RONALD REAGAN (1911-2004)
By Lyn Nofziger

LIKE MOST WESTERNERS of his generation, Ronald Reagan came from somewhere else, in his case the small towns of central Illinois. As a young man he followed his dream to California, but that dream was not to be president—it was to be an actor. And that, in his mind, regardless of his political successes, was what he always was—not a politician, but an actor who ran for office, because he believed government needed new leadership and new direction.

Reagan grew to adulthood in the early days of the New Deal and, like his father, became a disciple of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was only after World War II that he began moving rightward. Two periods between l945 and l960 cemented his political philosophy.

Immediately after the war he became active in the Screen Actors Guild, spending six terms as its president. During those years he led a successful fight against Communist efforts to infiltrate the movie in-dustry. That battle convinced him that Communism was an evil that needed to be destroyed.

As his movie career was winding down Reagan took a job as host of television’s General Electric Theater. During the off-season his contract called for him to speak to GE workers on topics of his own choosing. He chose to speak on his political beliefs, which were then evolving.
“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny,” he told his audiences. “We can preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we can sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.”

The philosophy he developed then stayed with him the rest of his life. It boiled down to a belief in low taxes, maximum individual freedom, and minimum government interference in the life of the individual.

By the early 1950s he concluded that he could no longer be a Democrat and also that he should take an active role in Republican politics. In l964 a widely praised speech he gave in support of Barry Goldwater jump-started his political career. Two years later he was elected governor of California. In 1976, after leav-ing the governor’s office, he failed to wrest the Repub-lican presidential nomination from the incumbent, Gerald Ford. But four years later he was nominated and went on to unseat the Democrat, Jimmy Carter.

In the ensuing eight years Reagan changed not only the United States, but also the world.
He entered the presidency with the philosophy he had developed as president of the Screen Ac-tors Guild and when he worked for GE, tempered somewhat by his experiences as governor.

Reagan was uniquely fitted to be president. More than most who came to the office, he knew why he wanted to be president, what he stood for, what he wanted to accomplish. Second, he had a strong faith in God and confidence in his ability to handle the job. Third, he was an eternal optimist who believed there was nothing the American people could not do if they put their minds to it.
As a result, when he left office the Soviet Union was tottering on the brink of dissolution, a wave of freedom was sweeping Eastern Europe, and for the first time since the end of World War II, Com-munism had gained no new territory.

At home, inflation had been controlled, unem-ployment was low, taxes were significantly lower, and the nation was in the middle of the longest sustained economic boom in its history. Despite widespread predictions of failure, a nuclear shield was being developed, the armed forces had been rebuilt, America had regained its place as undis-puted leader of the free world, and the can-do spirit which makes this a great nation had been revived.

All in all, not a bad list of achievements for a president whose political enemies early on had la-beled him variously as a trigger-happy cowboy, a B actor, and an amiable dunce.

Lyn Nofziger currently works with The Carmen Group, a Washington, D.C., public relations firm. Nofziger was press secretary for Reagan during his successful campaign for president and later served as Reagan’s Assistant for Political Affairs. He has published four Western novels—his “Tackett” line—all of them revolving around his fictional cowboy hero, Del Tackett.

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