Reagan Revelation: At 100, Why He Still Matters

“What I would really like to do is to go down in history as the President who made Americans believe in themselves again.” —Ronald Reagan

Before he became an icon, Ronald Reagan was a paradox: a complex man who appeared simple, at once a genial fundamentalist and a conservative innovator. As America’s oldest President, he found his most fervent supporters among the young. The only divorced man to occupy the Oval Office, Reagan as President rarely attended church. He enjoyed a relationship with his own children best described as intermittent. Yet his name was synonymous with traditional values, and he inspired millions of the faithful to become politically active for the first time. During eight years in the White House, Reagan never submitted a balanced budget or ceased to blame Congress for excessive spending. He presided over the highest unemployment rate since World War II and one of the longest peacetime booms ever.

It was hard to know what about Reagan, who was elected in 1980 as a bristling anti-communist, offended the foreign policy establishment more: his harsh rhetoric consigning the Soviet Union to the ash heap of history or his scorn for the prevailing doctrine of mutually assured destruction. State Department bureaucrats who tried to censor his speeches, most notably his 1987 Berlin ultimatum to Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” threw up their hands when Reagan proposed to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether. Even among his White House staff, admiration for the President’s achievements was mingled with a faint whiff of condescension. “He knows so little and accomplishes so much,” marveled Robert McFarlane, the third of Reagan’s six National Security Advisers.

(See Reagan and Gorbachev in TIME’s list of the top 10 memorable state-dinner moments.)

For much of his presidency, Reagan was a sharply polarizing figure. His job-approval rating bottomed out at 35% halfway through his first term. Yet he left Washington more popular than when he first took office, a feat unmatched since Dwight Eisenhower. That’s not all the two men had in common. “You know why I like you, Ike?,” Winston Churchill asked the wartime commander who had labored, more or less harmoniously, alongside Bernard Law Montgomery, Charles de Gaulle and Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Because you ain’t no glory hopper.” True to form, in the Oval Office, Eisenhower displayed a paperweight that read, in Latin, “Gently in manner, strong in deed.” Equally revealing was the plaque Reagan placed atop his presidential desk. “There is no limit to what a man can do, or where he can go,” it proclaimed, “if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.”

Reagan’s modesty set him apart in Washington even more than in Hollywood. As the media succumbed to Gorbymania, Gorbachev’s American counterpart laughingly conceded center stage to the Soviet leader, reminding fretful handlers that he had once shared the silver screen with such notorious camera hogs as Wallace Beery and Errol Flynn. With equal sangfroid, Reagan professed not to care what “history” would say of him, on the eminently logical grounds that he wouldn’t be around to read it. Scholars and journalists will more than compensate for his indifference. Acknowledging the economic turnaround that occurred on Reagan’s watch, they’ll weigh over 16 million new jobs and a successful war on inflation against (then) record deficits and a deregulatory binge that saddled his successor with a ravaged savings-and-loan industry.

(See Reagan in TIME’s list of the top 10 memorable debate moments.)

For decades to come, students of the Reagan era will debate Margaret Thatcher’s assertion that her American ally won the Cold War without firing a shot. Nearly as intense is the argument swirling around the arms-for-hostages deal known as Iran-contra, a bizarre enterprise born of administrative neglect, wishful thinking and Reagan’s all-too-human desire to rescue his countrymen brutalized by their Middle East captors. Under more benign circumstances, Reagan didn’t hesitate to poke fun at the supposed confusion in his White House, conceding, “Our right hand doesn’t know what our far right hand is doing.” That he could laugh at himself was a source of reassurance to Americans who had lived through a series of failed or tragically shortened presidencies. Not the least of Reagan’s accomplishments was to refute popular doubts, widespread in 1980, that the office had grown too demanding for any one individual to master.

By his own acknowledgment, Reagan arrived in Washington with a script. Indeed, by running in 1980 on a clearly articulated platform of less government, lower taxes, fresh incentives for entrepreneurship and a massive military buildup to counter Soviet expansionism, he could legitimately claim an electoral mandate for what he called his New Beginning. The actor in Reagan instinctively understood that successful leaders don’t just speak to us; they speak for us. Certainly, no one who heard his husky-voiced tribute to “the boys of Pointe du Hoc” 40 years after they scaled the walls of Hitler’s Fortress Europe is likely to forget the experience. But it was in unscripted moments, far more than any of Michael Deaver’s made-for-television stagecraft, that Reagan showed his essential self. Above all, on March 30, 1981. In taking an assassin’s bullet and cracking wise in the shadow of death, he displayed qualities of character only hinted at on the campaign trail. The grace and grit he exhibited that day marked the genesis of Reagan’s enduring bond with the American people, including millions who never voted for him.

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Political scientists speak of transformational vs. transactional leaders. Catalyst or figurehead. Agent of change vs. defender of the status quo. Transforming Presidents — think Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, T.R. and FDR — boldly challenge the orthodoxy of their time, leaving in their wake an alternative consensus that effectively extends their grip on power, sometimes for decades. By promising Depression-era Americans economic security through government action, Franklin Roosevelt established political norms that lasted half a century. Yet the life jacket of one generation can become the straitjacket of the next. Four times, a young Reagan cast his vote for the father of the New Deal. At the time, he could scarcely imagine that one day, he would lead his own political revolution, a conservative crusade to undo the ascendancy of Washington first proclaimed by his boyhood hero.

Unlike Roosevelt, who enlisted the state to fulfill democracy’s promise, Reagan relied on an unfettered marketplace to disseminate possibility. In his cherished city on a hill, individual liberty was celebrated as a gift from God, not government. Reagan’s skill — or luck — in averting the consequences of failed policies won him status as the Teflon President. Exactly the opposite holds true where political realignment is concerned. For only Reagan could supply the adhesive necessary to bind Greenwich brokers and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Jeanne Kirkpatrick neocons and Pat Buchanan paleocons: a coalition of opposites every bit as improbable as FDR’s ragtag alliance of Southern racists and Northern blacks, dust-blown farmers, big-city bosses and Ivy League brain trusters.

(See Reagan in TIME’s list of the top 10 political defections.)

Not content simply to move the center of political gravity to the right, Reagan remade American conservatism into an instrument of reform. He outsourced the preservation of Social Security to a bipartisan commission chaired by Alan Greenspan, in the process defusing an issue that was traditionally lethal for Republicans. Defying the second-term jinx, he vastly simplified the federal tax code, discharging millions of low-income Americans from taxpaying obligations altogether. And if he was initially forced to disguise his philosophical U-turn as a mere change of course, the time would come when Reagan’s successors had no choice but to conform to his vision. Thus, when Bill Clinton famously proclaimed the era of Big Government at an end, he wasn’t so much renouncing his activist instincts as deferring to the anti-Washington accord that was Reagan’s legacy.

Reagan understood the difference between learning from the past and living in it. His conservatism was equally optimistic and futuristic. Moreover, he was a practical visionary, happy to claim victory if he could get 80% of what he wanted. Inevitably this provoked rumblings from ideological purists who thought he was being exploited by closet liberals like White House chief of staff James Baker and communications director David Gergen. (They appear not to have considered the possibility that the ultimate Washington outsider might have been exploiting Washington insiders to obtain his goals.) “Let Reagan be Reagan,” cried the true believers, confusing guilelessness with naiveté.

(See Reagan in TIME’s list of the top 10 State of the Union moments.)

To which one might logically inquire, Which Reagan? The foreign policy hard liner who decried economic sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid government as “a historic act of folly” — or the destabilizing democrat who helped drive right-wing dictators from their palaces in Manila and Port-au-Prince, Haiti? Was it the quasi-libertarian who hung Cabinet Room portraits of Calvin Coolidge and William Howard Taft — or the pinstripe populist who displayed in the Oval Office a likeness of Andrew Jackson?

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Most politicians are incrementalists. Reagan, like Jackson, was anything but. A more conventional President than Reagan would have accepted the basic assumption governing American politics since 1933, that Washington’s growing authority over public expenditures and personal decisionmaking was irreversible. Reagan did not merely dispute this notion; he likely demolished it. A more conventional President would take for granted the existing superpower relationship, precariously balanced on the equilibrium of nuclear standoff. Reagan insisted that the Soviet Union was a historical aberration and that the Cold War could be won by the West in his lifetime. Finally, a more conventional President would have contented himself with slowing the rate of increase in the world’s nuclear stockpiles. Reagan believed that the arms race could be ended and the stockpiles eliminated.

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This refusal to be bound by the status quo, this capacity for seeing what eludes the more literal-minded, is the hallmark of transformational leadership. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,” said George Bernard Shaw. “The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Was anyone more unreasonable than Lincoln in committing the lives of countless soldiers to validate his mystical theology of Union? Seventy years later, FDR inhabited a reality of his own making. As President, he was forever inventing conversations with fictitious garage mechanics and Chinese laundrymen who had just “dropped in” long enough to voice agreement with his policies and provide spectral evidence of Roosevelt’s closeness to ordinary Americans. Yet the same fertile imagination conjured Lend-Lease, the Four Freedoms and a too-clever-by-half scheme to pack the Supreme Court with Justices friendly to his New Deal.

For his part, Reagan practiced make-believe long before Warner Bros. paid him to do so. As a child in rural Illinois, he was encouraged by his doting mother to look upon the “oatmeal meat” she served her family as a rare delicacy. As a young radio announcer calling Chicago Cubs games for station WHO in Des Moines, Iowa, Reagan didn’t miss a beat when the telegraph wire went dead one day and he was forced to improvise by describing a fictional series of pitches and foul balls. The adult Reagan convinced himself that he had never been a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968. Nothing better illustrates his parallel universe than Reagan’s visit to the National Naval Medical Center in the summer of 1985. Doctors successfully operated on the President for a colon malignancy, news of which they shared with the press, only to be rebuffed by their distinguished patient.

(See TIME’s 2004 Appreciation on Reagan.)

He didn’t have cancer, maintained Reagan. Something inside him had cancer, and the surgeons removed it, Reagan explained with the same blithe disregard for the obvious that buttressed his faith in the Laffer Curve, inspired the Strategic Defense Initiative to ward off incoming Soviet missiles and fostered the President’s unshakable belief that defense spending — which soared under his leadership — added nothing to the federal deficit.

Two years ago, I wrote in this magazine that with Barack Obama’s election, the Reagan era was coming to a close. My assessment was, at the least, premature. Across much of the ideological spectrum, government today generates less trust and incites more hostility than the unregulated market forces that helped bring on the economic meltdown. If Obama has bounced back from the drubbing his party took at the polls last November, it is in no small measure because he has been acting positively Reaganesque as of late, reaching out to the business community, scoring bipartisan victories and delivering in Tucson a sermon against mindless partisanship worthy of the Great Communicator at his most consoling. Moving to the middle is a re-election strategy more tactical than transformative, unless Obama at some point is willing to confront hard choices mandated by past generosity and implacable demographics. Can this President reimagine liberalism for the 21st century? Is he sufficiently unconventional to subject government to an intellectual as well as a fiscal means test?

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Republicans confront their own test. Having largely succeeded in framing the debate over federal spending, can they now emulate Reagan’s principled pragmatism and settle for anything less than 100% of their stated objectives? If the Age of Reagan is anywhere consigned to the history books, it is among those who claim his mantle while practicing little of their hero’s sunny optimism and even less of his inclusiveness. Reagan, after all, excelled at the politics of multiplication. Too many of his professed admirers on talk radio and cable gabfests appear to prefer division. Can Tea Party Republicans endorse an immigration bill like the one Reagan signed in 1986, imposing penalties on those who knowingly hire illegal immigrants but also granting amnesty to 3 million immigrants already here?

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Long before Obama made hope his byword, Reagan was offering a share of the American Dream to all comers. And he did so with a smile on his lips, a decent regard for his adversaries and the conviction first planted in him by Nelle Reagan during his hardscrabble childhood that whatever happened in life was part of God’s plan. The late historian John P. Diggins said of Reagan that he “remedied America of all self-doubt.” The question remains, Did he restore, through the force of his personality and the timeliness of his ideas, popular confidence, the prerequisite for national renewal? Or did he unintentionally foster an American exceptionalism bordering on hubris, affording license to spend and borrow without thought of the consequences? That Reagan told us we were capable of great things did not make him exceptional. Sooner or later, every President does this. That he made us believe it testifies to the enduring impact of the life that began a hundred years ago in a most conventional Illinois village.

Smith has been the director of five presidential libraries, including Reagan’s. He is currently a scholar-in-residence at George Mason University and is working on a biography of Nelson Rockefeller.

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