HE BELONGS TO HISTORY
Nash, George H.
He Belongs to History Ronald Reagan’s legacy and American conservatism By George H. Nash 4 0 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 I In 2008 a specter is...
...By the beginning of 2008 Reagan’s historical reputation had soared to heights that few conservatives had thought attainable...
...Shortly afterward, a funny thing happened on Reagan’s journey into the history books: His reputation among the professors began to rise...
...On the whole, it is safe to say that tives than his second...
...More than any other scholarly publications in the past 20 years, the Skinner/Anderson anthologies demolished the old, demeaning stereotypes and pro pelled the upward arc of Reagan’s reputation...
...Nevertheless, most movement conservatives credited Reagan with bequeathing them a politically precious gift—a successful, conservative presidency—and their verdict was accordingly positive...
...But current events do not fully explain a phenomenon that has been building for nearly 20 years...
...Reagan himself did not appear to mind the aspersions cast upon him by his ideological enemies...
...It could even be said that Reagan in a sense was a premature neoconservative, for he had once been a very liberal Democrat who moved to the right...
...Its arresting title: “What Would Reagan Do...
...One sign of The Republican capture of Congress in 1994 ratified the “Reagan revolution” even further...
...In one corner stands the “Reagan Victory School,” which argues essentially that Reagan won the Cold War, that he intended to win it, and that as president he conceived and carried out a coordinated campaign to achieve this objective...
...Reagan asked...
...It’s true hard work never killed anybody,” he once reputedly remarked, “but I figure, why take the chance...
...At the beginning of 1989 there was reason to believe that the coming historical evaluation of Reagan’s presidency would skip the first phase and g e o R g e H . n a s H permanently wallow in the second...
...He repeatedly let its leaders know that he considered himself to be one of their tribe...
...Secondly, and again unlike most Republican presidential aspirants of his era, Reagan was what activists on the right call a “movement conservative”: one who associated himself not merely with a few conservative causes and catchwords but with the intellectuals, journalists, and public policy entrepreneurs who were steadfastly building a movement of ideas...
...So, too, was that of most other Americans...
...He secured for them a permanent beachhead in the epicenter of national politics, and they were grateful...
...The “ideologue” or the “pragmatist...
...Until 2004 or so, conservatives had labored with increasing success to rescue Reagan from the sneering incomprehension of left-wing academics...
...More than that, he imbued it with rhetorical staying power...
...Reagan came in at undistinguished 22nd, just two notches ahead of Jimmy Carter...
...Thanks in large measure to Reagan, a healthy sense of humor is an 4 2 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 His message was more important than the messenger...
...Reagan himself seems to have been closest in his outlook and priorities to the free market conservatives and Cold Warriors...
...Reagan’s genuine likeability and his courageous response to Alzheimer’s disease no doubt helped to dissipate some of the lingering hostility evinced by his ideological foes...
...In 1990 he duly published a monumental autobiography...
...The question persists: why was he different...
...Particularly during the president’s second term, his increasingly intensive pursuit of arms control agreements with the Soviet Union offended and alarmed many conservatives...
...His legacy seemed to him plain enough, and it needed no defense...
...In fact, the more his reputation rose, the more contested his legacy became...
...Reagan’s electoral triumph completed this mainstreaming process...
...More recently, in early 2008, the conservative Heritage Foun da tion inaugurated a year-long campaign of political education on radio and the Internet...
...only one was a known conservative...
...Historical interpretation is a neverending process, subject to ideological crossfire So how stands the legacy of Ronald Reagan and the cycle of bunk-and-debunk...
...Sooner or later, historical scholarship must be grounded not on the quicksand of political or academic fashion but upon the solid bedrock of archival research...
...The “shining city upon a hill,” it seemed, had been well served...
...A large sampling from this cache of primary sources comprised the bulk of the volume Reagan, In His Own Hand, which Skinner and the Andersons assembled...
...Looking back with the advantage of hindsight, we tend to forget that it was not at all obvious on January 20, 1989—the day the Reagan administration officially ended—that the end of the Soviet empire was near...
...He became an early and lifelong reader of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review (founded in 1955), which he came to regard and publicly acknowledge as his “favorite magazine...
...Not surprisingly, the leftwardtilting American intelligentsia in the 1980s largely looked upon him as at worst a warmonger and at best (in Clark Clifford’s notorious phrase) an “amiable dunce...
...If so, how did the two of them fit together...
...By 1980 they had begun to speak of themselves as the vanguard of America’s silent majority...
...Still, it seems likely that five achievements of Reagan will stand out With incandescent prose he revived America’s sense of itself as a sweet land of liberty...
...His unruffled affability and dignified demeanor as chief executive contrasted favorably with the scandals and hyperpartisanship of the Clinton years (and beyond...
...But I want you to know that I endorse you...
...We made the city stronger...
...It was a war, as the expression of the time had it, between “pragmatists” and “ideologues”—that is, between middle-of-the road, pre-Reaganite Republicans and principled “movement conservatives” intent upon effecting a revolution...
...To answer these questions, we must underReagan was a conservative politician, of course, but there were many others during his long career, and he was by no means the most militant among them...
...in the fullness of time...
...His sense of humor and gifts as a raconteur were legendary...
...One of the interesting phenomena in American politics in the past half-century has been the invention and institutionalization of the hyperactive ex-presidency, dedicated in part to enhancing a president’s reputation beyond his term of office and even beyond the grave...
...In the 1950s, in short, he became—and remained ever after—a conservative by conviction, not convenience...
...On the left, certain liberals—unable to deny Reagan’s catalytic role in concluding the Cold War—began to assert that Reagan had succeeded because he had given up his hardline conservative ideology...
...Here and there reputable scholars—hardly any of them on the politithis new glasnost appeared in a 1999 essay in the Washington Post by the liberal political scientist and biographer of Franklin Roosevelt, Professor James MacGregor Burns...
...To a convention of 15,000 evangelical Christians in 1980, for instance, he famously remarked: “I know you can’t endorse me...
...cal right—began to publish books and articles containing more than a modicum of praise...
...not surprisingly, entire anthologies of his witticisms and stories are now in print...
...Obviously the mood of the moment has something to do with it...
...But even the academic disparagers of Reaganite “triumphalism” seem inclined to grant that Reagan’s policies helped to push the Soviet Union toward irreversible reform...
...Cold Warriors, convinced that America was increasingly imperiled by an evil empire seeking the conquest of the world...
...First, unlike most of the Republican politicians of his day, Reagan was something of an intellectual: a man who not only spoke the language of the right but seriously thought about it...
...In our current mood of celebration of Reagan’s legacy, we tend to forget what contemporary observers and the burgeoning memoir literature about him attest: that in both the domestic and foreign policy arenas, the Reagan administration was often at war with itself...
...With incandescent prose he revived America’s sense of itself as a sweet land of liberty, selected by God for a great purpose...
...But more importantly, Reagan made little further effort to furbish his legacy because, at bottom, he felt no need to do so...
...For so long as the United States of America survives as a free and independent polity, his vision of America’s meaning will tug at our souls...
...In 1990 the Siena Research Institute asked more than 200 academic historians and political scientists to rank all 40 American presidents...
...In 2003 the three scholars published an equally impressive sequel: Reagan: A Life in Letters, 4 6 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 g e o R g e H . n a s H a compendium of more than 1,000 substantive letters —entirely written by Reagan himself—out of an estimated 10,000 such letters that he is believed to have composed during his long life...
...And which, if either, was the dominant part of his innermost self...
...had done for conservatives out of power before 1980, so Reagan as president during the 1980s did the same: he performed an emblematic and ecumenical function...
...We made a difference...
...When the economy nevertheless grew stronger and the deficits disappeared in the 1990s, this part of Reagan’s legacy came to seem far less consequential than once feared...
...Still, the disdain that many in the professoriate expressed for him (and for his conservative political philosophy) made it seem unlikely that he would be treated favorably in the history books...
...He couched his social vision in the language of American exceptionalism, the lilting religious imagery of America as a chosen nation, chosen by God “to be free” and to be “the golden hope of all mankind...
...Ysors and successors: except for creating s e c e d e r p e t a e i s i h f t s o m r f f e e t r e in n t one o m respect o reaga m n m was d i decisively dif a - - presidential library, and the nearly obligatory memoir to go along with it, he did little to define and refine Almost 20 years after he left the presidency, and nearly 15 years after he withdrew into the solitude of his final illness, he continues to shape the political identity of a large sector of the American electorate...
...Consider his televised farewell address to the American people in early 1989, in which he acclaimed his beloved country (as he had so often) as a “shining city upon a hill,” blessed by God and chosen by Him for a noble purpose...
...Legacy: how often we now hear this word when we think about our presidents...
...In another corner are those who emphasize internal Soviet conditions and decision-making, the role of Mikhail Gorbachev, and Reagan’s pursuit of nuclear disarmament (over the objection of his more conservative advisers...
...First, at a moment of dangerous drift and national malaise, he restored his country’s sense of self-confidence and its will to greatness...
...He also placed his own distinctive brand upon their movement, thereby cementing even further the bond between them...
...Thus just as William F. Buckley Jr...
...Their closest associates produce a barrage of memoirs of their own, sometimes even before the president leaves power...
...When historians tally up the [20th] century’s ‘great’ or ‘near-great’ presidents,” he declared flatly, “Roosevelt and Reagan will be among them...
...Reagan gained conservatives’ favor not so much because of his winsome personality and superlative communication skills but because they liked and believed what he said...
...IV in 2008...
...This swift and stunning geopolitical earthquake, and the attendant end of the Cold War, confronted historians left and right with a monumental explanatory problem: How and why did all this happen, and so unexpectedly...
...Obviously his personal charm, wit, optimistic temperament, transparent decency, authoritative physical appearance, and oratorical talent were tremendous assets...
...Reagan, of course, had publicly prophesied Communism’s early demise...
...But the president was astute enough to identify himself (and sincerely so) with each component of the grand coalition...
...great conservative battle cry of the 1980s: “Let Reagan be Reagan...
...3) anti-Communist Unlike most of the Republican politicians of his day, Reagan was something of an intellectual: a man who not only spoke the language of the right but seriously thought about it...
...It was Reagan’s “pragmatism” and anti-nuclearism, they asserted, and his willingness to negotiate with the Soviets, that had led him to “end” the Cold War rather than “win” it...
...In his first autobiography, published in 1965, he asserted that classical liberalism was “now the conservative position...
...It is not the least of his legacies to his country...
...Indeed, one of his subtle legacies has been what one might call the theatrical presidency: the public expectation that our presidents will in some sense entertain us even as they govern...
...Like every one of his predecessors since Herbert Hoover, Reagan created a presidential library and museum for his papers after he left office...
...They publish memoirs big enough to be doorstops...
...Second, he bequeathed an ineffaceable example of optimism, grit, serenity, wit, and constructive use of the life he had been given to live...
...He seemed to play along with their misperceptions of his temperament...
...The first scholarly evaluations of Reagan after he left the White House seemed to confirm his conservative defenders’ worst fears...
...It was a remarkable accolade, particularly considering its source...
...It was a coalition of five distinct parts: 1) classical liberals and libertarians, apprehensive of the threat of overweening government and the welfare state to individual liberty and free market capitalism...
...his legacy after he left the White House...
...But even he was surprised when the Berlin Wall came down fewer than ten months after he left office...
...He was, we now know, an inveterate and voracious reader of conservative literature, including Whittaker Chambers’s classic anti-Communist autobiography Witness, which influenced him hugely (and parts of which he committed to memory...
...In 2007 Reagan scholarship took another leap forward with the publication of his presidential diary, which he faithfully kept between 1981 and 1989...
...Instead, they create presidential libraries, museums, and public policy centers to present their story to the public...
...According to the very liberal Professor Commager, it was “the worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve read them all...
...The crusader against Communism or the crusader against the Bomb...
...Reagan gained conservatives’ favor not so much because of his winsome personality and superlative communication skills but because they liked and believed what he said...
...2) “traditionalist” conservatives, appalled by the weakening of the ethical norms and institutional foundations of American society at the hands of secular, relativistic liberalism...
...It revealed a dimension of Reagan hitherto hidden from view...
...Its stated objective was to honor Reagan’s legacy by naming “significant public landmarks” after him in every state of the Union as well as in more than 3,000 counties throughout the United States...
...It turned out that he composed 670 of these essays by himself, in his own handwriting...
...In 1997 the J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 4 1 H e b e l o n g s t o H I s t o R y conservative activist Grover Norquist and his Americans for Tax Reform organization launched a bold and unprecedented initiative known as the Reagan Legacy Project...
...After all, it is the professors who write them...
...That is one way to measure a presidential legacy...
...In retrospect, Schlesinger’s skewed 1996 survey may be seen as the last hurrah of the anti-Reagan consensus in liberal academia...
...Early in 2001 three scholars—Kiron Skinner, Martin Anderson, and Annelise Anderson—published a remarkable book of Reagan’s own writings drawn from a previously unknown file in his personal papers...
...The nation’s 40th president stood revealed as a prolific and capable writer, skillful editor, disciplined worker, wide-ranging reader, and intelligent, even visionary, thinker...
...One of the principal criticisms of Reagan in the 1998s had been that “Rea gan omics” had led to dangerous federal budget deficits...
...It gave rise to the not everyone on the right was ready to give him a grade of “A...
...Unlike such presidents as Hoover, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and William Clinton, Reagan felt no compulsion to “run for ex-president” or seek exoneration in the eyes of history...
...Yet Reagan did more than simply give his fellow conservatives access to power...
...He Belongs to History Ronald Reagan’s legacy and American conservatism By George H. Nash 4 0 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 I In 2008 a specter is haunting American politics: the genial specter of Ronald Reagan...
...Wsome degree upon the record of his imm t s d p e d y r i n i e c a ’ t e i r p hy es th d is n ra s pid p l shifting h o st f o the tide e ? n Ever e o y - diate successors, and here Reagan was singularly fortunate...
...Thirdly, he transmuted American conservatism from theory to practice, gave conservatives a successful presidency to defend (and a statesman to honor), and shifted the paradigm of political discourse for at least a generation...
...Who was responsible...
...he brought American conservatives into the “promised land” inside the Beltway...
...Here we come to the third reason for his extraordinary bond with his fellow conservatives...
...Fourth, he mobilized the resources—rhetorical, military, diplomatic, economic, and spiritual—that in one way or another put Communism and its Soviet empire on the road to extinction...
...Although this much-awaited tome yielded no spectacular revelations, it enhanced Reagan’s stature as a genuinely decent person and reinforced the growing sense among scholars that he had been an astute and competent chief executive...
...II stand Ronald Reagan’s special relationship with modern American conservatism...
...Was this—conservatives wondered—how the “impartial” judgment of history would be rendered upon Reagan...
...We must probe more deeply...
...He was, in that now hackneyed phrase, a “great communicator...
...The persistent Cold Warrior and scourge of the “evil empire” or the peace-seeker who (in his own words) “placed a lot of faith in the simple power of human contact in solving problems...
...is important to remember that the movement that came to power with him was not a mono- In assessing reagan’s legacy for conservatives it lith...
...His free market, low-tax philosophy seemed vindicated...
...Other contemporary politicians “talked g e o R g e H . n a s H the talk” just as sincerely as Reagan did, but he—not they—won the conservatives’ fealty and affection...
...asked 30 prominent historians (and two Democratic politicians) to rank the presidents anew...
...His invincible optimism, his unquenchable confidence in the elixir of freedom, his conviction that history “is not predetermined,” Reagan’s first term was more congenial to conserva- inspired not only Americans in general, but also a generation of his fellow conservatives...
...For despite his broad popularity with the general electorate, there was one influential corner of America where he remained anathema: academe...
...Much of his popularity as a conservative paladin derived from his ability to embody all these impulses simultaneously...
...More than any of our 43 presidents—more even than our current incumbent—Reagan’s memory is on the minds and tongues of a nation hungering for renewal...
...All in all, not bad, not bad at all...
...In 1996 the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...To be sure, there were—and remain—sharp differences of emphasis among the scholars...
...The urge to build a legacy (and thereby, presumably, impress future historians) does not diminish when a president walks out of the Oval Office for the last time...
...But Reagan’s personal qualities do not definitively explain his profound appeal to the American right...
...No longer do our presidents leave their presidencies alone when they vacate the White House...
...Once upon a time, during the 1950s, many conservatives J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 4 3 H e b e l o n g s t o H I s t o R y had gloomily regarded themselves as a forlorn and defeated Remnant, “standing athwart history yelling Stop...
...And so the question arose, as it had so often during Reagan’s lifetime...
...The career of Ronald Reagan has not been exempt from this process...
...Of this legacy, historians will likely say: not bad, not bad at all...
...As the scholarly investigations proceeded, nearly every serious academic investigator came to recognize that Reagan’s role in these shattering developments had been substantial...
...The contempt many academics felt for him was captured in the response by the historian Henry Steele Commager to Reagan’s 1983 address labeling the Soviet Union an “evil empire”—a speech roundly applauded by conservatives...
...His message was more important than the messenger...
...His invincible optimism, his unquenchable confidence in the elixir of freedom, his conviction that history “is not predetermined,” inspired not only Americans in general, but also a generation of his fellow conservatives...
...This essay is adapted from the paper he delivered earlier this year at a Regent University symposium on “The Legacy of Ronald Reagan...
...We’ve done our part,” he said...
...attribute we now hope to find in our chief executives...
...No longer do our chief executives confine themselves, while in office, to performing their constitutional duties...
...Once conclusion was certain: “the riddle of Reagan” (as his close aide Michael Deaver once put it) had not yet been totally solved...
...Libertarians, especially, wondered just how much had really been accomplished during his two terms...
...Since the 1980s, members of his presidential team have generated a torrent of fascinating memoirs, probably the largest and richest such trove for any president in our history...
...When Reagan won the presidency that year, he scored more than a smashing personal victory...
...What is one to make of this enduring fascination with America’s 40th president...
...In the case of Reagan, the archival record turned out to be more effulgent than anyone dreamed...
...We made the city freer, and we left her in good hands...
...The septuagenarian president was pilloried as an indolent actor “sleepwalking through history...
...Soon Bill Clinton himself was claiming that “the era of big J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 4 5 H e b e l o n g s t o H I s t o R y government is over...
...Now a new battle for his legacy loomed, with liberals striving to claim at least a part of it for themselves...
...and 5) the Religious Right, traumatized by the moral wreckage unleashed upon America by the courts and by the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s...
...Almost 20 years after he left the presidency, and nearly 15 years after he withdrew into the solitude of his final illness, he continues to shape the political identity of a large sector of the American electorate...
...Why the fervent determination to preserve, protect, and defend the historical reputation of this man...
...Perhaps not coincidentally, several months later Grover Norquist initiated the Reagan Legacy Project...
...Thus in his inaugural address in 1981, Reagan exhorted his fellow citizens “to believe in ourselves and to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds...
...4) neoconservatives—disillusioned men and women of the left who had been “mugged by reality” and were gravitating toward the conservative camp...
...Someone said of him that he “could get a standing ovation in a graveyard...
...The debate between these two “schools” is likely to continue, at least until more of the Soviet archives are opened...
...Before 1980, the conservative insurgency since World War II had been largely an alliance of dissenters, outside the American political mainstream looking in...
...Like the Labour Party leader Tony Blair after the “Thatcher revolution” in Great Britain, Clinton appeared to recognize that Reagan had pulled the political center of gravity to the right...
...The conflict permeated the highest levels of the White House staff, it involved the president’s wife (who sided with the pragmatists), and it engendered internecine feuds and manipulative policymaking processes that aptly have been described as Byzantine...
...Why has the celebration of Reagan’s legacy become a “project...
...Norton...
...Partly this was because of his advancing age and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease...
...Nearly every participant in his survey was a left-of-center intellectual like himself...
...But most of all, Reagan’s reputation—and the new respect for his legacy— profited from the amazing events that occurred shortly after he left office: the liberation of eastern Europe from Communist captivity and the collapse of the USSR just two years later...
...Thus just when it seemed that Reagan’s triumphant march into the history books was secure, and conservatives could say at last, “Mission accomplished,” the spin-doctoring of his legacy took a most unusual turn...
...Between 1975 and 1979, Reagan had delivered more than 1,000 daily syndicated radio broadcasts, each about 500 words long, on nearly every public policy issue and controversy imaginable...
...His zealous drive for the total abolition of nuclear weapons—culminating in the rollercoaster summit conference in Reykjavik in 1986—made even Margaret Thatcher fear that he had gone wobbly...
...And how stands the city on this winter night...
...Schlesinger’s poll outraged Ameri can conservatives...
...As a spokesman for General Electric between 1954 and 1962, he was exposed to the cascade of libertarian, limited government publications that the company disseminated to its employees...
...Yet it was Reagan who became the most revered conservative leader since Calvin Coolidge...
...tives were enraptured by Reagan’s performance in the presidency...
...Truth to tell, they were often dismayed and disappointed, although All this is not to say that American conservamore by his advisers than by the man himself...
...Finally, he gave us his words...
...In their composite ranking, Reagan placed a mediocre 25th, just behind his successor in office, George H. W. Bush, and just barely ahead of Chester Arthur...
...In 2008 the political coalition that Reagan forged is widely perceived to be in disarray, and memories of the Gipper remind embattled conservatives of better days...
...Instead—or so the media tell us—toward the end of their tenure they become preoccupied with seeking the plaudits of posterity...
...The new consensus did not mean that scholars agreed on what it was that made him so estimable...
...george H. nash is the author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (ISI Books) and The Life of Herbert Hoover (W.W...
...4 4 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 When Reagan left the White House in 1989, III A through three stages: bunk, debunk, and o g y c a l s t n d s e r a f o s l a s i p l r a l o h c s ccordin y g a to p a r a historian p of m i y e acq ’ ua eg intance, rebunk...
...Reagan was articulate, but so were Barry Goldwater and Robert Taft...
...But even this observation does not completely hit the mark...
...J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 4 7...
...When he ran for president in 1980, he was not even the sole conservative in the field...
...But if Reagan himself seemed serene about his accomplishments, many of his ardent admirers were less so—and less inclined to let the judgment of history take its course...
...in January 1989, Reagan left office with a public approval rating of well over 60 percent—the highest for any departing president since Franklin Roosevelt...
...Unlike them, he succeeded in becoming president, but so too did several other Republicans during his lifetime...
...For all of Reagan’s wit, charm, and persuasiveness, his had been a highly polarizing presidency on the plane of principle, and few academics inhabited his side of the great divide...
...After the brief economic recession of 1991–1992, the economic revival that had commenced on his watch resumed: the “long prosperity” (it has been called), arguably rooted in the policies he implemented in the early 1980s...
...The looming question for conservatives was: would historians agree...
...favorable interpretation of Reagan’s legacy, another development proved nearly as impor- If events after 1989 encouraged a fresh and tant...
...The phenomenal wave of current interest in Ronald Reagan is a powerful reminder of his continuing influence on American life...
...Had there, in fact, been two Reagans behind that good-humored façade...
...In Peggy Noonan’s words, “Who was that masked man...
...Both before and during his presidency, Reagan displayed his affinity for the conservative movement in a multitude of ways...
...More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago...
Vol. 41 • July 2008 • No. 6
