The Great Communicator: The Political Rhetoric of Ronald Reagan (Part 2)

No objective was more important to President Reagan than ending the Cold War, peacefully. Based on the daily intelligence reports that he received as well as his intuition, he concluded that communism was cracking and ready to crumble. Reagan noted particularly the economic problems the Soviets were experiencing, but his interests went beyond the economic. “What are the Soviets saying about the Pope in Warsaw?” he asked his national security adviser. “What is Leonid Brezhnev thinking about Europe? How are they dealing with their losses in Afghanistan?”

The president first went public with his prognosis of the Soviet Union’s systemic weakness at his alma mater, Eureka College, in May 1982, declaring that the Soviet empire was “faltering because rigid centralized control has destroyed incentives for innovation, efficiency and individual achievement.” One month later, in a prophetic address to the British Parliament at Westminster, Reagan said that the Soviet Union was gripped by a “great revolutionary crisis” and that a “global campaign for freedom” would ultimately prevail.

In one of the most memorable statements of his presidency, Reagan predicted that “the march of freedom and democracy…will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.” The president deliberately used the phrase “ash heap of history,” knowing that a similar phrase, “the dust bin of history,” had been used in 1917 by Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik revolutionary.

The New York Times ignored the irony, preferring to dismiss the Westminster speech as an appeal to “flower power.” But when the Berlin Wall fell seven years later, followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union two years later, Reagan’s prediction and his phrase “the ash heap of history” were frequently recalled. In summing up his presidency, following his death in 2004, the media split between anchors like ABC’s Peter Jennings, who said that “a great many people thought he’d made the wealthy wealthier and had not improved life particularly for the middle class;” and reporters like the Washington Post’s David Von Drehle, who said Reagan was one of the three greatest presidential communicators—“Abraham Lincoln, master of the written speech; Roosevelt, master of the radio address; and Reagan, master of television.” “The greatness of Reagan,” wrote Lou Cannon, one of the president’s earliest and most perceptive biographers, “was not that he was in America, but that America was in him.”

Tearing Down the Wall

The extraordinary power of words is demonstrated by the most often quoted sentence of the Reagan presidency—“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” It was delivered in front of the Brandenberg Gate in June 1987 over the vehement objections of the State Department, the National Security Council and every other advocate of detente fearful of offending the Soviet Union.

Speechwriter Peter Robinson has documented the intense struggle between the president and the establishment over six little words.

As the drafts were being vetted by numerous agencies and departments, Robinson asked Reagan if there was anything in particular that he would like to say to people on “the other side” of the Berlin Wall. The president replied: “There’s that passage about tearing down the wall. That wall has to come down. That’s what I’d like to say to them.” Reagan was repeating a sentiment he had held for two decades. In a May 1967 televised debate with Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Governor Reagan said, “I think it would be very admirable if the Berlin Wall . . . should disappear.” On a 1978 visit to West Europe, arranged by his future national security adviser Richard Allen, Reagan had come to Berlin and stood before the Berlin Wall. He reached out and touched the wall, then turned to Allen and said simply, “This wall should be torn down.”

It turned out that neither the State Department nor the NSC was against a reference to the wall as long as the language was something like, “One day, this ugly wall will disappear.” They did not want a direct challenge to the Soviet Union, and they emphatically did not want the challenge directed at Gorbachev. Among those who objected were Secretary of State George Shultz, deputy national security adviser Colin Powell, and a host of other but vocal foreign policy advisers.

Before Reagan flew to Europe he met with deputy chief of state Kenneth Duberstein who briefed him once again on Shultz’s objections to the line as “being too tough on Gorbachev.” Duberstein said, “You’re president so you get to decide.” A smiling president replied, “Let’s leave it in.” The morning of the speech in Berlin, State and the NSC again submitted an alternative draft without the controversial line. Reagan held firm. “The boys at State are going to kill me, but it’s the right thing to do.”

Peter Robinson, a White House speechwriter for six years, compared the Reagan sound that June day to that of a trumpet: “Until he became President, Ronald Reagan wrote most of his own speeches, developing his own distinctive voice or sound. Simplicity, directness, the diction of ordinary American speech, a certain sense of energy—all contributed to the Reagan sound. But the dominant element, the feature that gave Reagan’s speeches their trumpet-like quality was his insistence on telling the truth.” And the truth about the Berlin Wall was that it was one of the first walls in history built to keep people in rather than out.

A Time for Choosing

Ronald Reagan’s most famous non-presidential speech is “A Time for Choosing,” a half-hour television talk delivered on behalf of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, on October 27, 1964, in the last week of a campaign doomed to defeat. It is Reagan’s work from beginning to end: He researched it, he wrote it, and he delivered it without the help of a TelePrompter or a manuscript, relying on a packet of 4 x 6 inch note cards on which he had written, in his own shorthand, phrases, quotes and statistics. Some have called it his “Gettysburg Address.”

In it, he addresses a critically important event—the presidential election before the electorate. The “choice” before the American people, Reagan began, is between two starkly different visions of America and the kind of government we should have. One side says “you never had it so good” and the nation is at peace. But do they really mean peace or do “they mean we just want to be left in peace” he asked? There can be no real peace, he said, when “we’re at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars.”

If we lose our freedom, Reagan said, history will record with the greatest astonishment that “those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.” He sharpened the differences between the two sides and the importance of the choice. It’s time, he said, to ask ourselves “if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the founding fathers.” Those freedoms, he said, are based on one idea: “That government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.” The choice before the people, Reagan stated, was simple: “Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.” Any conservative would be hard pressed to present a more concise argument against the progressive paradigm.

Up or Down?

Next, Reagan addressed and rejected the liberal argument that “we have to choose between a left or right.” “There is no such thing as left or right,” he argued. “There’s only an up or down, up to man’s age-old dream of individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.”

He quoted liberal Democratic voices like those of Senator J. William Fulbright, who said that the Constitution was “outmoded,” and Senator Joseph Clark, who defined liberalism as “meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government.” He responded that he resented it when a representative of the people referred “to you and me, the free men and women of this country, as ‘the masses.’” As for the “full power of centralized government,” that was exactly what the Founding Fathers sought to minimize because they knew that “a government can’t control the economy without controlling people.”

He proceeded to give a number of examples where government had tried and failed to solve problems such as farming, public housing, unemployment, poverty, and juvenile delinquency. He often used humor to expose the failed policies of the other side: “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”

Addressing several key issues, Reagan suggested common sense solutions, like introducing voluntary features in Social Security and stopping foreign aid that is used to buy “dress suits for Greek undertakers [and] extra wives for Kenyan government officials.” From the beginning to the end of his speech, his primary target was the ever increasing size of government. “Actually,” he said, “a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”

Responding to partisan charges that Barry Goldwater was “brash, shallow and trigger-happy,” he described how Goldwater initiated profit-sharing plan for employees, flew medicine and supplies to storm-isolated Mexicans, took time out in the middle of the campaign to visit an old friend dying of cancer. He quoted the Socialist candidate Norman Thomas as saying: “If Barry Goldwater became President, he would stop the advance of socialism in the United States.” Reagan provided a perfect riposte: “I think that’s exactly what he will do.”

He concluded by laying out the most important choice of all—peace through strength or peace through appeasement. Conceding there was a risk in standing firm, Reagan declared that “you and I do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery.” Borrowing from Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lincoln, Reagan said, “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll silence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.” And then he finished with a message of hope and optimism, looking into the camera and saying, “You and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny.”

“A Time for Choosing” was described by political analysts David Broder and Stephen Hess as “the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic convention.” It immediately brought in $1 million in contributions and another $7 million in the remaining week of the campaign. It shifted tens of thousands of votes; Goldwater gained several percentage points following the Reagan telecast. California Republican Henry Salvatori said that he and other conservative leaders would not have approached Reagan to run for governor of California in 1966 had it had not been for his TV talk.

“We the People”

In his 1989 farewell address, echoing “A Time for Choosing,” President Reagan acknowledged the central role of the American Revolution in our history. He said: “Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government and with three little words, “‘We the people.’” “‘ We the people,” he said, “tell the government what to do, it doesn’t tell us.” The idea of “we the people” was the underlying basis for everything he had tried to do as president.

He ended the address—it was his thirty-fourth talk from the Oval Office—by referring to America as “the shining city on a hill,” a phrase he borrowed from the Pilgrim leader John Winthrop and subtly strengthened, adding the word, “shining.” The link to that first city on a hill—Jerusalem—was deliberate on the part of Winthrop and Reagan as well.

Intent, as he had been throughout his presidency, on lifting the spirits of those watching, the president asked:

And how stands the city on this winter night?. . . . After two hundred years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite edge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet, for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who hurtling through the darkness, toward home.

Then he shifted from soaring rhetoric to a tone of quiet confidence, reassuring the men and women of the “Reagan revolution,” that they had made a difference. They had made the city stronger and freer and had left her in good hands. “All in all,” said the president, with just the suggestion of a twinkle in his eye, “not bad, not bad at all.”

Those were Ronald Reagan’s last public words as the fortieth president of the United States, confident, optimistic, humble, reflective of the indomitable American spirit.

Photo courtesy of City of Boston Archives, uploaded August 15, 2013.