What It Takes. - book review

When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan, by Peggy Noonan (Viking, 224 pp., $24.95)

Successful presidents, as Tolstoy somehow neglected to tell us, are all alike, while each failure fails in his own way. Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, and Jimmy Carter did not fail the same way as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, but each damaged the country. By contrast, the best ones -- Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, the early Cold War presidents, and yes, Ronald Reagan -- all shared some pertinent traits: All were able to define and embody the national purpose and character, to name the key challenges of their era and meet those challenges. Reagan, it is becoming more and more evident, met these criteria, and merits inclusion in this roster of notables. What is less obvious is that he is in no way as different from the others as he seems.

Two things have conspired to make him seem special. First, he came from the entertainment world, not business, the law, or the army; and no one before had thought of the film studios as a breeding ground for future world leaders. Second, he reached power at a time when the traits shared by all these great American leaders of the past -- a fierce patriotism, a keen moral sense, and an ease with and wish to use power -- were no longer in style with the chattering classes, and even considered outre and sinister.

Didn't Reagan know that power was useless, that virtue was relative, and that talking of force could get you in trouble? No, he didn't, which is the source of his claim on our interest and loyalty. So says Peggy Noonan, his one-time speechwriter, who is becoming these days a student of power. It turns out that the film star from Dreamland was really a fairly conventional national leader; and it was precisely because he enraged the elites of his era that he became, Noonan says, a great man.

Noonan details the contempt in which Reagan was held by the supposed intellectual heavyweights of his era, and gives us a full page of epithets from pundits and hacks who are or who should be forgotten: "amiable dunce" (from Clark Clifford); "shockingly dumb" (from Jimmy Breslin); and so on. They were scared by the arms race, rattled by Star Wars, stunned by what they considered Reagan's naive and provocative references to the "evil empire." But if Reagan was mocked in Manhattan and Georgetown, Natan Sharansky, locked up in the Gulag, was thrilled. "President Reagan understood the nature of a totalitarian regime," Sharansky told Noonan. "He had very healthy instincts about it. He was a fresh change after Nixon's attempts at detente, and Carter, who talked well but couldn't link practical policy to this talk . . . Star Wars was a way of talking to the Soviet Union." As a result of Reagan's new approach, Sharansky says, "the fate of the dissidents [became linked] to the policy of the United States."

Liberals assumed that Reagan's words and actions would end in war or disaster. Instead, they ended in the peaceful defeat of the Communists in Latin America; then of the Communists in Eastern Europe; and, finally, of the Communists in Russia itself. The uses of force as a threat and a tactic had once been understood by American presidents, but these crucial simplicities eluded Reagan's critics. "The clever men and women of his time were more often than not fooled by the arguments and maneuvers of the Soviets," Noonan tells us. "But Reagan, who did not think himself clever, was not."

One reason that Reagan appears an exotic is that he was a man out of time. In an age demoralized by lost wars and liars, he bore the faith of the hot and Cold Warriors, who took on and shattered the Axis alliance, drew lines in the sand against Soviet Russia, brought Europe back from the dust and ashes, created a boom, cracked the atom, and then sent a man to the moon. His contemporaries believed in limits and boundaries; he still looked to great possibilities. They believed in American guilt; he believed in American promise. He also believed in confrontation, and, as Sharansky noted, the power of moral ideals. He was indeed retrograde, but not in the way that his critics suspected. His "evil empire" phrasing harked back to iron curtains, days of infamy, and people willing to bear burdens and pay prices. He did not refer back to the past as it was portrayed in old John Wayne movies, but to the real past of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Kennedy.

He broke with his old idol, FDR, on domestic policy, because he came to believe that the country had been overgoverned. But in foreign affairs, he remained his master's disciple: a determined warrior, dreaming of peace. "The old movie actor confidently promoted the liberal establishment's old worldview as if there had never been a Vietnam, with its stern lessons of caution and humility and limits," Robert Kagan wrote recently. "The truth is that Reaganism -- that combination of ebullient confidence in the superiority of American society, and the determination to triumph over the evil of Communism -- was little more than the resurrection of the old establishment's worldview."