Pull Quote: Regarding history, I wish right here, in this space, to formally begin petitioning the Hungarian state to change the name of Roosevelt t???? ©r to Reagan t???? ©r. After all, isn’t it better to thank one man for making this wonderful country free, as opposed to harking back to a time the Soviets honored America for giving them Hungary?
In 1996, I was invited to a breakfast with Marian Krzaklewski, Walesa’s successor as head of Solidarity, and Caspar Weinberger, former U.S. defense secretary and chairman of Forbes Magazine.
We were on the top floor of the 40-story Warsaw Marriott, which provided a sweeping vista of the rebuilt Polish capital. The Solidarity leader, whose face was already a bit flush, sat down and immediately said to Weinberger, with a tear in his eye: “You and Mr. Reagan saved my country. Without Reagan, we would have been finished!” With much humility, Weinberger responded: “I was just doing my job – the job the President asked me to do.”
For me, it was a seminal moment. For much of my adult life, I had been cynically taught, even by my Philadelphia Democrat parents, that Reagan and his team were no good men. Reagan represented, to many in America and to most in Europe, a leadership bent on warmongering and wealth appropriation for a cowboy, capitalist elite. Sadly, the demagoguery directed at Reagan by the threatened power base of the left was unending for young college students studying history such as myself, and – as I only later learned – it always beat out the facts.
But here sitting next to me, in Warsaw, Weinberger was graceful, almost grandfatherly, responding to the Solidarity man half his age with kindness and humor. I was considerably affected. That day I finally gave way to the practical and real experiences my brain had been processing since arriving in Eastern Europe to try my hand at entrepreneurism.
After Reagan left office and disappeared back into America, most of academia, the media and the political left were still giving most of the credit for the ending of the Cold War to that unrepentant communist, Mikhail Gorbachev. Even I, back in 1993, met the man in Frankfurt Airport (ironically, in the duty-free shop, buying perfume for Raisa). I fawned over him and thanked him “for positively affecting my life.” Only much later did I realize I had metaphorically thanked a former kidnapper for not killing my child only because he got caught.
Thankfully, though, it now seems it is no longer entirely social suicide to give credit to one man for trying to make a difference. Well, at least in Eastern Europe it’s not. But as Dinesh D’Souza relates this week in Newsweek, it was not always so. The learned and the wise, with all their book learning, argued differently.
Strobe Talbot, editor of Time magazine back in the 1980s, later to become Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, condemned Reagan for trying to implement “the early ’50s goal of rolling back the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” He arrogantly went on: “Reagan is counting on American technological and economic predominance to prevail in the end.”
In the ’90s, Talbot got his shot at his sliver of power. At the U.S. State Department, he officially insisted the collapse of the Soviet workers’ paradise happened “not because of anything the outside world has done or not done […\" but because of defects and inadequacies at its core.”
Many said the job of president had become too big for one man, and that maybe a co-opted committee should take over the job. Reagan, alone, thought differently. From reducing the size of federal expenditures stateside, to orchestrating possibly the greatest poker bluff in history (Star Wars), Reagan was unstoppable.
He said in 1981: “The West will not contain communism, it will transcend communism […\" whose last pages are even now being written.” Marxism-Leninism, he predicted, would be left “on the ash heap of history.”
However, Harvard Professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. – the Kennedy administration’s beloved historian – said in 1982: “Those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse […\" are wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves.” Post-1989, Schlesinger said: “No one foresaw these changes.”
Reagan was no aristocrat, professor, or career politician. He was one of only two U.S. presidents in the 20th century (along with Harry Truman) to ever have to really work for himself.
Reagan spent years with General Electric traveling America, relating and interacting with their hundreds of thousands of middle-class workers. He “shared in their pain” at an all-encroaching state. Not surprisingly, he had had enough.
David Stockman, Reagan’s first budget director and Harvard wunderkind economist, left the administration early on. He then went on to write a scathing book about Reagan, saying he lacked the intellectual capacity to lead the country.
Twenty years later, on CNN last Saturday, Stockman gracefully admitted he was wrong. He said he had got caught up in the minutiae of his spreadsheets, while Reagan saw the forest through the trees. He said Reagan alone had the drive to implement the change that the government had to follow in order to roll back the Roosevelt era’s welfare state, and at the same time outspend the Soviet colossus. Stockman amazingly finished by saying: “He was the greatest American president of the 20th century.”
Well, Reagan would never take that credit because, as he always said, he was just doing his job. If the job got done he didn’t care who got the credit. The closest he ever came to self-congratulation was in the mid-’80s, when he argued that his plan must be working because “they [i.e. the media\" don’t call it Reaganomics anymore.”
Reagan’s practical life experience taught him that if people could pursue happiness unfettered, whether Americans or East Europeans, they would flourish. No longer, he determined, should the centralized few dictate to the masses.
Some things change and some things stay the same. Right now America has another Republican Party cowboy dunce in the office of president. I guess history will tell if one man was right, or if everyone else was wrong.
Regarding history, I wish right here, in this space, to formally begin petitioning the Hungarian state to change the name of Roosevelt t???? ©r to Reagan t???? ©r.
After all, isn’t it better to thank one man for making this wonderful country free, as opposed to harking back to a time the Soviets honored America for giving them Hungary?
[This op-ed originally appeared in the Budapest Business Journal on June 14, 2004.]
