Ronaldus Magnus
March 26, 2013 — Steven Hayward
I made a brief reference here the other day to a lecture Herbert Meyer recently gave to the Young Americas Foundation on the occasion of the 100th birthday of William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s extraordinary CIA director. Meyer was a special assistant to Casey from 1981 to 1985. This lecture, along with Meyer’s contribution to the endgame of the Cold War, deserve more attention. American Cold War policy might be said
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March 23, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Earlier this month Paul Kengor and others brought to our attention the 30th anniversary of Reagan’s famous “evil empire” speech, which was, keep in mind, chiefly a domestic policy speech where Reagan slipped in the evil empire reference that his foreign policy apparatus had managed to strip out of previous foreign policy speech drafts. But there was no getting around the objections of both the State and Defense Departments to
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February 6, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Today is Ronald Reagan’s 102nd birthday, and the usual observances are under way at good places everywhere. I know that since November I and many others have drawn our attention to Reagan’s 1977 CPAC speech on “A New Republican Party,” which holds up fairly well in the current circumstances. But it is also worth having a look at the article Reagan wrote in the December 1, 1964 issue of National
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January 28, 2013 — Steven Hayward
One of the themes of my Age of Reagan books is that to a certain extent Reagan’s administration represented a coalition government, as he had a number of prominent Democrats or ex-Democrats (like Minnesota’s Jeane Kirkpatrick) serving in senior posts. One of the most significant was Minnesota’s Max Kampelman, who passed away last Friday at the age of 92. Kampelman had been very close to Hubert Humphrey, and in fact
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November 17, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Reagan nostalgia is often overdone, and I’ve been at the forefront in criticizing Republicans who claim to be “Reagan Republicans” but who don’t bother to study the man carefully enough to understand the skill and practice involved in his success. Many lazy Republican pols seem to think it sufficient just to invoke his name. On the other hand, Reagan was ahead of his time on so many issues, and among
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October 26, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Lena Dunham’s embarrassing “First Time” ad on behalf of President Obama has drawn quite a bit of criticism because in it Dunham uses sexual innuendo to compare the first vote experience to a girl losing her virginity. The left, though, claims that Dunham’s “first time” joke about voting “goes way back to another presidential candidate: Ronald Reagan, less than a week before he ushered in the Republican landslide of 1980.”
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October 24, 2012 — Steven Hayward
I was on the road all day yesterday down to LA and back (more about that errand in due course), so I missed the debate after party here. One benefit of a long morning car trip on the left coast is getting to listen to Rush Limbaugh the old fashioned way on the car radio, and Limbaugh was making many of the same observations about the debate as Scott, Paul,
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September 2, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Is it Reagan’s Revenge that the question Reagan posed to the nation in his 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter inevitably haunts Obama today as he stands for reelection? Watch David Axelrod dance around the question this morning on Fox News Sunday. I don’t think it’s enough for Romney to prevail that the answer to the question is no, any more than it was for Reagan, but the answer is no.
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August 18, 2012 — John Hinderaker
When Ronald Reagan ran for re-election in 1984, he won in a landslide, carrying 49 states. Why? Because he had a great record to run on. His free-market policies led to explosive economic growth that blew away the stagflation of the Carter years and reinvigorated the American spirit. Reagan ran on a simple platform–freedom brings prosperity–as this ad from Americans For Prosperity reminds us: Barack Obama can’t run a campaign
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July 5, 2012 — Steven Hayward
My occasional series on F.A. Hayek last fall drew exclusively from his economic books, especially The Constitution of Liberty. But cleaning up some old files today I came across a 1983 interview with Hayek in Encounter magazine where he displayed that he was not only a dedicated Cold Warrior, but understood the logic of deterrence and completely approved of President Reagan’s peace-through-strength strategy: Question: Isn’t high arms expenditure also a
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July 4, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Okay, I take a back seat to no one in admiring Ronaldus Magnus, but this is just over the top (though I do admit I kinda like it–I mean, if we can have “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter,” why not this):
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June 13, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Not many speeches are mighty deeds. When Ronald Reagan stood in front of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987, he performed a mighty deed by giving the speech he gave (video excerpt below). Our friend Peter Robinson was the man who wrote the speech. He tells the story behind the speech in his memoir How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life. On the occasion of the
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June 12, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Today, as has been widely noted throughout the morning on all the right Twitter feeds and Facebook posts, is the 25th anniversary of Ronaldus Magnus’s speech at the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin, where he issued his demand, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Oh what the heck, here’s how I describe the scene in the opening passage of The Age of Reagan: MOST of his senior aides didn’t want him
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June 12, 2012 — Steven Hayward
I’ve always liked Jeb Bush. He was a great governor of Florida, and would likely make a very good president. He might still have been a contender some day if he hadn’t put his foot in his mouth in the precise fashion he did over the weekend, embracing the stupid liberal talking point that Ronaldus Magnus couldn’t win the Republican nomination today. Not only that, he complains, Poppy Bush couldn’t
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June 8, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Today is the 30th anniversary of Reagan’s famous address in Westminster Hall, London, where he outraged fashionable opinion with his argument that it was Communism that would end up “on the ash heap of history.” Kudos to the Washington Post editorial page today, which takes positive note of the anniversary to say: THIRTY YEARS AGO, on June 8, 1982, President Reagan delivered an address to the British Parliament that stands
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March 18, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Of the many things liberals hated about Ronald Reagan, few excited more spasms of outrage than Reagan’s use of the image of the “welfare queen.” Reagan gave an example of a person in Chicago who illegally collected welfare benefits under multiple names: “She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her
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February 6, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Steve noted earlier today that it is Ronald Reagan’s 101st birthday. Americans For Prosperity released this video in honor of the occasion, contrasting Reagan’s leadership with that of the current president:
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