They underestimated him
June 8, 2004

We all knew it was coming, but Ronald Reagan's death still came as something of a shock to those of us who grew up as Reagan conservatives. He was a part of our world, and we loved him.

In the brief time since his death, so much has been written about the man and his accomplishments that one wonders if there is anything more to say. He was indeed a great president. He did end the Cold War, and he did revitalize the U.S. economy. In the final analysis, he did what few politicians can claim -- he left his country and the world better than he found it.

Many of us who worked with him have commented in the past few days on the surprising fact that his critics and even his friends always seemed prone to underestimate him. They thought him a lightweight and constantly dismissed the threat he posed to them, both politically and intellectually. California Democrats never thought he could be elected governor and were gleeful when he won his party's nomination against Pat Brown because they just knew he'd be a pushover. They discovered too late that they had underestimated him. It was a mistake that was to be repeated by many others.

I still remember a luncheon conversation on the eve of his announcement in 1975 that he would challenge then-President Gerald Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination. The Sacramento bureau chief of Newsweek was steaming. He and others who had covered Gov. Reagan had been summoned to Washington for a meeting at which publisher Katherine Graham informed them Reagan wouldn't last a month once he hit the big time and the crack national reporters in her stable at Newsweek and The Washington Post could start dissecting him.

"It was insulting," the California journalist said. "I tried to tell her and the others at the meeting that Reagan is better than they think. We haven't laid a glove on him out there, and I don't consider myself or the other reporters that have covered him incompetent." Graham dismissed his perspective out of hand as she and her East Coast colleagues began planning the journalistic destruction of the cowboy from the West. They soon discovered that, like Brown, they had underestimated him, but by then it was too late.

Reagan lost the nomination that year, but in the process won the heart of his party and came back four years later to defeat an incumbent president in a landslide.

Jimmy Carter was at first gleeful at the prospect of running against Reagan. Chuck Morgan, a Southerner who headed the Washington office of the ACLU for many years and was close to the Carter people, told me then about a meeting he had with Carter, Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell. They knew their man was in trouble but were convinced that if the Republicans would just nominate Reagan, all would be well.

That was a conversation that could have taken place in Brown's office in Sacramento some years earlier. By the time they realized they had underestimated Reagan, it was too late.

People continued to underestimate him, of course, even after he moved into the White House. Congressional Democrats, the media and just about everyone else, including our European allies and our Soviet enemies, underestimated him until it was too late. As a result, he managed to change our world and theirs.

Some got it. I remember driving from Boston to Manchester, N.H., back in 1980 with the late Rep. Barber Conable (R-N.Y.). who had been George H.W. Bush's seatmate in Congress and who was at the time chairing his campaign against Reagan. Bush, like Brown and Carter, was into self-delusion, but Conable saw something Bush missed.

Glancing up from his newspaper, Conable said, "It's strange the way the press treats Reagan. You'd think from what they write that Reagan is a lightweight, but it seems to me that he's thought everything through, knows who he is and what he wants and is much brighter than they think."

And so he was. Conable, unlike either his candidate or the people covering the race, sensed the real Reagan: a decent man with a philosophy grounded in principle who had thought deeply about his country and knew just what he would do when he got to the White House.

Now that he's gone, the world is beginning to see what those who got it always knew. Reagan was a great man and a great president who will be missed by all who knew him and many who didn't but who live in a better world because of him.

Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, is a managing associate with Carmen Group, a D.C.-based governmental-affairs firm (www.carmengrouplobbying.com).