HE'S A WHAT? (via The Mother Judd):

The Music Man: How a b-movie actor changed the world (Paul Greenberg, June 7, 2004, Jewish World Review)

To appreciate what Ronald Reagan achieved, you'd have to conjure up more than his genial smile and always upbeat presence. You'd have to go back to the drifting, demoralized America of the 1970s, the one that had made its peace with Detente and Decline, the America of stagflation at home and drift abroad, of gas lines and double-digit interest rates, and a general, even un-American defeatism. The challenge had become how to stave off defeat as long as possible, just to survive, not how to triumph. The spirit of that pre-Reagan America was as unnatural, as ungainly and as unflattering as its fashions.

If it can ever be said that one man changed everything, he was the one man. And he did it the way he did everything - dramatically. There was something almost B-Movie about his story: Actor Changes World. [...]

An actor in more than one sense of the word, Ronald Reagan refused to settle for what the intellectuals and establishment told him was reality - that economics is the dismal science, that the American Century had passed, that the Soviet Union and the Cold War were immutable facts of life, that the threat of nuclear war was a permanent feature of global politics, and that co-existence with an evil empire was the best we could hope for . . . none of which Ronald Reagan would believe, or let us believe.

Reality, he showed us, was so much brighter than we had thought, freedom so much greater a force in the world than we had realized. He made us optimists despite ourselves. This Music Man had enough optimism to supply the whole country - and, more impressive, he acted on it. He believed in good and evil, and they proved to be not such outmoded concepts after all. The Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the evil empire soon afterward.

This actor turned politics into a morality play, and even supplied the happy ending. By the end of the show, he had restored our faith, and, with it, a whole world. Ronald Reagan has finally made his exit, but those 76 trombones are still going strong.

The younger among you who are having trouble figuring out why older folk are so passionate about Ronald Reagan might consider this: during the years from the mid-60s until Ronald Reagan was elected just about every day was like those dark days right after 9-11. George Bush lifted us out of a couple of days of doubt; Ronald Reagan lifted us out of better than a decade of despair.

MORE:
He Could See for Miles: Reagan had a vision and the courage to endure all the doubters (CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, 6/14/04, TIME)

Conviction told him that the proper way to deal with this endless, enervating, anxiety-ridden ordeal was not settling for stability but going for victory. Courage allowed him to weather the incessant, at times almost universal, attacks on him for the radical means he chose to win it: the military buildup; nuclear deployments in Europe; the Reagan doctrine of overt support for anticommunist resistance movements everywhere, including Nicaragua; and the piece de resistance, strategic missile defenses, derisively dubbed Star Wars by scandalized opponents. Within eight years, an overmatched, overwhelmed, overstretched Soviet Union was ready for surrender, the historically breathtaking, total and peaceful surrender of everything — its empire and its state.

Reagan won that war not just with radical policies but also with a radically unashamed ideological challenge, the great 1982 Westminster speech predicting that communism would end up in the "ash heap of history" and the subsequent designation of the Soviet Union as the "evil empire." That won him the derision of Western sophisticates, intellectuals and defeatists of all kinds. It also won him the undying admiration of liberation heroes from Vaclav Havel to Natan Sharansky. Rarely does history render such decisive verdicts: Reagan was right, his critics were wrong. Less than a year after he left office, the Berlin Wall came down.

The ungenerous would say he had a great presidency but was not a great man. That follows the tradition of his opponents who throughout his career consistently underestimated him, disdaining him as a good actor, a Being There simpleton who could read scripts written for him by others. In fact, Reagan frustrated his biographers because he was so complex — a free-market egalitarian, an intellectually serious nonintellectual, an ideologue with great tactical flexibility.

With the years, the shallow explanations for Reagan's success — charm, acting, oratory — have fallen away. What remains is Reagan's largeness and deeply enduring significance. Let Edward Kennedy, the dean of Democratic liberalism, render the verdict: "It would be foolish to deny that his success was fundamentally rooted in a command of public ideas ... Whether we agreed with him or not, Ronald Reagan was a successful candidate and an effective President above all else because he stood for a set of ideas. He stated them in 1980--and it turned out that he meant them — and he wrote most of them not only into public law but into the national consciousness."

There is no better definition of presidential greatness.

-Forever the Optimist (BOB DOLE, 6/07/04, NY Times)

Reagan believed the compassionate thing to do was to give people their freedom, to place our trust in that freedom, and to put our trust in democracy — in the people, in the goodness of our people — and to believe in ourselves, in our country and what we stood for. While others scoffed at him, he was never ashamed to stand up for what America believed and for what mattered to ordinary people. Government was not equipped to tell us what to do, how to invest our money, or how best to provide for our families. He moved the country in his direction, creating Reagan Democrats — people who believed what he did — regardless of party, race, religion or wealth.

While Americans live in the house that Abraham Lincoln built, the modern world is the home of Ronald Reagan. More than 700 million people who lived behind the Iron Curtain now have a taste of freedom, and their children and grandchildren will live with opportunities they could not have imagined. By building our defenses — rather than unleashing aggression — Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet Union. In so doing, he exposed its bankruptcy — financial, political, moral and spiritual. This is his great and lasting achievement. Today, economic opportunities are increasing, and while individual and political liberties lag in some corners, they are moving inexorably in the direction that Reagan envisioned and to which he devoted his presidency.

Although his style is inimitable, our leaders today are disciples of Reagan's style and substance. They embrace the entrepreneurial spirit that Reagan saw at the pulse of change and progress. "A communist was someone who reads Marx and Lenin," he joked. "A noncommunist is someone who understands Marx and Lenin." He once asked: "What were the four things wrong with Soviet agriculture? Spring, summer, winter and fall."

One of the first things he taught me was about loyalty: a few months after he took office, I was in the hospital recovering from kidney stone surgery. Much to my surprise, he took a helicopter to Walter Reed hospital to visit and to discuss my new role as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. By the time he left, I was ready to march up any hill, let alone Capitol Hill, for him. He also once called my mother when she was very ill.

Later he taught me about compromise: he would rather get 80 percent and go back for the rest later than go home with nothing. Eighty percent was a pretty good deal. He taught me that success is never final nor defeat fatal, as long as you have the courage to act on principle and take the heat. Reagan knew that sometimes you win by losing if you stand firm for what is right.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 7, 2004 11:13 AM