America yesterday said goodbye to one of the most successful US presidents of modern times. Much has been written of the achievements of Ronald Reagan, and for some they have been extraordinary. Others have seen in Reagan the first media president, a handsome, charming but vapid figurehead for whichever interests he was made to stand up for.
At 69, Reagan was the oldest man ever to be elected to the White House. His enemies enjoyed highlighting his age, short concentration span and his past as a B-movie actor. They referred to his apparently laid-back style when he was governor of California from 1966 to 1974. The suggestion was that this was a politician of no particular convictions who was happy to let his underlings and campaign backers dictate the script of his administration.
If the 40th president of the United States served two terms, it was because the challenges before him where essentially rhetorical, and it is his rhetoric that still carries a faint echo beyond the memories of such dinosaurs of the lecture circuit as Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev.
Gorbachev indeed could serve as the president’s mirror image and opposite — a man of real achievement who is now despised in the country he did much to change.
Reagan’s job in any case was to make the Americans feel better about themselves after the crimes of Vietnam, the shame of Watergate and the disaster of the Carter presidency’s Iranian hostage drama. And make them feel good he did, with his easy humor and avuncular style, with his simple terminology — the phrase “empire of evil” to describe the Soviet Union, something straight out of Star Wars, remains associated with him, as indeed does the “Star Wars” project.
During his very first security briefing, legend has it, Reagan asked his aides to list the ways in which the United States was superior to the Soviet Union. In weaponry of all sorts, the Soviet Union outnumbered the Americans. There was only one thing which the Americans had plenty of which the Soviets did not, and that was money. So that, the story goes, was what he decided to hit them with.
Of course he needed no such encouragement. The Reagan era and its economic high jinks — known as Reagonomics — quickly became associated with conspicuous consumption and a generation maniacally dedicated to the pursuit of money, money and more money. The West over time did indeed manage to bankrupt the Soviet Union by driving defense spending to ever more grotesque heights, but how far the credit rests with Reagan must be a matter for speculation. Let it be charitably said that Reagan provided the gloss and finish to the operation, the distinctive soothing voiceover for a frantic decade that ended in massive budget deficits and recessions for the West and in liberation for the people of the Warsaw Pact.
Europe, with the exception of Britain, knew to benefit from what happened on the Gipper’s watch. Our own region was entirely marginal to his presidency.
By all accounts he was a genuinely nice man, and it seems a cruel irony that the gift of longevity was marred by Alzheimer’s disease in his later years.
