Tag Archives: Ronald Reagan

David McCullough Takes on Donald Trump

18 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by in Current Events, Politics

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David McCullough

“What has the Republican party come to? That at such an unsettling time as this, with so very much at stake, so many momentous, complex problems to be addressed — and yes, so much that we must and can accomplish — why would we ever choose to entrust our highest office, and our future, to someone so clearly unsuited for the job? Someone who’s never held public office, never served his country in any fashion.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who so admirably served his country his entire career, said there were four key qualities by which we should measure a leader: character, ability, responsibility, and experience.

Donald Trump fails to qualify on all four counts. And it should be noted that Eisenhower put character first. In the words of the ancient Greeks, character is destiny.

So much that Donald Trump spouts is so vulgar and far from the truth and mean-spirited; it is on that question of character especially that he does not measure up. He is unwise. He is plainly unprepared, unqualified, and it often seems, unhinged. How can we possibly put our future in the hands of such a man?

We’re on the whole — let’s not forget — a good country, of good people, with good intentions.

Good, even great, leaders have played decisive roles in our history, time after time. We have believed from the start in worthy achievement, and have set landmark examples for how very much can be accomplished when we work together, infused by positive spirit.

Inspired by Theodore Roosevelt, we built the Panama Canal. Led by President Harry Truman, we created the Marshall Plan. President John F. Kennedy called on us to go to the moon — and we went to the moon! Through leadership of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, we ended the Cold War.

And there is no reason that under the right leadership, we can’t continue on that way.”

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David McCullough’s short video take on Trump, posted to the Facebook page “Historians on Donald Trump.”

Other highlights from McCullough:

Appraising Reagan

29 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in Biography, Politics

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Ronald Reagan

“The daily expressions of Reagan’s long-term strategies – inveighing against deficits while creating them, aspiring to eliminate nuclear missiles while increasing them – were often inconsistent. Failure to choose between opposing alternatives sometimes produced a zigzag pattern in his presidency. But a tolerance for cognitive dissonance, like other forms of irrationality, can be an effective negotiating tactic. The Soviets, like Tip O’Neill, were never quite sure which Reagan they were bargaining with. His ability to live with contradiction was, on balance, more blessing than curse.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many people remembered having had views similar to Reagan’s about the vulnerability of the Soviet Union. But Reagan, as Robert Gates wrote in his 1996 memoir From the Shadows, ‘nearly alone truly believed in 1981 that the Soviet system was vulnerable not in some vague, long-range historical sense, but right then.’ Reagan’s commonsense view of historical inevitability was that an unworkable government was sure to break down sooner or later. ‘Communism is neither an economic or a political system – it is a form of insanity – a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature,’ he wrote in his unpublished 1962 statement, ‘Are Liberals Really Liberal?’ […]

Reagan himself never used phrases such as ‘American exceptionalism’ or ‘moral clarity,’ any more than he talked about being visionary or consequential. He had a low level of self-consciousness, and expressed these concepts simply by being himself. If none of his successors formed the kind of bond he did with the country, it may be because few politicians have ever embodied the idealized national character the way Reagan did. Simplicity, innocence, and personal modesty are rare qualities in public life, and difficult ones to fake. People excused Reagan’s lapses and contradictions because they believed he was genuine and recognized themselves in his aspirations.

Reagan’s claim to the nation’s affection rests on his American personality: his homespun wit, his good nature, and his native optimism. His claim to greatness rests on his role in the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism. To put the case in the simplest possible terms, the Soviet Union didn’t fall; it was pushed. The push that Gorbachev gave it was the proximate cause, but it reflected pressure that Reagan began to apply four years before Gorbachev came to power. Gorbachev’s goal was to render it harmless. Through the shove he gave it came from farther away, it was intended to produce the outcome that followed, one that he was nearly alone in thinking possible.”

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Pulled from chapters 10 (“The Ash Heap of History”) and 15 (“Tear Down This Wall”) of Jacob Weinberg’s short biography Ronald Reagan, which was published last month.

Yes, I posted this so I could chalk one up in the February ’16 column. Shameless, especially on a leap day, but the 41-month post streak is alive.

You can see Weinberg, who’s a self-identified liberal, discuss the book and some revelations about the Gipper in his recent conversation with Christopher Buckley at the 92nd St. Y.

Can We Be Optimistic about America’s Future? (Yes, Says Charles Krauthammer)

02 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by in Freedom, Politics, Speeches

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Charles Krauthammer

“Looking down the road, to the future of the United States, I… I really am, despite the burden of our current problems, optimistic.

If you believe, as I do, in the political ideology of liberty; in the importance of an open civil society, and that the relationship between the citizen and the state should be a limited one, then I think you must believe that, if we can advocate those ideas clearly enough, we will win out in the end. And when you take away the other contaminants — the personalities, the contingencies, the financial crises, the Congressional gridlocks, the things that are confined to ‘the times’ — those ideals will survive for another generation. And that’s why I think, in the end, reality does win out. That’s why I’m confident.

Let me just end by saying that I’ve always had a sense that there is something providential about American history — and this is from somebody who isn’t strictly religious. But here is a nation founded on the edge of civilization by a tiny colony, living on the outskirts of the civilized world — one that, at a time when it needs it, miraculously finds within its borders the most brilliant generation of political thinkers in the history of the world. Then, a century later, when it needs a Lincoln, it finds a Lincoln. Then, in the 20th century, when it needed an FDR to fight and destroy fascism, it found it. When it needed Reagan to revive the country, it found one. And I don’t think there is a Reagan or an FDR on our horizon.

But there’s something about American history that redeems itself in a way that should inspire even the most pessimistic cynic. The way I would summarize the root of this feeling is by quoting my favorite pundit, Otto von Bismarck. He’s not known for his punditry, but he did famously say that, “God looks after four things: children, drunks, idiots… and the United States of America.”

I think he still does. I hope he still does. Thank you.”

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Charles Krauthammer, speaking off-the-cuff at the closing of his address to last summer’s Bradley Symposium.

More from Bradley:

What Was the American Founders’ View of Human Nature?

03 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by in History, Political Philosophy, Politics, Speeches

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The American Founding

Robert George:

“The American Founders famously supplied constitutional mechanisms to remedy what they called the darker motives of man. And with their rather Presbyterian view of human nature, the founders’ hope was that we could correct for some of mankind’s defects through principles and institutions that would check the thirst for power, and would prevent government from becoming oppressive or tyrannical.

At the same time, they were under no illusions about the possibility of having a successful scheme of ordered liberty without there being some substantial virtue in the people themselves. And they knew, crucially, that virtue could not be ordered by the government. It couldn’t be produced by the economic system. It couldn’t be dictated by a judge.

They knew that the virtue needed for constitutional government, for ordered liberty, would be provided by individuals themselves, with the assistance of what we call the institutions of civil society — beginning with the family, the marriage-based family, and all the other institutions that are influencers and shapers of people.

Our Founders themselves understood their work, their project, as an experiment. And experiments can fail. And they understood that. Republics, after all, had been tried time and time again throughout the course of history; and they had failed, and most societies had given up on them.

This is why Lincoln, in giving his formal explanation for why he didn’t simply let the South go, famously said that, what is at issue in this contest is not simply whether republican government would last on the North American continent. No, he said, what is at stake is whether government of the people, by the people, and for the people — republican government — would perish from the Earth.

Because if it were tried, and then failed within less than a century, the lesson for all of humanity, at least for the indefinite future, would be that republican freedom simply doesn’t work. We have to go with another theory: some kind of benign authoritarianism is the best that we can do.

Robert P. George

And republican government, as I say, requires a certain kind of virtue in its citizens… The Enlightenment French philosopher Rousseau famously said that, ‘Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.’

Well, is man born free?

There’s a certain profound sense in which we human beings are not born free. We are born into a form of slavery, and the whole project of a life is to liberate oneself from that slavery.

What I have in mind here goes back to a thinker who was not especially friendly to democracy, and depending on how we read his Republic, not especially friendly to freedom. But Plato had something important to say about character and character-formation: that the project of a human life is overcoming what is perhaps the most abject form of slavery — the slavery to one’s own desires, the slavery to one’s self.

As Plato himself put it, the goal is to achieve a proper order in the soul so that the rational element of the self has control over the appetitive element. A good life, in this framework, is one in which wisdom has the whip hand, harnessing reason to bridle desire and control the big I-want.

And our parents, and our religious institutions, and our schools (when they are healthy) are all about the business of soul-shaping. The goal of those institutions is getting the little baby, who is all absorbed in want satisfaction, to grow to be a responsible human being who is master of himself, who has control over his own desires. And when that works, then you have got human beings who are fit for freedom in the full political sense, who can be entrusted to be the guardians of their own liberty, who can be entrusted with republican government, who have the virtues that are necessary for ordered liberty.”

Charles Krauthammer’s response:

“I appreciate what Robbie is saying about the necessity of virtue. But to me, the lesson of the American experiment is precisely the opposite.

The Declaration does not speak about the pursuit of virtue or the exercise of reason. It speaks about the pursuit of happiness.

The premise of our republic is that we would have an economic system based on, essentially, capitalism, as described by Adam Smith, where everybody is pursuing their own ends but the invisible hand works it out. And Madison translated that into a political free market, where he said that the greatest guarantee of liberty would be the multiplication of factions, all of whom will be acting in their own narrow self-interests. And if you could construct a system in which the factions would compete against each other, and prevent coalitions of a majority that would crush the other side, you could then have the same kind of invisible hand working itself out.

So I would say, unlike a lot of other political systems, which are based on the notion of the virtue of the individual, the American system is constructed in a way that it requires it the least. In fact, to me the American system was and is the most realistic in understanding the fallen condition of the human being and expecting very little of the individual, but understanding that if you can construct the system — which they did ex nihilo, and it has endured for a quarter of a millennium — you don’t have to rely on virtue of the individual, because if you did, no republic would ever be possible.”

Charles Krauthammer

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My transcription of an exchange between Charles Krauthammer and Princeton law professor Robert P. George on the subject of what was the American founders’ conception of human nature.

Pick up good works from both: George’s Conjugal Union: What Marriage Is and Why It Matters and Krauthammer’s Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics.

This conversation took place in June, at the 2013 Bradley Symposium in Washington, DC. The question considered and debated by the various speakers and panelists was “Are We Freer Than We Were Ten Years Ago?”; Krauthammer, who gave the event’s keynote address, supplied his answer in the form of an autopsy of the GOP’s 2012 bid for the White House. His comments were refreshingly even-handed yet searingly critical of the Right. Although I often disagree with him, Krauthammer has a seriousness, a knack for self-criticism, and an understanding of political philosophy that make him worth listening to each time you hear his papery and discerning voice.

I plan on posting and writing more about his Bradley talk and exchange with George in the future.

In the meantime, read an anecdote Krauthammer cited in his speech, about Winston Churchill talking political philosophy in the restroom. Then check out Ronald Reagan’s letter about what the founders meant to him, or read Mark Leibovich’s recent interview about how their vision has been corrupted by today’s Washington:

Winston Churchill

Churchill in the Restroom

Ronald Reagan

The American Founding according to Reagan

Mark LeibovichA Political Culture that Rewards Cowardice

The Fourth of July According to Ronald Reagan

04 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by in Freedom, Political Philosophy, Politics

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Ronald Reagan

In 1981, during his first year in office, Parade magazine asked President Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) to write something for them about what Independence Day meant to him. This submission was written by Reagan himself, and in his own hand. It shows his special finesse in locating himself emotionally among the people while also speaking without embarrassment about human greatness and without irony about high principles.

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For one who was born and grew up in the small towns of the Midwest, there is a special kind of nostalgia about the Fourth of July.

I remember it as a day almost as long-anticipated as Christmas. This was helped along by the appearance in store windows of all kinds of fireworks and colorful posters advertising them with vivid pictures.

No later than the third of July—sometimes earlier—Dad would bring home what he felt he could afford to see go up in smoke and flame. We’d count and recount the number of firecrackers, display pieces and other things and go to bed determined to be up with the sun so as to offer the first, thunderous notice of the Fourth of July.

I’m afraid we didn’t give too much thought to the meaning of the day. And, yes, there were tragic accidents to mar it, resulting from careless handling of the fireworks. I’m sure we’re better off today with fireworks largely handled by professionals. Yet there was a thrill never to be forgotten in seeing a tin can blown 30 feet in the air by a giant “cracker”—giant meaning it was about 4 inches long.

But enough of nostalgia. Somewhere in our growing up we began to be aware of the meaning of the day, and with that awareness came the birth of patriotism. July Fourth is the birthday of our nation. I believed as a boy, and believe even more today, that it is the birthday of the greatest nation on earth.

There is a legend about the day of our nation’s birth in the little hall in Philadelphia, a day on which debate had raged for hours. The men gathered there were honorable men hard-pressed by a king who had flouted the very laws they were willing to obey. Even so, to sign the Declaration of Independence was such an irretrievable act that the walls resounded with the words “treason, the gallows, the headsman’s ax,” and the issue remained in doubt.

The legend says that at that point a man rose and spoke. He is described as not a young man, but one who had to summon all his energy for an impassioned plea. He cited the grievances that had brought them to this moment and finally, his voice falling, he said, “They may turn every tree into a gallows, every hole into a grave, and yet the words of that parchment can never die. To the mechanic in the workshop, they will speak hope; to the slave in the mines, freedom. Sign that parchment. Sign if the next moment the noose is around your neck, for that parchment will be the textbook of freedom, the Bible of the rights of man forever.”

He fell back exhausted. The 56 delegates, swept up by his eloquence, rushed forward and signed that document destined to be as immortal as a work of man can be. When they turned to thank him for his timely oratory, he was not to be found, nor could any be found who knew who he was or how he had come in or gone out through the locked and guarded doors.

Well, that is the legend—but we do know for certain that 56 men, a little band so unique we have never seen their like since, had pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.

What manner of men were they? Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists, 11 were merchants and tradesmen, and nine were farmers. They were soft-spoken men of means and education; they were not an unwashed rabble. They had achieved security but valued freedom more. Their stories have not been told nearly enough.

John Hart was driven from the side of his desperately ill wife. For more than a year, he lived in the forest and in caves before he returned to find his wife dead, his children vanished, his property destroyed. He died of exhaustion and a broken heart.

Carter Braxton of Virginia lost all his ships, sold his home to pay his debts, and died in rags. And so it was with Ellery, Clymer, Hall, Walton, Gwinnett, Rutledge, Morris, Livingston, and Middleton.1

Nelson personally urged Washington to fire on his home and destroy it when it became the headquarters for General Cornwallis. Nelson died bankrupt.

But they sired a nation that grew from sea to shining sea. Five million farms, quiet villages, cities that never sleep, 3 million square miles of forest, field, mountain and desert, 227 million people with a pedigree that includes the bloodlines of all the world.

In recent years, however, I’ve come to think of that day as more than just the birthday of a nation. It also commemorates the only true philosophical revolution in all history.

Oh, there have been revolutions before and since ours. But those revolutions simply exchanged one set of rules for another. Ours was a revolution that changed the very concept of government.

Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people.

We sometimes forget that great truth, and we never should.

Happy Fourth of July.

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The above description says it all: The Fourth of July according to Ronald Reagan.

Ronald-Reagan-California-Ranch-1965 Ronald Reagan