Letters to a Young Conservative (7 page)

You might think that, after these revelations, Rigoberta Menchu and her book would have been cast into outer darkness. But such is the leftist mind that even facts cannot violate a morality tale! The
Chronicle of Higher Education
reported that many American professors who teach Rigoberta Menchu’s autobiography intend
to continue doing so, and they are angry with David Stoll for having humiliated an already-victimized woman of color. One of her American academic devotees said that even if Rigoberta did make stuff up, her memory must have been distorted by years of oppression! Personally I believe that
I, Rigoberta Menchu
has a place in the liberal arts curriculum. The book should be taught in courses that survey celebrated literary hoaxes.

Moreover, for her ingenuity in pulling off such an ingenious hoax, who can doubt that Rigoberta Menchu deserved a prize?

But enough about Rigoberta. Let us move from small things to large. Your letter makes a very interesting reference to Ronald Reagan. You remind me that you were much too young to remember Reagan as president. You grew up, poor fellow, in the Age of Clinton. Thus, instead of remembering Reagan’s Challenger speech, or the signing of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Mikhail Gorbachev, what you’ll probably remember is your mom’s turning off the television to shield your little brother from the sexually explicit parts of Clinton’s impeachment hearings. No wonder you are curious about what it must have been like to grow up with a real president. “What was Reagan really like?” you want to know. “What difference did he make? How will he be remembered?” Actually, the issues you raise are discussed in my book
Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader
. But I see that you are trying to save yourself $16. Very well, I will try to answer your questions.

Ronald Reagan seemed to be a very ordinary guy. He lacked all the basic credentials that our political science textbooks say are needed in a president. He was a C student at Eureka College. He spent most of his career as a movie actor. He was not a scholar or an intellectual. He had no foreign policy experience when he was first elected president. He put in a short day at the office, and allegedly took naps. He appeared to be an unserious, whimsical fellow who spent much of his time cracking jokes. To the liberal mind, and even to some conservatives, it seemed unlikely that he would prove an effective leader.

Yet even liberals know with hindsight that important things happened in the 1980s. The Soviet Union began to collapse, and socialism was discredited. Today, there are probably more Marxists on the faculty of our elite colleges than there are in all of Russia and Eastern Europe. The American economy, after being in the doldrums throughout the 1970s, went into high gear. The technological revolution really took off: Suddenly computers and cell phones were everywhere. A generation ago, John F. Kennedy told Americans who were young and idealistic to join the Peace Corps. Public service was seen as the embodiment of American idealism. But by the end of the 1980s, most young people would rather have started a new company than pick coffee in Nicaragua. The entrepreneur—not the bureaucrat—became the vehicle for youthful aspirations. This cultural shift had policy implications. The welfare state, which
had expanded since the 1930s, stopped growing. The era of Big Government that began with FDR in the 1930s seemed to have come to an end in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Was this not the “Reagan Revolution” that the old boy promised?

The liberals refused to believe it. Since Reagan was such a simple, dumb, sleepy, unqualified fellow, he could not possibly have directed the vast changes of the 1980s. This was the premise of Edmund Morris’s official biography of Reagan,
Dutch.
Morris was selected to write about Reagan because Reagan’s aides thought that a man who had written favorably about Teddy Roosevelt was bound to like Reagan. After all, TR was an outdoors guy and so was RR. What Reagan’s aides ignored was that Teddy Roosevelt was also an aristocrat from an old moneyed family. And he was an intellectual who invited historians and anthropologists to the White House for learned debates on the fine points of scholarship. These are the aspects of TR that impressed Morris.

But Reagan was not like that. On several occasions, Morris visited the Reagan ranch in Santa Barbara. He probably looked on Reagan’s bookshelves for the works of Thucydides and Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill. They were not to be found. Instead, Morris would have seen copies of
Reader’s Digest
and
Arizona Highways
and the novels of Louis L’Amour. Morris seems to have decided right then that Reagan was an unsophisticated boob. Throughout his biography, Morris beats himself over the head to figure out how such a
plebian could have achieved the great things that occurred during Reagan’s tenure. And ultimately Morris becomes so frustrated with solving this Reagan puzzle that he gives up, and instead of writing about Reagan he starts writing about himself. Never has a presidential biography failed so ignominiously to provide new insights into its subject. What a missed opportunity.

But let me tell you about my own experience with Reagan. I am part of a generation of young people who became interested in politics because of the Reagan Revolution. We saw Reagan as a cheerful, forward-looking guy. We loved his self-deprecating humor. Yet we also saw that, beneath that jocular exterior, Reagan was a determined man who was making some big and important claims. Indeed, he was taking on the big idea of the twentieth century, which is collectivism. Reagan wanted to halt the growth of the welfare state at home, and he wanted to dismantle the Soviet empire abroad. These were enormously ambitious goals. Many people, including most conservatives, considered Soviet Communism to be irreversible. So, too, Republicans such as Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford had made their peace with the welfare state. Reagan was the first person to say “Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.”

Many of us young conservatives—including a small battalion from the
Dartmouth Review
—came to D.C. excited by Reagan and eager to be part of his revolution. In short order, many of us found ourselves working for the
Reagan administration. There was even a Dartmouth Mafia in the White House. We were able to get these jobs because Reagan didn’t want to hire the old guys who had worked in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Reagan had run against Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976, and many of these guys had viciously attacked Reagan. “Who needs them?” Reagan figured. “Yes, they have experience, but it is experience in screwing up.” At the age of twenty-six, I was appointed senior domestic policy analyst in the White House.

This was exciting for many reasons—big salary, big office, car and driver, the chance to make an impact on policy—but an important consideration for me was that I would finally be able to convince my family that I was doing something important. My parents had expressed concern when I chose not to attend the Wharton Business School and instead came down to Washington, D.C., to be a writer. Not only were they worried that I would starve but they weren’t sure what it was that I actually did. My attempts to explain the mysterious contours of American politics were particularly ineffective. So finally I mailed my parents a photograph showing me side-by-side with Reagan. I figured that even if they still didn’t know precisely what I did, they would have to reckon that it was something significant. I found out later that just as my parents opened the package, my grandmother hobbled into the room, took one horrified glance at the photograph, and then exclaimed, “What is my grandson doing with that scoundrel Richard
Nixon?” Since this incident, I have given up trying to raise the political consciousness of the D’Souza family.

The Reagan White House was an endlessly fascinating place. Walk down one hall and you’d see the Sons of Italy. On another floor a representative of the administration would be meeting with a group of Catholic nuns. Soviet émigrés with long beards sometimes showed up for a meeting with the president. On occasion, I saw Afghan children whose limbs had been blown off by Soviet mines. Every administration, I suppose, develops its own character according to the types of people it attracts. In the Clinton administration, I suspect you would have seen an entirely different crowd: union bosses, witches, transvestites, and so on.

In America, Reagan is today bathed in a warm glow of affection. Conservatives revere him, and even liberals claim to have developed a kinder, gentler feeling for the guy. This is in stark contrast to the 1980s, when liberals treated Reagan with loathing and contempt. For instance, Eric Alterman of the
Nation
described Reagan as a “pathological liar” and an “unbelievable moron” with a “heart of darkness” that showed a “fondness for genocidal murders.” Normal people would be unsettled by such allegations. Think of Dan Quayle, who has labored for years to dispel the public’s suspicion that he is an idiot. Reagan, by contrast, never exerted himself to rebut his critics. He even agreed with them. Once, when asked about his light work schedule, Reagan quipped, “They tell me hard work never killed anyone, but why take the
chance?” During a speech at Eureka College in the mid-1980s, Reagan confronted the allegation that he had graduated from a third-rate school with a C average. Reagan mused, “Even now I wonder what I might have accomplished had I studied harder!”

Over the years, I have pondered the question of what made Reagan so successful. I have three answers. First, he had a Euclidean certainty about what he believed and where he wanted to take the country. Not only was he a man of conviction but he was a man whose convictions were not open to change. This is a key point, so let me elaborate a bit. When I was a student at Dartmouth, I was informed again and again that a liberally educated man has an open mind. Having an open mind means making only provisional judgments and always being open to new evidence that might change your mind. I realized, with some stupefaction, that Reagan did not share this view. He knew in advance what he wanted to do—say, lower taxes. If his aides informed him that the facts went in the other direction, Reagan’s basic attitude was, “Okay, get me new facts.”

In this, Reagan was right. In a certain sense, it is important for a president to be closed-minded. The reason is that when you are elected president and come to Washington with an agenda, you are immediately surrounded by highly competent and experienced people who tell you, “Sorry, Mr. President, but you simply cannot do that. The Congress will never go for it. There is opposition within your own party. The Supreme Court is sure to
strike it down. The General Accounting Office has serious reservations. What are we going to tell the American Association of Retired People?” And so on. The open-minded person is quickly drowned in a sea of facts. Only the man with a firm rudder, only the man who has already decided where he is going is confident enough to keep going when the political waters get rough.

Second, Reagan instinctively understood that the president, powerful as he is, cannot change the world in sixty-five ways. He can change the world in only two or three ways. And so Reagan set his priorities. He wanted to defeat inflation, revive the economy, arrest the advance of the Soviet empire—and that’s about it. The other stuff Reagan didn’t care about. In the White House we were sometimes frustrated when Reagan avoided issues such as affirmative action and conceded to the liberals on farm subsidies and such. But Reagan understood, better than we did, that a president has to choose his fights. Early in Reagan’s first term, he was criticized for failing to recognize one of his own cabinet secretaries. This was Sam Pierce, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Reagan saw the guy at a meeting of big-city mayors and greeted him by saying, “And how are things in your city, Mr. Mayor?” This was a bit of a gaffe, yet the reason for it was that Reagan didn’t really care about the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He saw it as a rat-hole of public policy. He knew that if he went in, he might never come out. And this was probably a correct perception.

Third, and perhaps most important, Reagan was successful because he didn’t care about what the elite culture said about him. Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp are similar to Reagan in some ways, but they differ from him in that they are both anxious to win the approval of elites. As Speaker of the House, Gingrich was always troubled when he was excoriated by Dan Rather on the CBS
Evening News.
Kemp yearned for the plaudits of the editors of
Time
and the
Washington Post.
But Reagan genuinely didn’t care. He had the same attitude when he was governor of California. During the late 1960s, Reagan was repeatedly attacked in the
San Francisco Chronicle
by the influential columnist Herb Caen. On one occasion, Reagan’s aide, Michael Deaver, said to him, “Governor, have you seen these vicious attacks by Herb Caen?” And Reagan’s response was, “Yeah. What’s eating that guy?” Reagan’s assumption was that something was obviously wrong with Herb Caen. He did not for an instant consider the possibility that Caen’s criticisms might have some merit. This liberation from the tyranny of elite opinion gave Reagan the freedom to operate outside the bounds of what is normally permissible.

None of this is to say that Reagan refused to acknowledge any moral or intellectual authority. But his authorities were drawn from, let us say, outside the bounds of the policymaking world. The economist Arthur Laffer recalls that shortly after the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983, he met Reagan at a conference. He
told Reagan that the newspapers had reported that the administration had gone back and forth on whether to go with the invasion. Laffer asked, “What made you finally decide to do it?” Reagan said, “Well, Art, finally I asked myself, what would John Wayne have done?” Somewhere deep down, Reagan knew that John Wayne was a better guide on this occasion than the collective wisdom of the Washington establishment.