GE: imagination at work

Progress Reports: Thomas W. Evans

Vision Accomplished

Ronald Reagan brought about a revolution. When he entered the White House he had a vision of America. To have accomplished any one of his goals — British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called them “big ideas” — would have been a remarkable achievement. He accomplished them all.

No less an informed observer than Barack Obama has noted: “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America … He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.”

The term “vision” was used by close observers — including his secretary of state George Shultz, Margaret Thatcher and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev — to describe Reagan’s agenda. The basic elements were formed or honed during the eight years (1954-62) that he worked for GE.

1957 — Ronald Reagan (far right) speaking with GE employees in Hendersonville, North Carolina

When Reagan gave his nationally-televised speech in support of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in October of 1964, David Broder, the dean of the Washington press corps, described it as “the most successful political debut since William Jennings Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech in 1896.” The speaker told the press that the address had been developed during his GE years, when, in addition to his television duties, he spent a quarter of his time traveling the country to speak with the company’s employees and their neighbors.

Hugh Sidey of Time/Life, who covered every president from Eisenhower through George W. Bush, commented that he thought Reagan’s speeches in England and Russia were the finest ever given abroad by an American leader. When he asked a White House speechwriter who had written these offerings, he was told: “Reagan. They were actually pretty much the speeches he had given when he worked for General Electric.”

1987 — Thomas Evans (left) with President Reagan.

GE had four publications in those days and Reagan absorbed them as he traveled on the Super Chief and other great transcontinental trains. (He detested flying.) The trips were frequent because the General Electric Theater, which he hosted on television, was produced on both coasts. Even such an obscure (at that time) part of his agenda such as the anti-missile shield (later SDI) appeared in a company publication, Forum, a defense quarterly. President Reagan later appointed the article’s co-author a U. S. ambassador.

In the movie The Candidate, when the film’s central figure, played by Robert Redford, wins a U. S. Senate seat, he turns to the campaign manager who has led him every step of the way, and asks, “What do we do now?” Too many of our candidates for office, even our highest office, assume their jobs without any specific goals. Ronald Reagan was different. He had a vision which developed from study and talks with GE workers and executives all over the country. This progress was certainly the company’s most important product.

Thomas W. Evans is the author of The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of his Conversion to Conservatism. Mr. Evans chaired the National Symposium on Partnerships in Education, sponsored annually by the White House during the Reagan years, and served on President Reagan’s Private Sector Initiatives Advisory Council.