So vows the President, warning, "We have to face the truth "
Ronald Reagan normally sleeps soundly, but he woke up worried at 4 a.m. last Wednesday. Neither of the two drafts that aides had prepared for the TV speech he was to deliver 41 hours later—his first from the White House—sounded quite right to him. So the President got up in the predawn darkness to scribble on a yellow legal pad, beginning a painstaking rewrite that continued later with the help of speechwriters and ended only five hours before he went on-camera in the Oval Office. Though Reagan rarely carries cash, he made a point of bringing a dollar bill into one session with his advisers, but forgot to take coins with him also and had to ask Aide David Fischer for some. The purpose was to try out a gesture that he later used on TV: holding up the greenback in one hand and tossing a quarter, a dime and a penny onto his desk with the other in order to dramatize the way inflation has shriveled the purchasing power of a dollar earned in 1960 to a mere 36¢ today.*
That, however, was the only touch of playacting; otherwise the drama of the speech came from its subject and context. Both were important enough to justify fully the President's deep concern with sounding the right tone. His task was to begin rallying public support for a program designed to jolt the U.S. out of what he called "the worst economic mess since the Great Depression." Though details will not be spelled out until next week, enough is known already to make it obvious that the program marks a drastic change in national direction. It combines slashes in federal spending so deep and painful—perhaps $40 billion next fiscal year—and tax cuts viewed by many economists as so risky that all of the President's persuasive powers will be needed to induce the nation to accept them. Predicted Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker: "We're going to have the biggest legislative battle in this country since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and certainly since World War II."
Reagan's speech was an impressive opening gun. Talking quietly but seriously for 18 minutes in layman's language, the President asserted that the nation has no choice but to break with its past profligacy. Said he: "We have to face the truth." Ticking off some familiar statistics —back-to-back years of double-digit inflation for the first time since World War I, 7 million unemployed, a national debt of $934 billion—he warned that "we are threatened with an economic calamity of tremendous proportions, and the old business-as-usual treatment can't save us." The fault, he said, lies in an explosive growth of Government spending, "punitive" taxes and excessive regulation that are sapping the economy's productive strength. The only solution, he said, is to slice both spending and taxes, deeply and together.