Ronald Reagan
How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader
Dinesh D'Souza
Free Press, 292 pp., $ 25
RONALD REAGAN is today a president without honor in his own country, a Republican without imitators in his own party, and a conservative without followers in his own movement.
This is so despite some superficial appearances to the contrary, and it is odd. After all, Reagan was the most consequential president since Franklin Roosevelt, the most successful Republican leader since Theodore Roosevelt, and the first true conservative to reach the apex of American politics since Coolidge. Reagan won the Cold War almost without firing a shot; he laid the groundwork for the GOP to escape half a century of minority status; and he decisively vindicated the claims of conservatism. Feared by the Communists, patronized by the Democrats, loathed by the Left, Reagan vanquished them all. Yet who today is a Reaganite?
Dinesh D'Souza is, and his fine new study of Reagan provides a fresh opportunity to consider Reagan's achievements and our neglect of them. Those achievements teach important lessons, and so does our neglect. For it turns out to be easier to ignore Reagan than to appreciate him--if appreciating him means facing up to challenges that we would prefer to avoid.
Reagan accomplished two great deeds as president--restoring America's economic health and winning the Cold War. The second, of course, is by far the greater, and D'Souza's discussion of Reagan's indispensable role in concluding "the supreme political drama" of the latter half of the century is the part of the book. D'Souza reminds us of the magnitude of the event: " What will probably prove to be the most important historical event of our lifetimes has already occurred. We are unlikely to live through anything else of comparable significance." D'Souza convincingly shows that Reagan was "the prime mover" in his own foreign policy, "the architect of his own success." From the assault on detente to the Reagan Doctrine, from the deployment of the Pershing IIs to the Reykjavik summit, Reagan pursued policies that were anathematized by liberals and derided by the "wise men" of the day. He broke with conservative conventional wisdom as well when, in his second term, he brilliantly pivoted and helped Gorbachev along in the dismantling of Communist rule and the Soviet empire.
Reagan was, of course, a staunch anti-Communist. But his anti-communism followed from his patriotism. He was able to take the moral offensive against communism not only because he believed the Soviet Union evil, but because he believed America a force for good. The Reagan Doctrine--a determination to aid anti-Communist insurgents around the world was a hard-headed and shrewd means of weakening the Soviet empire. But, as D'Souza points out, "Reagan conceived of his doctrine primarily in moral terms." He always emphasized the universal right to freedom and self-government. Unlike the sophisticates of his time (and ours), Reagan "defined the conflict between the West and the Soviet Union as fundamentally a moral conflict." Indeed, "Reagan saw himself as doing nothing more than clarifying what America stood for and against."
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