Friday - February 04, 2011

An English tribute to our great President Reagan … from Charles Moore of the Telegraph

He was the best Governor that Calif. had in my lifetime, and the best President too. Sure miss him.

I thought my countrymen and women passing through BMEWS, might be interested in a Brit’s view of Ronald Reagan.

In an age when conservatives find it embarrassing to talk frankly about their true beliefs, the example of Reagan is very important. He never compromised on his creed,

Ronald Reagan: warming to the cold war warrior

Ronald Reagan would have been 100 on Sunday. Charles Moore says our current leaders could learn a lot from the great man.

By Charles Moore
The Telegraph

To understand the genius of Ronald Reagan, one should focus on his handling of an event that occurred days before his 75th birthday. On January 28 1986, the space shuttle Challenger crashed on take-off, killing all seven astronauts on board. Millions watched it happen on television.

Reagan, a year into his second term as President of the United States, paid tribute: “The future doesn’t belong to the faint-hearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.” He ended by saying: “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God’.”

Reagan’s great friend and close ally, Margaret Thatcher, immediately sent him a public message of commiseration at the disaster. But what privately impressed her most was what she saw as Reagan’s uncanny ability to find the words that expressed the deep feelings of a nation in its best idiom. She considered this the mark of a great democratic leader.

Analyse the Challenger tribute, and you find most of the best Reagan tricks – the celebration of human courage, the very American belief in the future and in technology, the capacity to capture, through some gift of imagination, a moment that people can hold in their minds. To do this in mass-communication politics requires an element of hokum. If you think, after all, about his use of the words (from a poem written by an American, British-educated fighter pilot whose plane crashed fatally in the young Margaret Thatcher’s Lincolnshire in 1941), you could argue that they do not fit the facts: it was precisely because the shuttle failed to “slip the surly bonds of earth” that the astronauts were killed. But that is pedantically to miss the Reagan magic. He had a way with him that was utterly persuasive. The sentence which includes the phrase is long and difficult to say, yet Reagan paced it beautifully. I remember watching the tribute that day and feeling it working, even on my own hard, journalistic heart.

I use the word “tricks” to describe Reagan’s methods, and that is what they were. But this does not mean that he was dishonest. He understood that the President of the United States, being head of state as well as head of government, is inevitably an actor. The presidency is the greatest stage that modern politics offers. The man elected to occupy it must act as well as he possibly can, and he is no more “lying” by doing so than was Laurence Olivier when he played Henry V. As a former Hollywood professional in the first age of American world domination, Reagan knew what the dreams of the people were, how to appeal to them and how to make them global.

But he also shared them. However corny and repetitive he was, Reagan believed completely in the American version of liberty, opportunity and limited government. He spent his youth on the moderate Left, but came to think differently: “Americans are, in their time of discontent, encouraged by doom and gloom criers who would have us believe our only salvation lies in becoming docile sheep for the government shepherd. I happen to believe government is not the solution to our problems – government is the problem.”

PLEASE READ ALL THE REST OF MOORE’S TRIBUTE HERE

Posted by peiper     on 02/04/2011 at 02:30 PM   
Filed Under: • Editorials •  
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It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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