line of cool shade trees standing along North Ottawa Avenue in Dixon, Illinois. The three, who had grown up with Dutch Reagan decades ago, reclined in the facility’s “Ronald Reagan Room,” a roughly ten-by-ten-foot unimpressive space with a sink, refrigerator, bland cabinets, a desk with an enlargement apparatus for reading, and a simple table with a piece of paper taped to the surface that read in capital letters: “NO FOOD OR DRINK IN THE REAGAN ROOM DUE TO SENSITIVE EQUIPMENT THANK YOU.” Pictures of the hometown boy adorned the walls. Marion Emmert Foster and sisters Olive and Savila Palmer squeezed around the small table and reminisced. Olive had been baptized with Ronald Reagan at the First Christian Church in June 1922 and was introduced by an administrator for the facility in this way: “This is Olive, she became a Christian the same day as the president.”
Of all the topics they could have discussed, the three ladies brought up Reagan’s lifeguarding and self- confidence, explicitly connecting the two. “Those lives he saved…really affected that,” said Marion, the daughter of Reagan’s beloved Sunday school teacher, Lloyd Emmert. “He was an extremely confident person,” Savila Palmer chimed in, “all the way back to when he was a boy.” “Yes,” Marion summed up. “That was always true for him.”3
Ronald Reagan often said that those he rescued from drowning never thanked him, but in truth their gratitude came forth in a more intangible way, one for which mere words could never do justice: Reagan was paid back through the self-confidence that those seventy-seven rescues brought to his various endeavors, particularly his can-do willingness to take on the Soviet Union. As his son Ron has pointed out, lifeguarding ingrained in Reagan a broader life-saving mentality, one that followed him through his life, guiding his decisions until his final days.
Pushing seventy years old when he arrived in Washington, DC, his new self-appointed rescue mission was directed at many more lives than just those swimming in the river. His was a self-appointed mission to save the world from the evil of atheistic, expansionary Soviet Communism—an ideology that took the lives of tens of millions in the USSR alone, and over 100 million worldwide throughout the twentieth century, twice the death toll of the first two world wars combined.4 The lifeguard would lead the charge from the shores of the United States toward the “captive peoples” behind the Iron Curtain. He decided it was up to him to play the role of world saver.
Indeed, a rescuer rescues. By the end of the 1920s, Dutch Reagan had not yet become a crusader. A crusader is a rescuer driven by an ideology, a deeper, grander cause, sometimes even a religious mission. But a crusader needs something to crusade against. That target resided in Moscow.
Over the course of his crusade, Ronald Reagan had frequently cited data from Freedom House marking the number of free and unfree nations in the world. When he did so in the 1970s, he bemoaned the lack of freedom. As president, he dedicated himself to improving those numbers. Now, today, we can cite that same source to demonstrate the degree of his success: In 1980 there were 56 democracies in the world; by 1990, there were 76. The numbers continued an upward trajectory, hitting 91 in 1991, 99 in 1992, 108 in 1993, and 114 in 1994, a doubling since Reagan entered the Oval Office. By 1994, 60 percent of the world’s nations were democracies. By contrast, when Reagan lamented the lack of freedom in the mid-1970s, the number was below 30 percent.5 In the time he shifted from presidential candidate to ex-president, the number of democracies increased from under one-third to a strong majority.
Today, 120 of the world’s 192 nations are democracies. Outside of Western Europe, 88 percent of Latin American and Caribbean nations are democracies, 91 percent of Pacific Island states, 92 percent of South American nations, and 93 percent of the nations of East Central Europe and the Baltic states—that is, the former Soviet region. There has been an explosion in freedom worldwide since the 1980s. This transformation is one of the great stories of modern humanity, and a momentous development that Ronald Reagan desired. Few presidents got so much of what they wanted.6
IN THE END, IT WAS THIS COLD WAR VICTORY—THIS rendezvous with destiny—which was remembered most when Ronald Wilson Reagan died at age ninety-three on June 5, 2004. That week, America witnessed an outpouring of emotion for a president not seen since the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The week was filled with eulogies. The world heard from Reagan’s Cold War partner, Margaret Thatcher, from his vice president, George H. W. Bush, from the current President George W. Bush, from Reagan’s children, and from numerous dignitaries and everyday Americans.
Mikhail Gorbachev immediately sent a letter to Nancy Reagan: “I shall always remember the years of working together with President Reagan, putting an end to confrontation between our two countries, and equally, our friendly rapport.” He finished: “Your husband has earned a place in history and in people’s hearts.”7 Gorbachev took a moment to tell reporters: “I take very hard the death of Ronald Reagan, a man whom by fate sat with me in perhaps the most difficult years at the end of the twentieth century.”8
In the Washington Post, a newspaper hardly sympathetic to Reagan in the 1980s, the page one story on his death, written by respected Russia journalist David E. Hoffman, was titled simply, “Hastening an End to the Cold War.”9 NBC’s Tim Russert said that Reagan’s legacy was “winning the Cold War.” Among the causes, Russert said that Reagan had dared the Soviets to an arms buildup they could not match and forced Mikhail Gorbachev to “reform” and the Kremlin to “cry uncle.”10
Even Senator Ted Kennedy, who had once resorted to extraordinary lengths to defeat Ronald Reagan, now believed that the fortieth president “will be honored as the president who won the Cold War.”12 For Kennedy, it was a remarkable concession.
One group that Americans did not hear from that week was the hundreds of millions of individuals who once lived in the former Soviet bloc and USSR—those souls from Prague to Leningrad that Reagan sought to liberate. These were the “voiceless,” as Reagan had described them. Now, they had voices, uncensored, and they stepped up to pay tribute to the man that many of them credit for their freedom.
In the Romanian newspaper, Bucharest Ziua, Dan Pavel wrote an op-ed calling Reagan, “The political leader who contributed the most to the fall of the totalitarian communist system.” Pavel thanked Reagan for the “moral perceptiveness of defining the communist totalitarian regime as the ‘Evil Empire,’” and for having “freed” him and his fellow members of the Soviet bloc from Communism. Pavel added: “A superficial analysis has conferred exaggerated merit on Soviet leader Gorbachev, but what the Soviets really wanted to do was to reform the system, not to overthrow it. They would not have gone as far as to achieve glasnost and perestroika if the Americans had not forced them to admit that they were outdated and defeated in the military, economic, political, and cultural competition.”12 Such a view was also advanced that week by Alexei Pankin in the Moscow Times: “My thesis is that thanks to Reagan, perestroika might never have happened.”13
From Poland, Lech Walesa remembered his hero: “Our job was to overthrow this stupid and murderous Communist system.” The now former Polish president told the Polish News Agency that Reagan was one of a few world leaders who contributed to doing just that. The news agency itself noted the obvious: “Reagan’s contribution to the overthrow of Communism made him immensely popular in Poland.”14
A writer for the Budapest Business Journal—its mere existence a testimony to Communism’s defeat— recalled a 1996 breakfast he had with Marian Krzaklewski, Walesa’s successor as head of Solidarity, and Reagan defense secretary and longtime aide Caspar Weinberger. They sat on the top floor of the forty-story Warsaw Marriott, which provided a sweeping vista of the rebuilt Polish capital. Krzaklewski, whose face was already a bit flush, said to Weinberger with a tear in his eye: “You and Mr. Reagan saved my country. Without Reagan, we would have been finished!” Weinberger responded: “I was just doing my job—the job the President asked me to do.”15
From Russia itself, on June 7, two days after Reagan’s death, the
Reagan is vividly remembered in Russia today as the force that precipitated the Soviet collapse. “Reagan bolstered the U.S. military might to ruin the Soviet economy, and he achieved his goal,” said Gennady Gerasimov, who served as top spokesman for the Soviet Foreign Ministry during the 1980s.
Even though Reagan’s “Star Wars” never led to the deployment of an actual missile shield, it drew the Soviets into a costly effort to mount a response. Many analysts agree that the race drained Soviet coffers and triggered the economic difficulties that sped up the Soviet collapse in 1991.
