H.W. Brands, Historian, author and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. chair in history at the University of Texas, Austin
Landon Lecture
April 7, 2016
Reagan brought parties together
Thank you, President Schulz, for that kind introduction. I'm delighted to be back at Kansas State and to have an opportunity to speak in the Landon Lecture Series. I was looking down the list of previous speakers and I'm quite flattered to be part of this group.
I do teach American history and I do try to teach using stories. I'm going to talk to you about what I have learned about the American presidency and about American history, but I'm going to start with a story. This is a story that Ronald Reagan used to tell about himself. And it's a story that is set somewhere in the Midwest in an unidentified small town. A lot of Reagan's stories took place in these small towns. I think Reagan did this partly because he was the product of a small town in Illinois — Dixon, Illinois, is where he grew up — but also because he understood that if you want to speak to the largest body of Americans, you should probably set it not in a big city somewhere, even though most Americans live in cities. And you should not set it on one of the coasts even though most Americans live on one of the coasts. You should put it in the Midwest because that seems to be the heartland of America.
So this story is set in some small town in the Midwest. It's a story that takes place at a moment of Reagan's life and career when things were not going very well. It's set in the late 1950s to the early 1960s. Ronald Reagan had been a film actor but his film career had ended. He discovered in the late 1940s that he couldn't get any good roles. He had gone into the politics of the film industry, becoming president of the Screen Actors Guild. But even that gig ended and he basically got fired from his job as a film actor. In a sense he got fired; nobody wanted to make movies with him anymore. So he got demoted from the big screen of film to the small screen — the tiny screen in those days—of television.
Now Reagan liked to spin things in the most positive way possible, but he understood that things were not going well. In fact, when I say he got demoted to the small screen, his TV appearances lasted all of about three minutes once a week. He was host of the "General Electric Theater." These were plays made for television. Reagan didn't even get a part in the plays; he just introduced the plays and then he was gone. The rest of the time — the rest of his workweek — he traveled the country speaking on behalf of the General Electric Co. Actually, more precisely, speaking on behalf of G.E. management. He'd gone from films to public relations. He was a flak for G.E. management. This was not what he had envisioned when he was a kid growing up in Dixon, Illinois, watching the movies on the screen up there and imagining that could be him. He'd had his shot and he'd gotten some parts, but he just didn't have it in him to be an A-list actor. So now he is trying to figure out what to make of being a spokesman for G.E. People around the country — if they ever knew who he was — they've pretty much forgotten him, as exemplified by this story.
So the story goes that Reagan is about to give a talk in this small town. It's a lunchtime talk and he's going to be speaking to — it could have been the Chamber of Commerce or the Rotary Club or some group like that. The guy who was going to introduce him is shown the program. Here's the program, and the speaker is this guy named Ronald R-E-A-G-A-N. And the guy does not know how to pronounce the last name. Is it "Ragan" or is it "Regan?" It could quite possibly be either one, and this guy simply does not know. Now he's a polite fellow, a sensitive guy. He doesn't want to embarrass the guest by mispronouncing his name. So he doesn't — so what is he going to do?
Now I tell this story to my students. In this day of ubiquitous information and the internet and YouTube and everything else, it would be no problem. But I point out to them there was a time when those did not exist, believe it or not. So this guy in his quandary — again, in this small town — and he goes out for a walk just a couple hours before the lunch. He's walking around and he's thinking really hard, "What am I going to do?" Because as I say, he doesn't want to embarrass himself, he doesn't want to embarrass the guest. While he's walking along like this, he bumps into a friend, a neighbor. Well, actually he bumps into the neighbor's dog, because he's walking with his head down and he almost trips over the dog.
The neighbor says, "Gee, you look like you're deep in thought. You look like you're having problems. Is everything OK?" And the guy starts to explain his dilemma. He starts talking and then just reaches in his pocket and he pulls out the program and he hands it to the guy, this fellow walking the dog, and he says, "Do you know how to pronounce this guy's name? Do you know who he is?"
The guy looks at it and says, "Oh yeah, he used to be a movie actor. I don't know what he's doing now, but it's ‘Ragan,' Ronald ‘Ragan.'"
The guy who's going to introduce him says, "Really? Are you sure?"
"Oh yeah, it's 'Ragan.' If you say 'Ragan' you'll be fine."
So the guy starts walking off and says, "Oh boy, thanks! 'Ragan, Ragan, Ragan.'" And he again trips over the dog. He says to the guy, "Oh, by the way, that's a cute dog you've got there. What kind of dog is it?
"A bagel."
OK, now I want you to just try to hold in your memory that ripple of laughter that went around. I told this for a particular reason and I'll come back and explain what the reason is. It's not just to start with a joke. Actually, that is part of the reason — but there's a reason for that reason.
So I wrote this book about Ronald Reagan and as the biographer and as the historian I'm trying to figure this person out. The reason I wrote about Reagan is that he was a very important figure in American public life and in world affairs in the second half of the 20th century. That's the reason I wrote about Reagan. But having made the decision to write about Reagan, I wanted to find out as much as I could about the guy. This is a biography; it's not simply just a study of his presidency. I used to — I sometimes would write books that were simply studies of presidencies, but the more I did it, the more I realized that simply scratched the surface and didn't explain what needed to be explained. What needed to be explained was why these presidents, why these leaders, why individuals do what they do.
Actually, this aspect of it started out years ago. I was going to write a study of the presidency — actually the foreign policy of Theodore Roosevelt. I started studying the foreign policy of Theodore Roosevelt when I realized you can't simply write about the foreign policy of a president without writing about the domestic policies. Because presidents are presidents not simply of foreign affairs, they're presidents of the whole country. Very often what is happening in domestic affairs influences what's happening in foreign affairs and vice versa. So you have to study the whole presidency. But then having gone that far I realized, well you can't just act as though this person was dropped down sort of in the White House on Jan. 20 of his inauguration year as though nothing had happened before. The people who make these decisions are not simply presidents; these are flesh and blood individuals. If you want to understand why they act the way they do, you need to try to understand them as individuals. So this is what really led me to the genre of biography. Eventually I wrote — I'm pleased to say that Reagan's is the final volume — a series of six biographies that covers American history from the 18th century to the present.
But I'm going to focus on Reagan. The question is … well, I faced what has been called the enigma of Ronald Reagan. Now everybody is an enigma and nobody is easy to understand. But I had a suspicion that Reagan wasn't going to be that much harder to understand than other people, despite the reputation that had grown around him. Much of it originated with Reagan's official biographer, a historian and biographer named Edmund Morris, who was given unprecedented access to Reagan while Reagan was in the White House. He finally proclaimed to be so defeated by understanding Reagan that he sort of threw up his hands and instead of writing a biography of Reagan — which is what he had been commissioned to do — he wrote a very odd fictionalized memoir of Reagan where he creates this fictional character who follows Reagan around during his life and is able to report from the side.
A lot of people who were expecting an authoritative account of Reagan's life were disappointed. The people in the Reagan family — the people who knew Reagan, who sat for the interviews with the author — were outraged by this because it seemed essentially an insult. You know, "We gave you all this time and you don't even make this — you don't tell a straight-up account of this individual's life." Morris, he's a wonderful writer, and he professed to be defeated. He said, "Reagan is this enigma; I just can't understand him." Well, I'm going to jump forward a little bit to tell you that there is an enigma about Ronald Reagan, but it's not that one. It's not the enigma of what made Reagan tick. It's the enigma of what made Reagan successful. These are two rather different things.
Now I'm going to tell you that I think I know what made Reagan tick. You can decide for yourselves whether you think I'm right, because one of the things that I have learned in the 35 or 40 years of teaching history and writing history, is that one's interpretation of history depends as much on one's view of human nature as it does on any particular set of facts — especially when you get to these questions of why do people do what they do. I can sort of point out the circumstances, the alternative, the decision points in all of this, but when you get down to the question, "So why did that person do that?" then I can give you my interpretation. But you're free to have your interpretation, which might reflect your own particular view of human nature.
So, I was working on Ronald Reagan — actually I started working on Reagan, as I often do, while my previous book was in the production process. Usually it takes about a year from the time you finish a manuscript of a book to the time it's actually published. So during that year, if you're going to make good use of your time, you start on your next project. So this previous book was on Ulysses Grant and I was doing a book tour to support the book. I was giving an interview to this radio host based in Chicago. So we talked about Ulysses Grant. We had a good interview. At the end of the interview — toward the end of the interview — he did what people often do on these interviews. He said, "So who's your next project?" and I said I'm writing about Ronald Reagan. He put his hand over the microphone and he said, "When we get off the air, there's something I need to tell you." OK, I'm all ears. And I thought, OK this is Illinois and he's of an age where, I don't know, maybe his aunt dated Ronald Reagan and had love letters that no one had seen.
So the interview ends, we go off the air, and I'm waiting. He says, "If you want to understand Ronald Reagan, you need to keep one thing foremost in mind. And that is that Ronald Reagan was the son of an alcoholic father." When he said this, I didn't know how he expected me to respond. I didn't know if he thought that he was giving me information that I didn't have, because I knew that Reagan was the son of an alcoholic father. Reagan wrote two memoirs and in both of them he explains that his father was an alcoholic. So, not knowing quite where he was going with this, I just kept quiet. And he went on to say, "I speak as the son of an alcoholic father." And, he said, "When you grow up in a situation like this, you develop a characteristic emotional approach to the world. You grow up realizing that the person on whom you most want to rely, the one who's supposed to be your emotional pillar of support, the one who you want to model yourself after, is the most unreliable person in the world. And one day you're tossing the ball around in the backyard and he's telling you funny stories, he takes you out for ice cream, and you think he's the greatest guy there is. The next day he's beating the living daylights out of you. When you wake up in the morning, you don't know which of these two you're going to be dealing with, so as a result, you build this wall around yourself. You can be friendly; you can appear extroverted, but there's always this reserve. There's always a part you keep to yourself because you've learned you can't let yourself out there without suffering this kind of pain."
This is what he told me. So I Iistened and I thought, "OK, this is this individual's experience; maybe it will shed some light on Ronald Reagan. I'm not going to take his word for it, but I'm going to be open to the possibility." So I continue my research on Ronald Reagan. I re-read some sources. And there were two personal accounts — two sources — that seemed to corroborate what he said. Two in particular.
One was the memoir of Nancy Reagan. Nancy Reagan — Reagan's second wife — his dearest partner. The one who was sort of the sum of Reagan's emotional world. Reagan was closer to Nancy than he was to anyone else in his life, anyone else on earth. And she reciprocated. They were this wonderful couple. Their marriage is terrific — one of the greatest love stories of American public life in the 20th century, even continuing into the early part of the 21st century.
And Nancy, who always called her husband Ronnie, said that she knew Ronnie better than anyone else on earth. And that is quite true. But she went on to say, "But there were things that even I didn't know. There were times when that wall would come up and I wouldn't know what he was thinking, I wouldn't know what was in his heart. I would simply have to wait until he would let the wall down, let me back in." I thought if Nancy Reagan said that, there's a lot to that. Nancy was insightful. This was her husband. She was closer to him than anyone else. So that was one bit of evidence that seemed to indicate that what the radio host had said might apply to Reagan.
The second bit of evidence came from Reagan's own hand. I was going to say his mouth, but it was actually in his memoir. He tells the story of a moment when he is 11 years old, living in Dixon, Illinois. It's a winter day, it's late afternoon. He's gone to the local YMCA for an after-school event. He comes home, there's snow on the ground, the temperature is below freezing, it's getting dark. He comes off the sidewalk, he turns off the walkway to his house and there is his father, passed out facedown drunk in the snow.
And Reagan remembers this from 70 years later — he's writing this memoir at the age of 80 and he's 11 years old. He remembers — and he says this in the memoir — that "I stood there for a moment and I asked myself should I just walk on by and go on inside?" He entertained the thought. He didn't tease out in the memoir what the consequences of that would be, but it was pretty obvious: That his father would freeze to death in the snow. Now in the next sentence Reagan says, "I decided I ought to pick him up and drag him in." And he does. And it all sort of ends OK. But the fact that seven decades later he remembers stopping and thinking — at the age of 11 — that his life might be better if his father were dead, that's quite an experience for a young boy to have and to carry for the rest of his life.
OK, so on all sorts of evidence, Reagan was this person who was friendly but friendless. Reagan had essentially no friends — close individuals — other than Nancy, in whom he confided his hopes and fears. I exaggerate slightly, but only slightly, when I say that if he hadn't been president of the United States, if he hadn't been this famous public figure, nobody would have come to his funeral except Nancy and probably the kids.
But the fact that he invested himself entirely in Nancy very often left the kids feeling on the outside. But as he grew old and he spent the last 10 years of his life suffering from Alzheimer's, they sort of softened toward their father, so they did show up. But he was this person who seemed friendly from a distance, but the closer you got, the more you realized there was this basic reserve there. You could never get very close, and that's the way he wanted it.
So that's kind of the personal side of Reagan. You can decide for yourself whether you think that explains the Reagan personality, the Reagan temperament. Maybe, maybe not. But that explained it enough for my purposes.
The next question — the other part of the Reagan enigma, as I say — is I think I know what made him tick. The question of what made him successful, that's harder. Because here's this guy — I told you about him addressing this group in some small Midwestern town at a time when his career was going nowhere, where people didn't remember who he was — even those people who knew him from Hollywood saw nothing in Reagan particularly.
In fact, when Reagan did enter politics and announced that he was going to run for governor of California, Samuel Goldwyn of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer said, "No, no. Jimmy Stewart for governor. Ronald Reagan for best friend." So that's how he was viewed. Kind of a lightweight and not somebody sort of up to the political demands of being governor, and then being president and being leader of the free world.
But Reagan became, I would argue, one of the two most consequential presidents of the 20th century. I would say that what Franklin Roosevelt was to the first half of the 20th century for the United States and for the world, Reagan was to the second half of the 20th century. Reagan changed the world.
Reagan changed American domestic politics by turning the conversation in the United States in a conservative direction. From the beginning of the 20th century, and certainly from the New Deal era of Franklin Roosevelt, the trend line in American politics was in a liberal direction, in a direction of greater government involvement in the lives of ordinary Americans.
The New Deal gives rise to the Great Society of the 1960s, and so government becomes larger, government becomes more ambitious. This is because that's what American voters wanted. When American voters re-elected Franklin Roosevelt overwhelmingly in 1936, over — Do you know whom he defeated in 1936? Alf Landon — American voters were saying we want bigger government, we want more ambitious government, we want more energetic government.
But in time Americans changed their minds. When Ronald Reagan was re-elected — when he was elected first in 1980 and then re-elected in 1984 by a comparable margin to that which re-elected Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 — but this time on behalf of a conservative president — it demonstrated that Americans had changed their mind. It also demonstrated that Alf Landon lived half a century too soon.
Anyway, for me the biographer and the student of the presidency, I have to explain how did Reagan accomplish what he accomplished? First, what did he accomplish? He shifted American politics in a conservative direction. I can say that from Franklin Roosevelt until the end of the 1970s, this country lived in what I call the Age of Roosevelt. Again, the liberal tide was flowing. Americans expected more and more out of government. Reagan comes in and says, "No, it's time for a change."
In fact, if you want to distinguish liberals from conservatives in this country on the basic political issues — leave aside socialists because that complicates things. You are a liberal in the United States in the modern era if you believe that government is the solution to important social problems. You are a conservative if you agree with Ronald Reagan in his first inaugural address where he said that government is not the solution, government is the problem. I would argue — I'd suggest — that Reagan accomplished that part of his mission so well that we still largely live in the Age of Reagan.
In the Age of Roosevelt, Americans believed that government could effect positive change in their lives. People had confidence in government. In the Age of Reagan, people have nothing but disdain for government. It's hard to find people almost of either party really — maybe leave aside Bernie Sanders — who think that government really gets stuff done, that government is efficient, that government can be a force for positive change.
Reagan actually dreamed of shrinking government at home. That was a step too far. Americans weren't going to give up Social Security. Reagan had been opposed to Social Security. They weren't going to give up Medicare. Reagan had been opposed to Medicare. He believed in the private route on those issues, but he was also a realist and he recognized that Americans have become used to Social Security, they like Social Security. They have become used to Medicare, they liked Medicare. But from Reagan until now, the growth rate of government slowed dramatically. Simply look at the number of new programs. New federal programs came thick and fast during Franklin Roosevelt's presidency, thicker and faster during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. New federal programs came slowly and painfully from Reagan forward. The best example of slow and painful is the Affordable Care Act, which is still sort of struggling for its existence six years after it was passed. Anyway, so Reagan changes the conversation in America on domestic issues.
In foreign affairs, Reagan changes the face of the international system. Reagan had two goals as president. One was to shrink government at home, the other one was to defeat Communism abroad. And that second was much more radical than is commonly appreciated. From Harry Truman — the president at the onset of the Cold War — through Jimmy Carter — the president just before Ronald Reagan — the basic position of American presidents and of the American national security establishment was that the Soviet Union — Communism — is here to stay and we need simply to deal with it. This was exemplified most clearly by the policy of détente, inaugurated by Richard Nixon in the 1970s. But Reagan said, No, no. We're not going to live with Communism. We're not going to coexist with communists, we're going to defeat Communism."
Now I don't have time to go into how all this happened, and I would be the last person to say that Reagan defeated Communism by himself. One of the secrets of success of a president is living at the right time and having things happen — things fall your way. Ronald Reagan's policy toward the Soviet Union, toward Communism, required Mikhail Gorbachev or somebody like him for it to take effect. Reagan had been trying to engage Soviet leaders in discussions leading toward arms control. But, as he said, they kept dying on him. And then along comes Mikhail Gorbachev who is willing to talk. And they achieve a breakthrough in arms control. But more importantly, Reagan staked the moral position of the United States in a famous speech that he gave in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in 1987, where he stood in front of the Berlin Wall and he challenged Gorbachev. He said, "Mr. Gorbachev, if you are serious about reform come to Berlin. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." This is 1987. Reagan leaves office in 1989. The wall is still standing. In fact, when Reagan uttered those words almost nobody took them seriously. Almost nobody in the obvious positions of authority took them seriously. Gorbachev and the Soviet PR people said, It's just more of the same. What can you expect out of a Hollywood actor?" People in the United States said, "Oh, he's just trying to inflame this. He's trying to distract people from the Iran-Contra scandal that had broken just a few months before and he's flailing. He's in the last two years of his administration."
But there were people who were listening. And those people were the ones on the other side of the Berlin Wall: in East Berlin itself, in East Germany, in Poland. And when they had their opportunity in 1989 to themselves take the physical risk to tear down the wall, they remembered that the president of the United States had staked out this moral position basically saying, "We're on your side." Any number of them who were asked, "So what did you know about this, what were you thinking?" They said, "We remember what President Reagan said and the wall did fall. And a short while later the Soviet Union disintegrated." Reagan was once asked, "So what is your policy toward Communism, toward the Soviets?" He said, "It's simple: We win, they lose." And we won, they lost.
So Reagan had two goals as president. He wanted to shrink government at home, he wanted to defeat Communism abroad. He got all of the second. He slowed down the growth of government at home. Part of it was that the cost of — well, part of it was the cost of — this is going to sound paradoxical — very large federal deficits. Reagan took the Republican Party and fiscal conservatives across a Rubicon from which they have never come back.
Before Reagan, the litmus test of a conservative — of a political conservative in the United States on fiscal issues — was the balanced budget. Government has to live within its means the way families live within their means. That's the position that Reagan staked out when he was campaigning in 1980. It's the position he stated in 1981, but it is the position he gave up in 1981 in the course of negotiations — political fighting over taxes and spending. Reagan believed that taxes should come down. He believed that spending should come down. He proposed a budget doing both.
But when he discovered that he didn't have the political momentum, the political clout to get the budget cuts this year, he accepted a deal in which taxes were cut today in exchange for a promise of spending cuts tomorrow. One of the things that Reagan learned — maybe he knew, maybe he simply overestimated his political persuasiveness — he discovered that tax cuts are written in stone, and spending cuts are written on paper, which is very flimsy paper. He never got the spending cuts that he wanted.
The result was — and this is quite ironic for someone who claimed to be a fiscal conservative — Reagan's administration rolled up as much federal debt as every administration before him. From George Washington to Jimmy Carter, the federal debt doubled in real terms — it tripled in nominal terms — but it doubled in real terms during the Reagan years. One of the consequences of this is that the Republican Party is no longer the party of the balanced budget. This is Reagan's party. I mean they still talk about a balanced budget, but this is a party of tax cuts. Tax cuts in good weather, tax cuts in bad weather. Tax cuts under any circumstances.
Now, this is not — and I should say Reagan was sort of responsible for creating this — but one of the questions that I get asked is, "So what would Reagan think of his party today? What would he think of politics today?" I would say — oh, actually one form that the question takes is how would Ronald Reagan fare as a candidate today? Could Ronald Reagan get the nomination of his old party? The answer I give sounds like kind of a historian's dodge, but it's not really. I said, "If Reagan had never been president of the United States, I think he would compete very well for the nomination of the Republican Party today, partly because Reagan was an engaging personality."
Even though he didn't have close friends, he was friendly and — Oh, you know why I told you that story at the beginning? Because Reagan had a sense of humor, and Reagan understood how to use that sense of humor. Reagan began nearly every speech with a joke. And the joke was kind of a shaggy dog story like that one, where you heard that sort of ripple of laughter. Not just belly laugh, and nobody says, "Boy, that's the cleverest thing I've ever heard," but just, "Hey, that's kind of funny." Reagan in those years when he was on the G.E. circuit and giving all those lunchtime speeches, he learned that laughter is a great way to dissolve skepticism. He understood that if you can get audiences to laugh with you, you're halfway to getting them to agree with you.
Reagan was, in addition, somebody — something — who is almost unique in modern American political history: an optimistic conservative. Think about it for a minute. Conservatives are, by their nature, pessimists. I mean, the reason you're a conservative is you think that change is generally for the worse, so you just want to hold on tightly to what we have because things are going to get worse if you don't. Well Reagan was a conservative, but he was also an optimist. Reagan preached a message of hope.
Now, the message that's being preached by candidates today — especially on the Republican side — is anything but hope; it's fear and anger. And Reagan, I think, would be — I think he'd clean up in that party precisely because he's this appealing personality and Americans want to vote their hope. They voted for Reagan in 1980 because he said America remains the shining city on a hill, and the American dream still lives, and America's brightest days are ahead. He was re-elected in 1984 on a slogan of "Its morning in America." You know I'm not hearing that 'morning in America' these days in politics. So if Reagan were a candidate today — not having been president — I think he could probably get the nomination. The problem is that Reagan was in fact president. And I say that's a problem because Reagan was 100 percent a rhetorical conservative.
And Reagan's speeches — Reagan gave essentially the same speech during his entire political career. He burst onto the scene with a speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater in 1964, his last speech was his farewell address in 1989, so a quarter century where he's giving the same speech again and again. It's always smaller government at home, defeat Communism abroad. He really stuck to his message. The details and the anecdotes changed but the message was always the same. And he was, as I say, this consistent conservative.
And so, conservatives today — Republicans can cite Ronald Reagan's speeches, he's their guy. But the trouble arises if they have to look at Ronald Reagan's record as president. It's a problem for the real hard-core conservatives, because Reagan was the last thing from hard core. Reagan was a pragmatist. Reagan believed that the point in getting elected was to govern. And to govern in a pluralist democracy means taking account of the fact that other people have their own views on things and they have a right to their own views.
Reagan — fun fact: when I was writing the book I interviewed surviving members of the Reagan administration and I talked to James Baker, who was Reagan's chief of staff and then his secretary of the treasury. Baker told me — he quoted Reagan and he said, "If Reagan told me once, he told me 15,000 times: I'd rather get 80 percent of what I want than go over the cliff with my flags flying."
This was Reagan. Reagan understood that in politics in the real world, when you are in office and intend to govern, you make progress incrementally. You don't insist that the perfect become the enemy of the good. If you get 80 percent today, that's a really good day. Take it and bank that, come back tomorrow and see if you can get more of the rest. So if Reagan had to defend his record as president in Republican primary seasons, I can just imagine what would be said of Reagan.
Reagan is known as the president who slashed taxes, and indeed he did — in one big swoop right at the beginning. But he proceeded to raise taxes several times after that. Much smaller amounts, but because those tax increases were necessary, for example, to shore up Social Security. Reagan recognized that Social Security was a reality. Since it was a reality, he was going to make it fiscally sound and this required substantial increases in Social Security taxes.
Reagan was the last president to seriously revise, reform and streamline the tax code. This was in 1986, which was a remarkable accomplishment given that it was in his last term as president. Second-term presidents rarely get much done. But Reagan reformed the tax code, and he did it on a basis that was overall revenue neutral, so on the whole it leveled out. The point wasn't to raise taxes on the whole — or to reduce taxes on the whole — but it meant that some people's taxes went up. Now these days he would be branded as a tax-raiser and we're not going to have that.
And Reagan was the last president to preside over important immigration reform. It wasn't everything that Reagan wanted, but it recognized the reality of lots of people who had come into this country illegally. He said, "They are here, we have to do something about it." So Reagan would be a sitting duck for the kind of rhetoric that is used by conservatives these days against their opponents. But again, that's because he was president. Now, needless to say, none of the other candidates for president has been president, so they don't have to deal with that sort of thing.
I said that I had the — there was this sort of enigma of how did Reagan do it. Why was he successful? It wasn't because he was the smartest person ever to occupy the White House. I can name five or six presidents whose raw IQ was probably higher than Reagan's — and we could start with Jimmy Carter. But Reagan understood that when you are president, there's such a thing — you have to be smart enough. But being a whole lot smarter than smart enough is probably no advantage — and it might even be a disadvantage. Somebody like Jimmy Carter, for example, was tempted to try to master all aspects of governance. Reagan didn't even try, but he did understand that a president can't change the waterfront of politics and world affairs. But if he focuses on a couple things, if he says shrink government at home, defeat Communism abroad, and you work on those things, then you can get some motion.
Reagan understood that it's absolutely essential to have the American people on your side. Reagan took as his model of how to be president — not the policies to follow but how to be president — Franklin Roosevelt. Reagan started his career sort of on the air as a radio announcer at the time when Franklin Roosevelt was giving his fireside chats. Reagan listened to those fireside chats and he understood that's the way a president has power. It's not the number of votes you have in Congress, it's the connection you make with the American people, the ability to convey a vision. It's what Roosevelt did in the depths of the Depression, what Reagan did during the end of the 1970s, which were a troubling time for Americans, and during his time as president. Reagan understood the value of humor. Reagan could tell a joke, he could get people to laugh, and when they laughed with him, they found that they couldn't dislike him — and many of them came around to agree with him.
One last thing. Reagan benefited from coming along at a time in American politics when it was still possible to have bipartisan measures — have important measures receive bipartisan support. Until — just a very quick summary of American sort of political parties — until the 1960s, the two major American political parties were always ideological coalitions. There were liberal Republicans as well as conservative Republicans. There were conservative Democrats as well as liberal Democrats.
This changed when Lyndon Johnson nailed the mast of the national Democratic Party — nailed the flag to the mast of civil rights reform, giving all those southern conservatives an excuse to leave the Democratic Party of their fathers and grandfathers, which they had been in since the Civil War, and go to the party to which they were more closely affiliated philosophically: the Republican Party. So there's this grand migration of conservatives out of the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.
Reagan becomes president in the 1980s when the migration is half accomplished. But there were still conservative Democrats, and on every one of Reagan's important pieces of legislation he got a substantial number of Democratic votes. He could present these positions as bipartisan. He could portray himself as the president of all the people. The migration of conservatives out of the Democratic Party ended about the year 2000. Since then, there have been essentially no liberals in the Republican Party and no conservatives in the Democratic Party. If Reagan became president in 2017, he'd have a whole lot harder time accomplishing what he accomplished. But we historians have the advantage of leaving people in their place and moment in history and appreciating what they accomplished there.
Thank you very much.