Reappraisal

There are presidents who serve out their terms and vanish from history, leaving no stain or mark on the path their nations took on the way to the future.

And there are great presidents whose full import is measured only after some time has passed, when their countrymen look back at the road taken and realize how dramatically the course was transformed by a leader with a vision. Ronald Reagan, on reappraisal, was a great president.

I did not intend to write about Ronald Reagan’s death. Like most of us in this forsaken country, I was focused on the appallingly slow canvass the Congress was performing.

That slow count is made even more appalling by the fact that the politicians in charge of it actually work short hours and observe weekend breaks even as the country teeters on the brink of a constitutional crisis.

I was initially inclined to propose that the joint session of Congress be locked up in a conclave, fed crackers and water, until the count is done.

Jerry Barican, among whose lesser known virtues is that he is a self-taught scholar of sorts on Church history, educated me last week about the origins of the practice of locking up cardinals in a conclave to choose a new pope. That practice began a few centuries ago after it took three years to elect a new pope because of intense politicking between the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and the French king.

If we do the same with our senators and congressmen, they will soon tire of each other and decide that proclaiming a new president might be worthwhile.

But that stupid canvass is of no historical value. At some point, the politicians of the opposition will tire of their own idiocy and yield to the necessary proclamation of the president and vice president.

Ronald Reagan, by contrast, is of great historical significance. He, along with his contemporaries in leadership Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev, composed a triumvirate that changed the world.

The local editorials I read the past week took a narrow, extremely parochial view of the man, seeing him simply as a friend of Ferdinand Marcos and the man for whom the "Palace in the Sky" was built. That was disappointing.

All the eulogies delivered for Reagan’s funeral and the analyses put out by the more analytical publications have brought forth a serious reconsideration of recent history and Reagan’s key role in shaping the dramatic events of his time.

I was a student in France when Reagan was elected president. That was not the best vantage point for properly appreciating the role he was to play. It led me to nurse, for too long, a jaundiced view of the man.

I remember the day he was sworn into office a small riot erupted at a university cafeteria in Paris where I was having lunch. The riot broke out after Arab and French students began jeering a group of American students over the fact that the greatest nation of the world elected a grade-B actor to be its leader.

The American students, I suspect, were Democrats by and large. But their patriotism did not allow them to suffer the jeering lightly. They stood up for their president.

The heroism of that small band of expatriate American students impressed me only much later. I was nourished in a nationalist tradition that defined itself by its reflex anti-Americanism. Because of that, I instinctively aligned myself with the Arab and European hooligans who held, as history bears out, a serious misunderstanding of the man. Because of that, too, I did not properly appreciate the patriotism of average Americans.

Ronald Reagan clung to a vision that might not have been fashionable to the intelligentsia, especially the left-of-center variety that dominated the journals and academe during the seventies. But that was a vision that, on hindsight, proved revolutionary in a world burdened by the orthodoxy that nations can only be saved by the superior wisdom of large bureaucracies.

When he assumed the presidency of the US, Reagan faced a country that was demoralized. Its stock market was shrinking, its unemployment rising, its inner cities rotting its factories increasingly idled by obsolescence.

When he left the presidency, the unemployment rate was cut in half. The capital market grew by over 140 percent . The US returned to its role as the engine of global growth.

Too, when he assumed the presidency of the world’s largest economy, the Cold War seemed to be the encompassing logic of global affairs. When he left office, the Soviet Union (which Reagan called an "Evil Empire") was breaking up. Communism was discredited, especially among the populations put under the thumb of this obsolete ideology. The Cold War was over.

What was unthinkable that cold winter day in 1980 in some insignificant university cafeteria in Paris soon happened in quick succession. The Berlin Wall was torn down. The Soviet Union broke up. The Eastern European countries joined NATO. The European Community, today, encompasses all Europeans.

True, Reagan did not, by himself, cause the dramatic turn of modern history. But his contribution has been fashionably understated.

A few weeks ago, I received, quite fortuitously, the book Reagan in His Own Hand. I was initially amazed by the fact that Reagan actually did a lot of writing and owned so much of what he said. Browsing through it, I was more profoundly amazed by the prescience of his thought, the clarity of his own personal vision.

That was a vision sustained by Reagan’s sterling character and engaging personality. Those virtues made him an effective leader to his people and a diplomat to the rest of the world.

In eulogies, it was correctly said that this unique individual was capable of engaging adversaries without making them enemies. He was a man who not only understood the job of the presidency, but more important understood the role of the president.

This man left the world a better place than when he found it. There were contingencies he bowed to, policies that might have to be argued long into the future. But they cannot be more important than the revolution he led in his country, as his contemporaries Thatcher and Gorbachev led in theirs.

Reagan was an actor. But he also prepared extensively to be a statesman. He ended up a great president.

We, too, elected an actor to the presidency once. But I will not even begin drawing a comparison.