Great Men, Part III: President Ronald Reagan 


"Government is the people's business and every man, woman a becomes a shareholder with the first penny of tax paid." 



Perhaps the most well-known person to be featured in my Great Men series, President Ronald Reagan guided our country through the anything-but-tepid waters of the 1980s with sense, wisdom, plainspokenness and grace. He is my favorite president for a plethora of reasons, not least of which include his tendency to tell things as they are and not to sugarcoat things of importance, the Cold War with the Soviet Union being the most important during his tenure as president.

"It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history...[It is] the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people."

Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in Tampico, IL on February 6, 1911. He began his working career as a lifeguard in Dixon, IL, saving 77 lives over the seven summers that he worked there. After majoring in economics and sociology at Eureka College, Reagan began his career in radio broadcasting, working in the sports department.

Five years later, in 1937, Reagan enlisted in the Army Reserve as a Private but was soon promoted to a 2nd Lieutenant. It was during this year that an agent for Warner Brothers discovered Reagan and he soon signed a 7-year contract to make movies with the studio.

In the 40s Reagan married Jane Wyman and had his first child, Maureen. In 1942 he was called to active duty in the Army Reserves and was assigned to make training films for the military in the 1st Motion Picture Unit in Culver City, California. The following year Reagan was promoted to Captain and he was discharged from its service in late 1945.

It is interesting to note Reagan's politics, above all else, during this early stage of his life. Reagan was a supporter of President Harry Truman (hey, why not, he was a good guy!) and Helen Gahagan Douglas (a New Deal Democrat from LA). Ronald Reagan, the father of the modern Republican party, was a Democrat at this point, but was an open-minded one nonetheless. In 1952 he campaigned, as a Democrat, for President Eisenhower. The insight provided by Reagan's actions before he married Nancy serve to portray Reagan as an intellectually honest man who was politically active and strongly opinionated from the beginning.

It wasn't until 1962 when Reagan officially changed his party registration to that of the Republican party. His acting background thrust him into the role of making a television address for Goldwater in 1964, an event that also began his political career and garnered the attention of several California businessmen who became proponents for his candidacy for Governor of the state.

In 1966 the already-55-year-old Reagan defeated the incumbent Democratic governor of California in a landslide. This got him national attention and his name was volleyed around as a leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 1968. He tested the waters a bit at this point but later threw all of his support behind Richard Nixon. Reagan was reelected Governor two years later.

Reagan returned to broadcasting after his tenure as two-term governor expired, and provided his views on everything from taxes to international politics in both radio commentaries and written columns. On November 20, 1975 (exactly 8 years before I was to be born) Reagan announced his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination yet again, but he lost it to President Ford. His presence in the field in '75, some say, laid the groundwork for the next campaign that he was to finally be nominated in and win: the 1979 Presidential Race.

On November 4, 1980 Reagan was elected as the 40th President of the United States in a landslide victory against my state's native son (and constant Emory haunt), President Jimmy Carter. And so began the "Reagan Years", not only in this country but in the world as a whole, because, you see, Reagan's politics and and strong and powerful views not only changed the US for the better but also affected the dynamics and the balance of power in the world.



Above: the landslide victory of President Reagan over Democrat Walter Mondale in the 1984 race. States that Reagan won are colored in blue, while Mondale only won his home state.

"The years ahead will be great ones for our country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization. The West will not contain Communism, it will transcend Communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we'll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."

I found the quote above on a PBS site on President Reagan and I found a couple of the questions that it posed under the quote (and the others on that page, for that matter) quite interesting. In the "Questions to Consider" portion the site asks the following questions:

• How accurate was Reagan in his prediction?
• Did Reagan's administration contribute to making this prediction come true? Why or why not?

I choose to answer those two questions right here, right now. To begin with, President Reagan made those comments in May of 1981, merely a year and a half since taking office and at a time when the mistakes of détente were still apparent. No one could ever predict that the empire that Stalin had so successfully pushed into the heart of Europe after the second war would be dead in less than decade after the above statements were pronounced. I would contend that not even Reagan knew the true prophetic nature of his own words when he spoke them, although he was privy to much more information about the situation over there in the "Evil Empire", as he put it so bluntly, than was the common person.

Now, focusing on the second question, whether Reagan's administration contributed to the downfall of the USSR, the answer is, again, a resounding 'yes.' While the technological superiority and economic resources that the US had were extremely overwhelming to what the USSR had at its disposal, perhaps the most important and powerful thing that Reagan and his advisors knew how to wield was the power of psychology. The "Star Wars" program (the missile defense system that was devised under Reagan and which is only now truly being implemented) served not only as fodder for the folks in this country who thought that it was going to destroy the Earth by bringing nuclear destruction into outer space (I remember the anti-Reagan ad in 1984 with the girl looking out of her window to a light in the night sky that suddenly has the appearance of having exploded; Reagan destroyed the world), but also served as an important tool to dissuade and discourage the Soviets from continuing to believe that they would somehow, some way catch up and surpass the US in some aspect. In reality, "Star Wars" scared the shit out of the Reds and put something new on the bargaining table to give America the upper-hand. This, in combination with many other initiatives accomplished by the Reagan administration (and with another one of my favorites: The Right Honourable Margaret Thatcher of the UK) created the majority of the external pressure that contributed to the iron curtain being lifted from the continent that it divided for almost half a century.

“No arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women."

President Reagan's ideas on smaller government, personal responsibility, moral clarity and political will characterized his presidency as one of the most successful in the history of this country and certainly in the 20th century. There is so much more that I could say about this now-93-year-old great man who at this time, sadly, does not even know who he is or what he has accomplished in his illustrious life. Although he does not remember, the world does, and I do, and I hope that his ideas for this country continue to flourish and take it to the peak of its potential.

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Next week, the last part of my "Great Men" series: my father, Jan Lorenc, my greatest man.

Before reading this upcoming piece, think about the song by the group "The Foo Fighters" entitled 'My Hero': "There goes my hero, watch him as he goes."

(But my dad is anything but "ordinary"...) 

Posted: Sat - May 1, 2004 at 11:34 PM          

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