October 13, 2009
EXCEPT THE FOUNDERS GAVE US LIBERTY, NOT FREEDOM:
Reagan’s Candid Way: Peter Berkowitz on The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution 1980–1989 by Steven F. Hayward (Peter Berkowitz, OCT/NOV 2009, Policy Review)
It is a great merit of Steven Hayward’s politically sophisticated, thoroughly researched, and generally superb exploration of Reagan’s eight years in the Oval Office that it demonstrates that through the ups and downs, Reagan’s labors were guided by his principles, which he never ceased to expound and defend. Focusing on Reagan’s statesmanship, Hayward’s book completes the work that he began with The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964–1980 (2001). Taken together, Hayward’s two volumes provide an abundance of evidence and analysis to support the increasingly solid consensus among historians that Reagan deserves to be considered among our greatest presidents.A fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, Hayward writes as an admirer of Reagan, endorsing his principles and policies, delighting in his achievements, and evincing pain at his setbacks. Such was the level of contempt showered on Reagan by the media, the intellectuals, and the Democratic Party elite that Hayward is frequently compelled to pause in the narrative to note how the facts do not comport with the widespread belief at the time that Reagan was, in the mocking words of Democratic wise man Clark Clifford, an “amiable dunce,” a mediocre actor in way over his head, subject to systematic manipulation by his advisors and cabinet secretaries, always more likely than not through his domestic agenda to inflict irreparable damage on American society and economy, and, with his trigger-happy finger and cowboy diplomacy, a good bet to blow the world to smithereens. Yet his sympathy does not prevent Hayward from recognizing Reagan’s shortcomings as the nation’s chief executive and forthrightly examining Reagan’s greatest failure as president: the complex series of events that came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair, which significantly weakened Reagan in the final years of his presidency and tarnished his administration.
Hayward’s narrative is driven by the argument that in the name of individual freedom Reagan led a counterrevolution against the dominant left-liberalism of the day, opposing on the domestic front the great expansion of New Deal liberalism by lbj’s Great Society programs, and in the sphere of foreign policy rejecting the equivocal stance toward Soviet communism in favor of defeating it. In the process, Hayward maintains, Reagan corrected a dangerous drift to the left in American politics and “transformed the Republican Party in his own image.”
One hesitates to contradict Mr. Berkowitz, but individual freedom is unprincipled by definition.