EASTER WEEKEND 1981
After the failed attempt on his life in March 1981, Reagan felt a sense of calling stronger than ever: Believing that God was moving him to something greater, he was certain his life was spared for a special purpose related to the Cold War struggle—to the epic battle against atheistic Communism. The assassination attempt failed to derail his resolve, and a few weeks later, back in the saddle at the White House, on Good Friday, he reflected on the “divine plan” he sensed internally. Mike Deaver summoned New York’s Terence Cardinal Cooke, who flew to Washington to counsel the president. “The hand of God was upon you,” Cooke told Reagan. “I know,” a serious Reagan replied, before confiding: “I have decided that whatever time I have left is for Him.”9
Two days after this encounter with the prominent Catholic, Reagan had another special meeting with Louis Evans, this time Easter Sunday. Reagan asked Evans, along with his wife, Colleen, to serve communion to him and Nancy in the Yellow Room. Evans agreed, and did not speak of the moment for decades.10
After the private service, Pastor Evans told Reagan that while the president had laid in the emergency room, Evans had a kind of “mental image”—Evans himself is not sure of the best word to describe it—that he believes was granted by God, in which he pictured himself standing over Reagan’s bed in the operating room, and through which God told Evans that Ronald Reagan would be healed and that God had a plan for Reagan’s life. Reagan responded by thanking Evans and saying that he felt that way himself. “God has a plan for my life and I want to find it,” he told Evans.
Reagan said more that Easter Sunday: As he gazed pensively out the Yellow Room window toward the Jefferson Memorial, he told Evans that as he struggled for his breath on that table in the emergency room, he felt that if he did not forgive John Hinckley at that very moment, he would not be healed. He forgave him on the spot.
Struggling with conflicting emotions—a sense of grand calling and his mother’s humility—Reagan would ultimately conclude that God had chosen his “team” to defeat Soviet Communism.11 The power of that spiritual component should not be downplayed. His sense of divine purpose now reinforced and amplified his Cold War purpose.
MAY 1981: NOTRE DAME
A similar zeal possessed Reagan in his May 17, 1981 address at Notre Dame University, which, in a profound series of events with enormous implications, came only days after Pope John Paul II was also shot by a would-be assassin. This Notre Dame speech featured Reagan’s first public presidential predictions on Communism’s demise: “The years ahead are great ones for this country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization. The West won’t contain communism, it will transcend communism….It will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”12
Although no one else said it or expected it, those last pages were at that time being written. This prediction was scoffed at by many liberals; and perhaps even some conservatives figured that Reagan’s words were cheerleading—mere rhetoric. In fact, the statement foreshadowed Reagan policy: he would not seek to contain Communism; he would move beyond containment.
In addition to introducing this idea of victory to the public, the speech also demonstrated certain Reagan mainstay themes that would become routine during the 1980s: a spiritual dimension, a duty and obligation, and a great cause. It was the obligation of Americans to seize the cause and take up the fight against expansionary, atheistic Soviet Marxism. In the address, he rallied his audience to the cause, to one “bigger than ourselves,” a “common cause” to “attain the unattainable.”13
If Americans met this challenge, history would look back, Reagan assured, and determine that “the American Nation came of age,” that it “affirmed its leadership of free men and women serving selflessly a vision of man with God.” He invoked: “It is time for the world to know our intellectual and spiritual values are rooted in the source of all strength, a belief in a Supreme Being, and a law higher than our own.”14
A month later, a challenge was issued to Reagan: a reporter dared him to stand by his Notre Dame prediction. Reagan went further: He said he believed that recent intrigues in Poland were an added sign of Communism’s doom. “I just think it is impossible—and history reveals this—for any form of government to completely deny freedom to people and have that go on interminably,” said Reagan. “Communism is an aberration. It’s not a moral way of living for human beings, and I think we are seeing the first, beginning cracks, the beginning of the end.”15 Significantly, to Reagan, the Poland situation would be not just an opportunity for another prediction but a chance to fulfill the prediction.
RETURNING TO GREATNESS
In examining the Reagan game plan to win the Cold War, it would be a mistake to start with a specific policy directive or program. The fact is that before Ronald Reagan and his team could create a set of policies to take on the Soviets, the president wanted to get America’s domestic house in order, creating a strong national infrastructure to support his campaign against Communism. In Reagan’s estimation, this meant that one thing in particular had to be quickly resolved: he had to restore morale to the nation and the presidency. He needed to transmit his own confidence on to his country and countrymen.
This was a process that would not occur overnight; it would require patience, but it would be essential to victory. Without a change in national morale, the country and the plan to defeat Communism would be vulnerable. For now, strength at home was a precursor to strength abroad, and the domestic agenda needed to be top priority before the broader intent to undermine the USSR could commence.
“ECONOMY FIRST”
In Reagan’s eyes, there were two key components to boosting America’s morale: one was growing the economy and the other was military respectability. Of course, a strong military would be impossible without a healthy economy to support it, and so he chose to focus on the economy first. Indeed there was a consistency to this “economy first” philosophy in his Cold War scheme, one that dated to well before his presidency.
For years, he had been expounding on the value of a strong economy in the fight against Communism, and now he found himself in the position to try to integrate the two. In a July 1968 speech, he asserted: “The peace and security of the world depends on the fiscal and economic stability and the defense potential of the United States.”16 In an October 1972 speech, he said that, “it is America’s industrial and economic strength, translated into military potential, that represents the single greatest guarantee of peace for the world.”17 In an April 1975 radio broadcast he wrote, titled simply “Peace,” he stated that, “Power is not only sufficient military strength but a sound economy.”18 Recalling the start of his presidency, he later wrote in his memoirs:
In 1981, no problem the country faced was more serious than the economic crisis… because without a recovery, we couldn’t afford to do the things necessary to make the country strong again or make a serious effort to lessen the dangers of nuclear war. Nor could America regain confidence in itself and stand tall once again. Nothing was possible unless we made the economy sound again.19
The laser-like focus on the economy that first year is evident in the Presidential Documents from 1981: Reagan’s references to the economy were ubiquitous. Even when asked about foreign policy, Reagan tended to
