Ronald Reagan was a polarising figure in various ways, hated by many of the left, but loved by so many ordinary people – Americans and others. He had many shortcomings and weaknesses of course, but he had many standout qualities as well. Among the latter, he clearly loved America and the American people.
Having just waded through a new 1000-page biography of Reagan – and a new 800-page bio of William F. Buckley, both of which I wrote about in a piece yesterday – it is worth looking further at the great man. To do so I will bring three key witnesses to bear on this task.
The first one is the afore-mentioned new biographer of Reagan, Max Boot and his large tome, Reagan: His Life and Legend (Liveright, 2024). As I said in my article yesterday, it is a detailed and thorough biography, but his leftist biases run throughout the work.
My second witness is Paul Kengor who has penned a number of books on Reagan. I will draw upon his 2006 volume, The Crusader:Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (HarperCollins). And my final author is Peggy Grande. She was his executive assistant from 1989-1999 and wrote The President Will See You Now (Hachette Books, 2017).
There are so many highlights of his life that one can focus on, but I will mention just a few of them – one from each author. I start with Boot, who is quite critical of Reagan throughout his lengthy volume. And his views are certainly not shared by all Reagan observers.
While often dismissive of Reagan in his book, he did acknowledge (as I wrote yesterday) that few could fault him for the gracious and kind-hearted person that he was. And one episode that most of us remember he calls his “finest hour”. I refer to the March 30, 1981 assassination attempt on his life that happened early in his presidency.
Reading again about this very dark day moved me to tears. Boot picks up the story when his wife came to see him in the hospital:
She walked in, as she wrote, to “a horrible scene—discarded bandages, tubes, blood.” Ronnie looked “pale and gray.” When he saw her, he pulled up his oxygen mask and repeated a line that heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey had used after losing a title fight in 1926: “Honey,” he whispered, “I forgot to duck.” Fighting back tears, she told him, “Please don’t try to talk.”
At 2:57 p.m., thirty minutes after the shooting, the president was wheeled out of the trauma bay toward the operating room. Nancy walked alongside the gurney, and he held her hand. They passed by Jim Baker, Ed Meese, and Mike Deaver waiting anxiously nearby. Spotting them, Reagan quipped through his oxygen mask. “Who’s minding the store?” and they responded with a nervous laugh. Nancy Reagan went to the hospital chapel to pray, joined by Jim Brady’s wife, Sarah.
As he was being put to sleep by an anesthesiologist, Reagan again used the line he had first employed in the trauma unit: “I hope you’re all Republicans.” Even strapped onto an operating table, he was doing what he always did: putting others at ease. This time, he got a laugh. The surgeon, Dr. Joe Giordano. was a Democrat, but he said “Today. Mr. President. We’re all Republicans.” (pp. 456)
He really was so very close to dying. Boot goes on to write:
The breathing tube made it hard for Reagan to talk, so he asked the nurses for a pencil and paper. His first message was a paraphrase of W. C. Fields: “All in all, rather be in Phil[adelphia].” More messages, mostly lighthearted, followed: “What happened to the guy with the gun? Was anyone else hurt? . . . Could we rewrite this scene beginning about the time I left the hotel? . . . If I had this much attention In Hollywood I’d have stayed there.” And to an attractive nurse who was tending him, “Does Nancy know about us?”
This was Ronald Reagan’s finest hour. He had survived the shooting with his sense of humor intact. If, as Ernest Hemingway said, “Courage is grace under pressure,” Reagan had exhibited impressive courage. Ironically, Al Haig, a four-star general, had buckled under the stress, but the former actor who had been shot had not. A Culver City Commando during World War II, Reagan was doing a credible imitation of the way stoical, wisecracking tough guys behaved in war movies. Only this was no movie: the blood was real and so was the pain. “Getting shot hurts,” he wrote matter-of-factly in his diary. His conduct after he was nearly killed at age seventy was his most impressive display of heroism since he had pulled seventy-seven people from the Rock River as a teenage lifeguard. “He was really magnificent,” said his brother-in-law, Dr. Richard Davis, who visited him in the hospital. “His attitude was absolutely marvelous.” (pp. 459-460)
Reagan: His Life and Legendby Boot, Max (Author)
Although not meaning to use Boot as a foil throughout this article, Kengor takes a much different look at the role Reagan played in helping to end the Cold War and bring down the Berlin Wall – something Boot mainly gives Gorbachev credit for doing.
Reagan had long seen godless Communism and the USSR as the threat they were, and he long had wanted to see the Wall come tumbling down. Consider a debate between Governor Reagan and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in May of 1967, which even leftist commentators admitted Reagan had won. Writes Kengor:
Especially notable, but forgotten by history, were Reagan’s remarks that evening concerning the Berlin Wall. The governor asserted:
“When we signed the Consular Treaty with the Soviet Union, I think there were things that we could’ve asked in return: I think it would be very admirable if the Berlin Wall, which was built in direct contravention to a treaty, should disappear. I think this would be a step toward peace and toward self-determination for all people, if it were.”
Here was possibly Ronald Reagan’s first public call for the removal of the Berlin Wall, offered in May 1967, twenty years before his famous challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev. (pp. 34-35)
And at the end of his book Kengor says this:
Writing in 1986, Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis stated, “American officials at no point during the history of the Cold War seriously contemplated, as a deliberate political objective, the elimination of the Soviet Union as a major force in world affairs.” At that point in time, Gaddis could be excused for not knowing Ronald Reagan’s cards; after all, the historian did not have copies of all of those classified NSDDs, nor a seat inside Bill Clark’s National Security Council.
We now know, however, that such was precisely what Reagan had intended—and then some. What he pursued was truly revolutionary. He was not content to contain Soviet Communism. He wanted to kill it. He not only said so but committed himself and his administration to that very deliberate goal—a goal that stemmed from Reagan himself, not his advisers, long before 1981.
By the mid-1990s, with the presidency and Cold War over, Ronald Reagan might have spoken at length and repeatedly about his one-time intentions with the USSR. Unfortunately, his Alzheimer’s quickly became the major obstacle that prevented a complete accounting of Reagan’s goals with the Soviet Union. This meant that neither historians nor journalists could raise the issue with Reagan, though on more than one occasion everyday Americans—those Reagan heralded as America at its best—did. Bill Clark recalls a moment when he and Reagan were together again in the early 1990s. An admirer congratulated Reagan for “your success in ending the Cold War.” Reagan smiled and replied deferentially, “No, not my success but a team effort by Divine Providence.” He saw God’s hand in this “team effort” to “end” the Cold War.
On September 12, 1990, Reagan returned to the Berlin Wall as a private citizen. Just three years earlier he had called on Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the structure, and was now armed only with a hammer to chisel off a chunk of the edifice as a memento of the Cold War that he had brought to a close. The ex-president that day kicked off a ten-day, four-country European trip, fittingly starting at the neutered wall. “It feels great,” said the seventynine-year-old as he stepped carefully around the mangled steel rods that now protruded from the harmless, beat up barrier. “I don’t think you can overstate the importance of it. I was trying to do everything I could for such things as this. . . . It happened earlier than I thought it would, but I’m an optimist.”
Only twenty months earlier, on Reagan’s last day in the Oval Office, East German dictator Erich Honecker had defiantly proclaimed that the Berlin Wall would be standing 100 years henceforth, proudly “protecting our republic from robbers.” But on that September 1990 day, Reagan was the robber, as he chopped hard at the divide with a blue-headed hammer, taking a piece home with him.
Today, the largest chunk of the wall outside of Germany sits in Simi Valley, California, directly beyond the window at the welcome desk of the Reagan Library and Museum, a gift donated by the citizens of unified, free Berlin, again the capital of a united Germany. Inside that library sits a video cassette tucked in a box: it features footage of that May 1967 Reagan-Bobby Kennedy debate, when Ronald Reagan first publicly called for the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. (pp. 313-314)
The President Will See You Now: My Stories and Lessons from Ronald Reagan's Final Yearsby Grande, Peggy (Author)
Lastly, Peggy Grande says this about Reagan’s patriotism. She discusses his presidential library, and mentions a note of his she found when she was looking for a file. She says:
Written in the president’s perfect, beautiful cursive were the words of a patriot – from his pen and from his soul: “I love this Blessed Land. Ronald Reagan.”
His patriotism was contagious. And genuine. Ronald Reagan believed God was sovereign and that the people of this great land had the right to make decisions that were best for them, their families, their communities, and the nation. He would often brag, with pride, that out of all the nations and all the world, ours was the only constitution that began with three simple words “We the People.” “Ours,” he would say, “is the only constitution in which ‘We the People’ tell the government what to do, not the other way around.” This wasn’t just a nicely turned phrase to him; it was a core belief.
This love of country and love of its people was the foundation of his vision for his presidential library. President Reagan didn’t want his library to be a stale reminder of the past, nor did he want it to be a glorified trophy case where the accomplishments and accolades of his presidency could be admired. Instead, he wanted the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum to provide a snapshot of who we were as a nation during the 1980s.
He wanted it to celebrate all of us – and all that we had accomplished together – rather than a look at just one man and his role. His role, while vital, was not singular. Instead, he had been the catalyst that gave Americans the courage, the confidence, and the opportunity to create and build, innovate and take risks, establish and expand during the Reagan years. He hoped his library would be a place of patriotism and pride, not partisan politics. He would not have known then what great success he would have in achieving those goals. (pp.107-108)
Thanks Bill, I hadn’t heard these things about Reagan.
“I notice that all those people that are for abortion have already been born.” Ronald Reagan, 1980.