Remembering Ronald Reagan
A week ago today, Thomas Cantaloube, foreign correspondent for Le Parisien, a French daily newspaper, interviewed me for his forthcoming book on red state America. Fearful of an adversarial inquisition -- the interview actually proved quite friendly -- I did my homework. I prepared for every question I thought he'd ask. But I didn't prepare for the first one, and it stumped me.
Cantaloube: "When did you become a Republican?"
Me:
Me to self: "Gee, when did I become a Republican?" During the akward silence, I thought back for the date, or something close to it.
Me, finally: "In the fall of 1980." I was 17.
That year, the Nation was in recession, gripped by so-called stagflation; gas prices were as high as lines at the pump were long; Iranian militants held fifty-two Americans hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran; a military operation to rescue them had ended before it began in humiliating failure; and the incumbent president was lecturing Americans on their "self-indulgence." Our spirits as a people were at low ebb.
"What was really disturbing to me," according to then-presidential pollster Pat Caddell, "was for the first time, we actually got numbers where people no longer believed that the future of America was going to be as good as it was now. And that really shook me, because it was so at odds with the American character."
Nineteen eighty was also an election year, and a buoyant former governor of California was running for president. On the night of November 4, 1980, Ronald Reagan won in a landslide. Whatever promises Mr. Reagan made during the campaign, I remember only two, both of which he kept: cut taxes at home and defeat Soviet communism abroad. The latter promise would come to fruition only after he had left office. But it might not have come at all had Mr. Reagan not insisted that the United States seek victory over, and not co-existence with, the "evil empire."
With his gentle manner, good humor and, most importantly, irrepressible optimism, Mr. Reagan made Americans proud again of their country. When he said America was "a shining city on a hill," you knew he believed it. (It matters what a president believes.) And as his metaphor made clear, he didn't think of America in the terms of politically correct multiculturalism, wherein she could lay claim to being no more than the first country among equals; he thought of her as a beacon for human freedom, the most consequential one in man's dark history. Do you know what it means when a president restores the faith of his people in their destiny as the "last, best hope of mankind"? Or the affect that has on a 17-year-old boy with a nascent interest in politics?
And yet, for all his vision as a leader, Mr. Reagan never needed the presidency to tell him who he was as a man. At 9 a.m. on the morning of his first inaugural, Ronald Reagan was still in bed. Long-time aide Michael Deaver was dispatched to rouse him:
I opened the door to the bedroom. It was pitch-dark, the curtains still drawn, and I could barely make out a heap of blankets in the middle of the bed.
"Governor?"
"Yeah?"
"It's nine o'clock."
"Yeah?"
"Well, you're going to be inaugurated in two hours."
"Does that mean I have to get up?"
It's been years since Mr. Reagan left office and a year ago today since he died. I miss him still.
On the anniversary of his death, see a moving video tribute to Ronald Reagan's life and legacy.