Reagan: The Life (108 page)

R
EAGAN AND
N
ANCY
accepted Gorbachev’s invitation to Russia, and they expanded the trip into an eleven-day tour of Europe. They touched down in Germany, where Reagan was invited to have a whack at the Berlin Wall. “
Darned hard,” he remarked after several unproductive blows with hammer and chisel. A German onlooker responded, “German quality work.” They entered
East Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate and were greeted by the president of the East German parliament, who said, “Mr. President, we have much to thank you for.” Reagan replied, “Berlin is going to be Berlin once again.”

From Germany they traveled to
Poland, where the Polish government newspaper hailed Reagan as the “
real father of
perestroika” and dubbed his European tour the “symbolic harvest” of his support of freedom as president. Reagan met
Lech Wałesa, still the leader of the now-divided
Solidarity movement. Reagan urged the opposing factions to keep their differences within bounds. “To protect the liberty you have won, you will need a full measure of the tolerance and openness that are Poland’s tradition,” he said.

The good feelings followed them to Moscow, where Gorbachev embraced his erstwhile partner in diplomacy and praised him as a statesman of true vision. “
I’m sure you must have sensed by now during your stay here in this country that we, and people in Soviet society, hold you in tremendous respect and esteem,” Gorbachev said.

Reagan returned the compliment by praising Gorbachev to the
Supreme Soviet. As in Poland he cautioned against demands of too much too soon. “These are yeasty times, times of ferment,” he said. “Freedom can bring out passions between groups of people that may boil over. When they do, cool and calm decisions are called for by leaders, so as to lower temperatures all around.” Reagan cited the anguish of America’s Civil War and said he hoped the Soviet peoples would spare themselves anything similar. “Reason must prevail over passion if there is to be a climate conducive to the settlement of disagreements.” He observed that the United States and the Soviet Union had long eyed each other with distrust, but things had changed between them. Cooperation was evident in
joint efforts to settle a crisis in the Persian Gulf, where Iraq had recently invaded and occupied Kuwait. Reagan was pleased that the superpowers were on the same side of this issue, and he hoped their cooperation could be a model for responses to other crises. “Together, our great size can be used in the service of all humankind to persuade those whose passions have reached the danger point to cool down again.”

R
EAGAN TURNED EIGHTY
in February 1991.
Merv Griffin hosted a black-tie dinner party at the Beverly Hilton that doubled as a fund-raiser for the Reagan Library foundation. Nearly a thousand guests drawn from Reagan’s two worlds, Hollywood and Washington, paid as much as $2,500 apiece to honor the former president.
Charlton Heston,
Elizabeth Taylor, and
Jimmy Stewart mingled with
George Shultz,
Caspar Weinberger, and
Paul Laxalt. Margaret Thatcher traveled from London, where she had resigned as prime minister the previous November following a revolt within her Conservative Party. She offered a toast: “
Twenty-five years ago, in a famous speech, you quoted President Franklin Roosevelt, who said we all have a rendezvous with destiny. Certainly you had such a rendezvous. Thank God you were on time.”
Dan Quayle represented George Bush, who was busy directing a war in the Persian Gulf, where the crisis had not been resolved peacefully. Bush nonetheless sent videotaped congratulations. “They’ll get you on Mt. Rushmore yet,” he predicted.
Lech Wałesa, similarly speaking via video, expressed gratitude for what Reagan had done for
Poland. The San Diego Marine Corps Band supplied music.

Reagan thanked the guests for coming. He blew out the eight candles on his four-decker cake and accidentally smeared frosting on his tuxedo. He shared his birthday wish with the group: “That God will watch over each and every one of our men and women who are bravely serving in the Persian Gulf, and their families, wherever they may be. And may they know that we as a nation stand firmly behind them.” He closed the evening by holding hands with Nancy and leading the group in singing “God Bless America.”

T
HE DINNER RAISED
$2 million for the Reagan Library, which opened to the public six months later. Many of the same group reconvened at Simi Valley for the dedication. They were joined by an additional two thousand people, mostly Republicans, and several hundred members of the media. All of America’s living presidents were there: Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Bush, along with Reagan. The Republican presidents praised Reagan unstintingly. “
He believed that America was on the right side of history, standing with the forces of good against the forces of evil in the world,” Nixon observed. “And some have dismissed him, therefore, as an ideologue. But Ronald Reagan has been justified by what has happened.” Ford lauded Reagan as “a national leader who was able to articulate the highest hopes and deepest beliefs of the American people.” Bush called him “a political prophet leading the tide toward conservatism.” Carter, the outlying Democrat, couldn’t resist noting that poverty and unequal opportunity survived the Reagan years, but then he too joined the celebration, praising his successor as one under whom “our nation stood strong and resolute and made possible the beginning of the end of the
Cold War.”

Reagan accepted the plaudits and added his own. “Within the course of only a few short years I have seen the world turned upside down and conventional wisdom utterly disproved,” he said. “Visitors to this mountaintop will see a great jagged chunk of the
Berlin Wall, hated symbol of, yes, an evil empire, that spied on and lied to its citizens, denying them their freedom, their bread, even their faith. Well, today that wall exists only in museums, souvenir collections and the memories of a people no longer oppressed. It is also a reminder that a strong America is always desirable—and necessary in our world.”

N
OT THREE YEARS
out of office, Reagan had ascended to the realm of Republican legend. The party faithful loved him for the policies he had pursued in office, but they loved him even more for the vision he had conveyed of America’s inherent greatness. He made Americans feel good about themselves, and Republicans feel best of all.

Yet a few issues raised doubts, even among conservatives. On the tenth anniversary of his shooting, Reagan endorsed a handgun regulation bill named for James Brady, who had never recovered from the brain damage he incurred that day. The
Brady bill would require a seven-day
waiting period for the purchase of handguns, during which time state and local authorities could check the criminal and mental backgrounds of prospective purchasers. Reagan had previously supported waiting periods but only in the context of state laws. His support for the federal bill marked a significant concession to the big government he had long decried.

He explained his change of heart in an opinion piece in the
New York Times
. He recounted his own near brush with death at John Hinckley’s hand, and he described the permanent injury to Brady, as well as the wounds to police officer
Thomas Delahanty and Secret Service agent
Tim McCarthy. “
Four lives were changed forever, and all by a Saturday-night special—a cheaply made .22 caliber pistol—purchased in a Dallas pawnshop by a young man with a history of mental disturbance,” Reagan wrote. “This nightmare might never have happened if legislation that is before Congress now—the Brady bill—had been law back in 1981.” He acknowledged the argument for leaving gun control to the states as one he had often made himself. But the state-by-state approach wasn’t working. “Criminals just go to nearby states that lack such laws to buy their weapons.” The current system had to change. “Every year, an average of 9,200 are murdered by handguns,” he wrote. “This level of violence must be stopped.” He recognized that no law could prevent all mayhem, but the country had to start somewhere. “If the passage of the Brady bill were to result in a reduction of only 10 or 15 percent of those numbers (and it could be a good deal greater), it would be well worth making it the law of the land. And there would be a lot fewer families facing anniversaries such as the Bradys, Delahantys, McCarthys and Reagans face every March 30.”

Opponents of gun control reacted sharply. “
I felt somebody had stabbed me in the back,” the former head of
Sportsmen for Reagan, a campaign group from 1980 and 1984, said. The director of the
Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms shook his head and declared, “This action on his part leads one to the conclusion that, well, he’s just another politician, after all.” The director added, hopefully and in topic-appropriate terms, “He’s no longer a kinetic force in American politics.” A spokesman for the
Oregon State Shooting Association announced that Reagan’s turnabout made him suspect the former president’s entire party. “Every time I look at a Republican,” he said, “I’m going to wonder if he is telling me what he believes, or is he telling me what I want to hear to get my vote.”

T
HE
B
RADY BILL
passed, but not for another two years, suggesting that Reagan, indeed, was not the kinetic force he had been. On other issues, too, his influence waned. Though George Bush had campaigned as a Reagan conservative, he governed as a throwback to the era when Republicans took
balanced budgets seriously. Not long after Reagan left office, the heady economic growth of his final six years slowed and then reversed, carrying the country into recession. As recessions do, this one cut into government revenues, causing the sobering
deficits of the Reagan years to become alarming. Investors feared for the economy’s future and their own. And the
Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, passed during Reagan’s tenure, mandated automatic and painful spending cuts if Congress and the president didn’t come to terms.

Bush preferred spending cuts to tax increases, but the easy trimming had been accomplished in the Reagan years, and the Democrats, who still controlled both houses of Congress, insisted on tax increases to accompany any spending cuts. After much anguish and doubtless unspoken laments that he had permitted himself his Dirty Harry moment, Bush agreed to a deal with the Democrats that combined spending cuts with tax increases.

It was a bold decision. It enraged the Republican right. “
Read My Lips: I Lied,” screamed the
New York Post
. The libertarian
Cato Institute called Bush’s reversal the “
Crime of the Century.” But the bargain bore fruit when its terms took hold, shrinking the deficit and helping fuel the rapid economic growth of the 1990s, which, together with additional tax increases under Bill Clinton, diminished the deficit further. By the end of the decade, the federal budget showed a surplus for the first time since the 1960s.

Yet Bush’s retreat on taxes confirmed the belief of Reagan conservatives that he had never been one of them. The Reaganites remembered Bush’s branding of Reagan’s policies as “voodoo economics,” and the conservatives who didn’t abandon Bush at once made clear that they might do so any day.

Amid the complaining at Bush’s apostasy, few conservatives noticed that his compromise on the budget followed the practice, if not the rhetoric, of his predecessor. Reagan had consistently advocated lower taxes, and in the aggregate he had achieved lower taxes. But he had tolerated modest increases in taxes when they were necessary to secure the best available bargain with Congress. Reagan was a conservative, but he was also a pragmatist. He took what he could get, never holding practical
results hostage to ideological purity.
James Baker heard Reagan say as much many times. “
If Reagan told me once, he told me fifteen thousand times,” Baker recalled: “ ‘I’d rather get 80 percent of what I want than go over the cliff with my flags flying.’ ”

O
N ANOTHER SUBJECT
as well, Bush followed Reagan’s example. In July 1991, Bush and Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. The
START pact mandated deep cuts in strategic forces like those Reagan and Gorbachev had begun discussing in Geneva and nearly agreed to in Reykjavík. Gorbachev dropped the last of his insistence on linking START to restrictions on SDI, which had progressed more slowly than Reagan and its enthusiasts had hoped. The START process did not eliminate nuclear weapons, as Reagan had dreamed, but it marked a major step toward dispelling the nuclear specter that had haunted the world for much of his lifetime.

A
FTER
B
USH WON
renomination in 1992, despite the complaints of conservatives, Reagan was happy to address the Republican convention on his successor’s behalf. He looked remarkably hale for a man of eighty-one, and if his movements and gestures lacked some of the sureness and vigor of earlier times, his delivery was still polished and his voice strong. His speech, like so many of his speeches over the years, was a paean to
American exceptionalism. He had never had better occasion to trumpet America’s virtues. The last stage in the unraveling of the Soviet empire was the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself; at the end of 1991 the Soviet government voted itself out of business and ceded power to the republics that had formed the union. America’s Cold War foe of nearly half a century was no more. And the communist ideology that had tested democratic capitalism had finally and conclusively failed its own test.

Reagan didn’t gloat. But he took pride in his country and what it had achieved. America, he said, was the world’s moral compass, the guardian of freedom, the beacon of opportunity. And after all America had accomplished, its best days were ahead. “
The changes of the 1990s will leave America more dynamic and less in danger than at any time in my life,” he predicted. Humanity expected more of America than ever. “We remain the one nation the rest of the world looks to for leadership.” He urged the party and the country to remain true to America’s roots. “May all of you
as Americans never forget your heroic origins, never fail to seek divine guidance and never lose your natural, God-given optimism.”