GE: imagination at work

Progress Reports: Peggy Noonan

A Peaceable Warrior

When we speak of President Reagan we are able to celebrate his decisions, his leadership, and his presidency, but also his philosophy. He wrote of it, spoke of it, expanded upon it over decades. It was what he was all about.

That philosophy included a certainty that there should be a greater power, autonomy and respect for the individual, and less, comparatively, for the state, or the government.

Reagan believed you want to have as much government as you need but no more than that. And you want the government you have to do its job.

I think it was Ronald Reagan’s particular insight, as an adult operating in the world in the 1940s onwards, to see that government in the modern age would become more central and more powerful than ever, because it would be more capable than ever to make demands. He foresaw the way Washington would be taking more and more power to itself over the second half of the 20th century.

In foreign policy, Reagan loved peace. He had no illusions about war. He’d been in the armed services during a war; he didn’t like war. Reagan had a respect for the reality of the world, however, a respect rooted in part in the thinking of Edmund Burke. Reagan thought that if you have to fight, then you win. But you should never be eager to commit American troops, because war is hell.

Ronald Reagan’s way was to think and say of the great challenger of his time that the Soviet Union is involved in wickedness; it is, itself, at war with the very nature of man. We will speak the truth to it and about it. We will have a revolution of candor. An atheistic dictatorship with nuclear weapons whose premier had said, “We will bury you?” Ronald Reagan was not going to be intimidated by that. He was going to tell the truth about it.

He and his great friend and colleague, Margaret Thatcher, lived in the possible, in the imperfect, the broken, knowing that nothing perfect could be made by the ‘crooked timber’ of man or the twisted timber of politics.

I always think of President Reagan as having the peaceableness of a warrior. He appreciated the facts of his era, he accepted what had to be accepted, but he was never passive. He tried to persuade, and he never abandoned principle.

He spoke — and led — within the possible.

1988 — President Reagan meeting with Peggy Noonan in the Oval Office

Ms. Noonan was a special assistant to President Reagan, and is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.