It's My Party (3 page)

In Venice the day before the speech was to be given, the deputy chief of staff, Ken Duberstein, decided that the objections
from State and the NSC had become so strident that he had to present them to the president himself. When he finished briefing
the president, Duberstein tells me, an exchange along the following lines took place.

As
Air Force One
left Venice for Berlin the next morning, the fax machines on board began to whir. Making a final effort to squelch the speech,
State and NSC were submitting yet another alternate draft. Tom Griscom never even took the fax to the forward cabin.

The reasons I gave my heart to Ronald Reagan are all right there. The boldness. The clarity of vision. No one else would have
given that speech—certainly not George Bush. I liked Bush, as I have said, but I had worked with him long enough to know that
his first reaction on seeing my draft would have been to ask, “What’s State say about this?” Reagan didn’t care what State
said. He cared about tearing down the wall.

There is a school of thought that Ronald Reagan managed to look good only because he had clever writers putting words in his
mouth. But Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Bob Dole, and Bill Clinton all had clever writers. Why was there only one Great Communicator?
Because Ronald Reagan’s writers were never attempting to fabricate an image, just to produce work that measured up to the
standard Reagan himself had already established. His policies were plain. He had been articulating them for decades—until
he became president he wrote most of his material himself. When I heard Frau Elz say that Gorbachev should get rid of the
wall, I knew instantly that the president would have responded to her remark. And when the State Department and National Security
Council tried to block my draft by submitting alternate drafts, they weakened their own case. Their drafts were drab. They
were bureaucratic. They lacked conviction. They had not stolen, as I had, from Frau Elz—and from Ronald Reagan.

In my judgment, Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the last five decades and one of the half dozen greatest in our
history. When he gave the Soviet Union a few good kicks, causing it to fall in on itself, he drew the Cold War to a peaceful
end. When he enacted his economic program, he set in place the conditions that have led to eighteen years of almost uninterrupted
economic growth. When he spoke of his beliefs—in God, in the goodness of the nation, in the wisdom of the people—he changed
the very spirit and temper of the country, replacing the bitterness of Vietnam and Watergate with a buoyant, self-confident
patriotism.

The worst that can be said against Reagan is that he allowed federal deficits to pile up. Although often repeated, the allegation
is silly. Democrats controlled the House of Representatives during all eight years of the Reagan administration, making it
impossible for Reagan to cut domestic spending as much as he wanted. Yet while Reagan’s economic program added $1.4 trillion
to the federal debt, it added $17 trillion to American asset values—the market value of land, stocks, houses, patents, and
all other assets in the United States rose from $16 trillion in 1981 to $33 trillion in 1989—providing a return of twelve
to one.

Today the federal budget is no longer in deficit but in surplus. Why? For two reasons. The economy continues to boom—thanks
to Ronald Reagan. And we have been able to scale back our military, saving tens of billions each year, because the Cold War
is over—thanks to Ronald Reagan. President Clinton may take all the bows he wishes, but his principal contribution to the
surplus was to stay out of the way as the budgetary implications of Reagan’s policies worked themselves out.

Reagan accomplished all that he did without ever losing his sense of proportion about life itself. He remained sane. I witnessed
a particularly telling instance of Reagan’s normalcy just a few months after he left office.

In Los Angeles for a couple of days in the spring of 1989, I stopped by the suite of offices that had been set up for former
President Reagan and his staff. As he stood to greet me, Reagan had the same twinkle and shine in his eyes and the same knowing
nod that he had possessed during eight years in the White House. “Just doing a little writing,” he said, gesturing to a pad
of paper on his desk. “Now that I’m out of office, I have time to get back to writing my speeches myself.”

After a moment of small talk, the former president frowned and asked if I had seen the morning newspaper. I had, noticing
over breakfast that the
Los Angeles Times
referred to Reagan in two front-page stories. “Saw Risk of Reagan Impeachment, Meese Says,” one headline read, while the
other stated, “ ‘Star Wars’ Was Oversold, Cheney Says.”

“I just don’t understand it,” Reagan said.

“Neither do I, Mr. President.”

“How can a
judge
decide the outcome of a sporting event?”

It took me a moment to realize Reagan was not talking about his administration. He was commenting on the America’s Cup. A
judge in New York had just awarded the cup to the boat from New Zealand, even though the American boat had put in a faster
time. “San Diego Loses America’s Cup,” the headline stated. “Conner’s Use of Catamaran Ruled to be Violation of Governing
Deed.”

“Well,” the former president said, the twinkle returning to his eye, “at least it wasn’t a judge
I
appointed.”

When I left, I was disappointed at first that the former president hadn’t even mentioned world events, let alone imparted
any secrets or insights of historical moment. I had had my moment with the man who won the Cold War, and all I had managed
to come away with was some talk about a boat race. How could Reagan have done that to me?

But by the time I was back in traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway, I recognized that the former president had given me a very
good example of the wisdom and simplicity of spirit that I had always cherished in him. For eight years he had been the most
powerful man in the world. Then he set it all down and went back to being as ordinary an American as a former president can
be. When Reagan looked at the newspaper, he read about sports.

* * *

Pity John Moschos. After his monastery, the world seemed so confusing. Pity me. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War, turned the
economy around, and set an example of sanity that makes Republicans today seem ridden with angst. As I set out to learn what
the Republican Party now stands for, I scarcely knew where to turn.

I
began my journey by turning to the past. Perhaps, I reasoned, I could find the meaning of the present-day Republican Party
by reaching back across the decades, beyond Ronald Reagan, to the very founding of the GOP. Disappearing into the library
for a couple of weeks—as my journal records, I realized at once that I had some remedial work to do—I discovered bad news.
To understand the history of the GOP you have to learn a little bit about the Whigs—yes, the Whigs—and to learn about the
Whigs you have to acquaint yourself with the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. Even in an account as brief as this
one, there is no way to go about it but to begin at the beginning.

How did we end up with a two-party system in the first place?

When they drafted the Constitution, the founding fathers left out political parties, making no provision for them whatsoever.
The oversight was intentional. The founders detested parties. James Madison devoted an entire tract,
Federalist Number Ten
, to denouncing parties, or, to use the eighteenth-century term, “factions.” “The violence of faction,” Madison wrote, leads
to “instability, injustice, and confusion.” Yet before the nation was a decade old, nearly all the founding fathers, including
Madison himself, had gone right ahead and formed themselves into two political parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans.
Why? They had left themselves no choice.

Drafting the Constitution, the founders had been intent on preventing the formation of a powerful central government in the
United States like the one that ruled Britain. So they had fragmented power, dividing the government of the new republic into
three branches, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial, and encumbering each branch with onerous checks and balances.
Then, after the Constitution was ratified and the members of the new government assembled in New York City, the nation’s first
capital, the founders discovered a problem. It proved difficult to get anything done. To enact a program, the president had
to win support for his measures in Congress. To pass a law, Congress had to persuade the president to sign it. To stay on
the good side of the Supreme Court, the president and Congress had to coordinate their activities, avoiding measures the Supreme
Court might deem unconstitutional.

Imagine for example that you’re Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, President Washington’s secretary of the treasury, was determined
to build a strong, activist federal government—not as powerful as the government in Britain, but powerful enough to dominate
the state governments while directing the national economy. As Hamilton, you suppose yourself to be sitting pretty. This is
understandable. You, more than anyone, have the ear of President Washington, and President Washington, more than anyone, holds
power. Then you make an ugly finding. Hobbled by the checks and balances the Constitution has placed on his office, even President
Washington can accomplish almost nothing on his own. You realize that you need allies—not just a collection of cronies but
a formal organization of like-minded men, capable of raising money, recruiting candidates for office, and swaying public opinion.
So you get together with Vice President John Adams, and a couple of dozen members of the House and Senate, to form a party,
the Federalist Party. Then you obtain backing from your rich friends, bankers in New York and merchants in Boston, and go
national, setting up party organizations in all thirteen states. Now you’ve got something. Now you stand a chance of getting
at least some of your program enacted.

Next imagine that you’re Alexander Hamilton’s foe, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, President Washington’s secretary of the treasury,
wanted to bolster the power of the state governments, not the federal government, and he championed small landholders, distrusting
bankers and merchants. When you see the Federalists start to organize, you realize that you have no choice but to organize
a party of your own. So you get together with James Madison, a leading figure in the House of Representatives, to found the
Democratic-Republican Party. Then you get backing from your own friends, southern planters, and set up your own party organizations
in all thirteen states.

Thus the provenance of American political parties. The founders invented them to get out of a jam.

Which brings us to the next question. What’s so special about the number two? If Hamilton and Jefferson gave us two parties,
why didn’t Monroe give us a third? And Madison a fourth? For that matter, why didn’t each of the founders establish a party
of his own, giving us a couple of dozen? We return, once again, to our fundamental institutions of government. A couple of
institutions in particular endow the number two with special properties. The first is plurality elections.

In discussing electoral systems, there is always a danger of getting lost in the jargon of political science—when I was reading
about the subject I got lost in the jargon myself. But the point to grasp about plurality elections is simple. Probably the
easiest way to see it is to compare plurality elections with majority elections. In majority elections, the winning candidates
must capture more than 50 percent—that is, a majority—of the vote. If, in any given contest, many candidates compete, splitting
the vote so many ways that none receives a majority, runoff elections are held, pitting fewer and fewer candidates against
each other until one finally succeeds. In plurality elections, all that the winning candidates have to do is capture more
votes than any of their opponents—that is, a plurality. Runoff elections never occur. Now here is the point. Under a majority
system, the candidates who are defeated in each round can throw their support to other candidates in successive rounds, helping
the candidates whose views are closest to their own. But under a plurality system, all that minor or doubtful candidates can
do is hurt their own causes, drawing votes away from other candidates. Consider, for example, a race in which several liberal
candidates compete against just a single conservative. While the conservative keeps the conservative vote to himself, the
liberals will split the liberal vote, handing the conservative an easy victory. (As long as I was presenting a hypothetical
example, I thought I might as well make it to my liking.) The liberals would do a lot better to get together beforehand, uniting
behind a single liberal candidate. Thus in a plurality system it makes sense to have only two candidates in each race. And
since it makes sense to have only two candidates in each race, it makes sense to have only two parties.