•  Professor Smith received his B.A., cum laude, from Kalamazoo College, and his J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School.  Professor Smith has been teaching Civil Procedure and Election Law at the law school since 1993.  Before teaching, he practiced law with Vorys, Sater, Seymour & Pease in Columbus, and served as United States Consul in Guayaquil, Ecuador.  He has published scholarly work in such publications as the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Journal on Legislation, and the Wall Street Journal.  Smith is a member of the Board of Scholars of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the Board of Academic Advisors for the Buckeye Center for Public Policy solutions, and an Adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute.
 

 It has now been exactly ten years since Ronald Reagan left office, and (gulp) nearly twenty since he was elected the 40th President of the United States.  The typical first year day law student was probably 12 or 13 years old when Reagan left office, and barely more than a toddler when he was elected. He or she is unlikely to have any contemporaneous memories of the Reagan years.

 The other day I was in the public library looking for books on a quirky favorite of mine, Warren Harding, and I chanced to glance through the books on the shelves about Ronald Reagan.  The majority were sneering treatises with titles such as “The Reagan Detour,” in which Richard Reeves argues that the Reagan years were an unfortunate but temporary detour in America’s march through history; or “Sleepwalking Through History,” a title which says it all about the author’s bias.  There were a couple books that focused on Iran-Contra, in terms which, had anybody but left wing neo-socialists written them, would be laughed out of the market for their ludicrous conspiracy theories.  There was little positive about Reagan.  It is clear that the great liberal re-write of history is well along.  Indeed, in a book just out this year, titled, “Ranking the Presidents,” a group of historians place Reagan just 26th among the 41 men to hold the office, preposterously behind both Bill Clinton (23rd) and Reagan’s immediate predecessor, Jimmy Carter (19th).

 Thus, I want to reflect for a few moments on the Reagan presidency.  I think I can do this with some objectivity: given five opportunities to vote for Reagan during my life, I never once pulled the Reagan lever.  And having said that, let me say this: with every passing year, it becomes clearer what a great president Ronald Reagan was.

 The typical first year law student I mentioned above probably never gives a second thought to the idea of imminent nuclear war.  He or she quite likely has never heard of the Warsaw Pact.  Today, the United States stands alone as the world’s sole superpower, with no serious external threat to our security.  This wonderful state of affairs is, as much as anything, Ronald Reagan’s achievement.

 When Ronald Reagan took office in January of 1981, the Cold War was in full swing.  Make no mistake, the Cold War was a real war.  It was not a bloody, full scale war such as World Wars I & II, but for 40 years it sapped the American treasury, and kept the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over the country.  On the ground, it was normally fought through proxies in far away places with strange names, but as the veterans of Korea and Vietnam will attest, there were American battlefield casualties too. When Reagan took office, it was clear to most observers that the Soviet Union was winning the Cold War.  Just since 1974, when Richard Nixon had resigned the presidency in disgrace, Angola, Mozambique, South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan and Nicaragua had come under the sway of Marxist governments financed by and indebted to the Soviets.  Marxist-led revolutions in Guatemala and El Salvador threatened to pull all of Central America into the Russian sphere of influence, putting enormous pressure on Mexico.  Iran, formerly America’s most strategic ally in the oil producing middle east, had also fallen to a government implacably hostile to U.S. interests and containing a substantial Marxist element.  U.S. prestige was at it’s lowest point in the entire Cold War, as indicated by the sacking and burning of U.S. embassies in Pakistan and Iran in 1979, the latter resulting in an embarrassing hostage taking scheme by the new Iranian government that totally flummoxed the Carter Administration. For people like myself, born in 1958, the idea that the Cold War would ever end was all but incredible.  The idea that it would end in total victory for the west in our lifetimes was even more incredible; the so-called Brezhnev doctrine, which held that a country, once Communist, could never go back to democracy, was accepted by most commentators and, apparently, by Carter’s pusillanimous Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance.

 Reagan’s approach to this crisis was four-fold.  The first step was to boost flagging spirits in the U.S. and elsewhere.  This Reagan did by denouncing the Soviet Union for what it was: an “Evil Empire.”  To the sneers of the elite but the relief and hurrahs of ordinary people in both the free world and the communist block, Reagan proclaimed the moral superiority of western democracy.  His galvanizing effect on the morale of both political leaders and ordinary citizens can scarcely be underestimated.  He announced boldly that the Soviet Union would soon find itself “in the dustbin of history.”  His confidence, both in the rightness of the cause and in ultimate victory, did as much as anything to turn the tide away from Communism.

 Next, Reagan supported his rhetoric with a massive military build-up.  The inadequacies of the U.S. military, demoralized and underfunded since the inglorious retreat from Vietnam, had been demonstrated by the impotence of the Carter regime in the face of hostage taking and attacks on U.S. embassies.  The U.S. was considered seriously behind the Soviets in missile capability.  Reagan rejuvenated the armed forces into the lean, powerful force that eventually distinguished itself in the Gulf War.  But more than that, what Reagan recognized, that others had not, was that it was possible to win an arms race with the Soviet Union.  Reagan determined to spend the Soviets into bankruptcy.  Ignoring the wisdom of the elites who now scornfully deride his presidency in their petty rankings, Reagan realized that the a determined U.S. could force the Soviets into an arms race that the latter could never afford, and from there force the Soviets to the bargaining table.

 Having restored American and western morale and rearmed the U.S., Reagan also defied the Brezhnev Doctrine, carrying the fight to the Soviets.  He armed, over vigorous opposition from the Democrats in Congress, rebels seeking to overthrow pro-Soviet regimes in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Mozambique, and Angola.  He ordered U.S. troops into combat to turn out a Marxist regime in the Caribbean island of Grenada, after Cuban troops began building a military airbase there.  He initiated Radio Marti, broadcasting free news directly at Cuba.  Meanwhile, again over vigorous objections from Democrats in Congress, he gave full American support to fledging democracies in Guatemala and El Salvador. In short, for the first time in the Cold War, the United States took the offensive.

 Finally, from the position of strength he had created, Reagan negotiated.  Moreover, he negotiated with a far more sweeping vision of what was possible than any of his predecessors.  His discussions with Mikail Gorbachev in Reykjavik proved far more successful in setting the stage for a peaceful end to the Cold War than anybody had thought possible.

 With the Soviets outgunned morally, militarily, and at the negotiating table, the Cold War came to remarkably swift end shortly after Reagan left office.  It was, for the U.S., a victorious end, and an end virtually no one--except Reagan--would have predicted in January of 1981.  Ronald Reagan deserves credit as a great wartime leader, as great as Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt.  Today, for the first time in two generations, the United States doesn’t face the threat of sudden and massive destruction.  When you go to sleep tonight, secure in a peaceful dawn tomorrow, much of the credit must go to Reagan.

 Reagan was equally successful on the domestic front.  After Bill Clinton’s lies in the 1992 campaign (“the worst economy in 50 years”), many younger Americans can be forgiven for not remembering the economic state of the country when Reagan took office.  In January, 1981, unemployment was in double digits.  Inflation was in double digits.  Mortgage rates were in double digits.  Real incomes had been falling since 1973.  Lyndon Johnson’s inflationary policies, Richard Nixon’s incredibly stupid imposition of wage and price controls, and the spendthrift Democratic Congress that dominated the brief presidency of Gerald Ford and the first two years of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, had done incredible harm to the economy.  Most saw no way out, other than a future of living with less.  Carter, to his credit, had begun to reverse the tide, trying, after Republican gains in the 1978 off-year elections, to hold down spending and beginning the process of deregulation, especially in transportation.  He had also made the wise appointment of Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve.  But Carter’s economics remained hopelessly Keynesian and his instincts deeply regulatory, especially in energy, where rising costs of oil were particularly harming the economy.  The top tax rate on income was 70%, and inflation was pushing the middle class into ever higher tax brackets despite no increase in real income.

 Reagan, over the objections of his opponents (both Republican and Democrat, who ridiculed his platform as “voodoo economics”), forced through sweeping reductions in marginal income tax rates, and indexed those rates for inflation.  He supported wholeheartedly Volcker’s tight money policies at the federal reserve.  And he stepped up the pace of deregulation, especially in energy, and over vocal objections from Ted Kennedy and others that deregulation would lead to gasoline prices of as much as $5 per gallon.  “Reaganomics” worked.  By 1983, the economy was back in full swing.  “Stagflation,” that combination of high inflation and high unemployment for which liberal economists had no remedy, disappeared--most first year law students have probably never even heard the word.  The decline in real incomes was reversed.  High spending on both the military and discretionary domestic spending--the latter pushed by the Democratic House of Representatives--led to continued high deficits, but income tax revenues also swelled as the economy came back to life and tax rates came down.  By the time Reagan left office, the deficit was shrinking fast and, as a percentage of the budget, was roughly where it had been when he took office.

 A mild recession, caused by a succession of government shocks to the economy, including a big increase in the minimum wage; the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act; the Civil Rights Act of 1990; the amendments to the Clean Water Act of 1990; and the savings and loan bailout, which  resulted from Democratic amendments to the 1980s banking deregulation (the Democrats had blocked deregulatory measures which would have given the S&Ls market incentives not to make such risky loans) - occurred during the term of George Bush, but by the time Clinton took office the economy had already been growing for over a year, and that boom has continued to the present time.  Meanwhile, a rapid reduction in military spending begun under Bush and continued by Clinton, was made possible by Reaganís victory in the Cold War.  This reduction has been largely responsible for the budget surpluses we see today the so-called "peace dividend." In short, the current economic expansion is really the continuation of that begun by Ronald Reagan. Despite Clinton’s tax hikes, marginal income tax rates remain drastically lower--by some 40%--than before Reagan took office.  Large sections of the economy, including transportation, banking, and energy, have been deregulated, with stunning success, as indicated by the fact that gasoline is cheaper now in nominal terms than it was 20 years ago.

 When I graduated from college in the spring of 1980, double digit unemployment made jobs hard to find.  Everywhere we were told that we young grads would have to lower our expectations, accept a lower standard of living than our parents generation, and carry on our affairs under the perpetual threat of nuclear holocaust created by a war we were bound to lose anyway.

 Ronald Reagan reversed all that.  His success has spilled over into the rest of world, where more and more nations enjoy political freedom and, despite the recent troubles in Asia, the world economy, anchored by the U.S., looks better than at any time since the mid-1960s.  It is only a slight exaggeration to say, as Grover Norquist does, that Ronald Reagan saved the world.  And he did it all with a level of style, humor, grace, kindness, and dignity that his worst enemies had to admire, even as they called him a dunce and time and again predicted failure for his policies.

 Ronald Reagan was a giant of a man, and the greatest president of the late twentieth century, perhaps of the entire century.  The liberal historians and revisionists can try to detract from that image all they want, and we, basking in the peace and prosperity created by the Reagan years, may sometimes forget all that he accomplished.  But he did accomplish it, and I predict that when this great republic finally reaches its end in some distant future, Reagan’s name will shine with the greatest of presidents.