The Legacy Of President Ronald Reagan, 1911-2004

Ronald Reagan was a man ideally designed for a specific place and time. Early in the Primaries of 1980 he appeared to be a conservative Howard Dean at a time when conservatism was as trendy as liberalism is today. He had to sell America on his platform and the buyers were skeptical. Those primaries were drawn out and bloody with a centrist George H.W. Bush accusing Reagan of "Voodoo Economics" as well as religious pandering. In the end the Republican Party went with Reagan because he promised to reclaim the moral honor due the party of Lincoln.

Jimmy Carter was a noble and intelligent man who came to Washington without a clue and left without a legacy. As is always the case with an incumbent, he lost the White House of his own accord. Carter the peacemaker couldn't negotiate with frothing radicals. Reagan the hardliner, using his former CIA director Veep Bush, did get through to the frothing radicals. The irony drips.

Our armed forces immediately were built up to record levels under Reagan. Americans were flush with pride as battlewagons like the U.S.S. Iowa came out of mothballs. The Iowa trained her cannon over our enemies and we once again felt an Empirical invincibility that had decipated in the jungles of Southeast Asia. In the most important military action of the Reagan Era hundreds of American Marines were slaughtered in their sleep in a Beirut barracks. By pulling out of Lebanon with no trace of success we exposed our Achilles heal to two decades of terrorists. Fortunately however Granada and Libya and most of all "Top Gun" followed up that disaster to give Reagan the luster of a conquering hero. The irony drips.

Ronald Reagan is universally thought of as a compassionate giant but his policies disregarded the mentally ill and those afflicted with the disease whose name he would not utter. Eventually he would loose his extraordinary gifts to a disease of the mind that until recently was nameless. The irony drips.

Ronald Reagan was the first president that I ever voted for and he was in retrospect a great president who delivered on his promise to restore America's glory and honor. We don't need to cannonize him as a demigod. It is more impressive to see the man as he was, imperfect and flawed. A president need not be measured by his greatest weaknesses but by his greatest contributions. The presidency of Ronald Reagan was far greater than the sum of its parts.