Setting the record straight on Reagan

I've been catching up with recent studies of someone I regard as the greatest political figure--admittedly not a cosmic category--of my lifetime, Ronald Reagan. Everyone knows the old knock on President Reagan: religious zealot, McCarthyite, warmonger, reactionary, "Bedtime for Bonzo," "amiable dunce" in Clark Clifford's famous and arrogantly mistaken characterization. Yet as historians have patiently gone over the evidence, it adds up to a resounding refutation of all this.

The first crack in the image was the publication of letters and speeches, Reagan, in His Own Hand, that showed his thoughtfulness and decency in private. Then, two biographies by liberal historians Richard Reeves and John Patrick Diggins demolished the old stereotypes forever. A volume of President Reagan's diaries, edited by the distinguished historian Douglas Brinkley, has just appeared that confirms such judgments. Among these, Mr. Diggins argues that Reagan was one of the greatest American presidents, alongside Washington and Lincoln.

Despite my deep admiration for Ronald Reagan, I hadn't thought much about his place in the presidential pantheon. Mr. Diggins is wrong in several respects. He says President Reagan pursued liberal ends beneath the conservative surface and his optimism stemmed from a kind of Emersonian religion that rejected the idea of sin, downplayed the need for redemption through the cross, affirmed the desires of the self and identified the daily struggles of ordinary people with heroism and holiness.

This neglects other sides of President Reagan's personality that emerge in the documents, including gentle but firm advice to his children about resisting temptations and confidence in God. Mr. Diggins contrasts this sunny religiosity with traditional Christian views of the fallen world and, more specifically, with Jimmy Carter's Baptist pessimism and well-known lament about American decadence and malaise.

On the whole, I agree with the tradition that we are all profoundly fallen, whether we live under a communist regime or the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, the framers of the Constitution, like the writers of the Federalist Papers, thought a properly constituted government as a remedy for sin and folly. President Reagan did not think, as author Diggins claims, government per se was evil. But he did put a lot of emphasis on its vices and little on its virtues.

And yet in political terms, President Reagan was a profound success and President Carter an utter failure. In the confrontation with the Soviet Union, President Reagan once expressed his simple goal, as Richard Reeves reports: "We win, they lose." He hated nuclear weapons long before he was president and thought mutual assured destruction utter madness. At the same time, he knew he had to play a tougher game than President Carter had, until he developed confidence in Mr. Gorbachev. Recent studies show him wrestling deeply with the paradoxes of the nuclear standoff. Mr. Diggins compares his moral seriousness over this to Abraham Lincoln's over the need to fight a civil war to preserve the union.

Still, an important question remains: Why did the orthodox Christian fail and the Americanist believer succeed? There's no easy answer, but it seems clear that though President Carter believed in sin and evil, like many liberals he wanted to win it over with softness and goodness. Is that the real lesson of the tradition? Yes, in private we return good for evil and turn the other cheek. In public, Christians from Augustine to Winston Churchill thought a failure to confront public evils with the proper tools not a virtue but a self-indulgent vice. President Carter's subsequent career as humanitarian and--Lord have mercy--poet strengthens this suspicion.

President Reagan was intuitively more in line with the Christian tradition in his moral vision and effective tactics. "Trust but verify," is recognizably Augustinian. But what of his confidence on the domestic side that American prosperity and freedom were the expression of God's will, an apparent departure from the usual emphasis on poverty, obedience, humility? And his often-repeated line from Tom Paine: "We have the power to begin the world over again"? The latter always jarred me. Only God has such power and President Reagan knew as much, even if he wanted to open up our minds to the reality of human possibility at a time when the American people had grown cynical and felt powerless.

Ronald Reagan's emphasis on ordinary virtues and prosperity may not rise to the spiritual heights, but they express a tolerable public ethos in a democratic age. My main quarrel with the public preachers like Jimmy Carter has always been their misguided professions of guilt at home and abroad to figures who were not exactly in position to judge America.

Ronald Reagan governed the same nation in the 1980s that Jimmy Carter had in the 1970s. But 1980 was a pivot point between an America that was lost in the wilderness and a nation with a renewed confidence that it had been given great gifts by God and had a reasonable claim to defend them against bad alternatives. He stood up to some of the worst tyrannies known to history and overcame them without a major war. No occupant of the White House since has had his human decency and L clear-sightedness. No one likely to win in November 2008 can hold a candle to him--or his legacy.