American media and research bodies frequently conduct polls to rank the greatest presidents in American history. Sometimes they poll the general public, and sometimes they only poll historians or other experts, but at the top of the pile, alongside legendary presidents like the founding father George Washington, the abolisher of slavery Abraham Lincoln, the winner of World War II Franklin D. Roosevelt, and sometimes even above them, Ronald Reagan's name is always present.
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Many books have tried to analyze the secret of Reagan's success, but it seems that the fascinating biography When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan by Peggy Noonan, which was recently translated into Hebrew (Shibolet Press, an imprint of Sella Meir Publishers, translated from the English by Ilan Hazot), has come closer to achieving this goal than the others. Noonan, a journalist, commentator and writer, was the president's speechwriter and adviser, and working closely alongside him has provided her with insights into his character and his virtues.
However, When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan, is much more than a sequence of diagnoses and memories about the leading man of his generation. Noonan met with a long list of people who knew Reagan at different points in his life, researched what he thought and wrote over the course of his life (including stories from his youth about theater, football and war), drawing a unique portrait of one of the great figures who shaped the United States and our globalized world.
The Begin Obstacle
Appropriately, for a comprehensive biography, Noonan begins with her hero's childhood, in an attempt to understand how Reagan's personality was shaped and how the child from a low-income background acquired the skills which would take him to the top. "Dutch," as Ronald Reagan was nicknamed in his youth, grew up in an extremely poor family, in the shadow of an alcoholic father, but this poverty did not dominate.
His parents might not have been able to raise him in material abundance, but they instilled in him the correct values and faith in the good at the heart of people, and that everyone was created in the image of God. To illustrate the atmosphere which prevailed during the upbringing of the future president, Noonan tells a short story that will surely resonate with the Israeli reader.
Once, when his father Jack went on a trip selling shoes, he was about to check into a hotel when he heard the reception clerk say that he could feel safe "because the hotel doesn't admit Jews." Jack was so angry with the racist statement that he chose to spend the night in his car at the height of a snowstorm. Ronald Reagan thought that this was one of the reasons for the heart attack that his father had a few years later. Who knows, maybe the seeds of the president's determined struggle for the human rights of Soviet Jewry 60 years later were sown with this story?
"For decades, during his time in Hollywood and as governor of California, Reagan lived in a world where there were many Jews, and apparently even then his warm and sympathetic attitude towards Jews were being formed," Elliot Abrams, who was part of the government for all eight years that Reagan was in the White House, recounted in a conversation with Israel Hayom.
"Years later, as president, he raised concerns about Jews living in the Soviet Union to levels that had never been seen before at an international level. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, Reagan sent him a personal letter, and who was mentioned in it? Natan Sharansky, a Prisoner of Zion who was in a Soviet jail. At the start of every meeting with a Soviet official, Reagan always raised the human rights of Soviet Jewry, and the message was understood by the other side."
As for Reagan's policy towards Israel, the picture is more complicated. "Overall, he was pro-Israel, he saw Israel as 'the good,' valuable supporters of freedom, and his sympathy was for Israel and not for those who sought its destruction," noted Douglas J. Feith, who served in Reagan's White House on the National Security Council and afterward moved to the Pentagon. "At the same time, he was surrounded by people who really didn't like the Israeli prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin, and he was clearly influenced by them."
Feith explains that, when Israel attacked the Iraqi nuclear reactor, American diplomats serving around the world wanted America to condemn Israel and take action against it. Unlike them, the American ambassador to Israel, Sam Lewis, sent a long telegram that explained the rationale behind Israel's actions, and Feith himself summarized and delivered it to the president. Reagan read it and was so convinced that he declared that Israel had a legitimate reason to think that she was acting out of self-defense, but this did not prevent him from giving the green light to the condemnation of Israel at the UN.
His negative attitude towards Begin again found expression during the First Lebanon War, when one of the president's advisers showed him a picture of a baby wrapped in a blanket and claimed that his hands had been torn off in an Israeli explosion. Reagan thought that the Israeli government had not been telling him the truth. He delayed the supply of fighter jets to Israel, although avoided harsher steps recommended by some in his circle, like canceling military aid.
Despite this, according to Feith, the United States saved Arafat and the PLO by sending the Marines to Beirut, but when they took losses, Reagan, despite being a powerful figure, in a step that signaled American weakness, withdrew them from Lebanon. To sum up, the president has an almost ambiguous, paradoxical record regarding Israel.
Despite the tensions between Reagan and Begin, it is hard not to see the similarities between them. Both of them were described by their rival political camp as "extremists and dangerous," and their election to the highest position in their countries was presented by the same camp as a disaster and nearly the apocalypse. In America, with its fixed elections, there was no need to use the term "revolution," but Reagan's presidency, as Feith highlights, was labeled in exactly that way.
"His positions contradicted the basic ideas of traditional American policy in domestic and foreign affairs," Feith says. "Reagan wasn't thought of as an intellectual, but his views set an intellectual challenge for the beliefs which dominated in establishment circles. He was a leader who didn't hesitate to offer new paths regarding how the United States should act, and outlined a path that was sometimes not just different from the ways of Democrats but even from the ways of the Republicans before him. Reagan set a new goal for the United States in the Cold War – not stability but victory. It was a massive change in the shaping of American foreign policy."
Realpolitik versus values
Does the explanation for his intellectual courage and his ability to deviate from establishment norms lie in the fact that he was not steeped in traditional Washington politics, and was forced to blaze a trail through all the places that seemed closed to him – starting from his studies at college, via his career in Hollywood and his zenith in government? "Maybe that's part of it," Feith agrees, before immediately offering another explanation: "He believed that ideas played an important role in shaping policies, especially in international relations. The school of thought that dominated, and to a certain extent still dominates today, emphasized the importance of security and money instead of values, morality, and ideas.
They claimed that the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union revolved around the division of control and power, and in this regard viewed each of them as equal in their status as superpowers. On the other hand, Reagan thought that the dividing line in the world passed between free countries and enemies of freedom, between democracies and totalitarian communist dictatorships. During the Cold War he identified the struggle between worldviews, between opposing methods of morality. This difference had practical meaning."
"For example, Reagan abolished the doctrine from the days of Nixon, which had abandoned anti-long-range missile defense systems, since it relied on the belief that the situation whereby the United States and the Soviet Union could definitely annihilate one another contributed to global stability. He thought that every element of this worldview was immoral: both the willingness to leave the United States vulnerable to Soviet missiles and the reliance on a scenario in which millions would be killed. Instead of this he decided to construct a system that would protect against missiles, and the free world benefited from it, especially Israel."
And yes, in contrast to other politicians, and some would say most of them, Reagan knew how to turn ideas into reality and to keep his promises to his voters. In his first presidential campaign he promised to bring down the rate of inflation, which during the presidency of Jimmy Carter had reached highs of 12%-14%. After he was elected, Reagan took a series of steps, including some that were politically harmful to him, and as a result of these measures inflation dropped below the four percent threshold. Even more importantly, notes Noonan, it remained between three and four percent throughout all the years of his presidency.
On the day Ronald Reagan entered office, the highest tax rate for private individuals stood at 78%; on the day he left the White House this figure was 35%. The United States, which from 1980-1981 experienced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, awakened out of her coma. The tax cuts, together with other steps which the president took (reducing regulation, free trade, tightening the money supply) led to great economic growth and a flourishing that the United States had never experienced before.
During Reagan's time in the White House, every income group in the country, from the richest to the poorest, experienced a growth in income. Under Reagan the Dow Jones Industrial Average, commonly seen as a reflection of American industry, trebled in size, from 800 to 2,400 points.
If one lists the achievements in keeping his promises to his voters, the results are even more impressive. He fulfilled his promise to reduce unemployment: the number of jobs in the American economy grew, and unemployment fell by around a third. He fulfilled his promise to abolish oil price controls: the price of oil and its products began to fall. He fulfilled his promise to cut federal regulation: the Federal Register, which under his predecessor contained 87,000 pages of rules and regulations, "thinned" by nearly half, and together with it the bureaucracy "thinned" as well.
One can continue with the nearly countless list of achievements: promoting conservatives to the federal court, promoting a woman to the Supreme Court, putting an end to racially-based affirmative action quotas, rehabilitation of the armed forces, increasing the size of the American military, dealing with the "Evil Empire" of the Soviet Union and not surrendering to it. All of these were fulfilled, with the last promise even exceeding the expectations of the most optimistic. The lifting of the Iron Curtain became the greatest personal achievement of the president, and of the West as a whole.
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"Reagan didn't agree that the United States should aspire for coexistence with the Communist world," Feith explains. "He aimed for comprehensive policies that would weaken, undermine and ultimately bring down the Soviet Union, and worked towards that goal on the military, economy, diplomatic, and ideological fronts. He attacked the communist enemy's weak spots, embarrassed it in the United Nations and in other areas against the background of their damage to human rights, deprived it of advanced technology, reduced its trade and its ability to send gas to the west, supported its enemies all over the world and prodded it to enter an "arms race" which was beyond its economic means. The result of all these steps convinced Gorbachev that the Soviet Union was unable to compete with the United States and led him to adopt far-reaching reforms which destroyed the Soviet Union."
Reagan's Word
Despite his occupation with lofty goals and the fate of the world, Reagan, as his colleagues recall, remained a human being. Abrams offers a story that illustrates how the president took pains to protect and to defend his team, and to prevent them from feeling uncomfortable or humiliated. Towards the end of his presidency, and especially hot potato fell into the lap of his government in the form of the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who had sponsored drug trafficking and abused human rights.
American Secretary of State George Shultz wanted to take action against him, while Secretary of Defense Weinberger wanted to avoid action. "The president would listen seriously to both their arguments, mutter something to conclude like, 'hmmm… it's a very complicated matter which requires additional thought,' and nothing happened." Abrams explains that, due to his young age, he attributed this to indecisiveness. Only afterward did he understand: drawing out the conversation indicated the decision not to take action, but Reagan did not want to say this out loud in order not to hurt Shultz, whose view had not been accepted. The honor of his faith was more important to him than his own image.
And here is something else that's rare in politics: a reader of Noonan's book understands that this loyalty was mutual. The people who worked for him would defend him all the time, Dan Rostenkowski confirmed to her. He was the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in Congress and thought of as an omnipotent politician, one of Reagan's most powerful political opponents when the president wanted to advance sharp tax cuts. 'Rosty', as he was known, offers another memory of the president with whom he fought: "His most admirable quality was that if he gave you his word you could sleep peacefully."
Maybe because of this, even 40 years after the start of his presidency, people cannot hide their pride at having worked with him. "It was such a great privilege to serve alongside such a great leader and person," Abrams says. After the series of disappointments of Nixon, Ford and Carter, who led Americans to think that there was no one in our era with the right qualifications for a successful presidency, along came Reagan and proved that true leadership still exists, and that it can create miracles. He won the Cold War without firing a single shot, and he reminded us that the American system works, and when it doesn't work under a certain president, the problem is with them, not with the system."
