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Kiron Skinner
Assistant Professor of History and Political Science, Carnegie Mellon University; Co-editor, Reagan: A Life in Letters
Centuries often don't end for people on their calendar day; they're marked often by events - September 11 was one. Ronald Reagan's death marks an end, for many Americans, of the 20th century, because he was so closely tied to that century. He doesn't just show up on the American scene in January 1981 when he becomes president.
Reagan often said, in public and in private, in letters and in speeches, that he felt that God had a plan or design for everyone's life. Many of his advisors felt he relied too much on his faith in God and that he should have been more activist in what he was doing, but he had a relaxed feeling that there was a plan. One could have a design, but there was another design that would often trump what an individual was trying to do with his life. Reagan's entry into politics reflects this relaxed attitude that he need not be as activist as one might have expected for someone who was going to enter national public life.
He didn't intend ever to run for governor. He gave a speech on October 27, 1964, a televised speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for the presidency. After that speech, Reagan's life was nothing like it had ever been before. He was immediately seen by many, especially those in California, as someone who could run for president one day and be successful. Many people who heard the speech said, Maybe we nominated the wrong man. That marked the beginning of Reagan's political career. For the next two years he was pushed forward by a group of mainly Southern Californians who said that he should run for governor as a stepping-stone to the presidency. He tested the waters. He gave a few speeches around the state, continued to feel pressure from them and then announced in early 1966 that he would run for office. He won by a million votes; many people thought there was no chance he could win. A 55-year-old actor - sound familiar? - who'd never held a national office, wasn't considered the greatest actor in the world - that might sound familiar as well - hadn't won an Academy Award; how could he win? Edmund Brown, the incumbent governor, was thought to believe that Reagan would be an easy candidate to defeat, but that didn't happen.
And so Reagan's entry into national politics in California - governor of California; it's truly a national office: the most populous state even when Reagan won in 1966, the most diverse on so many indicators. In 1968, two years into his governorship, he became the "favorite son" candidate from California for the Republican nomination for the presidency - again something he didn't seek, it just kind of happened. His first presidential primary he lost in May of 1968 in Oregon - he didn't want his name on the ballot, but he couldn't have it removed - to Nixon.
In 1970, he was re-elected by a half-million votes. He steps down in January 1975, after two terms as governor of California. For the next five years he - and this is where I think Reagan takes the reins of his own political career extremely seriously, becomes much more deliberate - runs a stealth campaign. It's a period when we didn't have shows like "Oprah," there weren't the big talk shows where you could speak to millions of people a day. Reagan was speaking to between 20 and 30 million Americans, five days a week, for most of that time, through his nationally syndicated radio program. Mrs. Reagan gave me access to President Reagan's private papers in 1996, to work on the end of the Cold War, and the first thing I found was a set of Reagan's written drafts of those radio essays. They were about every major policy issue, domestic and foreign, facing the United States at the time, and Reagan was writing them primarily himself. He also had a nationally syndicated newspaper column. His radio broadcast went to probably 300 radio stations, his newspaper column to at least 200 newspapers.
By 1980, when he decides to run for the second time - he challenged Ford in '76 and came close - Reagan had been speaking to more Americans, as a non-elected official, than any elected official in the country. When you read the 1980 Republican platform, it is as if Ronald Reagan wrote it himself. So he'd been really working. He had this earlier period where he kind of relaxed and let others push him into politics and this five-year period, in his mid-60s, where he worked virtually around the clock. Many of his Republican challengers in the primary season, when they would travel around, said, Everywhere we go everyone seems to know Ronald Reagan and what he believes.
What was he saying during those years? He worked hard to get his message across. He took four trips abroad between 1975 and 1980 - two to Europe; he met Margaret Thatcher for the first time. He went to Iran, met with the Shah. There is a lot behind the Reagan story that situates him more, in his own presidency, as the causal actor to much of what happened in the 1980s.
What was Reagan mapping out? He had four basic hypotheses that were heresy at the time. They went against the conventional wisdom, both scholarly and popular, in the late 1970s, and they're all mapped out in his writings, radio essays, his letters, as well as some of his speeches.
One, he argued that the Soviet economy was so weak that it could not sustain a technology race with the United States. Many argued against this, including CIA estimates. Most Soviet specialists said, No, the Soviet economy is strong enough to go on for many, many decades to come. Reagan argued in the 1970s that it couldn't, and also the incentive structure was so poor that technological innovation could not match what would happen in the United States.
Second, he argued - and this was probably more heretical than the first hypothesis - that the sole source of legitimacy of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe was the Red Army of occupation: Pull the Red Army out, the countries will go their own way. Most didn't believe that; many Soviet specialists didn't even believe it in December 1988 at the UN, when Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet general secretary, said, I'm pulling 500 Red Army troops out of Eastern Europe. Many didn't believe that those countries would indeed go their own way, as they did almost immediately.
Third, Reagan argued that the American economy was so strong that it could recover from deficit spending; in a technology race with the Soviet Union, it could absolutely recover in a way that the Soviet economy could not. Finally, he argued that the American public - and he was saying this in 1975, as Saigon was falling and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam was unmistakable - would support peacetime rearmament if leaders would make it very clear that rearmament and a military buildup were part of a strategy for a very different goal: to get to mutual cooperation with the Soviet Union. No candidate at the time, Republican or Democrat, was putting the pieces together the way that Reagan was. It wasn't that he was the onlyone that had an alternative vision of the Cold War, it's that he put the pieces together in a way to suggest that we could, in fact, win the Cold War.
In 1980, that's what he campaigned on, on the foreign policy side and it rang true with a lot of Americans. He also argued that mutual cooperation meant the Soviet Union joining the community of free states - that seemed heretical. He began writing about that in the 1960s; some of that writing is in the first book I co-edited, Reagan In His Own Hand. These were Reagan's ideas about the Cold War. They don't seem that unconventional now, but they really were 20 and 30 years ago. I think he was just different from most, even conservative, analysts at the time. He really believed in this idea of mutual cooperation, and he believed to achieve mutual cooperation you had to be always engaged in negotiations with your adversary.
Many of his conservative supporters felt there should be no negotiations, but Reagan had four summits - more summits than any Cold War president - with his Soviet counterparts. He believed that the adversary was not the enemy, and that no one was an enemy. He believed that people were different from government and that the real evil was the Soviet government, not the people. He believed that it was important to show resolve when dealing with the adversary; that's what made Reagan seem like such a hardliner. He felt that being tough was crucial to getting cooperation, that you just had to stand firm and you couldn't back down. That's why he called the Soviet Union an "evil empire."
He also, throughout his career, was very much willing to take unpopular stands. He believed that if a principle was involved that principle should always trump political expediency. He may have backed down on that in some instances, but there are notable examples where he stood on the side of principle even though there was something to lose on the side of politics.
In the fall of 1965, when he was pondering, but had not announced, that he would run for governor of California, newspapers in Los Angeles began to report that the John Birch Society was endorsing Reagan and that Reagan was accepting their support. They wanted Reagan to denounce the John Birch Society if he was going to run, and he said, I will not. I've found letters, with my co-authors, during his governorship where he writes to some of his detractors, "I will not denounce the John Birch Society for political reasons because I believe that every organization and individual has the right to be wrong as long as it does not infringe on the constitutional rights of others; once that happens it's a different matter, but until such time, I believe in free speech."
Similarly, he made a decision in the middle of his presidency, in '85, to visit the German Nazi cemetery at Bitburg, a military cemetery where SS Storm Troopers were buried. Many Americans and Europeans said that he should not go there. He was also planning to go to a concentration camp site, Bergen-Belsen. He went to both, but he kept Bitburg on his itinerary because he said he wanted to go there and state that Nazism was an evil, but it was also an evil that affected the soldiers themselves; that those who participated in the Nazi regime were as much victims as the rest of the world. He came out of the Bitburg controversy, despite the fact that he was being told by many close advisors not to go there; that he would be seen as anti-Semitic. Reagan's style was quite different than most politicians today. He really did not go by polls or read the tea leaves. He went with what he believed was right, even if there was some short-term political fallout that might look like it would hurt him.
Mrs. Reagan gave me access to the president's private papers for my work on the end of the Cold War. I had done research for George Shultz on his memoir and got interested in the American side of the story because I felt that scholars were looking more at the Soviet and Eastern European side in the '90s, which was understandable; it was the first time that those archives were open, and people rushed in. I felt that there was more on the American side than just reacting to Soviet overtures. Sure, all the revolutions happened in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but there was a grand strategy that was important on the American side that helped make that possible. I wanted to investigate that, and along the way I found Reagan's radio essays, letters, speeches and thousands of pages of his writings.
I joined forces with the Andersons at Hoover, who'd worked for Reagan. We had very different perspectives, because I don't know him. I met him only once in April of '96, when he had Alzheimer's, in his office in Los Angeles. I never met him during his functioning life. All of these books are really written by Reagan, and they are, in some ways, Reagan's last words, especially Reagan: A Life In Letters. It covers more than 70 years of his letters, letters from all over the country, literally all over the world - Margaret Thatcher opened up some of her archives for us - and not just from Reagan's library but from private collections: people from his hometown in Dixon, Illinois, letters that he wrote to President Nixon. I found in the Nixon archives that Reagan and Nixon had been corresponding for decades. The handwritten drafts started in 1959, but I think they were corresponding well before then.
Reagan communicated probably best through letters and writings. He's known as a great communicator for his speeches, but he reveals himself in letters. He talks about home and family, sex and religion and race - things that we don't expect Reagan to talk about or positions we don't expect him to take. What's surprising is that during his presidency he wrote literally thousands of letters and no one seemed to ever go to the tabloids or to sell them for gain. He just had faith that people he did not know would hold the letters in confidence. We were able to use what we found in the archives, but there are many more. He probably wrote upwards of 10,000 letters, putting him in a league with Lincoln, with Adams, with Jefferson - something we never expected.
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