A charming, likeable small-town boy with a strong sense of right and wrong – ordinary Americans saw themselves in the Gipper. No wonder Newt Gingrich is quick to invoke this Republican hero
Why does the spirit of Ronald Reagan still inhabit the Republican Party a generation after the "Great Communicator" left the White House so powerfully that aspiring candidates for their party's presidential nomination in 2012 routinely invoke his talismanic name with evident pride and affection?
The egotistical Newt Gingrich, not averse to identifying himself with any passing hero, is keenest on grasping Reagan's coat tail. His congressional career took wing in the 1980s when blue-collar workers, already struggling to maintain their living standards, responded to Reagan's sunny nostalgia to become "Reagan Democrats". Yet Gingrich's erratic conduct, his rackety private life and flamboyant intellectualism – he may have written more books than Reagan read – only serve to highlight the contrast between the two men. Indeed, closer scrutiny of Congressional history this week has revealed that Gingrich's record of support for Reagan was not exactly unblemished.
The thing with Ronald Reagan was his likeability. His easy charm lit up rooms and his corny, often-self deprecating jokes made people laugh. As US correspondent of the Guardian during his second term I often saw it myself close up. At the first White House press conference I attended, the president made so many simple errors – obvious even to me – that I thought he'd have to resign. But no, he was head of state as well as chief executive, the Queen as well as Margaret Thatcher, and was shielded by respect for his office. A mere correction panel was published.
More than that, he was how ordinary Americans liked to see themselves, tall and handsome, imbued with an uncomplicated sense of right and wrong. A boy from humble beginnings in small town Illinois who became a film star, he became the scourge of "big government", a prejudice widely shared. Last but far from least, the 40th president of the United States (1981-89) was the good guy who led the west to victory in the 45-year cold war with the "evil empire" of Soviet communism.
The fact that much of the Reagan myth is either selective, misleading or plain wrong is beside the point. Part of Reagan's genius was to be a chameleon, his actor's trade allowing him to deliver memorable lines crafted by others in the myth-factories of Hollywood. He combined a capacity for convenient amnesia with what one biographer called "willed ignorance" of things he did not want to know, things like the elaborate Iran-Contra arms sale scandal of 1986, cooked up by his staff in the White House basement. Reagan got away with it. He usually did.
Wishful thinking, selective indignation and a stubborn optimism are very human traits and voters could identify with them. Even his notorious laziness worked for Reagan much of the time. "People say hard work never killed anyone. But I say: 'Why take the chance?'" he joked. He pretended that he took naps in cabinet meetings and once mistook a cabinet member for a city mayor (he was black). When his age and rumours of incipient Alzheimer's disease threatened his re-election in 1984, Reagan, then 73, was waiting. He turned on his Democratic rival, Walter Mondale (56) during a TV debate and quipped: "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."
America laughed, and the president went on to win 49 of the 50 states. That was the "Morning Again in America" election, and when a White House TV reporter compiled a selection of feelgood campaign moments intended to show what a shallow presidency Reagan's had been, his aides rang her to say thanks: the prime time item had reminded voters why they liked him.
Reagan did not change the entire direction of US economic policy as his friend Margaret Thatcher (1979-90) could claim to have done in Britain. Even under the Democrat Jimmy Carter (1977-81) policy was already edging away from the post-war Nixon corporatism and back towards the low-tax, small government regime which conservative Americans believed - and still do now - had made the country great.
Reagan's youthful hero was FDR – another optimist, albeit a far steelier one – who turned the federal government into the agent of recovery from the Great Depression and of victory in World War II. Reagan, a very conventional rebel, never quite abandoned him as he turned towards the right in the McCarthyite 50s under the influence of his second wife, Nancy. Some said that if she had been his first wife instead of fellow actor, Jane Wyman, he'd have stayed in Hollywood and won Oscars. Instead he became governor of California and president.
The curious thing about much of Reagan's belief system was that it proved both flexible and contradictory. He was pro-black, but opposed civil rights on libertarian grounds; he signed California's abortion law (but became pro-life) and helped block anti-gay laws; he was the first divorced president. He embraced socially conservative views while being personally tolerant. As for small government, Reagan slashed top tax rates – capital gains tax down to 20% – in the name of "supply side" economics ("voodoo economics", George Bush senior called them) which would rescue the US from Carter's "malaise."
As oil prices subsided and inflation came down after the grim 1970s, 16m jobs were created. But federal programmes for the poor and labour protection laws were slashed, the growing gap between rich and poor deepened, the minimum wage was frozen and thousands of striking air traffic controllers sacked, a famous victory for "Reaganomics". John Hinkley's assassination bid 69 days into his first term (" I hope you're a Republican," Reagan told the surgeon) helped seal the authority of a lucky president.
Yet the Reagan era also tripled the US national debt to nearly $3tn and opened up a structural hole in the US fiscal settlement which the rectitude of the Clinton years only temporarily assuaged. Like the Bush boom of the 2000s, the Reagan recovery now looks more illusiory than it did then, the weaknesses of the domestic economy left unaddressed – as China, under Deng Xiaoping (1978-92), gradually cast off the shackles of communist state planning.
Reagan preached the indissolvable link between free enterprise and democracy, always flexible where necessary allies failings were concerned, as China's new growth challenged that easy-going equation. Reagan's focus was the fading power of the USSR and the ever-turbulent Middle East. He pulled out of Lebanon after 241 marines were blown up by a suicide bomber and preferred to bomb Libya – then, as now, a handy scapegoat – from the safety of 30,000ft.
He was lucky, too, with Mikhail Gorbachev, a new type of Soviet leader whom Thatcher had been quick to see was someone "we can do business with". The Reagan fantasy of a "Star Wars" anti-missile missile defence system - 30 years later it remains a pipe dream - stepped up economic and military pressure on Moscow. In the search for an end to the arms race, Reagan came close to trading away the US nuclear arms race at Reykjavik, one of his three summits with Gorbachev, a leader who – like Deng – deserves more credit for global progress than the Reaganites and their heirs admit.
Reagan won the cold war, they insist. It is part of their pride in his legacy. But like the Challenger shuttle disaster of 1986 – Reagan's funeral speech, written by Reagan Democrat Peggy Noonan, was a minor masterpiece – Reagan's capacity to see the glass half-full came to his aid.
When the facts failed to live up to his expectations, he was able to shrug and walk away, like Thatcher more of a pragmatist than many devotees now seem to understand.
The eight years since Reagan's death from pneumonia in his Los Angeles mansion (his statement acknowledging Alzheimer's in 1994 had been a model of grace) have not been kind to the US. The traumatic 9/11 attacks triggered the "war on terror", rendition and torture, the flawed occupation of Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, all of which further undermined its liberal reputation. The shameful destruction of New Orleans, the Wall Street crash of 2008 and growing indebtedness to China, the collapse of so many industries and the shrill ideological divisions in Congress over monetary and fiscal policy can all be traced to habits ingrained in the Reagan years when the notion took hold that "the government is not the solution to our problems; the government is the problem".
It was a favourite Reagan aphorism, sometimes half-true, sometimes a disastrous basis for policy in a globally connected, ever more sophisticated world. Ronald Reagan was not the only one to suspect that climate change might be caused by trees – "killer trees", as the mocking liberal bumper stickers put it. With hindsight his may be the presidency that will come to be seen as the one where mistakes titled the US towards decline.
But the need for likeable heroes may instead ensure that the Bushes and Obamas will take the blame – leaving Ronald Reagan up there with George Washington, founding hero of the republic, and with Abraham Lincoln, its saviour. Reagan, after whom buildings, streets and even airports are widely named, would thus become America's Marcus Aurelius, the philosoper emperor of Rome whose death in AD 180 presaged its long, slow decline.