Reagans Big Idea

ON the eve of Ronald Reagan’s election as fortieth president of the United States, a reporter asked him what Americans saw in him. Reagan hesitated, then replied, “Would you laugh if I told you that I think, maybe, they see themselves and that I’m one of them? I’ve never been able to detach myself or think that I, somehow, am apart from them.” No one laughed. Reagan was popular with the working press, and reporters found it neither immodest of him nor newsworthy that he saw himself as national Everyman. While many in the campaign press corps had from time to time been appalled by Reagan’s knowledge gaps, they had also been ^”»*7 impressed by his consistent ability to connect with the people. Reagan was then 69 years old and secure in this connection. His bond with his fellow Americans was a gift that had been nourished in Illinois and Iowa and polished in Hollywood and on the campaign trail. “Reagan’s solutions to problems were always the same as the guy in the bar,” said his political strategist, Stu Spencer. Walter Lippmann once wrote that the greatness of de Gaulle was not that he was in France but that France was in him. In the same sense, America was in Ronald Reagan.

A recognition that Reagan, while in many ways exceptional, was in truth an ordinary American helps explain his interest in the vision that became the Strategic Defense Initiative or Star Wars. (The “Star Wars” label, while intended derisively, did not harm the missile-defense cause. In the movie trilogy, as Richard Perle observed, “the good guys won.”) Reagan shared not only the common sense of the “guy in the bar” but his innocence, and to some extent his ignorance of strategic issues in the nuclear age. Ordinary Americans rarely dwell on calamities too awful to contemplate such as the grim reality that the precarious peace called the Cold War was preserved by fear of mutual annihilation. After Reagan proposed SDI, polls showed that most Americans had assumed the United States possessed some defense against nuclear missiles, other than the threat of wiping out those who launched them. They were horrified, as Reagan had been, when they learned otherwise.

LC

About the Author

Lou Cannon

Mr. Cannon is the author of Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD.

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ON the eve of Ronald Reagan’s election as fortieth president of the United States, a reporter asked him what Americans saw in him. Reagan hesitated, then replied, “Would you laugh if I told you that I think, maybe, they see themselves and that I’m one of them? I’ve never been able to detach myself or think that I, somehow, am apart from them.” No one laughed. Reagan was popular with the working press, and reporters found it neither immodest of him nor newsworthy that he saw himself as national Everyman. While many in the campaign press corps had from time to time been appalled by Reagan’s knowledge gaps, they had also been ^”»*7 impressed by his consistent ability to connect with the people. Reagan was then 69 years old and secure in this connection. His bond with his fellow Americans was a gift that had been nourished in Illinois and Iowa and polished in Hollywood and on the campaign trail. “Reagan’s solutions to problems were always the same as the guy in the bar,” said his political strategist, Stu Spencer. Walter Lippmann once wrote that the greatness of de Gaulle was not that he was in France but that France was in him. In the same sense, America was in Ronald Reagan.

A recognition that Reagan, while in many ways exceptional, was in truth an ordinary American helps explain his interest in the vision that became the Strategic Defense Initiative or Star Wars. (The “Star Wars” label, while intended derisively, did not harm the missile-defense cause. In the movie trilogy, as Richard Perle observed, “the good guys won.”) Reagan shared not only the common sense of the “guy in the bar” but his innocence, and to some extent his ignorance of strategic issues in the nuclear age. Ordinary Americans rarely dwell on calamities too awful to contemplate such as the grim reality that the precarious peace called the Cold War was preserved by fear of mutual annihilation. After Reagan proposed SDI, polls showed that most Americans had assumed the United States possessed some defense against nuclear missiles, other than the threat of wiping out those who launched them. They were horrified, as Reagan had been, when they learned otherwise.