Reagan the infallible

Ronald Reagan was born ninety-eight years ago today. To mark the occasion, AEI hosted a panel discussion on Reagan’s legacy, with Newt Gingrich serving as moderator. FYI, we’re doing our own Reagan symposium here at Doublethink, which begins today with an essay by James Poulos.

I’m also part of the symposium; my column goes up on Monday. I chose to write about how we can learn from Reagan’s mistakes. I chose that topic because I’m concerned that conservatives are being seduced by their own mythologizing of Reagan’s legacy. That mythology is so seductive because Reagan did accomplish extraordinary things. It is also seductive because conservatives are in desperate need of a role model in the aftermath of the Bush presidency. In addition, Democrats have little to no interest in challenging the Reagan mythology, because the political pay-off would be so slight compared to the value of attacking Bush.

I went to the AEI panel today concerned that two-plus hours would be spent singing the great man’s praises. It was. There was one reference in passing to Reagan having (unspecified) flaws and one observation that Reagan delegated considerably authority to his staff, some of whom were incompetent. I tried to steer the discussion toward Reagan’s errors by asking the second question in the Q&A period. I observed that some of the panelists had suggested that President Obama could learn from Reagan’s example of bipartisanship and other virtues. By the same token, are there mistakes that Reagan made that Obama would be wise to avoid?

To my surprise, the next ten minutes were spent discussing everything that Obama has done wrong in his two weeks as president. The closest thing I got to a direct answer was from Sam Donaldson, who said that of course Reagan made mistakes, but that they paled in comparison to his extraordinary achievements. I think that’s a little bit like saying that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had flaws, but they paled in comparison to their achievements. It may be true, but you can’t really understand American history without knowing why Adams and Jefferson were fierce rivals who considered each other deeply flawed.

I think one of the reasons I’m so much more willing to criticize Reagan is a generation gap. The panelists were all veterans of Washington’s political warfare in the Reagan era. They all know first hand how viciously Reagan was criticized by his adversaries, both politicians and journalists. Then came the great moment of vindication, when the Cold War came to a sudden end on exactly the terms Reagan wanted. Since then, conservative authors have been working aggressively to erase negative stereotypes about Reagan, most notably that he was an “amiable dunce” who deserves no credit for anything that happened on his watch.

These “Reagan revisionists” have performed an essential service, especially by collecting and publishing Reagan’s hand-written manuscripts, which demonstrate clearly that he was a man of ideas. Now Reagan’s legacy secure. It is precisely for this reason that we should now approach Reagan as we would any other giant of American history, learning from both his successes and his failures.