The Gipper. The Great Communicator. The Teflon President. Bonzo. The epithets for Ronald Reagan came and went, and some of them stuck. But in the decade and a half between the end of his presidency and his final, quiet withdrawal from life's stage, something more solid than the epithets began to define him, something resembling a verdict of history. And if not quite a verdict, it is at least a provisional consensus, often taking the form of a question: Was Ronald Reagan the great hedgehog of 20th-century politics--a president who achieved so much because of his single-minded devotion to one idea?
[See photos of Ronald Reagan's life.]
The Greek poet Archilochus said it first: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Yet it was philosopher Isaiah Berlin's 1953 essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox, that gave the metaphor its modern currency and deeper meaning. Berlin suggested that writers and thinkers, and possibly all human beings, could be separated into two broad groups: those who are absorbed with one all-consuming vision (hedgehogs) and those who pursue many disparate ends (foxes). Plato and Dante were hedgehogs, Berlin suggested, while Aristotle and Shakespeare were foxes. It requires little guessing to say how Berlin would have labeled the 40th president: Reagan's devotion to the principles of liberty and freedom--and his equally firm and optimistic belief that America, the shining "city upon a hill," was the best hope for the preservation and extension of those ideals--would make him the consummate political hedgehog.
But was Reagan's fealty to his ideals the driving force that revitalized the economy and morale of a nation adrift? Was it the crucial factor in bringing about the collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War? Or is the hedgehog comparison simply a distraction, an accolade bestowed by admirers upon a spectacularly lucky ideologue whose penchant for blending fantasy with reality happened to coincide with momentous changes in American and global politics? Answering those questions seems a necessary step toward seeing where Reagan may stand in the more distant judgments of history.
It is not surprising that admirers, including most Republicans, tend toward the former interpretation, while most critics, including a goodly number of Democrats, lean toward the latter. What is surprising, though, is how many of the critically inclined have slowly drifted toward the more positive assessment. One survey of presidential rankings among a select group of academic historians and political scientists (a generally liberal-leaning cohort) shows Reagan going from No. 22 in the year after he left office to No. 16 in 2002. Even more favorably, a 2000 C-SPAN poll of historians and biographers put Reagan at No. 11. Presidential historian Richard Reeves, now working on a biography of Reagan, considers himself a critic of the 40th president. But, as he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer last week, after conducting hundreds of interviews with both Reagan's allies and his foes, "it's pretty hard not to conclude . . . that whether or not he was a great president, Ronald Reagan was a great man, in the sense that he changed the way people thought."
Judging by the nonstop lovefest put on by the mainstream electronic and print media during the week after Reagan's death, it's also hard not to conclude that journalists are another largely liberal cohort that has been won over to the positive assessment. To be sure, there have been the almost obligatory mentions of failings, misdeeds, and controversies--above all, the Iran-contra scandal and Reagan's initial denial of wrongdoing. There have also been reminders of the inattention to the spreading AIDS epidemic, the widening economic inequalities that accompanied the go-go boom of the 1980s, and, of course, the soaring budget deficit and a near tripling of the national debt. The contradictions have been noted as well, including a federal government that expanded despite Reagan's promise to make it shrink.
But the failings and shortcomings come across, by and large, as blemishes only slightly diminishing the large triumphs--restored national confidence, a nascent industrial and economic boom, and the winning of the Cold War. The voices of the commentariat, liberal as well as conservative, largely opt for a longer and more adulatory view. "Time sifts the petty from the grand," writes liberal commentator Richard Cohen, effectively comparing Reagan's grand accomplishment to Abraham Lincoln's preservation of the Union. And even the blemishes often receive sympathetic revisionist readings. Andrew Sullivan, the gay conservative pundit, notes on his weblog that, after all, "the Reagan presidency spent some $5.7 billion on HIV in its two terms." Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., opining in Time magazine, speculates that Reaganism may be a "transient episode in the stream of American history." But an equally liberal stalwart, Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, sees something more consequential in Reagan's ability "to steal the optimism associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt from the Democratic Party."
Yet perhaps more surprising than the expanding positive consensus is the way longtime Reagan partisans and admirers have come to more fully appreciate the complexity--and even, in some ways, the pragmatic foxiness--of their beloved hedgehog. After all, many conservatives, particularly of the brainy variety, once privately shared the perplexity and wonder of former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, who said confidentially of his boss, "He knows so little but accomplishes so much." It could be said that such admirers have tended to underestimate the hedgehog species in general, as Berlin himself did. Most intellectuals, policy wonks included, instinctively favor foxes: They value flexibility, adaptiveness, quickness, pragmatism, the "modern" intellectual virtues. But in truth, great hedgehogs may simply be wilier than most foxlike intellectuals give them credit for.
Scholarly reconsiderations of Reagan's career have begun to reveal how wily and original a thinker he was, particularly when it came to the Cold War struggle against communism. Peter Schweizer, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and author of the 2002 book Reagan's War, is one of many analysts who assail the notion that Reagan was a Hollywood-groomed mouthpiece for right-wing ideologues and string-pullers. Long before he reached the White House, Reagan began to map out a strategy that went beyond all previous thinking about containment of the Soviet Union. "Containment was strategically a defensive, or reactive, doctrine," says Schweizer. "What Reagan did was to take the offensive."
Scholars do not deny the enormous importance of the resistance movements in Eastern Europe to the eventual demise of the Soviet empire. Reagan himself paid homage to Poland's Solidarity and other similar efforts behind the Iron Curtain. But, says Schweizer, "People who try to make the case that the Soviet Union would have collapsed on its own ignore the fact that since 1917 it had always managed, by hook or by crook, to get breaks from the West that allowed it to sustain itself." That was particularly true of the detente policies of the 1970s, but Reagan's offensive on three broad fronts--political, economic, and military--radically altered the course. The strong rhetoric denouncing the "evil empire," the arms race and the threat of Star Wars that put added strains on the struggling Soviet economy, and the challenge to Soviet clients in Afghanistan and Central America--all were ways, albeit not equally successful, in which Reagan called the Soviets' bluff.
Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis came to similar conclusions while reviewing scripts from radio broadcasts Reagan made after he left the California governorship in the 1970s. "For years, people have debated who the chief strategist in the Reagan administration was," Gaddis says. "These scripts make it pretty dramatically clear the ideas came from Reagan himself." Gaddis also thinks most people fail to appreciate how Reagan became the only nuclear abolitionist to occupy the White House. "He was a very courageous critic of the conventional wisdom. He wasn't afraid to ask the simple questions: 'Why do we need nuclear weapons in the first place?' or 'Why can't we defend ourselves against them?' Sometimes the grand strategy community can become so sophisticated, so inbred, that they don't ask these questions."
The other quality often underestimated by both his admirers and his critics was his surprising flexibility and pragmatism. This was most striking in the unexpected way he struck up a close personal relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev. But the pragmatic qualities are more broadly apparent in Reagan's domestic and economic agenda. Yes, his central goal of reducing big government went unachieved during his presidency. "He didn't turn back the clock on the welfare state he inherited," says Brown University historian James Patterson, author of America's Struggle Against Poverty in the 20th Century. Even if he had tried to, he could not have overcome entrenched federal bureaucracies or the strong interest groups that supported them. Yet, says Patterson, "Reagan's opposition to big government had a lasting legacy."
Why? At least in part because he didn't squander political capital in trying to achieve the impossible. Nor was he was interested in getting rid of such essential New Deal safety nets as Social Security. Then, in addition to military spending, notes Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman, "there were lots of things he was very much in favor of funding--highways, the space program, law enforcement, border control . . . veterans benefits." For all that, Friedman adds, "we live in a world in which rhetoric matters. And phrases such as 'anti-big government' and 'antispending' have entered the political discussion because of Reagan."
That rhetoric eventually had real consequences, says Chester Pach, a historian at Ohio University who is working on a biography of Reagan. "Who is it that said the era of big government is over? Who signed welfare reform?" Pach answers his own rhetorical questions: "A Democrat [Bill Clinton]. And I don't think that would have happened without Reagan's changes in our ways of thinking about government."
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But didn't huge deficits and mounting national debt stifle the entrepreneurial energies that Reagan wanted to set loose? This is one of the more contested points in debates over Reagan's legacies. Reagan himself tempered his own most ambitious 1981 tax cuts with subsequent fiscal tinkering. Friedman maintains that it took three steps--tax increases and spending cuts pushed through by George Bush in 1990 and by Bill Clinton in 1993 and in 1995--to reduce the Reagan-era deficits, which he charges "caused a decline in investment in plant and equipment." But that view minimizes the offsetting effect of foreign capital that came into the United States and fueled a surge in private investment beginning in the Reagan years. It also gives little credit to the energies unleashed by Reagan's continuation and expansion of the deregulation launched by President Jimmy Carter. And it ignores the impact, for better or worse, of what Princeton labor economist Alan Krueger calls "a watershed event": the firing of 13,000 striking air-traffic controllers. After the president showed that he would defy a union, Krueger says, strikes "plummeted and never recovered."
Perhaps most astonishing is how little attention has been given to possibly the greatest economic turnabout of the Reagan era: the subduing of double-digit inflation. Economics columnist Robert Samuelson attributes the relative silence on that point to the fact that it had little to do with Reagan's trademark (though largely unfulfilled) pledges to cut government and restrain government spending. The Federal Reserve's tight-money policies under Chairman Paul Volcker deserve most credit for taming inflation. But, as Samuelson notes, amid widespread criticism of the Fed, Reagan remained a firm supporter of Volcker's unpopular policy. And that constancy paid off.
In the end, though, as many have said, Reagonomics was more complex than supply-side economics. It had more to do with the general spirit of optimism he encouraged than with any particular policy he pushed. For one thing, he reminded Americans that what went on in Washington should not be thought of as the major force in the nation's economic life. And it was not just in the realm of economics that he injected new attitudes and ways of thinking, or maybe restored older ones. "Reagan," says Pach, "gave voice and legitimacy and recognition to a lot of constituencies that had concerns about sexual promiscuity and declining moral values. He helped change our perception of the use of drugs and what to do about it. By embracing such causes, Reagan gave them a centrality--and he helped change the national debate."
How transformative a president was he? According to Edward Berkowitz, a historian at George Washington University, Reagan ranks high. "Next to Roosevelt, he really is the key president of the 20th century," Berkowitz says. "Roosevelt helped set up this New Deal-activist mode of government. Reagan created a post-New Deal government, which we in fact have today." Columbia historian Alan Brinkley modifies that judgment in a way that probably brings it closer to the current consensus. He believes that what Reagan did to change the political landscape--"how people thought about politics, how parties were organized, how the electorate behaved" --puts him in a category with FDR. "But in terms of actually changing what government does," says Brinkley, "I don't think he was nearly as influential."
That might be the greatest semi-backhanded compliment anyone could pay to Reagan. The Great Communicator himself wanted to be remembered above all for restoring Amercans' confidence in themselves and their exceptionalist destiny. Changing the nitty-gritty practices of government is the work of detail foxes. Reagan, the hedgehog, led and inspired a movement--a new conservatism that, over time, has fostered a humbler, more constrained vision of what government can and should do. If what Reagan achieved in America was not a revolution as dramatic and sudden as the one he helped bring about in the old Soviet empire, it was a new direction whose possibilities and limits still lie before us.
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