Ronald Reagan / Recollections of Reagan
D'Souza, Dinesh & Hannaford, Peter
There's Nothing Ordinary About This Man z Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader Dinesh D'Souza Free Press / 292 pages / $25 Recollections of Reagan: A Portrait of...
...The conservative perspective on public policy is now regularly on display in our magazines and journals...
...Hannaford's contributors do not share the Ku Itursmog's myths that our much-improved world was the result of miracles, swell luck, and the Soviet 'Union's doomed condition...
...The noble D'Souza places me at the table during a private dinner with the president the week of the INF signing...
...Yet when Reagan's instincts put him on guard, the charming Mikhail had no more influence on Reagan than anyone else...
...Without fear for one's tenure, and unsuborned by publishers into pumping out still more bilge on the greatness of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Martin Luther King, or Madonna, the solid biographer might essay the life of Jimmy Carter in all its magisterial puniness or that of Richard Nixon without the chains clanking off stage and the Statue of Liberty being blown up by Gordon Liddy...
...he horrified suave Soviets before Marxist-Leninist miscalculation brought on the Communist collapse, a collapse that all progressives anticipated (in private...
...My Herodotusian Oath will not allow me to let D'Souza's glorious scene stand...
...These two books nail down my case...
...he caused recession...
...and 2:30 p.m...
...Nonetheless D'Souza's heart is in the right place and he has pasted in most of the essential facts...
...Biographies recounting how conservative political and intellectual leaders brought us to a R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...Yet he stuck by it resolutely...
...I also think D'Souza misreads literature when he compares this remarkable president to "Gatsby," and I doubt conservative critics of Reagan deserve quite so much of D'Souza's scorn...
...Their financial support would not depend on the advances of politically correct publishers...
...It would come from those capitalist Medicis who are as mindful of their country's achievement as they are of the bottom line...
...When he deemed it time to retire the term "evil empire," he did so and set off on an entirely new course with Mikhail Gorbachev...
...When my National Center for Biography is established we shall have a better chance of knowing...
...Reagan's attempts to cut government were less successful, though its rate of growth slowed under him.44 These are worthy efforts, though they do not bear the scholarly heft of biography written by full-time historians...
...D'Souza's narrative reminds us of these myths as it goes on to record the polluters' many misperceptions of Reagan: he arrived at the White House ignorant, a menace to that delicate balance between East and West that the Liberals and doves found so reassuring...
...There's Nothing Ordinary About This Man z Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader Dinesh D'Souza Free Press / 292 pages / $25 Recollections of Reagan: A Portrait of Ronald Reagan Edited by Peter Hannaford Morrow / 210 pages / $24 REVIEWED BY R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...he made the deficit a constantly metastasizing cancer on the economy before sudden luck The American Spectator • February x998 81 caused economic rebound...
...The president had spotted a change in the Soviets that others had missed...
...He and Hannaford have reminded us of the achievement and the mystery of Reagan...
...There philanthropy would meet scholarship...
...I leap in and press the point with words my grandchildren might thrill to as they reiterate them to their grandchildren, "Well, have we...
...The polluters contributing to the Kultursmog's tarnished image of Reagan are forever reinforcing each other's prejudices...
...Historians of an independent mind would cleanse the Kultursmog by accurately chronicling recent American history...
...According to D'Souza, the Russian media star was out wowing official Washington while "out of the limelight, Reagan had dinner with a group of conservative friends, including Ben Wattenberg, Georgie Geyer and Robert Tyrrell...
...My question was vaguer still...
...Thus they took great comfort recently in the consensus arrived at by a panel of historians convened by Arthur Schlesinger to evaluate past presidents...
...None of the scores of observers of Reagan whom Hannaford brings together in his forum on the Reagan presidency would agree...
...Once again the hero of the proceedings was Reagan, not me and not Wattenberg...
...Under Carter American power had withdrawn towards Fortress America...
...Unlike the Liberals who get even more scorn, the conservatives' criticism was usually based on objective circumstances...
...77 Another of his personal inspirations was to label the Soviet Union "an evil empire...
...his is where I come in...
...They no longer believe in one-world Marxian domination," he blandly explained...
...They are worthy efforts at documenting the greatness of Ronald Reagan, but they do not bear the scholarly heft of biography written by full-time historians...
...As we left his presence Geyer noted, "I think we have just heard the announcement of the end of the Cold War...
...How did he manage to stand alone, decide wisely so often, and get so little credit...
...In fact we were not at dinner with the president but at coffee in the Oval Office between 2:00 p.m...
...The denizens of the Kultursmog (some even lurking in his White House) adjudged the term inflammatory...
...However, aides came and went...
...After governing California dramatically if not always effectively, Reagan spent six years refining his thoughts on governance, writing, speaking, and reading the likes of Hayek, Bastiat, Whittaker Chambers, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...
...Reagan remained, following his principles and preternatural political instincts...
...During his presidency Washington flinched and withdrew support when regimes serving our interest were under fire, leaving some—Nicaragua and Iran—overturned and replaced by enemies...
...Often he stood alone—or in the term of the day, stayed the course—implementing tax cuts, strategic arms reduction (replacing strategic arms limitations), the zero option on intermediate-range missiles, and the Strategic Defense Initiative, of which Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has observed "There was one vital factor in the ending of the Cold War...
...They see him as resolute, far-sighted, courageous, cheerful—for the most part a masterful leader, though Jerry Brown and the other Democrats came around to this sunny appraisal a bit late...
...T he publication of these two books reminds me of one of my fondest unfulfilled projects, a National Center for Biography...
...D'Souza even gives me a historic line...
...Reagan was esteemed a low-grade mediocrity...
...They hymned that "small is beautiful," and proclaimed an era of "limited growth," a time when as President Jimmy Carter said the United States and its allies "could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the world by the end of the next decade"—that is to say by now...
...These polluters when writing about Reagan frequently lose themselves in unwholesome metaphors, often implying sleep—supposedly the president's — though their superannuated conclusions make clear that it is they who have been at sleep...
...And, yes, Reagan showed his true treachery with the historically unparalleled Iran-contra atrocity that surely would have gotten him impeached had he not absconded from Washington just in the nick of time for the good of the world...
...A momentous question is asked the president by Wattenberg, "Have we won the Cold War...
...And so the Reagan epoch is left to a literate public figure, Peter Hannaford, from this magazine's board of directors (Hannaford was also an aide to Reagan in the 1970's), and a seasoned polemicist from the American Enterprise Institute, Dinesh D'Souza...
...A year later Gorbachev was in Washington signing the most obliging treaty the Soviet Union ever negotiated with the United States, the treaty that marked the end of the Cold War...
...82 February 1998 The American Spectator...
...world without Communism or the Phillips Curve will mainly remain unwritten until one of the tycoons who did so well in recent decades endows such a center...
...We did leave the room thinking something epochal had been said...
...Reagan urged growth and a military buildup that would bankrupt the Soviet Union...
...They prophesied the end of American prosperity...
...It was written by a scholar safely moored at the Hoover Institution, Martin Anderson, author of Revolution...
...The clouds of anger billowed up high in the Kultursmog, but Reagan followed his instincts...
...I never closed in on President Reagan with the line "Well, have we...
...By the way, this is hardly an exaggeration of what many otherwise sane Liberals believe...
...According to the legends of the Kultursmog, the Hollywood president was lazy and pliant in the hands of his aides...
...At Reykjavik the aging president simply walked away from the accommodating Russians who sought one revision Reagan would not give, Strategic Defense...
...There is, indeed, a mystery about him...
...T ruth be known, when Reagan arrived at the White House the Liberal elites were in a hell of a mess...
...on December 9. Wattenberg': question was much vaguer...
...It was Ronald Reagan's decision to go ahead with the Strategic Defense Initiative...
...is editor-in-chief of The American Spectator and most recently co-author (with "Anonymous") of The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton (Regnery...
...Actually the most scholarly book written on the Reagan presidency also makes my case for establishing a conservative center for biography...
...Unfortunately, as my recent published books on our present president make clear, I am at heart a disciple of Herodotus, a historian, indeed a presidential historian...
...because Wattenberg never preceded me with the question, "Have we won the Cold War...
...Otherwise the reader wishing to assess the Reagan administration's defeat of Communism, revival of America, and encouragement of free markets has to brave the Kultursmo g's tedious compendiums" of error: Laurence I. Barrett's Gambling With History: Reagan in the White House, Haynes Johnson's Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years, and Sidney Blumenthal's Our National Daydream: A Political Pageant of the Reagan Era...
...As both of these books demonstrate Reagan as president often made decisions quite independent of his aides...
...And by the way Geyer's name is Georgie Anne, and mine is R. Emmett...
...Nor can we expect a scholar living in the politically correct despotisms of Harvard or Stanford to commit suicide over mere American history...
Vol. 31 • February 1998 • No. 2
