THE NEW YORK TIMES
June 7, 2004
RONALD REAGAN'S IMPACT SEEN, FELT, EVERYWHERE
By TODD S. PURDUM
WASHINGTON, June 6 - His name adorns National Airport, a California freeway, a stamp in Grenada, a ballistic missile test site in the Marshall Islands, a suite at the St. Regis Hotel in Los Angeles and a massive office building here dedicated to international trade. But if you seek Ronald Reagan's real monument, just look around.
Mr. Reagan's legacy lives in the career of another underrated actor turned governor of California, one born in Middle Europe and not the Middle West, who is now ruling Sacramento with a blend of charm and flint. It endures in a Supreme Court and federal judiciary still led by Mr. Reagan's conservative appointees.
It flourishes in a federal government that never got as small as Mr. Reagan might have wished, but in which the prevailing economic debate is now almost always over how much to cut taxes, not whether. It pulses in a transformed political landscape: in an energized, grass-roots Republican Party; in the first Republican Congress in a half-century; and in a Democratic Party still at pains to deflect and defuse Republican dominance.
Perhaps most of all, Mr. Reagan's legacy prevails in the muscular foreign policy of the current occupant of the White House, who seems far more the spiritual heir to the Reagan revolution than to his own father's presidential policies, and who reacted on Sunday to a question about virulent anti-Americanism in Europe by invoking the man a French headline once dismissed as a "cowboy justicier."
"I believe in a future that is peaceful, based upon liberty," Mr. Bush told the NBC anchor Tom Brokaw in an interview broadcast from France, where he was marking the 60th anniversary of D-Day near the site of one of Mr. Reagan's most famous speeches. "And I remember my predecessor, whose life we mourn,
Ronald Reagan: they felt the same way about him. Tom, that doesn't mean a fellow like me should change my beliefs. I'm not going to. I'm not trying to be popular. What I'm trying to do is what I think is right."
It was Mr. Reagan's great fortune for most of his life and presidency to be popular, and the outpouring of tributes in the 10 years since Alzheimer's disease left him adrift in a world of his own suggested that his popularity only grew with time. But Mr. Reagan lived long enough to enable many of his old lieutenants, and some more dispassionate chroniclers as well, to argue that he had also been right on some of the bigger questions of his time.
"Ronald Reagan had a higher claim than any other leader to have won the cold war for liberty," said his old comrade Lady Thatcher, the former British prime minister. "And he did it without a shot being fired."
Mr. Reagan's command of details was far from complete. He once set aside briefing books on the eve of an economic summit meeting to watch "The Sound of Music" on television. Mario M. Cuomo, then governor of New York, loved to recount how Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to present him to Mr. Reagan, who interrupted, "You don't have to introduce me to Lee Iacocca!"
After it was revealed that officials in his administration had sold arms to Iran as a ransom for American hostages, then used the proceeds to help the Nicaraguan contras, Mr. Reagan only reluctantly acknowledged that it had happened, and a commission he had appointed himself concluded that his detached management style had failed him.
But most of the time, his command of direction was crystal clear.
Stuart Spencer, a political consultant who was with Mr. Reagan from the very beginning of his campaign for governor of California in 1965, recalled in a telephone interview how decisive his old boss could be.
"It was a pretty bold act to fire 11,000 air controllers," Mr. Spencer said. "At the time he said Russia was an evil empire, I know a lot of us were really nervous about it. He cut income taxes across the board 25 percent, named a woman to the Supreme Court. Those were all pretty bold decisions. Not today, maybe, but then. And he made them."
Cass R. Sunstein, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, said Mr. Reagan's was "the most important presidency of the 20th century, with one obvious exception": Franklin D. Roosevelt. Last year, Professor Sunstein wrote in The American Prospect that Mr. Reagan's appointments had left the federal
courts fundamentally different from their predecessors just two decades ago.
"What was then in the center is now on the left; what was then in the far right is now in the center; what was then on the left no longer exists," he wrote. And in a telephone interview on Sunday, he added that Mr. Reagan's influence on federal regulation was just as pervasive, because of an executive order that required all federal agencies to do a cost-benefit analysis of major proposed rules, and to make that the basis of the rule-making, to the extent allowed by law.
"That has redefined the practices of the executive branch," Professor Sunstein said. "Clinton didn't fundamentally change it."
Indeed, Bill Clinton, a founder of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council - created to reign in his party's most liberal instincts - was among the first to recognize Mr. Reagan's sweeping political legacy. Later, as president, Mr. Clinton successfully pressed for an overhaul of the federal welfare system and famously, if prematurely, declared, "The era of big government is over."
"Ever since Ronald Reagan, Washington has been playing on his side of the field," said Kenneth Duberstein, Mr. Reagan's last White House chief of staff."Everything that has taken place since the 80's virtually has been on Ronald Reagan's territory."
It was Mr. Reagan, a New Deal Democrat turned Goldwater conservative, who lured disaffected blue-collar Democrats to vote Republican in the first place, and his upbeat personality was a crucial factor. He once cut off debate among his advisers over how much credit to give the Rev. Jesse Jackson for negotiating
Syria's release of a downed American Air Force pilot by saying, "The only way we can lose is if we're not gracious."
Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, recalled how Mr. Reagan had introduced him at a rally in his long-shot campaign for the Senate 20 years ago as "my good friend Mitch O'Donnell," then continued unfazed when he realized the error, showing "how completely Teflon he was."
Mr. McConnell, now the Senate's No. 2 Republican, added: "He had an enormous impact on a lot of us, and our developing philosophies. I became a more solid conservative, and a more conviction-oriented politician, as the result of his example. He demonstrated that you don't have to flip-flop back and forth, and that you can take an unpopular position."
Newt Gingrich, whose Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994 was made possible by Mr. Reagan's years of toil, told Fox News that Mr. Reagan had taught him "cheerful persistence." Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who served Mr. Reagan as national security adviser, told CBS News that Mr. Reagan had taught him "how to be calm in the middle of a crisis; how to set a clear vision; how to use the skills you have as a communicator to push that vision forward."
If Richard M. Nixon's demons reflected a darker side of late-20th-century American conservatism, Mr. Reagan's relentless optimism projected the sun. Some of the words he used to inspire the nation and the world were the work of his speechwriters, but he shaped them meticulously, and he saw with a poet's eye.
On his 11th wedding anniversary, in 1963, he wrote his wife, Nancy: "This is really just an 'in between' day. It is a day on which I love you three hundred and sixty-five days more than I did a year ago and three hundred and sixty-five less than I will a year from now. But I wonder how I lived at all for all the three hundred and sixty-fives before I met you."
Mr. Reagan was the first president to have been divorced, and ease with his own children from two marriages often eluded him. But as the national paterfamilias, he transformed his gifts of intimate expression for use on the world's biggest stage.
"People connected to him," Mr. Spencer, the political consultant, said. "Because of his idealism, his vision. He wasn't a shouter. When he went on television, he came into your living room like a neighbor sitting on the couch. He wasn't harassing and haranguing you."
If Mr. Reagan was guided by fixed principles, he was far from inflexible. He adapted his policies to political realities, pressing for arms reductions with the Soviet Union after years of military buildup. He told his former chief of staff and Treasury secretary, James A. Baker, that he "would much rather get 80 percent of what I want than to go over the cliff with my flag flying," as Mr. Baker put it on CNN on Sunday.
Historians will long debate the impact of the huge federal budget deficits run up under Mr. Reagan's leadership, the efficacy of his tax cuts, the effects of his administration's involvements in Central America, his seeming indifference to civil rights, the environment and the plight of the poor. But few now seem likely to quarrel with his own assessment, given in his farewell address from the Oval Office on Jan. 11, 1989.
"My friends, we did it," he said then. "We weren't just marking time. We made a difference."
