Chapter 6: Ronald Reagan: summarizes and analyzes the leadership of Ronald Reagan (RR).

RR can be described as a whole as a person who lives through fantasies. He grew up in an idyllic small mid-west town with an alcoholic father and a mother who encouraged RR’s optimism. This optimism that continued throughout his life prevented him from ever peaking about his own feelings and made him deny the badness in the world. He strongly believed that Americans can do anything and are, as a whole, good and innocent. Although politically and dramatically involved throughout high school and college, RR worked toward entertainment, beginning as a sports announcer. His greatest public-speaking teacher was the president at the time, FDR. He had a short-lived acting career which ended after WWII did. From acting, his optimism began to include exaggerated stories that he looked up to. As Hargrove puts it on page 135, “Literal truth mattered less to Reagan than symbolic meaning.” This proved to be his greatest mistake throughout his leadership.
He later perfected he public speaking skills working as a spokesman for GE plants, a job that required him to speak to groups of average American citizens; this experience drove him to understand the American people throughout the rest of his life. During the years that Eisenhower accepted the New Deal, RR transitioned from being a liberal Democrat to conservative Republican, landing him the job of spokesman for the conservative movement. His speech for a Republican presidential candidate made the American people prefer him over the candidate and pushed him toward his next job as governor of California.
While running for governor, Reagan began the habit of working closely with a team of consultants due to his lack of knowledge of issues; this also continued throughout his presidency. He won the position through promises to Californians, and was governor for two terms during which he spoke of very conservative policies but actually had only moderately conservative policies. During this, he learned that he could work with a Democratic legislature, could win the support of people through his ideas, and that he was skilled at interpreting politics into a way that the American public could relate to. This pushed him to run for presidency; he was able to persuade voters of his ability due to various other issues occurring at the time such as high inflation and the public eventually giving up on Jimmy Carter.
When he became president, RR’s leadership techniques were concrete and consistent; he lived through and depended on his ideas, disregarded facts, knew little about political issues, and depended on consultants and was okay with being managed by others, but Americans liked him. RR promised America ‘restoration, renewal, and optimism’. His term began with optimism, which raised his support, and decisions that contradicted Carter’s early mistakes. His first year was set for putting economic and defense programs into action with the help of his experienced White House staff that he chose and the members of Congress that he took time to get to know. His economic program began with him insisting on the new theory of supply-side economics and, refusing to turn his back on his promises to the American public, ignored warnings of future deficits. Economic recovery was slow so the Federal Reserve Board tightened the economy from fear of inflation; the economy recessed in 1981 and 1982. As RR’s ratings dipped, he blamed economic problems on Democratic policies and continued his stubbornness to stick to his plan until he agreed to raise taxes in 1982; he excused this action saying that they were really tax reforms. The economy began to recover but the debt continued to rise and the president and Congress still could not agree what to do. These deficits prevented the Democrats from winning the 1984 election; when the Democratic nominee promised to raise taxes to reduce deficits and lost terrible, the Democrats stopped trying that solution to the national debt. RR was reelected despite his false promises made before and the first major economic decision during his second term was the tax reform of 1996. This succeeded but the deficit continued rising and the economy that RR left America with in 1989 was surging but had deeply-rooted problems.
RR’s fantastic ideas did not end with economic problems; to end the Cold War, his solution was to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether, disregarding that the reality of that happening was impossible. After people pushed him to rethink this, including his wife, he implemented the SDI foreign policy which scared the Soviet leaders into considering arms control. RR began the SDI without an analysis, something he always had done. Eventually, he resorted to insisting a meeting with Gorbachev where after refusing to end the SDI, they made an arms agreement.
RR faced even more difficulties with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. After putting others in charge of the situation, things got worse and RR found himself making that same mistakes made in Vietnam. He then tried to cover this up by making the entire operation top secret and the full details are still unknown, but his biggest mistake was lying about what happened. He violated American laws, did not inform the Congress, and in return, he is remembered for his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair.
Throughout RR’s entire political career, he also continued to be an actor; living in his ideas was all he knew. This was his biggest flaw: he could not face reality or turn back on decisions. The one thing that carried his career was his ability to appeal to the common American; Hargrove even says on page 153 that “He was too much one of us.” Either way, the use of television as a way to communicate to the people was crucial to RR’s success. Another flaw of his was that he communicated his ideas to the public, believing in those ideas, but not analyzing the logistics of those ideas. We agree with Hargrove that repeating things that he had not fully examined “in the end distorted the truth…[and] blocked realistic solutions,” (155). He also relied much to heavily on personal experiences which were often simply stories to him; he would use these stories during times when he did not entirely understand what he was speaking about and should have instead actually learned political issues and policies. He also continually failed to take responsibility for faults, a trend that presidents continue to follow. As Hargrove sums it up, “He practiced a leadership of ‘words that succeed and policies that fail’” (159).