ONE OF THE GREATEST?

It is funny what hindsight can do. Former President Ronald Reagan died at the weekend after a decade-long battle with Alzheimer’s Disease.

And if his memory was faulty then some of ours need a polish and an update.

It was easy to mock and ridicule Reagan – The Gipper, the Great Communicator. What was a former B-grade actor (he was always called “B Grade) even doing as Governor of California, let alone President of the most powerful nation on earth?

He was always easy to caricature, the cartoonist’s delight: ten-gallon hat, six guns, etc. But he won two presidential elections once won 49 of fifty states.

He had a passionate hatred for communism. He called it the “evil empire” and wasn’t embarrassed when an open microphone caught him, in a sound check, joking about having outlawed the Soviet Union and
”the bombing starts in five minutes”.

Reagan outlived the Soviet Union. His relentless policies helped end the Cold War. Former British Minister Margaret Thatcher once said that Reagan would go down in history as the man “ who won the Cold War without firing a shot. Thatcher was a Reagan friend. Gorbachev became one.

In 1987 on a visit to the Brandenberg Gate in West Berlin Reagan said “Come here to this gate, Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Not long after the Berlin Wall crumbled as East Germany and the Soviet Union crumbled.

It was right that, as news of Reagan’s death, flashed to Europe, leaders of more than twenty countries, including President George W. Bush (son of Reagan’s Vice-President and later President George Bush) for the 60th anniversary of the Allied D-Day invasion that liberated France and turned the tide of World War Two against Adolf Hitler.

President Reagan was there for the 40th commemoration of the landing.

On that day Reagan said:

“We’re here today to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved and the world prayed for its rescue. Here, in Normandy, the rescue began.”

It would have been impossible to even think on that day that this weekend the leaders of the US, France, Britain, Russia and even Germany could join together.

Already in the eulogies and tributes people are describing Reagan as “a great American president”. One of the greatest ever. At least the best since Franklin Delano Roosevelt”.

History may prove them right.

Monday, June 7, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004