Remarks by Peter Hannaford
The Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Association
Asilomar Conference Center — Pacific Grove, Calif.
February 13, 2009
The title of my remarks tonight is “Leadership and the Nature of Change.” The other day I heard a story about one of the most important leaders in our nation’s history.
On a recent flight, an aspiring young writer, by chance, found himself, sitting next to an editor of the Reader’s Digest. They fell into conversation. The young writer said he’d dreamed of one day having an article published in the Digest. He asked the editor what topics they favored.
“Well,” the editor replied, “Abraham Lincoln stories are always popular. Also, stories about doctors with their lifesaving work. And, of course, our readers love stories about animals, especially pets.”
About a month later the Reader’s Digest editor received in the mail a manusript from the young writer. Its title: “The Adventures of Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.”
Although yesterday was the 200th anniversary of President Lincoln’s birth, we’ll have to leave him there, for my talk tonight centers on three other presidents, the first, the 40th and the 44th — Presidents Washington, Reagan and Obama.
I’m going to ask you a question, then I’ll give you the answer so as to not keep you in suspense. The question is, "What do George Washington, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama have in common?" The answer is one word: "Presence."
I call “Presence” the quality of knowing how best to present oneself to achieve support for one’s public endeavors, no matter what the circumstances.
Washington overcame a young man’s hot temper to become a resourceful wartime leader who did daring things and had the loyalty of his troops. As president of the new republic, he bore himself with dignity and did not make hasty decisions or statements. He was revered by his countrymen (with the possible exception of John Adams and Thomas Paine — for different reasons). His fellow citizens forgot (if they ever did know) that a younger Washington loved to dance, play cards and watch horse races.
As the young repubic’s first president, Washington knew that the eyes of the world would be on him, and that virtually everything he did in public would set precedent. He managed to assemble a brilliant cabinet. It is a tribute to him that he got Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton — who were sharply different — to serve in that cabinet. Throughout his presidency, George Washington’s bearing — his presence — inspired support.
Ronald Reagan, the 40th president, saw ending the Cold War as his biggest mission. Along the way, he needed to straighten out the economy. He won election by showing a large majority that he was a calm, reasonable man who had the courage of his convictions and the determination to carry them out. His friendly, reassuring manner made his “presence” believable.
Barack Obama, in his campaign, set out to show that he was fit, energetic, thoughtful and self-disciplined. Now, as then, he wears well-tailored suits and a serious mien that fits these serious times.
When Presidents Washington and Reagan entered a room, their presence filled it. It looks if President Obama has that same quality.
All presidents must manage change, for all promise to improve upon what went before, in addition to redeeming promises to tackle present problems. President Washington had the entire nation behind him, and there were no political parties. It is different now. Modern presidents head the only nationally-elected ticket in a vast nation. They must earnestly govern for the common good, but also attend to their electoral bases.
If a president is to successfully manage change and meet unforeseen challenges, he of course needs “presence” to help him build support, yet first he must have well-defined objectives and then the determination to carry them out.
President Washington had two objectives: one was to have this upstart nation taken seriously; the other was ro actually build a governing structure. Under his calm, reserved exterior, here was a man of great determination — as his war record had proved.
President Reagan’s objectives and his determination we’ll come to shortly.
President Obama’s immediate objective on taking office was to get the economy back on track. We will not know for awhile whether the effort he has been making will accomplish that objective. Despite the program’s flaws, we must all hope it does what it is supposed to.
His secondary objectives have included universal health care and a so-called “greening” of the economy. Both would be very expensive, and it is not now known whether the economy will be sufficiently recovered during his term to afford these programs. We cannot, however, doubt his determination. His one-man campaign to get his stimulus bill passed by the Senate this week attests to it.
Let me turn now in more depth to the way President Reagan managed change through his leadership abilities.
When he died in June 2004, the mourning for him was nearly universal. He was remembered as a figure of warmth and reconciliation.
Former adversaries said he was one politician who could disagree without being disagreeable. This was true; however, what the former critics forgot was the derision they had once heaped upon him. He had variously been called a warmonger, an "empty suit" mouthing the ideas of clever writers and, in the words of one American statesman, "a dumb, cowboy actor."
Today, when one sets out to examine the Reagan legacy, the place to start is with the goals he set. There were three:
• Get the economy on track and set it on a course of long-term growth;
• Curb the growth of the federal government and turn more decision-making back to the states, cities and towns.
...and, most important:
• End the Cold War.
Ronald Reagan attained most of what he set out to do though some of it came to fruition after he left office.
Along the way, a great many people underestimated him. I did, too, when I first met him. It was early 1965 at the midwinter Republican state convention in San Francisco. Some friends and I had arrived early and were killing time looking at the commercial exhibits.
Suddenly, down the aisle came Ronald Reagan. At that time, he was exploring whether to run for governor the next year. He made a beeline for us, since there were few people around. We introduced ourselves to him and chatted a bit. As he left, I thought to myself, "What a nice man. Too bad he can't be elected."
At that moment I joined an army of those who underestimated him. I saw the light a few months later, when he won the primary, but some folks never did learn. In fact, then-Governor Pat Brown wanted Reagan to win the primary because Brown thought he would be easy to beat in November. Instead, Reagan beat Brown by a million votes.
Fourteen years later, Jimmy Carter made the same mistake.
Because Reagan was so often underestimated, his actions frequently came as a surprise.
Let me give you an early example: The late Caspar Weinberger, who was to become Reagan's Secretary of Defense, told of an incident early in Governor Reagan's first term. Cap was then California's Director of Finance. One day, he went into the Governor's office to say there would be an unexpected budget surplus for that fiscal year.
This was after Reagan had reluctantly raised income taxes to get the budget balanced. When he did so, he said as soon as things were straightened out, he'd return surpluses to the people. On this particular day, Weinberger said, "The legislature is going to learn about this pretty soon, and they'll have dozens of things to spend it on. So, what do you want to do with it?"
Reagan said, "Give it back."
"Give it back?" Cap replied. "But that's never been done before."
"No," Reagan said, "but then you've never had an actor for governor before, either."
Give it back was what Reagan did. By the time he left Sacramento in early 1975 he'd turned back some $5 billion to the people of California in the form of tax cuts and toll and license fee reductions. And that was in 1975 dollars.
Once in the White House, his first objective was to get the economy back on its feet and growing. He pushed through major across-the-board income tax rate cuts. His principle was this: When you cut high marginal tax rates you get greatly increased economic activity.
And that is what happened. During the balance of his terms some 19 million new jobs were created. Tens of thousands of new businesses were created, many owned by minorities and women. And, with all that new economic activity, federal revenues, which had been expected to decline with the tax cuts, actually increased by about half-a-trillion dollars.
His critics were fond of saying that under Reagan there were record deficits. They were referring to the dollar size of the deficit. This is misleading, for the key figure is the percentage of the Gross Domestic Product that the deficit represents.
Historically, our economy for years handled deficits in the two-and-a-half to three-percent range. During three of Reagan's years it went above that, then went down again. Compare that with today. With the passage of the so-called stimulus package, the federal deficit will come close to 10 percent of GDP.
Two things caused the relatively short spike in the deficit in Reagan’s years.
In his 1980 campaign he’d promised to rebuild our depleted military forces. He said he’d spend whatever was necessary to do this. He knew that the extra expense would be temporary. Had we not made that investment, the Cold War might have gone on for many more years, with all the expense that would entail.
The other reason was the failure of the House of Representatives, then controlled by the Democrats, to keep its promise to cut $2 of spending for every $1 of certain tax increases Reagan had agreed to in 1982.
President Reagan's second goal was to reduce the size and influence of the federal government. He succeeded in reducing many regulations that inhibited economic growth. His most important reform — welfare — didn't become law until after the election of a Republican Congress in 1994. Bill Clinton, who was president at the time, signed the historic bill.
President Reagan's third objective was to end the Cold War. Richard Allen, Reagan's first National Security Advisor in the White House, recalls one of his first conversations with the then-future president. Reagan said, "Dick, my idea about the Cold War is we win, they lose."
His strategy for accomplishing this was a long time in development. Back in 1967, his first year as Governor, he accepted an invitation from Dr. Edward Teller to visit the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory for a briefing. He learned that the scientists there were working on ideas for intercepting long-range missiles. In other words, missile defense.
Then, in Summer 1979, he visited NORAD, deep in a Colorado mountain. There he saw our sophisticated equipment for tracking incoming missiles. The cruel joke was that we had no defense other than to launch our own missiles in retaliation.
Not long after that, the Carter Administration completed negotiations with the Soviet Union for a second Strategic Arms Limitation treaty, based on the so-called SALT II talks.
The White House offered Mr. Reagan a briefing by one of its arms control experts. He accepted. Soon afterward, he gathered together a number of independent experts for an all-day briefing. His conclusion was to oppose the SALT II treaty because it would only reduce the rate of increase in nuclear arms. Reagan said that what we needed instead were Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) leading to the elimination of nuclear weapons.
A sort of priesthood had built up in Washington in support of the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD as it was nicknamed. The views of these insiders prevailed throughout the years of SALT I and II. Not surprisingly, they dismissed Reagan's idea of arms reduction as naive or downright dangerous.
They never expected Ronald Reagan to become president, nor did they have any idea how determined he was once he was in the White House. So, under President Reagan, we did have START. He and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the first treaty in 1987.
Early on, as president, Reagan knew, from the intelligence reports he was receiving, that the Soviets were straining their economy to its limits.
Throughout the years of detente, we had been observing both the letter and spirit of the law and were letting our defenses decline.The Soviets, on the other hand, had been paying lip service to detente while pouring every last ruble into arms expansion. They were spending more than four times the percentage of their annual budget on arms than we were.
Ronald Reagan reasoned that if we could push them to the brink of insolvency, confronting them with a choice between domestic chaos or ending the arms race, they would come to their senses and bring the Cold War to an end. He knew they were aware we had the technical and monetary resources to greatly expand our arms production.
He also was sure they thought we lacked the political will to do this. He intended to supply that political will.
During the 1980 presidential campaign, he emphasized the theme "Peace through Strength." He said he intended to spend whatever was necessary to rebuild our defense capacity so that no one — meaning the USSR — would be ahead of us.
Once in office, he set about to make this a reality.
The Soviets, their sympathizers around the world, and even the priests of the MAD theory, branded him as "dangerous," a "war-monger," and worse. This didn't deter Reagan. He was sure he was on the right course.
He set out to to put the Soviets on the defensive; to prove to them that they would bankrupt themselves if they tried to win an arms race.
First, in a speech at Notre Dame University in 1981, he said that communism's days were numbered, that it would end up on "the ash heap of history." Then, in June 1982 he addressed the houses of the British Parliament at Westminster. He described what became known as "The Reagan Doctrine."
This challenged the earlier Brezhnev Doctrine which was that once a nation became Communist it would always be Communist. The Reagan Doctrine was just the reverse: We would support democratic forces in any Communist country until that country could enjoy the fruits of freedom.
His speech was soon translated into action on a number of fronts, with support for democratic movements behind the Iron Curtain, especially in Poland. There, the Reagan Administration and the late Pope John Paul's Vatican worked closely in what came to be known around the White House as "the Holy Alliance."
That same year, 1982, President Reagan approved a plan by the CIA to confound the Soviet effort to steal and use Western technology.
The Soviets had been building a large and complex pipeline system to sell natural gas to Western Europe. They had two objectives: One was to obtain hard currency. The other was to soften the opposition of Western European countries by making them dependent upon Soviet natural gas. They expected this to render NATO less potent as a fighting force.
In July 1981, French President Francois Mitterand told Reagan of a KGB agent who had become a “mole” for French intelligence and had slipped them information about the Soviet program to steal Western technology. The KGB had already stolen data about computers, radar, machine tools and semiconductors.
Reagan's resourceful CIA Director, William Casey, and his team hatched a plan to let the Soviets steal carefully-crafted bogus data on pipelines.
According to Tom Reed, who at the time was serving in the National Security Council, the software the Soviets stole was "to run the pumps, turbines and valves (and) was programmed...after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds."
The result, in the summer of 1982, was a gigantic pipeline explosion in Sibera.
While the Soviets ultimately realized they had been stealing bogus pipeline technology, they could no longer be sure if anything else they had stolen was real or fake.
The next year, 1983, saw three pivotal elements in Reagan's strategy. First was the speech he made on March 8th in Orlando to the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals. The delegates had been debating whether to support a so-called "freeze" in the development and deployment of nuclear weapons by the United States.
Reagan urged his audience to take a moral stand, pointing out that as long as the Soviets, "preach supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individuals and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world."
He was immediately denounced for calling the Soviet sphere an empire and an evil one at that! But he was saying what millions of people knew to be true.
We now know that his words had a profound effect in Russia. Vladimir Bukovsky, a prominent former dissident, has said: "His phrase, 'Evil Empire' became a household word in Russia. Russians like a straightforward person, be he enemy or friend. They despise a wishy-washy person." Thus, Reagan was being taken seriously in Russia, while U.S. critics carped.
Today, Reagan is widely acknowledged as having been right all along. Most importantly, his candid declaration gave hope to the peoples of the nations behind the Iron Curtain.
Two weeks later, on March 23, 1983, he spoke to the American people on television from the Oval Office, announcing the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). He said the United States was about to "embark on a program to counter the awesome missile threat with measures that are defensive. Let us turn to the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base."
That message was aimed directly at the men in the Kremlin.
The idea of a Strategic Defense Initiative went back, first, to that briefing Reagan received from the Lawrence Laboratory scientists in 1967, then to his visit to NORAD in 1979. As soon as he announced the SDI, Reagan was criticized again by the arms limitation crowd, while the news media snickered and tried to trivialize the project by calling it "Star Wars."
Reagan was undeterred. He was convinced that the Soviets could not mount a parallel strategic missile defense effort while still building conventional and nuclear weapons at the pace they were building them without bankrupting themselves.
He was right. After the Cold War was over, a former adviser to Leonid Brezhnev, Genrikh Grofimenko said: "Ninety-nine percent of the Russian people believe that (the United States) won the Cold War because of your president's insistence on SDI."
Vladimir Isachenkov, writing from Moscow for the Associated Press at the time of Reagan's death, said that "His famed 'Star Wars' program drew the Soviets into a costly arms race they couldn't afford."
This is confirmed by Gennady Gerasimov, who was the spokesman for the Soviet Foreign Ministry in the 1980s. He said: "Reagan's SDI was a very successful blackmail. The Soviet Union tried to keep pace with the U.S. military buildup, but the Soviet economy couldn't endure such competition."
Today, it is hard to remember all the criticism leveled at Reagan as a result of his “Evil Empire” and SDI speeches. Media pundits and political adversaries denounced him harshly and steadily.
Yet, Joyce Barnathan, an American reporter in Moscow in the 1980s, later wrote in Business Week: "In the U.S., Reagan's talk of the sinister nature of communism was often dismissed as the rhetoric of a right-wing ideologue. (But) In Moscow, policy-makers believed he meant business."
While 1983 was the year of the “Evil Empire” speech and SDI, it was also the year that the then-new German government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl resisted furious efforts to stop it from deploying our Pershing cruise missiles. There were massive street demonstrations and a huge propaganda offensive all over West Germany — all of it inspired by the Kremlin, using its sympathizers.
Yet, in two bold strokes, Reagan had checkmated the Kremlin. An effective strategic missile defense system would protect the United States from Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. Meanwhile, the Pershing cruise missiles deployed in Germany and other NATO countries would checkmate the Soviet SS-20s which had been aimed at Western European capitals for several years.
The cruise missile deployment in Western Europe also created a new dimension of fear among the Kremlin's leaders. Vladimir Isachenkov put it this way: "The deployment of the U.S. missiles in Europe rattled the Kremlin's nerves, because of the shorter time these needed to reach targets in the Soviet Union, compared to intercontinental missiles launched from the United States."
Reagan intended to show the Kremlin leaders that further pursuit of an arms race was futile. For a time his message was lost on the Kremlin's leaders. As Reagan put it: "They kept dying on me." Brezhnev died, then Andropov, then Chernenko. It was not until Gorbachev came to power, in 1985, that the message began to sink in.
Reagan and Gorbachev first met at a chalet on the shores of Lake Geneva in mid-November that year. Reagan understood well the importance of communications on such an occasion. He knew that not only would Western televison would be covering it, but so would Soviet TV.
He arrived first at the chalet. It was a cold day. As Gorbachev's car drove up, Reagan, who was 74 at the time, bounded down the steps, tall and athletic in a well-tailored suit, to greet his counterpart, who was 20 years his junior. Gorbachev was bundled up in an overcoat and wore a hat, looking as if he were Reagan's elderly uncle, arriving to enjoy the hospitality of his genial host. Reagan actually held Gorbachev's elbow, guiding him up the steps.
Here was a case where one picture was probably worth a million words. It was “presence” in action.
At that first meeting, Reagan said to Gorbachev: "We don't mistrust each other because we're armed. We're armed because we mistrust each other. We have two alternatives: to find a way to trust one another enough to begin to reduce arms, or have an all-out arms race. And, Mr. Gorbachev, that's a race you can't win."
Reagan recalled later that Gorbachev didn't say he agreed with Reagan's conclusion, but that the message had sunk in. Reagan felt sure he had found a realist in Gorbachev. He was right. Gorbachev knew his economy was near the breaking point. He had already begun perestroika, an attempt to make the hopelessly inefficient Soviet economy work better.
At the next summit, in Reykjavik, Iceland the next year, October1986, the talk quickly turned to eliminating all nuclear weapons, the so-called Zero Option. The discussions progressed, but at the final meeting, on Saturday morning, Gorbachev declared that in order for him to agree, Reagan would have to put the Strategic Defense Initiative on the shelf. This demand was unexpected. Reagan responded with an angry refusal and the summit came to an abrupt end.
Predictably, the pooh-bahs denounced Reagan for failing to come to an agreement with Gorbachev, as if any agreement, no matter how bad, was preferable to none.
In fact, Reykjavik turned out to be a stunning success. Gorbachev had played his last card and Reagan trumped it. There was nowhere else for the Soviet Union to go in the arms race. This was the climactic event of the Cold War.
Gorbachev had tried perestroika. His next move was glasnost, an effort to let off steam by allowing Soviet citizens to engage in limited free speech. Although he was a realist, he had been reared in the Soviet system and seemed not to understand that once people who have had no freedom taste it they want more, not less. He could not put that genie back in the bottle.
Meanwhile, the Iron Curtain was corroding. In June 1987, President Reagan stood before the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate and issued the ultimate challenge when he said: "Mr.Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."
Those words echoed and reechoed throughtout the Evil Empire, supplying fuel to the fire that was soon to engulf communism. And, two years later, the Berlin Wall did come down.
Their final summit, in May 1988 in Moscow did not include signings of major agreements. Its power and significance lay in the symbolism it conveyed and the contribution it made to the growing momentum for change within Russia.
The President spoke at Moscow State University, standing under a huge bust of Lenin. He said, that this was "a time when the first breath of freedom stirs the air and the heart beats to the accelerated rhythm of hope." He took questions. The students loved it.
The final collapse of the Evil Empire took place after Reagan had left the White House, but there is no doubt that it was his strategy that led to its demise. Only Gorbachev could actually stop the Cold War, but it was Reagan who brought him to that pass.
The die-hard Reagan critics could not bring themselves to give Reagan credit for this. They insisted he was a lucky bystander, that the Soviet economy would have collapsed of its own accord, as if the many vigorous shoves Reagan had given it had not occurred. The critics, of course, had been witnessing events one at a time and were not privy to Reagan's strategic plan.
We now see that it was a deliberate and purposeful strategy, years in its development and carried out with unflinching determination.
Margaret Thatcher put the matter succinctly when she said: "Ronald Reagan won the Cold War — without firing a shot." At Reagan's passing, Gorbachev put an exclamation point to that when he said, "I deem Ronald Reagan a great president."
Like George Washington, Ronald Reagan proved to be a successful agent of change, confronting the Cold War status quo and carrying out a strategy that resulted in the end of communism as a world force. That change unleashed new challenges. President Obama must contend with some of these. To meet them successfully, he will need to set clear objectives, apply abundant determination and, at all times have the quality of “presence.”