Tom McMahon

Remarks At The Brandenburg Gate

Excerpts from the July 12, 1987 speech by Ronald Reagan:

In the 1950s, Khrushchev predicted: "We will bury you." But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind--too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.

And now the Soviets themselves may, in a limited way, be coming to understand the importance of freedom. We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness. Some political prisoners have been released. Certain foreign news broadcasts are no longer being jammed. Some economic enterprises have been permitted to operate with greater freedom from state control.

Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it? We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

It's interesting to go back and read the whole speech, when all you hear now is the same one sound bite over and over and over.

Help Put Ronald Reagan On The $10 Bill!

The time is right to put Reagan on our currency.  FDR, Eisenhower and JFK were all on currency less than a year from their deaths.  President Reagan deserves no less.

Nathaniel Branden On Ronald Reagan

From a Free Radical interview with Nathaniel Branden:

Let me begin by saying that I think he has been a very underestimated man by his opponents. I think that his understanding and handling of our relationship with the Soviet Union was brilliant. Gorbachev himself gives Reagan credit for effectively ending the Cold War. Are there areas where I would disagree with him? Sure. He was opposed to abortion. He did not believe in total laissez-faire capitalism. He did build up our national debt enormously. But I tell you one thing he did that impressed me so much it almost wipes everything else off the mat. It’s something I found thrilling beyond words. And that was: he was in Russia, and he gave a speech in the University of Moscow. And the theme of the speech was to explain to the people there what American capitalism is. Here is the president of the United States, in a distinguished university in a country with whom we’ve had hostile relationships for decades—getting up, and in the most passionate yet totally non-belligerent way, explaining what economic freedom means, what capitalism means. It was so extraordinary in the moral clarity that he brought to his presentation that I’ll remember it, with great admiration, forever.

Our Legacy, Their Legacy

From the conservative newsmagazine Human Events :

It's a blessing that President Clinton's ludicrous book was published on the heels of President Reagan's magnificent funeral. The contrast could not be more illuminating: Two men rose out of Middle America to the highest office in the land. One, a conservative, had unshakable convictions that led him, despite the establishment's derision, to defeat Soviet communism and win the Cold War. The other, a liberal, had no convictions at all, which led him, despite the establishment's unending applause, to commit high crimes--before winning a Senate impeachment trial.

Reagan is our movement's legacy. Clinton is theirs.

Growing Up With Ronald Reagan

From Frederick Turner:

Indeed, there is a stage in real grownups' lives when they become more givers than earners or fighters or sellers. We all do when we die, at least. The grownups among us can become net givers before we die. But the only way to get there is through the work of life. I realized this at the death of my own father -- a great giver if ever there was one -- and I now feel an echo of that death as we prepare for the funeral of Ronald Reagan. The work of life is only possible if we accept that we are going to die. But the eternal children in our society refused, and still refuse, to accept that they will die. Their anguish at the cost of the Iraq war is the great symptom of that refusal, of the inability to grow up. There should be no costs, they feel; when we were children there were no costs, in a socialist society there would be no costs.

Maybe this explains a bit why Bill Clinton hasn't submitted his Presidential funeral plans, eh?

The Lessons Reagan Taught Us

Excerpts from Newt Gingrich:

Cheerfulness can get almost anything done. One of President Reagan's great strengths was his commitment to big ideas and his willingness to remain cheerful no matter what the difficulties were. It made him likable and approachable and easy to support. Despite being the son of an alcoholic father, entering the job market in the Great Depression, and watching his career in movies fade out, Reagan remained a steadfast optimist. That disposition was a tremendous, politically potent change from the angry pessimism of traditional conservatism.

Beliefs matter. Watching Reagan stand for the same principles from October 1964 through the end of his presidency 24 years later was an amazing lesson in the power of consistency. He did not swing back and forth with each flurry of news stories or polling data. Instead, Reagan was willing to define a big vision of a bright future and keep repeating it until the country came to share his vision. Reagan did not change nearly so much as the country changed. Our approach to issues such as welfare reform, tax cuts, balancing the budget, military and intelligence strength, and how to govern as a majority were learned from Reagan.

Politics is like vaudeville. No matter how often the entertainer performs, each crowd is seeing him for the first and perhaps only time. This morally obligates the performer to give his best. It was this understanding of a very old tradition that enabled Reagan to be so stunning day after day and event after event. He could take the same cards out of his coat pocket, reshuffle them, and give a speech he had given 30 times but turn it into a sparkling moment for this audience at this moment in this hall. It was that sense of doing your very best in the here and now combined with the depth of thought and preparation behind the cards that made him so powerful a public speaker.

Reagan's Theory Of The Cold War

From Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson:

One day in 1977 Ronald Reagan asked Richard Allen, who would become his first national security adviser, if Mr. Allen would like to hear his theory of the Cold War. "Some people think I'm simplistic," Mr. Reagan said, "but there's a difference between being simplistic and being simple. My theory of the Cold War is that we win and they lose. What do you think about that?"

"I was flabbergasted," Mr. Allen now says. "I'd worked for Nixon and Goldwater and many others, and I'd heard a lot about . . . détente and the need to 'manage the Cold War,' but never did I hear a leading politician put the goal so starkly.

Jack Reagan, A Father Worthy of Honor

From Mary Beth Brown:

Almost all of the books on President Reagan devote about one sentence to his father. In this one sentence they note one negative aspect about the man, and sum him up in one word – alcoholic. Unfortunately, historians have only looked deep enough to catch a glimpse of John Edward (Jack) Reagan and not gotten a picture of the whole man.

One of the lessons Jack Reagan constantly taught his son was the importance of judging people as individuals and not holding a prejudice against anyone. The Reagan family came from Ireland to America prior to the Civil War, when food was scarce and times were bleak in Ireland. They came looking for a better life. Jack Reagan was a quintessential Irishman who loved his heritage and passed his love on to his son.

During the early 1900s, there was bigotry and discrimination against the Irish and Catholics. Jack Reagan was often on the receiving end of this discrimination and hated to see others treated the same way. Once when Jack was out of town selling shoes, he slept a night in his car during a winter blizzard rather than stay in the only hotel in town because they would not allow Jewish customers. From his own experience, there was born in Jack strong beliefs against ethnic and religious bigotry, which he passed onto his son.

He Faced Down The Totalitarians And The Appeasers

From What Ronald Reagan Understood:

Same theme from the 1930s till now--don't be an alarmist warmonger, the enemy's not so bad! A "human shield" who went to Iraq in 2003 to protect Iraqis from Americans wrote afterwards, "I was shocked when I first met a pro-war Iraqi in Baghdad--a taxi driver taking me back to my hotel late at night. I explained that I was American and said, as we shields always did, 'Bush bad, war bad, Iraq good.' He looked at me with an expression of incredulity." ("By the time I left Baghdad five weeks later," he reports, "my views had changed drastically.") MIT economist Lester Thurow, in the early 1980s: "It is a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable." In 1938 the British pundit and politician Sir Evelyn Wrench was shocked by the Kristallnacht pogrom, but "after a few days I regained my confidence in Germany's good intentions," and after all Hitler "will not go to war unless pushed into it by others," according to the former Labour party leader George Lansbury. Saddam was not so bad, Soviet rule was not so bad, Hitler was not so bad--and left-wing intellectuals call Bush and Reagan simple-minded!

The Communists Threaten The Reagans

Another excerpt about the Communist-led violence in Hollywood in the late 1940's, from Peter Schweizer's Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism:

After one take of a beach scene, Reagan was summoned to the telephone. When he picked up the receiver, a voice he didn't recognize threatened to see to it that he never made films again. If he continued to oppose the CSU strike, the caller said, "a squad" would disfigure his face with acid.

It was the first of many threats as the CSU and their Communist Party allies grew desperate to force SAG into line. Reagan hired guards to watch his kids. "I have been looking over my shoulder when I go down the street," he told a SAG meeting.

Blaney Matthews was so concerned that he took the unusual step of making sure that Reagan got a permit to pack a .32 Smith & Wesson. From the time he got up in the morning to the time he went to bed, Reagan kept the pistol close and snug, holstered under his jacket. When he went to sleep, he kept it at his bedside. But his nights were fitful. Jane Wyman would awaken and find him sitting up in bed at two in the morning, holding the gun because he had heard an unusual sound. The dreamland he had been living in only a few months earlier was turning into a nightmare.

Reagan Rides Alone

An excerpt about the Communist-led violence in Hollywood in the late 1940's, from Peter Schweizer's Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism:

Herb Sorrell had promised violence if he didn't get his way in the studio strike, and it didn't take him long to deliver. Led by his "sluggers," strikers smashed windshields on passing trains and threw rocks at the police. One studio employee went to the hospital after acid was thrown in his face. When the police tried to break up the melee, things got even worse. As actor Kirk Douglas remembered it, "Thousands of people fought in the middle of the street with knives, clubs, battery cables, brass knuckles, and chains."

Sorrell and his allies wanted to shut down the studios entirely, so anyone who crossed the picket line became a target of violence. Jack Warner insisted on keeping up production and the studio remained open. To avoid injury, workers, including stars who were shooting movies, were forced to sneak into the studio lot through a storm drain that led from the Los Angeles River.

Reagan, getting ready to start production on Night Unto Night, was furious about the violence. And unlike his approach to the little battle with the Communists in HICCASP, he was not in the mood to retreat.

Blaney Matthews, the giant-sized head of security at Warner Brothers, had seen this sort of violent strike before. He advised Reagan and other stars to use the storm drain to get onto the lot safely. Reagan flat out refused. If he was going to cross the picket line, he was going to cross the picket line, he told Matthews.

Matthews then arranged for buses to shuttle Reagan and a few others through the human gauntlet outside the studio gate. But he offered a bit of advice: Lie down on the floor, or you might get hit by a flying Coke bottle or rock. Again Reagan refused. Over the next several days, as he went to the studio lot to attend preproduction meetings, a bus would pass through the human throng of violent picketers, with a solitary figure seated upright inside.

Two Ways To Judge A President

From Thomas Sowell:

There are many ways to judge a President or anyone else. One old-fashioned way is by results. A more popular way in recent years has been by how well someone fits the preconceptions of the intelligentsia or the media.

By the first test, Ronald Reagan was the most successful President of the United States in the 20th century. By the second test, he was a complete failure.

Time and time again President Reagan went against what the smug smarties inside the beltway and on the TV tube said. And time and again he got results.

A Big Family . . .

From Brendan Miniter:

For Reagan this was much more than a contest of big ideas. It was always about real people struggling to be free. In 1982 Hu Na, a 19-year-old Chinese tennis player, decided to put that to the test and defected. She quickly found that the bureaucrats in the State Department were unsure about granting her asylum. In Peter Hannaford's book "Recollections of Reagan," David Laux, who was director of Asian affairs for the National Security Council at the time, recalled what happened next. "Some felt that, as a teenage athlete, she didn't have a political thought in her head and didn't, therefore, qualify for 'political asylum.' " But when Reagan found out about it, he ended the debate: "We're going to give her asylum if I have to adopt her and make her a part of my own family." The bureaucrats caved in, and she got asylum over Beijing's protests.

Clinton and Reagan

From Dick Morris:

One was obsessed with his public image and reveled in the company of stars and starlets, frequenting Hollywood at every opportunity; the other was self-contained, confident of what he stood for and needed no adoring mobs to satiate his ego or vindicate his sense of self-worth.

It's odd that the former is Bill Clinton and the latter Ronald Reagan.

Standing astride the two cultures of Hollywood and Washington, Reagan abjured the seductions of both — insisting, proudly and independently, on his own vision and persona. Every time he stepped onto a set, Ronald Reagan played someone else. That was his job. But in the Oval Office, he played only himself.

The Gipper and the Hedgehog

From Glenn Garvin's book review of Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism :

So how did Reagan do it? The answer, suggests Hoover Institution researcher and Cold War historian Peter Schweizer in his new book, Reagan’s War, can probably be found in Isaiah Berlin’s essay "The Fox and the Hedgehog." Berlin, musing on an obscure line penned by the Greek poet Archilochus, argued it was a modern typology. Archilochus wrote that the fox knows many things, while the hedgehog knows one big thing. Berlin characterized foxes as running hither and yon, taking actions that are unconnected by any guiding principle and that may even be at odds with one another. "Hedgehogs, on the other hand," writes Schweizer, "relate everything to a single central vision."

Schweizer is not so unkind as to say so, but when it came to foreign policy, Jimmy Carter was the archetypal fox. Pulling the rug out from under right-wing regimes in Nicaragua and Guatemala, then arming theocratic fascist guerrillas in Afghanistan, he could never translate his supposedly superior intellect into coherent policy.

Unlike Carter, Reagan was never invited to contribute to foreign policy journals. But he knew one big thing: that freedom is the defining value of mankind, and communism was its antithesis. It was that, and not the arcana of missile throw weights or U.N. treaties, that defined Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union. "Details that animate so many in the world of politics, academe, and journalism did not interest him so much as the ‘metaphysics’ of the Cold War," observes Schweizer. "He was, in short, a hedgehog living in a world populated with foxes."

Men Will Thank God On Their Knees A Hundred Years From Now

From Michael Beschloss:

How much credit does Reagan deserve? His first-term efforts to escalate the competition with the Soviet Union and his revival of American willpower may well have helped to usher in the reformist Gorbachev over a Romanov, who might have tried to tough out Soviet problems by revving up the police state. Reagan's defense buildup and SDI, so ridiculed at the time, pressed Gorbachev, while his economy was collapsing, to make arms deals and improve relations with the West, which contributed to the unraveling of his empire.

After FDR's death in 1945, The New York Times predicted that "men will thank God on their knees a hundred years from now" that FDR had been the president to fight Hitler and Tojo. It is not too much to suggest that, with Ronald Reagan's death, Americans might now give similar thanks that they twice elected a president who saw the chance to end the cold war in his own time.