In search of Reagan

AT THE FIRST TELEVISED Republican presidential debate held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the candidates stumbled all over each other paying homage to Mrs. Reagan and claiming the right to wear Reagan's mantle--a leader with a growing historic aura of greatness. No other Republican president of the second half of the 20th century quite lives up to "The Great Communicator." Dwight Eisenhower, perhaps the best prior to Reagan, was an effective steward but could not lay claim to any great historical deed. Richard Nixon became an embarrassment to the office. Gerald Ford restored dignity and integrity to the presidency, but there will be little engraved in the history books. George H.W. Bush steered American foreign policy carefully at the end of the Cold War, but lacked, in his own infelicitous phrase, "that vision thing."

Ronald Reagan has become the Republican Franklin D. Roosevelt. Reagan and Roosevelt had the good fortune to succeed two dour and failed presidents. Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter left behind an economy in shambles and had little idea how they were going to improve it. The U.S. in the 1930s was experiencing an economic catastrophe. During the 1970s, Americans, in addition to economic dislocation, had been shaken badly by double-digit inflation, humiliation in Viet ham, Watergate scandals, Soviet advances in Africa, Afghanistan, Granada, and Nicaragua, and, finally, the Iranian hostage crisis.

In their invocation of themselves as Reagan's heir, the current crop of Republican presidential hopefuls claims to have the ability to restore the country with Reagan's sense of optimism. They may have forgotten how many had sneered that Reagan's sunny optimism came out of one of his Hollywood movies. Reagan understood that invoking a sense of optimism did not simply create one. There was far more to Reagan's leadership than cheerleading. He had a powerful vision and a plan. He thought the past policies of containment and detente were defensive and, over time, debilitating. He rejected the psychiatric school of strategy. This misbegotten notion started with the belief that the Soviets essentially were paranoid and defensive. Therefore, the West should reassure them concerning our intentions and avoid threatening them. Such reassurance would, it was hoped, result in their mellowing and a more full-blown detente.

Reagan thought such thinking was nonsense. He strongly asserted that the Soviets were not defensive and paranoid and that they had every intention of imposing their system whenever and wherever they sensed American weakness. Reagan had no desire to assuage the Soviets. He wanted to challenge them consistently, confront them with strength and determination, expose the basic contradictions of their system, and bring down their empire. Such a monumental task required the use of all the instruments of power, short of war.

Reagan revitalized a flagging American economy with tax cuts, deregulation, and, with Paul Volker at the Federal Reserve Board, a stable currency. He rebuilt the U.S. military and challenged the Soviets to best us in an arms race he knew they could not afford. He told one of his advisors that he would tell the Soviets his simple concept of an arms race was: We win; they lose. He had this in mind when he announced his Strategic Defense Initiative. Most liberals disdainfully labeled it "star wars." The Soviets had no such disdain given their healthy respect for American technology as well as Reagan's seriousness. Thus, they reacted to the speech with a mix of shock and horror. Reagan had presented the Soviets with a Hobson's choice. They could try to match SDI or circumvent it with more offensive arms spending. Either way, it would involve things their stagnant economy could not afford.

Reagan rejected an unwritten Soviet role of the Cold War that the U.S. never would threaten the Soviet sphere. This was the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine in which the USSR claimed the right to intervene in any country to protect a Marxist-Leninist regime. They had done precisely that to Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, while the U.S. stood aside, leaving the Soviets to think we always would.

In 1981, Reagan gave them another thought. When martial law was declared in Poland and the leaders of Solidarity jailed, Reagan did not sit by quietly. He slapped economic sanctions on the Soviet Union and provided covert funding for Solidarity in Poland to keep the movement alive. This was part of a Reagan plan to turn the Brezhnev Doctrine on its head. We now would support the forces of anti-communism and nationalism against the Soviets in their own Empire. In addition to aid to Solidarity, Reagan ordered covert support to other anti-USSR resistance movements in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, and Mozambique.

He believed that history now was moving in our direction. He called the USSR "an evil empire" and asserted Mat the world would, "leave Marxism on the ash heap of history." To the shock of many, that is exactly where Reagan's policies left the former Russian empire. In building our strength and exploiting their weakness, Reagan pushed on a door that not only swung wide open, but eventually brought the whole rotten house down.