President Reagan had deep faith in his principles, in his religious beliefs, in his vision for the world, and in the American people.

Dinesh D’Souza bas been on CNN a dozen or so times in the past few days answering questions about President Reagan. At the age of 26 Dinesh was appointed senior domestic policy analyst in President Reagan’s White House. His book on the Reagan presidency has 200,000 copies in print. tothesource asked Dinesh to give us some insight into Reagan’s unique style of leadership.

tts: About 50,000 pastors and Christian leaders will read this email. Even those who disagree with Reagan’s policies can hopefully learn something about leadership from a man widely considered to be the most influential leader of the last half-century. How about answering a couple of questions for our loyal readers regarding Reagan the leader?

Dinesh: Sure.

tts: You have often said that Reagan’s presidency is a lesson in principled leadership. Our readers know how tough it is to make a decision based on principle and then have others try to move you off that decision. On occasion Reagan was at odds with his cabinet, with other world leaders, and with the United States Congress. Yet on key issues he stuck to his beliefs. How did he do it in the face of so much criticism?

Dinesh: Reagan was a man of deep faith, not only in his religious beliefs, but in his principles. Because of this confidence, Reagan pursued his convictions and refused to yield his presidency to the two most powerful forces in politics: the American people, and the elites.

Today’s politicians of both parties are obsessed with what the American people think. They instruct their pollsters, “Go and find out the views of the American people so that we can choreograph our positions to bring them into line with public sentiment.” They believe that this is a marvelous demonstration of democracy in action.

But this was not the American founders’ view of democracy, and neither was it Reagan’s. Reagan knew that we live in a representative democracy where the American people choose leaders, and it is the leader’s job to lead. In many cases this means taking action without consulting the people. Many times during the 1980s Reagan came on television and said something like, “My fellow Americans, I have just signed an executive order removing gasoline price controls.”

Reagan would often act and then ask us for our support. So Reagan did seek the approval of the American people, but not necessarily prior to pursuing a course of action. Reagan was willing to endure short-term public opposition in order to vindicate a longer-term objective.

It reminds me of a funny story that Richard Wirthlin, Reagan’s pollster, told me. The hard economic medicine of tight monetary policy to fight the 1970’s runaway inflation had plunged the country into recession. Interest rates soared, poverty went up, and unemployment reached intolerable levels. It was the worst economic crisis since the Depression. Wirthlin told the president that his approval rating had plummeted to 35 percent. “Well Dick,” Reagan said, “I think it’s time for you to arrange for me to be shot again.”

Although Reagan was willing to brave widespread public discontent, he was not willing to brave it indefinitely. “Stay the course,” he told the American people during the recession. But Reagan was determined that his policies be vindicated, not just 20 years hence, but by 1984. In a democracy it is imperative that the leader’s central objectives be met by the next election.

In short, Reagan knew that the American people would be patient only so long. He needed results.

tts: You mention Reagan’s confidence. He seemed confident in his vision of America’s future.

Dinesh: Reagan thought it was obvious that a vital American economy would allow us to spend the Soviet Union out of existence. He believed this at a time when many in America believed that the period of American prosperity had passed. We had fallen into a permanent malaise. Communism was considered the emerging political force in the world. Nearly half of the world’s population lived under communistic regimes. Yet two years into his first term, with America in a recession, Reagan shocked the world by proclaiming that Soviet Communism would end up on “the ash heap of history”. Everyone dismissed it as rhetoric, but Reagan believed it. That is how he saw the world.

The same is true for his famous Brandenburg Gate speech at the end of his presidency. He challenged General Secretary Gorbachev to, “Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Almost everyone thought he was kidding.

Two years later the wall came down. These were not just results that Reagan predicted. He intended the outcome. He worked for this outcome.

tts: And Reagan had great faith and confidence in the American people.

Dinesh: After all, they had elected him to be their president in two landslides (laughs). Reagan believed that, generally speaking, the American people where more capable of managing the details of their lives then someone else doing it for them. I am part of a generation of young people who became interested in politics because of the Reagan revolution. We saw Reagan as a cheerful, forward-looking guy. We loved his self-deprecating humor. Yet we also saw that beneath that jocular exterior, Reagan was a determined leader with massively ambitious goals. This was very infectious. I think all leaders, regardless of their policies, can learn from this.

Reagan led the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall came crashing down, and the Soviet empire began to crumble. Today communism and socialism are discredited. The American economy, in the doldrums throughout the 1970s, went into high gear in the 1980s, pulling the world economy up with it. During his presidency the Dow Jones average tripled and the silicon revolution began its transformation of the way we live and work after Reagan eliminated most federal technology quotas. Now computers and mobile phones are everywhere.

All of these accomplishments required a leader that empowers people to live their lives.

In the end, Reagan gave the American people the credit.

I think all of us can learn from Reagan’s confident leadership. His unshakeable faith in closely held principles, his vision of a better tomorrow, and his belief in the worth of every human being should inspire all of us.

The Wise Men and the Dimwit
How could so many professional policy wonks get it so wrong?

Strobe Talbott, a journalist at Time, wrote that the Soviet Union fell “not because of anything the outside world has done or not done…but because of defects and inadequacies at its core”.

If so, it is reasonable to expect that the inevitable Soviet collapse would have been foreseen by these experts. Let’s see what some of them had to say about the Soviet system during the 1980s.

In 1982, the learned Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University wrote in Foreign Affairs: “The Soviet Union is not now nor will it be during the next decade in the throes of a true system crisis, for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability.”

This view was seconded that same year by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who observed that “those in the United States who think that the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse” are “wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves.”

John Kenneth Galbraith, the distinguished Harvard economist, wrote in 1984; “That the Soviet system has made great material progress in recent years is evident both from the statistics and from the general urban scene…One sees it in the appearance of solid well-being of the people on the streets….and the general aspect of restaurants, theaters, and shops… Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of it manpower.”

Equally imaginative was the assessment of Paul Samuelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Nobel laureate in economics, writing in the 1985 edition of his widely-used textbook: “What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth… The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth.”

Columnist James Reston of the New York Times in June of 1985 revealed his capacity for sophisticated even-handedness when he dismissed the possibility of the collapse of communism on the grounds that Soviet problems were not different from those in the US. “It is clear that the ideologies of communism, socialism, and capitalism are all in trouble.”

The last-to-get-it award goes to Lester Thurow, another MIT economist and well-known author who, as late as 1989, wrote: “Can economic command significantly accelerate the growth process? The remarkable performance of the Soviet Union suggests that it can. Today the Soviet Union is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States.”

Arthur Schlesinger, in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, wrote that “history has an abiding capacity to outwit our certitudes. No one foresaw these changes.”

Not true. Ronald Reagan foresaw them and you ridiculed him for it. In 1981, Reagan told the students and faculty at the University of Notre Dame: “The West won’t contain communism . It will transcend communism. We will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”

In 1982 Reagan told the British Parliament that “In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis...But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union….It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying freedom and human dignity to its citizens.”

Ironically the self-proclaimed wise men turned out to be wrong while the man they dismissed as a dimwit turned out to be right.

Reagan didn’t care about what the elite culture said about him. The former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the former Vice Presidential nominee Jack Kemp are both very anxious to win the approval of elite culture. As Speaker of the House, Gingrich was always troubled when he was excoriated by Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News. Kemp yearned for the plaudits of the editors of Time magazine and the Washington Post. Reagan genuinely didn’t care.

Reagan today is bathed in a warm glow of affection, even more than polite protocol would suggest as his state funeral approaches. Republicans revere him, and even Democrats claim to have developed a kinder, gentler feeling for the man.

Some in the press today are generous in their admiration for his accomplishments. This is a stark contrast to the 1980s when some Republicans and most Democrats treated Reagan with loathing and contempt. The elite of academia and the press despised and ridiculed Reagan during his presidency. Eric Alterman of The Nation described Reagan as a “pathological liar” and an “unbelievable moron” with a “heart of darkness” that showed a “fondness for genocidal murders”.

Reagan seemed like a very ordinary fellow. To many Europeans, as well as many Americans, he lacked all the basic credentials that are needed in a president. He was a below-average student at Eureka College. He spent most of his career as a film actor. He was not a scholar, nor an academic. He had no foreign-policy experience when he was first elected president. He put in a short day at the office and allegedly took naps. He seemed an unserious, whimsical man who spent much of his time cracking jokes. His critics, and even some of his supporters, thought it unlikely that he would prove an effective leader.

When Reagan was confronted with the allegation that he had graduated from a third-rate school with a C average he mused: “Even now I wonder what I might have accomplished had I studied harder.”

You can call it mysticism if you want to, but I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.

Ronald Reagan, 1974