It is rare in these days of partisan bickering to see politicians of both parties honoring a Republican President who served during our lifetimes. Since I am writing this on Abraham Lincoln's birthday, another Republican President who is highly regarded by Americans of every political persuasion, I certainly do not want to suggest that bi-partisan admiration of past Presidents is unheard of in America. What is noteworthy is that Ronald Reagan has gained an historical stature that is usually accorded leaders of a more distant time. I even saw a recent report that some in the Conservative movement are talking about having Reagan's face added to Mount Rushmore alongside the other Presidents of historical significance already depicted on this national monument, including President Lincoln.
I agree that President Reagan achieved much of major significance, including gaining changes to the tax code that helped lead the country out of a recession that in many ways was worse than the one we are still coming out of today (higher unemployment and high inflation) and taking bold steps that had a major role in the collapse of the Soviet Union and other Communist countries in Europe. However, as someone who lived through the Reagan Presidency as a working adult and who grew up and lived through decades of the Cold War, I have always been somewhat surprised at the aggressive legacy building of Reagan's image that started almost on the day he left the White House.
I do not recall any other former President, who during his lifetime, had a major airport (Reagan National Airport) and a federal government building in DC (the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center that houses the EPA, US Customs and other federal agencies, as well as commercial tenants, located on Pennsylvania Avenue) named for him. Only recently, long after their deaths, has the Old Executive Office building been named for President Eisenhower and the State Department building been named for President Truman.
It will come as a surprise to many in my family that I never voted for Ronald Reagan. I thought he was a slick actor who knew how to read lines written for him by others. It has only been since he left office that I have learned that he had truly thought deeply about his philosophy of patriotism and conservatism. He cultivated his ability to speak from the heart about America when he traveled the country as spokesman for General Electric at company events. Since GE hired him to talk about the company and its products, he eventually left to get more actively involved in politics.
When he ran for President in the 1970's and in 1980, I knew he had been Governor of California for eight years, but I knew little of what he accomplished there since I lived in Illinois in those years focused on my own career. I voted for a third party candidate in 1980 because I thought Carter had a failed Presidency, and I was very uncertain of whether Reagan was his own man.
During Reagan's first term, while I liked his economic policies, he took on the Soviet Union with much saber-rattling, including calling the USSR an "Evil Empire", without ever meeting with the Soviet leader personally. I wondered whether he and his advisers really knew what they were doing. Furthermore, in his first term, Reagan was the first President I ever remembered, who did not meet personally with the Soviet leader to assure peaceful co-existence and civil relations between our two Superpowers.
By 1984, I had been reading the Chicago Tribune on the commuter train for four years about how Reagan kept poking a stick at the Soviet bear while increasing our own Defense expenditures and promising to build a new defensive weapon that the press called "Star Wars". Since I grew up with the Cold War threats of nuclear weapons, I was very unsure of what the Reagan White House was doing. I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I felt much more confident about how President Kennedy and his Ivy League advisers handled that than what I saw with the California crowd around a former actor who could make great speeches. As a result, my vote in 1984 became the biggest mistake of my Presidential voting history. But, at least, I can say that I have voted for a woman Vice President twice!
In Reagan's second term, it became more clear that he really did have a method and plan for what I had thought was madness in threatening the Soviet Union during his first term. Nevertheless, I still do not believe that Reagan alone should be given credit for bringing down the the USSR and its Communist satellites.
Reagan had the good fortune to have important allies in the right places who also contributed to the forces that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that it represented, including Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, who was much more enlightened and pragmatic than his predecessors. Furthermore, Reagan benefited by having Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, and Pope John Paul II (the first Pope from a Communist country) as allies in the struggle to end the Soviet threat. In addition, the Solidarity union movement in Poland during the 1980's served as an inspiration to people throughout the Iron Curtain countries, much as the successful civilian protests in Egypt over the past three weeks are now doing in the Middle East.
It has become clear to me in hindsight that Reagan was more insightful about the potential to defeat the Communist threat from the USSR than I realized in the early 1980's. My personal experience in reevaluating Reagan's Presidency has helped me appreciate how important it is to learn more about candidates and what life experiences they have had that contribute to their character and beliefs. Unfortunately, due to their own busy lives, many voters end up making decisions based on catchy campaign slogans, distorted attack ads, superficial coverage by a press interested in sound bites and sensational news stories slanted toward their own biases and Internet sources that include narrowly focused websites that distort the facts much more than did the press of the 1980's.
One thing that I always did admire about Ronald Reagan was how uplifting his speeches were and how good he was at making us proud to be Americans. The quote below from his Farewell Address demonstrates how he urged us all to appreciate what a great country we live in. The good fortune we have to live in a country with freedoms that we often take for granted has been illustrated quite dramatically over the past few weeks as we watched the protests in Cairo. Here's Reagan's message to us as he prepared to leave the White House:
"Finally, there is a great tradition of warnings in Presidential farewells, and I've got one that's been on my mind for some time....
An informed patriotism is what we want.... are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn't get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties.
But now, we're about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren't sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven't reinstitutionalized it. We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It's fragile; it needs [protection].
So, we've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important—why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, 4 years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who'd fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, "we will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.'' Well, let's help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let's start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual."
Ronald Reagan's FAREWELL ADDRESS, January 11, 1989
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