Reagan: "Warmly ruthless"

 

While we await the worst election result, about the worst US candidates in living memory, you might like to cast your mind back to Ronald Reagan. A Republican president when that meant something different. Martin Anderson worked as senior policy advisor to Reagan and helped shape the platforms of each of his campaigns. He remembers him this way:

"I once described him as warmly ruthless. He had this appearance of being friendly and jovial and nice, never argued with anyone, never complained. But if you shook your head and thought about it a little bit, he always did it his way. It was like there was a steel bar right down the middle of him and everything you touched was soft and fuzzy except the steel bar in the middle. He always did it his way. No matter how many people talked to him, no matter what happened, he always did it his way. If you were in the way, you were gone, you were fired. He never took any pleasure out of it, just gone. ...
    "He was incredibly smart. I know this doesn’t sound reasonable, but he was incredibly smart. I’ve dealt with professors at Columbia and professors at Stanford, but he could look at something and understand it and grasp it and turn it around and work with it and play with it. He was incredibly quick. I’d say he had a brain that was comparable to—and I’d talk to Milton Friedman or Ed Teller and Arthur [Burns], all those guys, he could stay with them.
    "Now, he hid that. He just backed off. He never argued with staff. You could have ten different people tell him the same thing and he’d just listen. He never said to them, Look, you dumb bunny, ten years ago I wrote an article on this, a long article. He’d just say, That’s an interesting idea. So many of the policy issues that were proposed to Reagan over time, by different people, he listened, That’s very interesting. Then when he did it, even though it was something he’d decided many, many years previously he would do, all these people were delighted. He was doing what they had told him. He was happy with that, he didn’t care.
    "He used to say privately, There’s no limit to what a person can get done if you don’t care who gets the credit. And he was just very smart. 

    "The second thing is, there was this feeling that he was lazy, that he took naps. Well, I travelled with him for almost four years. He never took a nap. It was total nonsense. In fact, he worked all the time. We have uncovered evidence with this book in terms of the handwritten documents and so on, he was writing all the time. He was studying, he was writing, he was working all the time, in private. As soon as he came out in public, put on the public persona, he was friendly and jovial and talking. ... 

"So I think people made the mistake of saying, Gee, this guy is an easy-going—obviously, we never see him working, so therefore the staff must be telling him what to say. Not true. And when they ran up against him, they assumed he could be persuaded and pushed around. Big mistake. And the woods are full of people that tried to do that ...

    "I remember one little thing in the campaign where ... one of the staff was answering some questions from reporters about naming a Vice President. The staff guy got up there and said, 'What he’s saying is totally wrong politically. He’s got it all wrong, he shouldn’t be saying this, he shouldn’t be saying that, telling me to straighten it up.' So I said, 'Hey, you tell him.' So he sits down with Reagan, explains to Reagan why what he is doing is wrong. Reagan looks at him and nods and says, 'Thanks,' real pleasant, 'Thank you very much.' Next day there’s a press conference and the second or third question is dealing directly with this. And I’m standing there and I’m looking. So Reagan looks around the room, and he looks around and he finds this guy that gave him the lecture and he looks directly at him and gives the 'wrong' answer. He did this all the time, nobody noticed. To this day they don’t notice, but that’s all right, he didn’t care."

[Hat tip David R.Henderson]