Craig Shirley is the author of “Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America,” recently released in paperback.
Shirley is currently the president and CEO of Shirley & Banister Public Affairs, a firm he founded in 1984. He has been involved in numerous political campaigns.
Shirley recently agreed to answer 10 questions from TheDC about his book and other topics of interest:
1. Why did you decide to write the book?
It is was surprising to discover that so little scholarship existed on the 1980 campaign, though it was surely one of the four most important elections in American history. As I’d already written “Reagan’s Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign that Started it All,” again, the first time anyone had taken a deep look at Reagan’s challenge to Gerald Ford for the GOP nomination in 1976, it seemed a natural follow on. Also, frankly, I’ve discovered that book writing combines some of the things that make living so enjoyable; meeting and interviewing people, research and letting one’s legs stretch in attempting to pen an entertaining story. Faulkner said history is not “was” but “is” and the history of Reagan and all his accomplishments and careers I’ve discovered “is” just as many others have as well.
2. Dozens (maybe hundreds) of books on the Reagan and the Reagan era have been written. What makes yours different?
Because no one has ever written in depth on these topics from the Reagan perspective. Most of the books on 1980 are either quickies or dismissive towards Reagan or both. I also think as an insider to the campaigns and political wars of the 1970’s and 80’s, I have a different view on politics, history, the conservative movement and Reagan than academics and liberal historians, who too often tend to rely on the works of others rather than doing their own original research. But there are many fine books about Reagan out there and more are coming. As my friend, Doug Brinkley, said, the field of Reagan scholarship is just beginning to open up.
3. What made Reagan’s 1980 campaign successful and how did it differ from his nearly successful 1976 primary campaign against President Ford?
Well, he started out as the frontrunner for the 1980 nomination, but because of mistakes and his own inattentiveness to his campaign, by January of 1980, he was tied with George H. W. Bush in national polls. Reagan went on to lose the Iowa Caucuses to Bush, which was devastating to his campaign, but like in 1976, when he took control of his own destiny, he came back to win the 1980 nomination just as he’d come back to almost win it in 1976.
What made it successful was that he ran as an unabashed populist conservative with a vision for the future while making the GOP into a party of enlightened and optimistic conservatism. He knew if he ran as a traditional Republican, he would be competing for votes with the liberal Independent candidate, John Anderson, who’d been a Republican congressman from Illinois. But if he ran as a conservative, he would force Carter to compete for left of center votes with Anderson.
What made it successful is that it is one of the five most important presidential elections in American history, alongside 1800, 1828, 1860 and 1932.
In each, the American voter went for a radical change in governing philosophy.
4. What made Reagan so attractive as a person?
He used to say that maybe people liked him because he genuinely liked people. He was most interested in young people though and many of his important policy speeches took place on campuses such as his alma mater, Eureka. Young Americans adored the Gipper. When he left office in January of 1989, his overall approval rating was 73 percent but among voters under thirty, it was an astounding 85 percent!
He was both self-confident and humble. He was self-aware and self-deprecating. He was supremely secure in his ability to lead people yet he hated gossip. He celebrated the individual yet was a deeply religious man. He was proud of his many successful careers and yet learned from his failures as well. He embodied and embraced American Exceptionalism as no president since JFK.
He knew America operated on a higher moral plane than any other country in history. He believed in God, the American people and himself as Lyn Nofizger once told me. He used to say, “I don’t want to go back to the past. I want to go back to the past way of looking at the future.”
He spoke often of “Man with God” and in so doing, has found a synthesis between his two favorite philosophers, Thomas Paine and Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. Where the Enlightenment placed Man at the center of the universe, Solzhenitsyn eviscerated the Enlightenment for this. But Reagan believed that if Man was at the center of his world, then not only was it because God wanted him there, but also because God was there with Man as well.
5. President Reagan’s son, Ron Jr., has recently suggested that his father had manifest signs of Alzheimer’s while still in the White House. Do you have any personal insight into whether that is true or not?
In 1996, I took my brother John out to see President Reagan at his office in Century City. We spent about 20 minutes with him. Now remember, this was two years after the Alzheimer’s had been announced, but Reagan was warm and funny. When my brother asked the president if he came to the office every day, he replied, “Not on the seventh day!” He told us he hadn’t been to the ranch recently because of flooding. Am I am expert on age issues? No. But he seemed to me to be as well then as any other 85 year old man.
Also, having studied the man, his writings, his pronouncements and having come to know and become friends with so many of his closest and longest aides including Nofziger, Meese, Allen, Hannaford, Khachigian, Wirthlin, Deaver, Spencer and others, they told me that from the day he entered the White House until the day he left, he was nothing but a mentally and physically vigorous man. If one were to look at his White House diaries, the same detailed entries were being made the last day as the first day.
6. What do you think are Reagan’s most lasting achievements?
John Patrick Diggins, my old friend, was in many ways the official chronicler of the American Left in the 20th century. He was at Berkeley in the 1960’s and himself did battle with then-Governor Reagan.
But his last book was “Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom and the Making History,” and in it, he says that Reagan was one of our four greatest presidents, because he’d freed many people, alongside Washington, Lincoln and FDR. Another liberal historian, James MacGregor Burns, said he would rate Reagan in the great or near great categories of American presidents.
Reagan’s greatest achievement was in putting the neck of Soviet Communism under his cowboy heel and crushing the life out of it, thus freeing millions. But to do that, he first needed to restore the morale and spiritual and economic self-confidence of the American people and this was again a lasting accomplishment. For America to have the muscle to win the Cold War meant it first must have a muscular economy and this only comes if America has a muscular belief in itself.
7. Is there anything President Obama could learn from Reagan?
Sure. But the better question might be is Obama interested in learning anything about Reagan? If this is the case, he needs to learn that the Founders and Reagan believed the individual to be more important than the state and that power flows upwards and not downwards. But to learn and embrace this means Obama would have to unlearn the collectivist philosophy that has animated his presidency for the past two years. Placing emphasis on the individual and his or her freedom is not only a winning political philosophy; it is a superior one as well. Collectivism is anti-intellectualism.
8. Is there any potential 2012 Republican nominee that strikes you as particularly Reaganesque ? And is it unfair to measure potential candidates by comparing them to Reagan?
No and yes. I am currently writing a book about Newt Gingrich and having known him for years, he among the field probably understands the argument better than any of the other aspirants. Most of them simply shout platitudes about Reagan but Gingrich worked up close and personal with the man for eight years in Washington and before that in the conservative movement. At an intellectual level, he understands Reaganism better that any of the other aspirants. Reagan liked Gingrich and said so in his diaries.
Palin is intriguing because her Jacksonian populism is akin to Reagan’s — anti-elitism — although Reagan’s was also blended with the Enlightenment and his Christian faith. Barbour, Daniels and Pawlenty have all been good governors, holding the line on taxes and spending.
But the comparison is also unfair as it does not allow these candidates to develop their own programs and personas.
9. What are three books or events that you believe most shaped Reagan’s worldview?
The first event was his speech at Eureka in leading a successful student strike as a freshman. In the depths of the Great Depression, the school was struggling and was planning on firing some professors which meant some underclassmen could not graduate in their major. A student meeting was called and Reagan spoke to the 250 students who attended the school. The strike was successful and Reagan got his first taste of public speaking and leading people.
The second may have been when as a young boy, he and his brother asked their father Jack how much money he made. The father stormed at this two sons, telling them it was no one’s business about how much a man made. It was private. From this, Reagan began his road towards individuality and privacy and the dignity of the private citizen. The rights and security of an individual against outside forces is the essences of Reagan’s “libertarian- conservatism,” which is how he once described himself.
The third was his intellectual awakening while working for GE all through the 50’s. Since he refused to fly (he’d had two bad experiences in the 1940’s). He rode the train across country but rather than knocking back drinks in the club car, he would get his own compartment and fill it with books and magazines, constantly reading. And then, the second part of the journey of education included meeting, by his estimate, 250,000 GE employees all across the country, speaking, asking questions, answering questions, learning more about his country and fellow countrymen than he could have in any other manner.
10. Any plans for another book? If so, about what?
I am currently working on a biography entitled “Citizen Newt” of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who to my mind is one of the most interesting political figures of our lifetime. He is compelling I believe in part because of his durability. I am also writing “December, 1941: The Month that Changed America and Saved the World.” This is a day by day accounting of the forces at work in America from December 1st, 1941 to December 31st, 1941. America changed radically in 31 days. I am also working on three more books on Reagan, including his 1968 and 1984 campaigns. I also have a list of about a dozen more books I’d like to write on American leaders, our culture and our history.
One thing is for sure. It keeps me off the streets and out of the pool halls!