Redstate

By TomlinsonDouthat Posted in Life Issues — Comments (7) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

On June 26, 1947, Christine Reagan was born. On June 26, 1947, Christine Reagan died. She was the daughter of Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman.

Her death cannot have been a surprise, for her birth was premature—a precarious circumstance even with today's advanced medicine, and all the more in 1947. Whatever warning her parents may have had had, it cannot have made her death any less heartbreaking. This is one of the worst things that can happen to anybody. Nothing, surely, can prepare one for it, and nobody can walk away from such an experience unaffected.

But nobody is affected by such a tragedy in precisely the same way. We suffer according to our character, and we respond to our suffering likewise. Jane Wyman was a private woman, and so the particular nature of her suffering is none of our business. Ronald Reagan, however, was a very public figure, and one of the most influential men in American history. It is our task to understand his suffering, so that we might better understand him and the influence he still has upon this country.

We often speak of Ronald Reagan's optimism, but we tend to speak of it in simple terms, as if it were nothing more than a sunny disposition, with perhaps a touch of naïveté. But optimism, properly understood, is an intensely complicated thing, and it is utterly incompatible with naïveté. This, at least, is true of Reagan's particular from of optimism.

Let us consider, for instance, one brief episode from Reagan's youth. Two black basketball players were visiting his hometown of Dixon, Illinois, and they found themselves without accommodation, perhaps due to a local hotel's policy of segregation (although this had been illegal in Illinois since 1897). Having met the two and learned of their situation, he invited them to stay the night with his family. A simple good deed, which probably would not have been remembered by anybody except that such good deeds did not cross racial lines often enough in that era.*

Reagan's parents' influence was clearly evident in this simple act. His father Jack was a vocal opponent of segregation, and Reagan clearly adopted his father's views on this from a young age. His mother Nelle had similar views, and she acted on them to extraordinary lengths. She was famous for picking up hitchhikers, of all races and certainly of varying levels of rectitude. She also regularly invited convicts, paroled into her care, to stay in their home (a humble one: Nelle and Jack did not own a house till their son bought them one in Hollywood) until they could get themselves situated.

Reagan once wrote of his mother that she "always expected to find the best in people and often did." This is clearly true of her, and it is also clearly true of him. He cannot have known with utter certainty that these athletes were what they said they were, nor that they were the sort of people one would invite into one's mother's home. But Ronald Reagan, just as his mother, always expected to find the best in people, and in this case, as in many others, he did.

Such constant faith in the goodness of one's fellow man, as displayed by both Ronald and Nelle Reagan, is incompatible with naïveté, for it could not survive disappointment. They expected to find the best in people, and they often did. If they had been naïve and hence poor judges of character, then the requirements of survival itself would dictate that they build a wall of cynicism around their hearts. To avoid the disastrous consequences of inviting any of the few truly bad apples into their home and into their lives, they would have to err on the side of caution and avoid inviting anybody at all into their lives until a great deal of evidence of good faith had been provided. They would, in other words, have had to live their lives as most of us do and always have.

But they did not. Their optimism was not naïve but well-established, and hence it could grow and grow and grow. In Nelle's case, it could grow into her extraordinary, even saintly, record of good deeds. In her son's case, it could grow into a comprehensive theory of politics—and one, being well-established, that could work in practice.

Ronald Reagan saw the best in people. He saw, in contradiction to fashionable opinion (then and now), that the American people were competent to manage their own lives, and that they had the right to do so. Hence, he supported the free market economy—perhaps more deeply than any other president—where those with less optimistic opinions of human nature held that their choices had to be managed by their betters.

He saw that the people of the Eastern Bloc were not our enemies, even as he waged the Cold War more intensely than any other president. Where previous international conflicts had usually been against "the British" or "the Hun" or "the Japanese," Reagan (and a number of others, to be fair) was clear that his and America's dispute was not with the people of the Communist states but with the regimes that oppressed the people of the Communist states. He saw the best in people everywhere, even in our nominal enemies. And his faith was rewarded, for many of those people, having won the right to self-government, have become some of America's strongest allies.

But Ronald Reagan's optimism was even deeper than this. For not only could he see, accurately, the goodness of his fellow man in the present, but he could also see it, still accurately, in the future. Through most of his adult life, the Cold War seemed like it would be a permanent fixture of life on this planet—or at least that its permanence would be the best possible outcome, the only realistic alternatives being nuclear annihilation or else worldwide submission to Communist domination. But Reagan saw things differently. His genius for perceiving the fundamental goodness of humanity allowed him to see—where others, even on his own staff, could not—that this was not the natural state of things, that better things were possible and even likely. It allowed him to foresee the end of the Cold War, and hence to take measures to bring this about—as well as to see the possibility, even if this was never realized, of the abolition of nuclear weapons. This allowed him to gain a vital amount of trust from Mikhail Gorbachev as they sat across from each other in the most delicate and, it turned out, the most important diplomatic negotiations that this world has yet seen, thereby eventually giving Gorbachev the freedom to follow the better angels of his own nature in his reaction to later developments in the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself.

This was the nature of Ronald Reagan's optimism. It was not just a treacly campaign commercial. It was not just the charisma of a Hollywood actor. It was not just a sentimental story in a speech to a room of stuffed suits. It suffused his life, his politics, his career, and his character.

We suffer according to our character.

Imagine what it must have been like to be Ronald Reagan. We cannot get the full measure of it, but we can try. Imagine what it must have been like to grow up thinking it perfectly normal that random strangers should pass through the home or get in the car of a decent, if troubled, family—and in the case of the parolees, often coming out of the experience better human beings. Imagine the confidence you would have had in the inherent goodness of the human race, even in its least members. Imagine what sort of a man it would take to be able to picture the entire world being freed from the constant threat of either utter annihilation or totalitarian domination, even when almost everyone around you insists that no alternative is possible.

Now imagine what it must have been like for a man with such vast optimism and such vast imagination to learn that his wife was pregnant. Imagine all the joys and all the possibilities that such a man could imagine for his daughter. This would be the happiness that every expectant father must feel, but having a particular genius for such things, Ronald Reagan must have felt this with a particular intensity. Now imagine all this being ripped away from such a man on the very day of his daughter's birth.

When Reagan was first entering electoral politics, abortion was first coming to prominence as a political issue. It is impossible that his daughter Christine was not on his mind when he first confronted this issue. He can only have considered that the lives now being discussed had the same vast potential for goodness as Christine's, and that the loss of such goodness would be mourned by the world as deeply as he mourned the loss of Christine. In his first year as governor of California, he signed a law liberalizing the state's abortion law only slightly—or so he thought. He did this out of sympathy for the very few mothers who would find themselves in extraordinary danger from their pregnancies. But this, it turns out, was one of the few instances of Reagan's optimism crossing the line into naïveté, as it eventually became clear that the measures put in place to ensure that abortions only took place under extraordinary circumstances were utterly insufficient. Christine must have been on his mind as he looked in horror upon the unintended consequences of his action. It is inevitable, I think, that the suffering he had felt since June 26, 1947—softening with the passage of time, but never lessening—was felt more sharply again as he contemplated all the goodness the world was being denied with the establishment of legal abortion.

But Reagan's optimism was so well developed by this point in his life that he was not driven, as so many of us are, to build a wall of cynicism around his heart. He retained the ability to imagine the world as a better place. In 1980, as Reagan ran his first successful campaign for the presidency, the politics of abortion in America were at a crossroads. It had been only seven years since the Supreme Court issued its ukase in Roe v. Wade. The Democratic party had been growing more and more monolithically supportive of abortion. Richard Nixon, likewise, had been openly supportive of Roe, and he had appointed three of the Justices in the majority of that decision. Gerald Ford had claimed to be mildly pro-life, but his appointment of John Paul Stevens and his subsequent statements draw reasonable skepticism upon this claim. If, in 1980, the Republican party had chosen its third straight pro-choice presidential nominee, it is reasonable to conclude that the American pro-life movement, with neither major party willing to court its support, would have gone the way of the dodo.

But it did not. It could have. By signing the California abortion bill, Reagan clearly demonstrated profound sympathy with expectant mothers who find themselves in difficult circumstances, even if he did not realize the full scope of that legislation. And he was clearly, at heart, a libertarian—a political tendency which has historically tended to draw its adherents towards the pro-choice side of the abortion debate.

But against these contrary influences and others, he had the memory of Christine, of his dreams for her, and of his pain at her loss. He had the knowledge that other people would feel the pain he felt for Christine, even if they did not know it yet. And he had the knowledge that these very young human beings had the same rights as his Christine and as his other children—Maureen, Michael, Patti, and Ron, Jr.—to experience the joys of this life and to give their inherent goodness to the rest of humanity, insofar as they were able.

Ronald Reagan spent his presidency as an advocate for the pro-life cause. He gave speeches, he wrote articles, he even wrote a book on the subject. Many more Americans were pro-life after his presidency than before it, and the momentum of public opinion has continued in the direction he set it to this very day. He initiated the strategy of appointing anti-Roe Supreme Court Justices. And although his particular execution of this strategy sometimes left something to be desired (see O'Connor and Kennedy), the strategy itself, with his successors having learned from his mistakes, is on the verge of fulfillment. Within a matter of months, it is quite possible that there will be an anti-Roe majority on the Supreme Court. And the happy day on which Roe is overturned will initiate a chain of events that will save millions of lives, each one of which will contribute immeasurably to the happiness of humanity as a whole.

When that happy day arrives, great credit should be given to Ronald Reagan, without whom it probably would never have happened. And great credit should also be given to Christine Reagan, whose time on this earth was brief, but more meaningful than she could know.

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*I get this anecdote from Paul Kengor's God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life, p. 15. Lou Cannon tells a similar story of Reagan's response to the segregation of some opposing football players in college. It's possible that their was some confusion of these stories in their oral transmission.