking wise in
the shadow of death, he displayed qualities of character only hinted at on
the campaign trail. The grace and grit he exhibited that day marked the
genesis of Reagan’s enduring bond with the American people, including
millions who never voted for him.
See TIME’s Ronald Reagan covers.
See the most notorious presidential pardons of all time.
