Content area
Full Text
Ronald Reagan was fond of a nap and no intellectual. Oddly enough, he had what it took
HE WAS, most clear-thinking people clearly saw, not the right man for the job. To be president of the United States in the cold-war thunderstorms and economic frost of the early 1980s, you needed to be somebody with a mind sharp enough to carve through half a dozen problems at a time, somebody who could spend 18 hours a day rationally assembling facts and figures, a natural chairman of all-powerful committees: you needed to be, well, a clear-thinking person.
Ronald Reagan, as the ghost in this week's sky would cheerfully admit, was not at all like that. Only a fortnight from 70 when he became president, the one-time minor film actor often glazed over in cabinet meetings. He disliked, and sometimes dodged, painful arguments with awkward colleagues. He could fail to notice murky things going on behind his back. He was a definite non-intellectual. He was bound, in short, to be a bit of a bumbler.
The decade the door was pushed open
Instead of which, the Reagan presidency of 1981-89 changed the face of the world. The American-led alliance won the cold war, a potentially even bloodier confrontation than the first world war's murderous clash of European nationalisms and the second world war's six-year struggle against would-be Superman Hitler and his friends. By defeating communism, Ronald Reagan ended one of history's most violent centuries and opened the door to the possibility that for at least a few decades ahead war, though it can never be abolished, would be a smaller horror than in the past, and democracy might become available to more of the people who wanted it. In his foreign policy, at any rate, he turned out to be one of the two or three most effective American presidents of the 20th century.
It...