January 20, 1981
25th Anniversary of Reagan Inaugural:
Are you better off now than you were 25 years ago?
During the 1980 presidential election campaign, then Governor Reagan asked audiences "Are you better off now than you were four years ago" before President Carter took office? The answer was a resounding "NO" and Reagan became President in a landslide rebuke to the politics of doom and gloom that pervaded the Carter Administration.
For those of you old enough for this question to be relevant, ask yourself: are you better off now, than you were before Reagan took office? The answer among those participating in this commemoration is a resounding "YES."
In nearly a week of heartfelt remembrances, the overwhelming consensus is that Reagan changed the world for the better. And perhaps more importantly, he changed for the better the lives of those who joined in this look back at the beginning of the Reagan age of freedom, peace and hope.
Reagan: A Victory Strategy for America
Many of the blog enthusiasts, who this week shared their reflections on the Reagan presidency, cited remarks from one of his famous speeches. Doing so presented a unique opportunity to go back and re-read the words themselves, even hear them in the President's voice, or see the video. More than any soundbite snippet offered on a History Channel program, the reader can be immersed in the text and decide it's relevance to history for themselves.
Naturally, President Reagan's First Inaugural Address is the one cited most often. Special Agent Utah has the text, photos from the event and the speech on video.
In his first speech as President, Reagan laid out his governing philosophy in clear, direct terms. Call it a "victory strategy" for America. Recognizing that Reagan was speaking for his time, and for the future, GM's Corner cited the following quote from the speech which continues to reverberate today: "It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed. "
The speech delivered in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on June 12, 1987 is a close second in our Reagan remembrance. This is the famous 'Tear Down this Wall" speech (audio excerpt- Windows Media audio- here).
In the Further Adventures of Indigo Red, Indigo, who was by no means a fan of many of Reagan's policies, describes how this speech changed history:
It didn't happen immediately, but the walls standing between America and Russia did come tumbling down just as the walls of Jericho had tumbled before the trumpets of Joshua's mighty army thousands of years ago. The clarion call of freedom's trumpet can be muffled, but never silenced.
...
I was in my apartment in Long Beach, CA. with my friend and roommate, Bianca, a native of Hamburg, Germany. We were watching television Friday night, November 10, 1989, when a special news report interrupted the program with live satellite pictures broadcast from Berlin. People were beating on the Berlin Wall with sledgehammers and clawing pieces away with their bare hands. The reporter said the Wall was being torn down and apparently East Germany had opened the borders to the West.
Bianca turned to me and asked incredulously, "Is this really happening?" I could only say that I was seeing the same thing she was seeing and "I don't know." Just the day before we had been talking about the Wall and that it would never come down in our lifetimes. Yet, there it was being torn to pieces before our eyes. Then two east German border guards appeared on top of the Wall with their submachine guns. I thought for sure they would fire and people would die. But, no. One of the guards reached down and pulled West Germans up to stand on top of the Wall with them. Both Bianca and I began to cry and laugh and cry some more.
Our world was changing right there in front of our disbelieving eyes.
Peter Robinson, who wrote the speech describes in this insightful article how the speech came about, and how it was Reagan that insisted the line "tear down this wall" be kept in despite the vehement opposition of the usual State Department appeasers and apologists. And more to the point, as it is with all of Reagan's speeches:
There is a school of thought that Ronald Reagan managed to look good only because he had clever writers putting words into his mouth. (Perhaps the leading exponent is my former colleague Peggy Noonan, who while a Reagan speechwriter appeared in a magazine article under a caption that said just that: "The woman who puts the words in the president's mouth.") There is a basic problem with this view. Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, George Bush, and Bob Dole all had clever writers. Why wasn't one of them the Great Communicator?
Because we, his speechwriters, were not creating Reagan; we were stealing from him. Reagan's policies were straightforward--he had been articulating them for two decades.
A Victory Strategy for the Cold War 
The Brandenburg speech outlined the moral foundation of Reagan's vision for a more peaceful and free world. Four years earlier in March, 1983 he outlined his military strategy for winning the Cold War with his speech on rebuilding America's defenses and establishing a Strategic Defense Initiative to defend against a Soviet nuclear missile attack. The speech later came to be known as the "Star Wars" speech, the text of which City Troll posts here.
It was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or Star Wars, along with the rebuilding of America's military might that eventually led the Soviets into successful negotiations to end the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war. At a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, Soviet leader Gorbachev desperately tried to stop SDI. He offered a deal that was almost too good to be true if Reagan would agree to scrap SDI. Had the President agreed, it would have been an international media sensation. Reagan might even have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But instead, of fleeting acclaim and awards he achieved peace with an enemy that has lasted far longer and meant much more.
The Great Communicator: More than Great Speeches, a Great Heart!
Thornblog puts it well:
Reagan properly earned the moniker The Great Communicator. But let us not simply and lamely consider that distinction to have merely been made due to his eloquence. No, he was The Great Communicator because he was right, because his ideas were great, because he called our nation to proper greatness.
Throughout his life Ronald Reagan carried his victory strategy for America in his heart. He expressed it in so many ways. Both A Tangled Web (one of our favorite British blogs) and TMH's Bacon Bits (one of our favorite American blogs) both cite the recent book: "Dear Americans: Letters from the Desk of Ronald Reagan" an extraordinary treasure trove of handwritten letters, many sent to ordinary Americans, in answer to letters they had sent him during his time in office. No other president has personally written a comparable volume of similar letters.
A Tangled Web posts one such letter that Mr. Reagan wrote to a woman who had written to him after the loss of her son in the bombing of our Marine compound in Beirut:
...I have no words to tell you how very much your letter meant to me. My heart has ached for all of you who bear the burden of sorrow and then to have the added pain of someone telling you that the sacrifices of your loved one made were for no reason.
Mrs Collin, there was a reason and a cause. The cause was peace and your son and those other fine young men died (in the Beirut bombing) because the enemies of peace knew they were succeeding. Now your letter comes and with all you have to hear you express concern for me. I have asked, with regard to men like your son, where do we find such men? Now I ask where do we find such women as you?
When he describes "the added pain of someone telling you that the sacrifices of your loved one made were for no reason" he might just as well be addressing the sacrifice of today's mothers in our current war and the shrill and insensitive remarks of the war's critics.
Bacon Bit's has a cross section of letters on a variety of other topics. It's the final nail in the lid of those who claim that Reagan was just a Hollywood actor mouthing lines and incapable of the depth that others so readily saw.
Achieving a peaceful end of the Cold War and the freedom of Eastern Europe would not have been possible without partners in peace like Pope John Paul II shown here in Fairbanks Alaska, May 2, 1984.
The Great Motivator
During the course of this celebration we've heard many stories about American's whose sense of hope and purpose they felt was restored by the Reagan presidency. Curt from Flopping Aces shares another. Raised by an ultra-liberal mother, he found his own path to conservatism:
My friends and I posted Reagan/Bush signs up all over the place and when he was re-elected I recall being outside of [my parent's] house blasting "Born in the USA."
Two years later I was in San Diego becoming a Marine.
To this day I credit Ronald Reagan with helping me see the light. To see how narrow minded, how intolerant, and how cowardly liberals could be.
His election would become the first step to bring the US out of it's descent into liberal madness. The madness that forced our country into running from a enemy we were beating in Vietnam, which eventually cost a million Vietnamese it's lives.
It was a proud day, and one that I will remember until the end of my days.
Most of us will remember Reagan until the end of our days. His legacy and the sadness of his passing were also not far from our minds during this celebration. Rhymes with Right put it this way:
Ronald Reagan inspired us to be something better than what we were, and pushed us to move beyond ourselves. It is this vision that led me to become an active Republican, and to remain one.
And then came the day when my hero died. I wept for Ronald Reagan that day, and in the days that followed -- tears of joy that his suffering was done, and tears of loss that this man I loved was gone.
But is he? Or does he yet live in the dreams of those who hold fast to his vision?
Let us be faithful to that vision.
It can be morning in America again.
The "other woman" in President Reagan's life wasn't a romantic partner, but the third in the partnership of peace with Pope John Paul II. Margaret Thatcher (shown above walking with the President at Camp David in November 1986) was Ronald Reagan's conservative soulmate. In her eulogy at President Reagan's funeral she said: "We have lost a great president, a great American, and a great man. And I have lost a dear friend."
Finally, Always on Watch sends this poem, written by a homeschool student on the occasion of the death of President Reagan:
Linked to Stop the ACLU "Reagan Revolution."A Great Man Remembered
Two flames--
One is extinguished,
The other is never-ending,
Today a great man moves on,
Maybe not in this world,
But in Heaven.
He helped fight off the evil in this world.
He helped those in time of justice,
This great man was President Ronald Reagan--
A leader,
A husband,
A Christian,
Even though his body is broken,
His spirit still lives.
At the right hand of God
He sits and talks to Him
About the world.
And he says, I am truly home.
One flame extinguished--
The other still lives,
And will live eternally.
--N.B.
June 2004
Linked to The Political Teen "A Day of Anniversaries"
Linked to Michelle Malkin This Day in History"
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