Of all the things Ronald Reagan did for me, maybe the best was that he gave me something to call myself. I am a Reaganite. It can be difficult to answer when someone says, “What are you, politically?” The word “conservative” is subject to a thousand interpretations. You don’t want to launch into a lecture about the Scottish Enlightenment, the strange journey of the word “liberal,” the advent of Frank Meyer, etc. So, instead you can say — if it’s true — “I’m a Reaganite.”
Everyone has an idea of what Reagan was: Some think of him as a mainstream conservative, others think of him as a right-winger, or as a genuine liberal, or as a Neanderthal — whatever. The point is, people know what you mean. He had a view of America’s place in the world, and of the place of government in America, and of what this republic should be. I share that view, wholly.
Although I wasn’t destined to. I was born into a quite left-wing environment — Ann Arbor, Mich. — and Reagan’s name was mud. Actually, it was sometimes “Ray-gun,” ha, ha, a popular epithet in the early ’80s. We’re all supposed to love, or at least respect, Reagan now, so it’s hard to convey just how hated he was when his career was live. The Left hates W. now, to be sure. They hated Reagan no less, trust me.
In my world, “conservative” meant bigot, warmonger, plutocrat, ignoramus . . . shall I go on? And Reagan was the worst of the conservatives. He was a “nuclear cowboy” — that was the phrase — and his superficial charm would hoodwink the American public into electing him. How could the voters throw out Jimmy Carter, pure, sweet Jimmy Carter, who read the Bible in Spanish and cared so much about human rights?
Rosalynn Carter said, about Reagan, “He makes us comfortable with our prejudices.” Yeah, that was it.
Reagan’s election was considered a national disaster in Ann Arbor. I was a sophomore in high school. After being sworn in, Reagan set about doing many shocking things, like cutting taxes (“for the rich”) and challenging the Soviet Union. Why, he was the kind of guy who might even fire air-traffic controllers! (Reagan would say, “I didn’t fire them — they quit.” The union had vowed not to strike, you see.)
A pivotal day came on March 30, 1981, when Reagan — along with those three others — was shot. It was pivotal for me, that is. I was amazed by the grace and courage he showed in that situation. From then on, you couldn’t tell me that he was an empty B-movie actor, with no substance whatsoever. I wouldn’t believe it; he’d given the lie to it. I wasn’t necessarily ready to agree with him — but I would listen to him.
And I did. I was a natural anti-Communist. That was caring about human rights too, wasn’t it? Didn’t the millions who lived under Communism have the same right to liberty and decency as Filipinos, South Africans, and Chileans? And, even at my leftest (which wasn’t very left), I couldn’t hate America. I knew that, as Donald Rumsfeld would later put it, “America is not what’s wrong with the world.”
But, oh, at my university, Reagan was what was wrong with the world. On the last day of one class, a history professor told us that he doubted we’d live into real adulthood, because Reagan, through his rejection of détente, would incinerate the world. And in the reelection year of 1984, the kids around me chanted, “Reagan, Bush, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” What they meant was that the administration had slowed the rate of growth of social-welfare spending.
Brick by brick, my entire edifice — never all that solid — fell. I opened my mind to free-market economics. And I could no longer believe — I don’t think I ever believed — that abortion was merely ama matter of a woman’s sovereignty over her own body. The feminists had a slogan: “A fetus in a woman’s womb has no more standing than a hamburger in her stomach.” That slogan was repulsive to me.
If I hadn’t liked Reagan so much, as a man, would I have swung around to his views? Probably — but it would have taken longer. There was his humor, his “security in his own skin,” as everyone said. People wanted him to be embarrassed by his acting career, especially his role in Bedtime for Bonzo, in which he played alongside a chimp. But Reagan wasn’t the least embarrassed. Someone gave him a still from that picture to sign — Reagan with Bonzo. He wrote, “I’m the one with the watch.”
And I remember that a TV reporter, hugely frustrated with Reagan, yelled at him, as he was walking back into the White House, after some outdoor event, “Mr. President, do you think you have no responsibility whatsoever for the federal budget deficit?” (I am paraphrasing.) Reagan turned back, cocked his head, and said, “Well, I was once a Democrat.”
And it was extremely important to me that Reagan had been a Democrat. I’d been one, too (in a way). Reagan would say, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party; the Democratic party left me” — that wasn’t quite true, for Reagan had moved significantly rightward, but it was partly true.
By the end of my college days, at least one classmate teasingly called me “Gip,” short for “Gipper” (itself the nickname of George Gipp, whom Reagan had played). It will sound trite, but Reagan made me what I am today, politically (along with WFB and National Review, and Norman Podhoretz and Commentary). I will never forget him. He will always be my president. He shaped me, stamped me.
Later in life, when I got to know a lot of people who’d been around Reagan, I pumped them endlessly for stories, and they happily obliged. These stories are now mine, weirdly enough, as though I’d been there.
And I was, in a way — there in Reagan’s America, when politics was hot, and when I was being forged. Reagan’s greatness is as clear to me as Beethoven’s. Even many who were his enemies concede that he was the right man at the right time. Frankly, friends, George W. Bush isn’t so bad, either.
— This article first appeared in the June 28, 2004, issue of National Review.