Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (116 page)

Some on the right were less than thrilled with Reagan's high regard for Paine. A notable example is Reagan's friend George Will. Will criticized Reagan for being “inexplicably” and “painfully” fond of quoting Paine's line “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” which the columnist dismissed as a “preposterous cry” and “the most unconservative statement that ever issued from human lips.”
⁷³

The question of how to define Reagan's conservatism is crucial at a time when politicians routinely attempt to claim the Reagan mantle. The regular appeals to Reagan's legacy are easy to understand, given that Reagan has become adored, his name gracing thousands of buildings, roads, medical centers, and schools. His statue, incredibly, stands in former Communist countries where his name was once jeered and assassination plots were hatched against him.
⁷⁴

The fortieth president's name was invoked many times, in all manner of things, by the forty-third president, George W. Bush, in justifying the inconsistency of “compassionate conservatism.” While the 2000 election offered a clear choice between a right-of-center candidate, Bush, and a left-of-center candidate, Vice President Al Gore, libertarians and some conservatives were not altogether pleased with Bush's election. Three years later, Ed Crane, head of the respected Cato Institute, penned this: “The philosophical collapse of the GOP came with the 2000 campaign of George W. Bush, who ran without calling for a single
spending cut, much less the elimination of programs, agencies or departments. Worse, neoconservatives moved to fill the philosophical vacuum created by the supply-siders.”
⁷⁵

Today, the Republican Party is back in the wilderness. A key reason is that the GOP of the early twenty-first century has largely discarded Reaganism. In his farewell address to the nation on January 11, 1989, Reagan summed up his philosophy: “‘We the People’ tell the government what to do, it doesn't tell us. ‘We the People' are the driver—the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which ‘We the People' tell the government what it is allowed to do. ‘We the People' are free. This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I tried to do these past eight years.”
⁷⁶

Freedom was the Republican Party's organizing philosophy from 1856—when the first GOP nominee, the great explorer and military leader John C. Frémont, ran with the campaign slogan “Free Speech, Free Press, Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont”—extending through Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Reagan. But now that organizing principle has been abandoned, replaced by “security.” Security—like “justice,” the organizing principle of the Left—requires a large, centralized government. Reagan's freedom needed only a Bill of Rights and a Constitution, intelligent courts, and a restrained police force.

The GOP has also been besmirched by corrupt politicians, lobbyists, and “Republican strategists” who had neither the discipline, the courage, the conviction, nor the understanding to extend and enlarge the Reagan Revolution. The siren song of command and corporate largesse, mixed with easy entrée to sleazy politicians, combined to create the downfall of Republicanism.

Author Tom Wolfe once observed, “At a Washington party, it is not enough that the guests feel drunk; they must feel drunk and important.”
⁷⁷
The Republican gatecrashers came; got drunk on power, easy money, and easier access; felt important; and destroyed the home of Abe, Teddy, Ike, Barry, and Ronnie.

In 2003 George W. Bush's handpicked chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ed Gillespie, attended an editorial meeting of the
Manchester Union-Leader
. Afterward, the paper wrote that Gillespie “said in no uncertain terms that the days of Reaganesque Republican railings against the expansion of the federal government are over.… Today the Republican Party stands for giving the American people whatever the latest polls say they want.… The people want expanded entitlement programs and a federal government that attends to their every desire, no matter how frivolous? Then that's what the Republican Party wants, too.”
⁷⁸

Was Gillespie right? Is it all over? Reagan populism as a force inside the Republican Party has since been replaced by a belief that America needs two big-government parties. Whether the GOP ever returns to its pro-freedom, smaller-government roots is open to question.

T
HE WEEK OF THE
Reagan funeral, time seemed to stop in America. Margaret Thatcher, ailing, was not intending to make the trip, but at the last, she summoned the strength to see her old friend and fellow warrior off one more time. In the guest book she wrote, “To Ronnie: Well done, thy good and faithful servant.”
⁷⁹

As his body lay in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, more than a hundred thousand people waited patiently in a line that snaked from the Capitol all the way back to the Air and Space Museum. The Rotunda was open for a number of days, twenty-four hours per day. People traveled hundreds and even thousands of miles just to pay their respects. As his casket was moved to the Capitol—led by a riderless horse with Reagan's own scuffed but polished riding boots turned backwards, in the fashion of fallen military leaders—tens of thousands lined the streets, just as they did when he was moved to the National Cathedral and then to Andrews Air Force Base for his final trip home to his beloved California. And then, as the funeral procession made its way from Los Angeles up the highway to Simi Valley, an amazing thing happened.

All along the route, people stopped and got out of their cars to pay their respects.
⁸⁰

Old Reagan aide Jim Stockdale said, “I don't think the Washington press corps had any concept of how Americans felt about Ronald Reagan until that funeral.”
⁸¹
Stockdale had been with the Gipper going all the way back to Reagan's wilderness days. Like everybody, it seems, he has stories about Reagan's kindnesses, such as the day his thirteen-year-old son, Marty, was sent to get Reagan some lunch. Stockdale heard a crash. Marty had dropped the lunch, but there was Reagan on the floor, helping the boy pick it up.
⁸²

For this author, the most memorable moment came at the end of the services at the National Cathedral as the casket was being taken to the hearse waiting outside; suddenly a ray of sunlight broke through the gray, overcast, drizzly day—and shone on Reagan's casket.

That day, June 9, 2004, the Washington transit agency, the Metro, experienced its busiest day ever, as 850,636 hardy Americans used the rail system.
⁸³
The programs from the Reagan funeral at the National Cathedral showed up quickly on eBay, fetching as much as $250 each. The hand cards passed out in the Rotunda
were going for $46, and the programs from the final service in Simi Valley were getting $455.
⁸⁴

In the U.S. Navy, sailors forcefully compete with each other to serve on the USS
Reagan
, so revered is the ship and her namesake.
⁸⁵
Reagan's library is, by far, the most popular of all the presidential libraries, surpassing even JFK's in annual attendance, despite the fact that the Reagan Library is somewhat off the beaten path compared to most others. Reagan's presidential alumni association remains the largest of all, and seems to grow each year, even though his presidency ended twenty years ago.
⁸⁶
The postage stamp bearing Reagan's image remains one of the most popular ever issued by the U.S. Post Office. When it was released in January 2005, it sold out instantly. When the Richard Nixon stamp was unveiled, no one wanted it, and the Postal Service ended up destroying hundreds of thousands of stamps bearing the visage of “Tricky Dick.”
⁸⁷

The outpouring for Reagan was not universal. At the time of his death, a Broadway play entitled
Assassins
featured an actor portraying John Hinckley—who almost shot Reagan to death in early 1981—firing away repeatedly at a cardboard cutout of the Gipper.
⁸⁸
This tasteless “art” recalled the liberal radio announcer who, when Reagan was shot, bewailed the fact that Hinckley hadn't used a more powerful weapon like a .45. Many left-wing activists hadn't softened their views since the days when they had excoriated him for all manner of things, from wanting to start World War III to hating the homeless.

When news of Reagan's death reached a march sponsored by the radical protest organization ANSWER, “the crowd whooped and cheered,”
National Review
reported.
⁸⁹
One commentator, Adrian Wooldridge of
The Economist
, said upon Reagan's death that he represented “wild-eyed lunacy.”
⁹⁰
CBS, always Reagan's worst critic among the three networks, produced a docudrama called
The Reagans
. The made-for-TV movie was supposed to be historical, but the producers consulted not one person who knew the couple. Reagan biographer Lou Cannon was appalled at all the mistakes in the smear job, and the outrage from millions of Americans was such that the movie was pulled from network programming at the last minute and offered only on a flimsy CBS-owned pay-cable channel.
⁹¹

O
NE MONTH BEFORE THE
1980 election, Scotty Reston, fabled liberal columnist for the
New York Times
, wrote that Reagan “hates races, even the tiresome race for the Presidency. He may not have a sense of history but he has a sense of humor and knows he cannot reform the world.”
⁹²

With the exception of the remark about Reagan's wittiness, untruer words were never penned.

Reagan had a clear sense of history, and even more important, he had a sense of duty and destiny that propelled him. The Reagans' old friend Nancy Reynolds said, “He always thought he had a purpose.… He believed in destiny.”
⁹³
Candidate Reagan, both modest and superstitious, was reluctant to say too much about coveting the presidency. But quietly, he believed it was his calling to occupy the Oval Office, and therefore to save America and change the world. On rare occasions he let this quiet confidence slip to reporters. Once on the 1980 campaign trail, he mused that it's not enough for a candidate simply to
want
to be president. “There is,” he said, “more of a feeling that maybe you
should
be.”
⁹⁴

Contrast that with Jimmy Carter, whose makeup was astutely captured by the liberal writer John Stacks: “Once in office, Carter failed to respond to the different demands on him as president. He failed to project the sense of sureness, of direction, of certainty that is required of any president. The irony was that as a campaigner, Carter often seemed to me an arrogant man decked out to seem humble. As a president, he seemed a humble man pretending to power and decisiveness. Too full of self-doubt to be a certain leader, he was at the same time too proud to admit his real shortcomings.”
⁹⁵

Bill Buckley made the same point simply and elegantly, saying that Carter was “lost in power.” But Reagan, Buckley said, had a sureness both about himself and about America. The Gipper “believed in … the basic premises of American society,” and he was also a leader “who would face the Soviet threat with ingenuity and adamancy and determination.”

Of Reagan's own rendezvous with destiny, his old friend Buckley said that “his extensive use of language occasionally suggested that he thought that he and divine destiny were loosely synchronized.”
⁹⁶

It would seem so.

S
urprisingly, few books have been exclusively devoted to the monumental struggle in 1980 between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan for the presidency of the United States, certainly one of the most important campaigns in American history. Jack Germond and Jules Witcover wrote a short book immediately after the election,
Blue Smoke and Mirrors
, which was fairly derisive toward Reagan. John Stacks of
Time
wrote a quickie entitled
Watershed
that came out in 1981 that was also somewhat disdainful of Reagan. Elizabeth Drew wrote
Portrait of an Election
, but it was mostly from Carter's vantage point. And Andrew Bush wrote a fine textbook entitled
Reagan's Victory
.

Portions of other books have looked at the 1980 election. The great Lou Cannon covered the campaign along with other parts of Reagan's life and presidency in his book
Reagan
. Peter Hannaford also devoted several chapters to the 1980 campaign in his book
The Reagans
, as did Steven Hayward in
The Age of Reagan
. Teddy White broke ground with his masterful
The Making of the President
books starting in 1960 and continuing until 1972. He did not write a book focused on 1976 or 1980, though he did produce the highly enjoyable
America in Search of Itself
, which touched on the 1980 campaign. Both President Carter and President Reagan devoted several pages in their autobiographies to 1980.

Nearly as important, there has never been a book comprehensively detailing Reagan's wilderness years. These years of 1977 to 1979 were extremely important to Reagan, as he honed his message and ideology while mulling whether to make one last run when he would be sixty-nine years old.

My daughter Taylor's high school textbook
The American Pageant
, published in 2002 by Houghton Mifflin, devotes a large chapter to Reagan, more than twenty
pages. But it illustrates the need for clarity in this important story. Titled “The Resurgence of Conservatism,” the chapter attempts to document the rise of the fortieth president and the conservative movement he sometimes led. A portion of the work is acceptable, but most areas are shot through with bias and errors. For example, the text says that Reagan was guided by “neoconservatives,” which is nonsense, and states that Reagan's campaign slogan in 1980 was “It's morning again in America.” That was the slogan in the 1984 campaign. The slogan for 1980 was “The time is now.” Far worse, the work claims that Reagan “renew[ed] the Cold War” and gives Mikhail Gorbachev the lion's share of the credit for “bringing an end to the Cold War.” This is simply ridiculous, as all now know. What's more, the work associates Reagan with greed, Iran-Contra, deficits, and the declining economy in the early 1990s, though Reagan had been out of office for four years. Snarky references are made to Reagan's previous careers and his intellect. The chapter is clearly written by liberals bending over backwards trying to prove they don't despise Reagan. Unfortunately, they don't succeed.