(2 of 12)
He replaced a President who had talked of America's malaise and proceeded to speak of its destiny and greatness, notions that had been dismissed as naive or arrogant. Talk of America as a shining city on a hill was long out of fashion, but it was a core belief of Reagan's, and it is no accident that it animates the man who occupies the White House now. George W. Bush, though a President's son, is cast as Reagan's heir even more than his father's. Long after Reagan had retreated from the public eye behind the veil of Alzheimer's disease, his influence over the politicians of our time, from both major parties, only grew. "The question really arose whether the presidency was a viable institution," says Fred Greenstein, a presidential scholar at Princeton. "With Reagan, that changed. He reminded us what a confident and sure President looked like."
For a man with the power to pull history around a corner; to end a long, cold, fearsome war; to change the conversation of our politics and culture as much by the sheer force of his personality as by the power of his ideas, Ronald Reagan was an unaccountably modest and good-natured soul. He seemed untouched by the arrogance and self-regard common to actors and politicians, to the point that when a brash reporter asked him on the eve of his election what he thought the American people saw in him, Reagan said, "Would you laugh if I told you that I think, maybe, they see themselves, and that I'm one of them?"
He wasn't, of course. This was the actor's gift, to be both larger than life and disarming at the same time. He was, in fact, never so simple as he seemed. A fervent tax cutter, he raised taxes significantly four times as economic conditions and reform demanded. The man who said government was not the solution, it was the problem, actually presided over its continued expansion. Far from abolishing the departments of Energy and Education, he added a new Cabinet-level department, for Veterans Affairs. The archconservative who was skeptical of Social Security ultimately was credited with saving it. He came into office looking not to survive the cold war but to win it, building up America's defenses to confront the "evil empire" but then backing off enough to give Mikhail Gorbachev room to change course. Reagan may have been the champion of missile defense, but he also declared as his dream the complete abolition of nuclear weapons, a position that made even the moderates around him flinch.
He was, in other words, that most uncommon politician, a man of clear conviction who was capable of compromise where necessary and growth where possible, whose ideas were both deeply held and able to evolve as circumstances changed or expediency required. Likewise, the man himself was not so simple, not to mention simpleminded, as his critics held--the "kindly fanatic" in Garry Wills' phrase. He confounded his biographer Edmund Morris, remained opaque even to friends of many years. The notion that he was a second-rate actor who did well with a script continues to be dispelled with the release of his radio addresses and more recently, his personal letters, which show a far more subtle mind and sophisticated outlook than the caricature ever suggested. But then, Reagan had a gift for being underestimated, which served him well in all the lives he led.