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Shane Deichman at the Ronald Reagan Roundtable at Chicago Boyz:

“A new hope for our children in the 21st century”

….On March 23rd, 1983, a few weeks after President Reagan presented his Fiscal 1984 budget to Congress, he gave his famous “Star Wars Speech” to a national televised audience. Although “Star Wars” was the derisive name opponents used to mock the fantastic nature of the President’s vision, President Reagan’s speech was singularly focused on restoring American military strength and credibility – and to “… pave the way for arms control measures to eliminate the [nuclear] weapons themselves.”

Ironically, unlike President Kennedy’s 1962 speech at Rice University that was fully focused on the seemingly-impossible challenge of putting a man on the moon (and Rice defeating Texas in football), Reagan’s “… call [to] the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents … to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete” warranted only a couple of sentences in an otherwise lengthy speech.

Rather, this speech was part of “…a careful, long-term plan to make America strong again after too many years of neglect and mistakes,” and (when coupled with President Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando just two weeks prior) was a deliberate escalation of Cold War rhetoric.

President Reagan was rightfully concerned that the defense budget had been “trimmed to the limits of safety” by Congress. This decay of U.S. armed forces led Reagan “…to improve the basic readiness and staying power of our conventional forces, so they could meet – and therefore help deter – a crisis.” But his confidence in the logic of deterrence had limits. The Star Wars Speech presented to the world Reagan’s realization that deterrence based solely on commensurate offensive capabilities was fallacious.

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Joseph Fouche at the Ronald Reagan Roundtable at Chicago Boyz:

Reagan Roundtable: Growing Up Reagan

….I felt the reinvigoration of American pride that Reagan fed during his term. The local culture in which I grew up was extremely patriotic anyway. However, the banishment of the clouds of Carterly malaise was clear even to a young child. The martial virtues were preached during those years and my interest in military history partially flows from that influence. G.I. Joe was a real American hero and the Ruskies were the bad guys. I would draw maps and redo the borders of the world in a future era when the Soviet Union was gone. I did it with more abandon than ten Sykes and Picot at an imperialist bender. I had no idea that the Soviet Union would be gone within six years and largely peacefully instead of a global conflagration. Peaceful falls and peaceful rises are better for the people of this earth overall but less appealing to nine-year old boys with action figures.

The outcome of Reagan and his administration on future events is not fully apparent. I’m sure we’ll get more ideas on that as this roundtable proceeds. However, for a child growing up in the 1980s, Reagan was the ideal president. Whether he was a good president or not really didn’t matter to a pre-teen just like it didn’t really matter if Douglas MacArthur was a great general or not. Douglas MacArthur played a great general for the newsreels and Ronald Reagan played a great president on TV. Those who overlook the advantage that acting talent gives to a president ignore a strength that Reagan shared with his idol Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Once, at a dinner party, FDR supposedly leaned over to Orson Welles and whispered, “Mr. Welles, you and I are the two best actors in America.” For many Americans, the detailed policy fluctuations of the New Deal didn’t matter. The New Deal was one of the great stage dramas of the Golden Age of American entertainment and FDR was its most consummate performer. The personal impact of FDR on my grandparents was clear even fifty years later.

FDR may or may not have been a great president but he played one on the radio and on film

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Historyguy99 at the Ronald Reagan Roundtable at Chicago Boyz:

Ronald Reagan: A Personal Reflection

….My first introduction to Reagan was unrelated to politics as I would be allowed to watch the General Electric Theater, which Reagan hosted, on Sunday evenings whenever there was school holiday on Mondays. Later, in my teens, he was a familiar figure with a cowboy hat that hosted Death Valley Days. Reagan made no impact on me in those early years and it was not until November of 1968 that I was introduced to his leadership style.

After Vietnam, I was married and stationed at Fort Campbell, Ky and we were expecting our first child in April 1969. We decided to move my wife home to be near her parents and undertook a cross country drive to California. Just after sunset, three days later, we crossed over the Colorado River on I-10 and were met with two things that signaled that we were back in what at the time was the “Golden State.” First, was the roadway, brightly lit as far as one’s headlights carried, with little glass reflectors that were an invention of a Cal-Trans engineer named Botts. They had been installed after I had joined the army and California was the only state in the nation to have them. Driving in the desert that night, the first California radio station we tuned in was carrying a live interview with then Governor Ronald Reagan. As I drove along, and listened to him discuss the affairs of California and the state of the nation after changing leadership with the election Nixon a couple of weeks earlier, I was struck by the tenor of the way he presented his convictions. I was still naive about most politics and frankly had not formed any political affiliation, but listening to his positive message about individuality and the human spirit that night, left me with a very favorable impression. To reveal my ignorance about the history of Bott’s Dots, I was initially left to credit Reagan with lighting our way across the California desert that night, only to learn later, they were approved the summer before he was elected.

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Dr. Michael Kennedy at the Ronald Reagan Roundtable at Chicago Boyz:

Another personal reminiscence of Reagan

….When Jimmy Carter was elected, I was in practice. My wife and I were taking our first trip to England. I remember being ashamed that Carter was president. I thought, “Well, he can’t be too bad. After all, he has been a businessman.” He was. He made the same mistake that Obama did. He let Congress and the Democratic majority have its head in legislation. The 1974 class of Democrats in Congress was the most leftist in history. Inflation took off. I knew doctor colleagues who were buying bags of quarters and dimes for their pension plans. Others had Swiss bank accounts with gold coins (It had only become legal to own gold under Ford). The Swiss charged negative interest of about 2% on those accounts. Two other friends, both doctors, opened a crystal shop in Laguna Beach and became the largest sellers of Lalique crystal in the world. The company brought them to France to honor them. Everybody was fleeing the dollar.

The conventional wisdom said Reagan was too conservative to ever be elected. The present rhetoric about Sarah Palin is similar to that about Reagan. He certainly was better qualified than she is but it didn’t matter. He was “an amiable dunce”(Clark Clifford) or he was a madman determined on a nuclear war. The Democrats who are trying to conflate Reagan and Obama would just as soon you didn’t remember that. I watched all the debates. I was shouting at the TV the night that Ford made his gaffe about Poland which elected Carter. I was worried about Reagan and how he would do. Here is where we all learned about his charm and his ability to slough off nasty comments by opponents. His skill with repartee and humor made him president. He looked like a reliable father figure and the attacks just bounced off. The only other president in my memory who was as immune to attack was Eisenhower but that was an earlier, pre-Nixon coup era. His “Great Communicator” title is often meant by Democrats as a slur, implying that was all he was. What I mean, and I think it is true, is that without that talent, he would not have been elected, as bad as Jimmy Carter was. That attacks on Reagan have been forgotten but they were harsh and had some resonance until the debates.

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James Frayne at the Ronald Regan Roundtable at Chicago Boyz:

Reagan Roundtable: The Lessons of the Reagan ’84 Campaign by James Frayne

On 7 October 1984, just a few weeks before the November election day, President Reagan’s campaign suffered a serious setback. Having put in an unconvincing performance in the first Presidential debate against Democrat challenger Walter Mondale, serious questions were being raised about the President’s age, health, and his ability to lead America through difficult times. To some observers, he did not appear to be in full command of the details of his administration. Attention immediately turned to the second debate, on 21 October.

The initial reaction of some campaign staff was to ensure that Reagan was prepared for the next debate by force-feeding him stats on every conceivable subject. But the campaign finally worked out that this approach risked getting in the way of what voters liked best – Reagan’s character and charm. They realized the best way of getting the President to put in a winning performance was by letting him be himself – by letting Reagan be Reagan.

In You are the Message, Republican media consultant Roger Ailes (now of Fox News) talks of being brought in to help prepare Reagan for the second debate. Ailes describes seeing Reagan forced to listen to endless advice, with consultants constantly rebuking him for not remembering detail. “Every time they finished a round, somebody in the audience would raise a hand and say, ‘Mr President, the tonnage on that warhead is wrong. The date of that treaty was so-and-so'”.

Ailes told the team to cancel the mock debates and give him access to the President for a couple of hours. “‘If you give me that’, I told them, ‘he’ll win. If you don’t you’ll probably lose.’ I realized that sounded presumptuous, but actually I was gambling on Reagan and his innate gift of communication. I felt pretty sure that if I could get him back to being himself again, he’d be okay.”

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