Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  The next day Reagan bade his supporters thanks and farewell. At least one journalist spotted him dabbing a tear; many observers assumed, given the candidate’s age, that this was his last convention. Reagan’s words revealed little of his plans. “Sure, there’s disappointment in what happened,” he said. “But the cause, the cause goes on … It’s just one battle in a long war, and it’s going to go on as long as we all live … You just stay in there, and you stay there with the same belief and the same faith to do what you’re doing here. The individuals on the stage may change, but the cause is there. The cause will prevail because it’s right.”

  James Baker left the convention with the winner but deeply respectful of the loser. “He damn near took us down,” he said of Reagan’s challenge to Ford. “It was really close.”

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  THE BLOW OF defeat was softened for Reagan by the common perception that the Republican nomination wasn’t worth much that season. The Republicans were still answering for Watergate, which the Democrats milked for every vote. Several prominent Democrats made a run for their party’s nomination, but the best known suffered from the taint of government experience, especially in Washington, the home of the corruption voters extrapolated from Watergate to politicians at large. Jimmy Carter had been governor of Georgia, but he soft-pedaled this part of his résumé in favor of his background as a plainspoken peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. His persistence and evident candor, which included an interview with Playboy magazine in which he admitted to lustful feelings about women not his wife, impressed enough primary-season Democrats for him to secure the nomination a month ahead of the July convention. The result was that while Ford and Reagan were still wrestling their way to Kansas City, Carter was catching his breath and building his campaign reserves. Polls gave him a big lead over either Republican.

  The campaign for the general election inspired almost no one. Ford was damaged goods following the Nixon pardon and his close call with Reagan; though the race tightened after Labor Day, as presidential campaigns often do, flubs by Ford in debates with Carter recalled the cutting comment by Lyndon Johnson that Ford had played too many football games without his helmet (at the University of Michigan, where he was the sort of lineman Reagan had aspired to be at Eureka College).

  Reagan did little to help the Republican cause. He gave enough speeches on Ford’s behalf to deflect charges of sulking in his tent, but his enthusiasm for the moderate president was conspicuous by its absence. Reagan never wholly mastered the partisan mind-set: the psychological frame that puts the interest of the party ahead of that of the country. He could and did say that Ford was preferable to Carter, but he barely believed it. He wasn’t immune to the conservative argument that the best thing for the country would be Ford’s defeat and the final discrediting of Republican moderation. The conservatives could then seize the party and spearhead an American renaissance.

  They got the first part of what they wanted. Ford continued to gain ground but finally fell short of Carter by a popular vote of 50 percent to 48. Many in the Ford camp blamed Reagan for weakening the president in the long battle for the nomination. “We might never have lost to Carter without that challenge,” James Baker said. The result was a less resounding repudiation of Republican moderation than the most zealous conservatives desired, but at least it meant that the next GOP nomination would be wide open. And nearly all the conservatives assumed that Carter would so mishandle the presidency that voters would be happy to give the Republicans another try.

  “ONCE UPON A time there was a little red hen who scratched about the barnyard until she uncovered some grains of wheat,” Reagan told radio listeners two weeks after the election. He was glad to be back on the air, happy for the opportunity to tell his stories, and appreciative again of the discipline required to distill complicated questions of policy into a few minutes of airtime. In this installment he borrowed from an old fable to make a modern point. His little red hen calls her neighbors and asks who will help her plant the wheat, that they all might have bread. The cow, the duck, the pig, and the goose beg off. So the hen plants the wheat herself. It grows tall and bears ripe grain. She asks who will help harvest the wheat.

  “Not I,” says the duck.

  “Out of my classification,” says the pig.

  “I’d lose my seniority,” says the cow.

  “I’d lose my unemployment compensation,” says the goose.

  So the hen harvests the wheat herself. In time she asks who will help her bake the bread.

  “That would be overtime for me,” says the cow.

  “I’d lose my welfare benefits,” says the duck.

  “I’m a dropout and never learned how,” says the pig.

  “If I’m to be the only helper, that’s discrimination,” says the goose.

  The hen bakes the loaves herself. She shows them to her neighbors. They each demand a share. But the hen won’t give them any. She keeps the bread for herself.

  “Excess profits!” cries the cow.

  “Capitalist leech!” screams the duck.

  “I demand equal rights,” yells the goose.

  The pig grunts, and the four complain to the government, whose agent tells the hen she must share.

  “But I earned the bread,” says the hen.

  “Exactly,” says the agent. “That is the wonderful free enterprise system. Anyone in the barnyard can earn as much as he wants. But under our modern government regulations, the productive workers must divide their product with the idle.”

  The irony in Reagan’s tone was lighthearted but unmistakable as he concluded: “And they lived happily ever after, including the little red hen, who smiled and clucked, ‘I am grateful, I am grateful.’ But her neighbors wondered why she never again baked any more bread.”

  The performance was vintage Reagan. It engaged the listener; it delivered a conservative message without the anger that infused so much rhetoric on the right. Barry Goldwater could never have managed the trick. Franklin Roosevelt could have, though Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats were in fact less chatty than Reagan’s show. Not being president, Reagan wasn’t burdened with the dignity of the high office. But there was that same link to an invisible audience, that same meeting of imaginations in the ether. And Reagan’s voice was better than Roosevelt’s: soothing, warm, serious but with an undercurrent of humor.

  How many voters Reagan won over by radio is impossible to know. Like other pundits he often preached to the converted. But with these he cemented his reputation as the most attractive conservative in the country. He doubtless pulled in some fence-sitters, perhaps wanderers across the radio dial who heard his voice and stopped to listen to the story. And he alienated almost no one. Critics might complain that his messages were oversimplified, but the honest among them attributed this to the genre as much as to Reagan. People could disagree with Reagan, but rarely did they find him disagreeable.

  However the performances played with listeners, their greater importance was to Reagan’s political and intellectual development. The radio show required him to learn about topics he had hardly considered before; he had to find something to talk about every day. He read more broadly than he ever had, mining newspapers and magazines for information, for stories, for hooks.

  He spoke about health care, warning of the advance of socialized medicine. “The campaign goes on to bring health care in America out of the free market system and into the protective custody of government,” he said. “Those who brought us the postal service and Amtrak”—two other regular targets—“are anxious to provide medical service of the same high caliber.” Some in Congress were promoting a measure that would require employers to offer medical insurance to their employees. Reagan cited Britain’s national health service as a cautionary tale of where such meddling in the market might lead. A woman in England—“attractive except for some facial scars”—had boasted to a visiting American that all her medical treatment was free. She acknowledged that it was sometimes slow. “I had to wait
eight years for an appointment with a dermatologist about my face.” And she had to wait another year before the treatment started. “But it is free.” Except that it wasn’t, Reagan pointed out. “They are taxed far more heavily than we are,” he said of the British. “And their health service takes a big bite of those taxes.”

  He talked about education. A St. Louis television station had aired a story that seemed to summarize the deficiencies of public education. “They interviewed a product of the St. Louis public school system,” Reagan said, “a young man twenty years of age who had gone from kindergarten through grade twelve and had his high school diploma to prove it. He is a functional illiterate, unable to read or write who is presently enrolled in an adult remedial reading program.” Reagan assured his listeners there was nothing wrong with the young man. “He is not mentally retarded. Neither is he stupid. He’s just plain untaught.” Reagan blamed the liberal theorists of the education graduate schools who emphasized reasoning processes rather than the retention of facts. And behind the theorists was the muscle of the National Education Association, which like all big unions put the interests of its members and especially its leaders ahead of the people it ostensibly served, in this case young people like the St. Louis illiterate.

  He chided the environmental movement. Poking fun at efforts to save endangered species, he asked his listeners, “How much do you miss dinosaurs? Would your life be richer if those giant prehistoric flying lizards occasionally settled on your front lawn?” He called for renewed use of DDT, contending that its discontinuance in America was based on fear rather than on evidence. “The EPA back in 1972 said that DDT was harmless to human beings and that properly used it posed no threat to animal, bird or marine life. Yet it is banned by the EPA on the theoretical grounds that it might, under some circumstances, someday harm someone or something.” He said recent hand-wringing over the clubbing deaths of northern harp seal pups by fur hunters had gotten out of control. “The harp seal is not in danger of extinction. It is one of the most abundant seal species in the world, and the herd is growing, not shrinking. Elimination of the seal pup harvest would have a disastrous effect on the already depleted Atlantic fishing grounds. The seals consume each year a half million tons of small fish that are a vital link in the food chain for cod, sea birds and whales.” The campaign for the harp seal, he said, was make-work for the environmentalists. “There is an international organization which stays in business year round primarily to raise money to protect against the seal harvest. A $40,000-a-year executive rides around in the organization’s own helicopter.”

  He criticized public transit. Washington, D.C., was building a new subway system, with a cost originally projected at $2.5 billion. “That cost figure has already doubled,” Reagan said. And the work was far from finished. “It is years behind schedule and only four-and-a-half miles of track are open for use at a loss of $55,000 a day.” People preferred the freedom of cars. “Most cities, including those of modest size, once had rapid transit. The clang of the trolley car’s bell was a familiar sound until people abandoned public transportation for their own set of wheels. The automobile gave man more freedom, the freedom to choose his own time table and route of travel on a portal to portal basis. He has shown he does not intend to give up that freedom, and government has no right to take it from him.”

  Reagan’s broadcasts were overwhelmingly negative. Negativity, of course, had been the posture of American conservatives since the New Deal. And opposition is expected of minority parties and factions. Republican conservatives were a double minority during the late 1970s. Their party was a minority in national politics; not since the 1940s had the Republicans commanded a majority in the House, and not since the early 1950s in the Senate. With Carter in the White House, the Republicans were exiles from the executive branch as well. Meanwhile, within the Republican Party, conservatives had been a minority since the Goldwater season of 1964. If Reagan sounded negative, like the embattled outsider, he had reason.

  Even so, his listeners might have wondered what he stood for. Smaller government, presumably, but despite his incessant complaints about government waste and inefficiency, he carefully avoided calling for the elimination of specific programs. He lamented the growth of Social Security but didn’t advocate its dismantling. He railed against “socialized medicine” but left seniors to enjoy their Medicare.

  He sounded negative, certainly. But he also sounded like a candidate.

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  NEARLY EVERY SUCCESSFUL presidential candidate treats his election as a mandate to pursue the policies he espoused during the campaign, whether voters actually favored those policies or not. Jimmy Carter was elected primarily because he had been farthest from the scene of the Watergate crimes, but he interpreted his election as cause to re-chart the path of American foreign policy. He explained his new approach in the spring of 1977 to an audience at the University of Notre Dame. The setting suited his theme, in that Notre Dame’s president, Theodore Hesburgh, had often spoken on behalf of human rights, which Carter emphasized this day. Carter contended that during the Cold War the United States wandered from its traditional values. “For too many years, we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs,” he said. “We’ve fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water. This approach failed, with Vietnam the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty.” Carter took his own election, on a platform stressing human rights, as evidence that Americans had learned from their country’s failure. “We have now found our way back to our own principles and values.”

  The world had changed dramatically since the 1940s, Carter continued. The bipolar model on which America’s containment policy had been based no longer described reality. New nations in Asia and Africa and newly assertive nations in Latin America demanded their place at the international table. And they refused to accept the priorities of the superpowers. “We can no longer expect that the other 150 nations will follow the dictates of the powerful,” Carter said. This was all to the good, for it played to America’s fundamental moral strength. “The great democracies are not free because we are strong and prosperous,” Carter asserted. “We are strong and influential and prosperous because we are free.” Freedom must guide the United States in international affairs. “Our policy must reflect our belief that the world can hope for more than simple survival and our belief that dignity and freedom are fundamental spiritual requirements.” Carter reiterated that the transition had already begun. “We are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear. I’m glad that that’s being changed.”

  Some Americans found the new international order threatening, Carter acknowledged. It need not be. “It is a new world, but America should not fear it. It is a new world, and we should help to shape it. It is a new world that calls for a new American foreign policy—a policy based on constant decency in its values and on optimism in our historical vision.” This vision should lead America and the world into the new era. “Our policy is rooted in our moral values, which never change,” he said. “Our policy is designed to serve mankind. And it is a policy that I hope will make you proud to be Americans.”

  Carter took steps to institutionalize his vision. He established a special position in the State Department for monitoring human rights, and he appointed civil rights activist Patricia Derian to head it. He tapped Andrew Young, another veteran of the civil rights movement, to be American ambassador to the United Nations. Derian and Young made human rights a touchstone of American foreign policy, lecturing foreign despots and urging the withholding of assistance from dictators on the American dole. Carter himself corresponded publicly with Andrei Sakharov, the most visible of Soviet dissidents. He signed United Nations covenants on civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights, and he cut aid to oppressive regimes in Argentina, Chile, and Nicaragua. He impo
sed sanctions against the white-supremacist governments of Rhodesia and South Africa and the brutal tyranny of Idi Amin in Uganda.

  CARTER’S NEW POLICY indeed made some Americans proud, but it made most conservatives ill. Jeane Kirkpatrick was an academic who crossed over into polemics to join the ranks of the neoconservatives, a group of intellectuals who had trekked from the left to the right of the political spectrum without losing the certitude that infuriated their critics. The neoconservatives cared about domestic issues but about foreign policy much more. They despised détente and assailed it at every turn. They embraced ideals but prided themselves on their hard-eyed realism.

  It was as a realist that Kirkpatrick attacked Carter. In a 1979 article titled “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” published in Commentary, the house organ of neoconservatism, she blasted the president for willful naïveté and consequent malpractice of office. She contended that Carter used human rights as a stick to beat America’s authoritarian friends while ignoring the far larger crimes of the real tyrants of the planet, the totalitarian leaders of the Soviet Union, China, and the other communist states. She saw a crucial distinction between conservative dictatorships of the right and socialist dictatorships of the left. The former allowed personal autonomy the latter denied. The rightists, moreover, were redeemable. “Although there is no instance of a revolutionary ‘socialist’ or Communist society being democratized,” Kirkpatrick wrote, “right-wing autocracies do sometimes evolve into democracies—given time, propitious economic, social, and political circumstances, talented leaders, and a strong indigenous demand for representative government.” Carter ignored this possibility and in doing so rendered reform less likely. Meanwhile, by treating foreign policy as a morality play, he undermined American strength and credibility. “What makes the inconsistencies of the Carter administration noteworthy are, first, the administration’s moralism, which renders it especially vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy; and, second, the administration’s predilection for policies that violate the strategic and economic interests of the United States. The administration’s conception of national interest borders on doublethink: it finds friendly powers to be guilty representatives of the status quo and views the triumph of unfriendly groups as beneficial to America’s ‘true interests.’ ”