Newt's WorldNewt discusses the legacy of former President Ronald Reagan with Craig Shirley, a New York Times bestselling author and presidential historian and author of The Search for Reagan: The Appealing Intellectual Conservatism of Ronald Reagan. Shirley, who has written six books on Reagan, discusses the former president's unique approach to conservatism, his popularity, and his intellectual prowess. They also discuss Reagan's time as a union leader and his transition from a Democrat to a Republican. Shirley shares insights into Reagan's decision to run for governor and later president, as well as his approach to dealing with the Soviet Union.
On this episode of News World. Ronald Reagan was a singularly unique man, a conservative who championed a wildly successful revolution, leading to more freedom and less government for the American people and to the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, while boosting American morale, which had been his three big goals. He was the first president in many years who believed optimism from the oval office had a direct bearing on the affairs of the nation. As a consequence, he left office more popular than when he entered, with a seventy three percent approval reading from the American people. He's beloved even today, as his Presidential Library has visited far more than any other presidential library by more than five million people each year. Here to discuss his new book, The Search for Reagan, The Appealing intellectual Conservatism of Ronald Reagan. I'm really pleased to welcome back my guests and my friend Craig Shirley. He's a New York Times bestselling author, presidential historian, author of eleven books, including six on Reagan, and I would argue that he is far and away the leading student of Ronald Reagan and has been just amazingly effective in trying to help teach the country and the world about an enormously successful president. Craig, welcome and thank you for joining me again on News World.
Thank you for the invitation. Newt, thank you very much. It's great to be here now.
Both you and your wife Sarene worked for President Reagan and Washington in the nineteen eighties. What was that experience like working with him.
We have such fond memories of that time, new It was a healthy in time for both of us.
We were committed conservatives.
I imagine it probably was the same for young people working at Washington when John Kennedy was president. There was something inspirational about him you look forward to every day. It was a happy, happy time. It was a time of hope. You just loved being in Washington. You loved working for a man who you utterly believed in, and quite honestly, we adored Brownd Reagan. I remember going to many many speeches of Reagan's, and many many Christmas parties and some sea packs and things like that, and it was just such an exciting time.
You wrote five books that are sort of traditional histories introducing and explaining the Reagan experience. But then with your new book, you took a very different approach the Search for Reagan the appealing intellectual conservatism of Ronald Reagan. I'm very curious what led you to take this new approach.
Thank you for noting that. Two reasons.
One is that there's never been a book that really explored Reagan's considerable intellect. You remember Marty, his old research aid assistant. I knew Marty for many years, but in the eighties, I remember having lunch with Marty one time and he told me he estimated Reagan's IQ at being one hundred and seventy five. Now Marty would know he had all sorts of undergraduate and graduate degrees from IVYV schools and from MIT, and so he knew from what he was talking about when he saw an intelligent man. Of course, you and I would both say, an intelligent man is measured by many yardsticks. We know that, but two good ones are the ability to write. And Reagan wrote all the time. He wrote probably more letters as president than any other president before him. He wrote radio scripts, which he gave from the Oval Office every Saturday, and before that, as a presidential candidate, he wrote twice a week. Op eds were syndicated to five hundred newspapers. So he wrote two autobiographies. Of course, that is just the true mark of an intellect. I wanted to explore Reagan's mind but also his compassion, but also as a third reason, was to refute the lies of the left have emerged over the years about Ronald Reagan, about Ronald Reagan, and gaze about Ronald Reagan, and blacks about Ronald Reagan and this issue, that issue, whatever you know. Napoleon once said history as a pack of lies agreed upon, and that there's so many lives about Reagan and gays and Reagan and issue of AIDS. As a matter of fact, AIDS didn't come on to the national political scene. They weren't part of a dialogue until really nineteen eighty one or eighty two. But then it was thought to be afflicting what haitians and hemophiliacs. And it was only a couple of years later that we came to understand its main target was gays, and Reagan by nineteen eighty five was now even talking about it. He was talking about in the State of the Union address in nineteen eighty five, and he committed billions of dollars to AIDS research so, and of course this was never mentioned by the left. And of course he spoke out often on AIDS. He committed billions, and also in the post presidency he and Missus Reagan did a lot of fundraising for a pediatric AIDS foundation. So to say that Reagan was insensitive that issue is just a lie. So I wanted to refute the lives of the left while exploring his intellect. I was very, very careful about the title. I had a tussle with the publishers about that. If you're right, you always have a tussle with your publisher I wanted something evocative of Churchill, and of course you remember Martin Gilbert wrote in Search of Churchill, and so I wanted to pick something similar because these are two of the greatest men of the twentieth century, Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan. I thought Reagan deserved that, and also, of course the subtitle. I also had a tussle with the publishers about I lost to the appealing intellectual conservatism. Well, to my mind, conservatism is intellectualism, so to call it intellectual conservativism is redundant. But that's another fight I lost with the publishers to me.
It communicates a case that there is a Conservatism that's learnable, and then Reagan understood it, and Reagan taught it. And as you know, I've always said that our great achievement with the Contract with America and electing the first House Republican majority in forty years, we totally stood on Reagan's shoulders, and it was the act of having studying Reagan. Recently, I wrote a book called marsh the Majority, precisely to try to get back to the current generation of Republicans that they have gone so far away from the things that worked with Reagan and the things that worked with us, that you really need almost a cultural revolution inside the Republican Party to get back to an effective, competent conservatism.
Couldn't agree more. The Republicans today are all tactical. It's all about one opsmanship with each other or with the liberal opponents. There's nothing strategic about them. They don't think beyond tomorrow's headliner, tomorrow's SoundBite. They don't think in terms like the Contract did and like Reagan did, about planning not only for the country but for the ideology for the party for the future. Is that what do we stand for and how are we going to achieve it? None of that thinking that goes on inside like that inside the Republican Party today, it's really sad to see. I blame weak politicians and also near to well consultants who are only in it for the money. Look at the case of Nikki Haley. She's all tactical, so there's nothing about her the strategic at all, and she's just staying in because I agree with Trump. I don't think she knows how to get out. But secondly is that it's all personal and she's being pushed by the consultants around her or simply want her to stay as long as possible so they can make as much money as possible.
Candidates become a gravy train, and I think they sometimes don't realize all to any of their consultants, they're in fact simply an opportunity to earn a living. The thing about Reagan was Reagan was a cause, and you can argue I think that Trump is a cause. Most candidates are not. Most candidates are just ambitious people who hire other people who hopefully will do something.
Now, well, there's the contract, obviously, with the cause. It was about a set of values for a political party to advance to help the country. Reagan was about a set of values to advance to help the country. Trump is about a set of values to advance to help the country.
You picked on something in the book, and that is the degree to which Reagan led the Screen Actors Guild strike in the spring of nineteen forty five. His role here is amazing, and I had a sense that this is one of the places Reagan learns to negotiate. Talk a little bit about that strike and his role as the president of the Screen Actors Guild.
It was I'm going to tussle with the studios over compensation for actors. It was over contracts, over how actors were treated. And Reagan said, look, we're calling a strike, and the studios didn't believe him, and finally he did call a strike. The studios held out for a number of months. He finally broke their will and got them to agree to the terms that he wanted for the actors and actresses who are members of the Screen Actors Guild. I think also the more longer lasting incident that happened with him as president of Screen Actress Guild was over the whole issue of compensation residuals for movie actors and actresses. For years, the studios had been making movies and then later TV shows, and they could rebroadcast them with impunity, make a lot of money and not have to compensate the actors and actresses. But one time when they were paid to star in those various TV shows and various movies, so that the studio could broadcast Gone with the Wind a thousand times but only pay Vivian Lee once and Reagan went to the mat with the studios. And today there are many many aging actors and actresses who are living comfortably because of Ronald Reagan.
It's ironic that the average conservative who would never think of themselves as pro union elected as president a union.
President the first ever.
There's a story that it was after one of the Screen Actors Guild meetings the Reagan ends up having a drink with a guy who says, I really am a Stalinist, and when we take over, you're either going to go to jail or we're going to kill you. And Reagan concluded the guy was serious and that that was a moment of conversion to sort of a militant anti communism because we had to realize how serious they were about creating toutilitarian control. I mean, do you think that story is true?
I do think it's true. In fact, the actor, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, the actor was Sterring Hayden, who later was outed as a communist and later had a bit part in the original Godfather movie. He played the corrupt police chief, which seemed kind of appropriate. I believe it was Sterling Hayden who also said about Reagan versus the communists, and the communists it was very, very deliberate new you know, they saw Hollywood as invaluable to gain control of to push a political agenda, and they wanted to gain control of Hollywood to take things over. And in fact, you know, you go back to the forties, two movies that were produced there were just pans to communist Russia. One was called Mission to Moscow and the other was Song of Russia, and they showed the leftward tilt of Hollywood in the post World War two era. So Hollywood was already leaned that way, and the communists wanted to take over the unions and eventually take over the studios to control the message, which was toward a socialist and communist state.
So Reagan comes out of that experience as a guy who had voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and who as late as nineteen forty eight there was a commercial for both Hubert Humphrey for Senate and President Truman. And then to what extent do you think that it was his wife's impact and her father's impact that helped move Reagan away from the Democrats.
I don't think much. Reagan began his historic move to the right much earlier before he met Nancy, while he was still married to Jane Wyman. It was the confiscatory tax policy of the nineteen forties, which had taken up to ninety five percent of his income. And then later he saw the communist provocateurs in Hollywood. He started reading publications and coming to understand the threat of collectivism and the threat to individuality. His historic move the right happened before he met Nancy.
So if you go back and you look at this period as Reagan is making the transition, there's a small book by Tom Evans called The Education of Ronald Reagan His Years a General Electric I thought it was very.
Revealing in many ways.
The ge executive Lemuel Bulwer was an early mentor of Ronald Reagan's.
Regular went through this period which maybe you can explain. Apparently, he had a really bad flight in forty five and quit flying.
He had two bad flights, and he swore a flying until nineteen sixty six, when his brother practically threw him on an airplane from Los Angeles, San Francisco to go up for a fundraiser for a NAC run for governor. He had two bad flying experiences in the early forties. One was on a plane back from Kettalian Island. They ran into a terrible, terrible electrical storm and barely landed. And then another time when he was on a bond drive. It was on a snowy day and the plane took off in this terrible snowstorm, and again they had lots of trouble and finally landed in Los Angeles. He was a white knuckle flyer after that, I mean, he never flew after that. He swore a flying from nineteen forty five until nineteen sixty six, So for twenty one years he refused to fly an airplane because he had those two bad experiences and he figured that was enough. That was enough for any man.
There are two inningdotes, So with that I mean one is that Buwar would give him conservative economic books. And Reagan's going around the country to ge by train, so he has lots of time. He didn't play cards, he didn't hang out in the club car, and he read.
Yes, when he was on the ge lecture circuits, he might take the train from Los Angeles to Syracuse, New York, three thousand miles, so it might be a couple of days. But he wouldn't go to as you said, he wouldn't go to the club car. Wasn't a drinker, was a boozer, He wasn't a card player. He would get a private suite with a steamer full of books and just sit and read for several days. He had a good education at Eureka. He had a double major at Eureka. But he was also constantly learning. He was an autodidact in that he was constantly learning, constantly teaching. Reagan's intellect grew after the nineteen forties, when most men reached a point in their life with a fixed ideology by the time they're forty years old. But Reagan really acquired many positions on many issues after he was forty, his position on nuclear war and his position on taxes. His position on so many issues began well after his fortieth birthday.
Jerry Pornell was a good friend of mine. Ron great science fiction writer. As an engineer, at helped design the radar guided machine guns at the back of the B fifty two. You got to go to see Reagan when Reagan was governor. He gets an hour schedule to talk about space, and about halfway into the conversation, he stopped and he said, Governor, I don't insult you, but I'm curious. You're so well briefed. I'd like to meet the staff person who did the briefing on space. And Reagan broke up laughing. He said, nobody briefed me. He said, I just read all the time, and I read a lot about space, and Pornell was just blown away. I thought this was so different than the public image.
Reagan read five newspapers a day and one nonfiction book a week.
There's a story. I hope it's accurate. I was told. You know, Reagan decides to run hires the best consulting firm in California for this governor's race. Spencer and Roberts and they create this big shoe box filled with all these pieces of information because they want to prove he's smart enough to be governor, because this was back when actors were not thought generally to be capable of this. And so he goes to the first town hall meeting, and of course, as a professional actor, he can memorize the entire box in one night. He goes to townhall meeting and the first questions, what are you going to do about Berkeley? Which isn't in the box. He comes back and he says to him, guys, we don't have this in the box. And they said, well, it's not really an issue. And he goes to the second meeting. First question is what are you going to do about those radicals at Berkeley? And he comes back and he says to them, guys, if the voters think it's an issue, it's an issue. And I always thought the wisdom. Very much like Lincoln, Reagan understood that what the public thought mattered more than what the consultant thought.
When he was president, Reagan got more letters written to him as president that anybody else did. Each day he would get from his secretaries a number of letters, and Reagan read those every day. That was how we stayed in touch with the American people was by reading the letters from the American people and not listening to the Washington Post or listening to his advisors or consultants, but staying in touch with as many people as possible.
One of the great crises of his career that would have, I think, really dramatically weakened somebody who wasn't as strategically smart was running on an anti tax platform and then discovering that the state was virtually bankrupt. And the way he handled that would you describe brilliantly in your book walks through from it, the whole strategic way Reagan thinks things through, and the speed and decisiveness with which he responded to reality.
He was elected governor and he found, to his chagrin that everything he said in the campaign was exactly true. Was the California was spending a million dollars day more than it was taking in. It was near to going bankrupt, and he needed to do something. And this is where he didn't compromise his principles, but he did compromise with his political opponents. For instance, Big Daddy Jesse Henru, who is then the most powerful Democrat and Sacramento. They sit down and they went through the budget line by line. They got rid of a lot of wasteful spending. It did require a small tax increase, but it was phased out and as a matter of fact, left the state with the surplus. And Reagan's first instinct and what he did with that surplus was that he gave it back to the California taxpayers. He didn't say, oh, let's go, we've got more money, let's go find a new program to spend it on, or some reason.
For the state to keep it.
He didn't want the state to keep anything more than it really needed to operate. So he gave something like five hundred million back to the folks of California.
There's a story that is standing in concrete against the tax increase, and that he handles it by going to the press conference and saying, guys, what you're hearing is the sound of concrete breaking.
I'm cracking, yes, which I think again.
People forget Reagan's sense of humor about himself, among other things, was one of the most winning parts of his personality.
I'm glad you mentioned that. Note.
He always said, the humor you used against yourself is the best type of humor. He would poke fun at himself all the time. He had that grace and that charm, but that utter self confidence to be able to poke fun at himself over so many things.
You know. I think it was in the maybe the ninety two convention he said, you know, I knew Thomas Jefferson.
Yes, right right.
It turned it around to be such a singer on Bill Clinton. I remember the speech well because it was written by a friend of mine's, Landon Parvin Reagan got up there and says, this new man they've chosen, says he's the new Thomas Jefferson. Well, let me tell you something. I knew Thomas Jefferson. He was a friend of mine and Governor Clinton, You're no Thomas Jefferson.
Yeah, which was also a takeoff on the line that had been used against dan Quiitlan just four years earlier. I flew a couple of times on Air Force One. He would always come back and tell jokes, and he particularly collected anti Soviet jokes, much like Lincoln. I think he relieved the tension by telling jokes and by being humorous and by looking for positive things.
Very much so.
I remember that one anti Soviet joke he told about the Soviet citizen is talking to an American citizen, and an American citizens says, hey, in this country, I can walk into the Oval office, I can pound my head on the table and say I don't like the job you're doing, mister President, And the Soviet citizen says, I can do the same thing. I can go into the Kremlin. I can go to the Soviet Premier's office, I pound on the table, and I could say I don't like the job Ronald Reagan is doing.
One of the most interesting and serious parts of Reagan story, in seventy six, he decides to challenge Gerald Ford. Ford had become president by accident. Nixon was forced out of office and what I think was a coup. But nonetheless, Ford is there. Why do you think Reagan decided to run? And do you think when he first decided he thought he would win or he just thought it was necessary.
He thought he was going to win.
He really always thought he was going to win, and he came damn near close to winning. It wasn't for shenanigans in the Illinois, Ohio, Mississippi, and New Jersey delegations because he only lost by sixty nine delegate votes out of two thy two hundred and seventy voted, So it's just a hair's breadth of losing. But I'll tell you the reason and he decided to run was because Ford's snub of Alexander Sozaneatsen. At the urging of Henry Kissinger, sozan Eatsen was expelled from the Soviet Union. They didn't want to kill him because there was too much light on him, but he was expelled and actually became a cause celeb in the United States and in the West. And ironically, there was a reception on Capitol Hill and the two people who cospond to the reception were Jesse Helms and Senator Joe Biden of Delaware. The one person who couldn't make it unofficially was Ronald Reagan, but he wrote many op eds about Sozan eats and did many radio commentaries. And then when the issue came up about President Ford meeting with Sozeneatsen, which would have angered the Soviets, and Reagan's attitude would have been, you know, go screw yourself. But Ford knuckled under to Henry Kissinger's advice to snub Sozan eachten and this is so angered Reagan. If Ford had met with and Reagan might not have ever run.
It's interesting because he comes very close and the Panama Canal plays a big role in that. And at the convention, in one of the most interesting moments of history that you could never invent, Ford asked him to come down and say a few words, and he basically delivers the speech he would have given as his acceptance speech. A good friend of mine said, at the end of that speech, he realized they nominated the wrong guy. It was electrifying.
Ford spoke politely, but when Reagan spoke, they said, let us march.
That's right, and forty gave a pretty decent speech that night, which was then totally overshadowed by Reagan. There's this moment, I think it's the next day, where Reagan meets with his entire team and he really talks as though it's over. You know, the cause will go on, the cause will live. But you had the sense that he thought he was now going back to the ranch and that probably he would never again be a factor.
He listened to the American people. He was out campaigning for everybody that fall. He was every place he was campaigning for you. He's campaigning for many candidates. He didn't campaign much for Gerald Ford did a couple of events for him, But that was it. But that speech that you referred to, it was broadcast live in all three networks. Everybody in the world heard it. Everybody in America heard it because it was the only thing on and every place Reagan went that fall, Chambermain's cops, everybody said, Governor, you've got to run again. You've got to try it again. You've got to run again. And I think that, as much as anything, convinced him to run one more time.
How much do you think his stature grew out of having been a genuine movie star. The people really knew him, they'd been in the movie theater, they'd seen him.
I think it grew tremendously. Don't forget not just movie star but TV. Scar the ge Theater, which he'd been the host of, won several Emmys. It was must watch TV sometimes had a market share of at fifty to fifty five percent of the American audience on any given Sunday night. He was an authority figure as the host of that. But you know, in the movies he was always the good guy, always played the good guy. Only one movie was he ever in The Killers, which was made in nineteen sixty four, which he never watched. He refused to watch it. Was he a bad guy? He hated that movie.
And I have seen it and he's totally unbelievable. Ronald Reagan cannot play the bad guy.
No, he's out of character. He hated slapping Angie Dickinson. So he's an authority figure because he's a good guy. He's an authority figure because he's the host of ge theater, and he develops a taste for being an executive, not a legislator. Because you know, after his speech for Goldwater in sixty four, a lot of people out in California said, oh, Governor, you got to run for Congress. O, Governor, you got to run for the Senate.
It was a.
Group of businessmen in Los Angeles, the kitchen cabinet evolved in the kitchen cabinet who said, no, you should run for governor. And that wedded Reagan's appetite because he saw himself as a leader.
I think changed history, not for the better. Was when Reagan finally wins the nomination, he picks his leading rival to be his vice presidential candidate.
Yeah, there's one person.
They didn't think about it because they thought about Jack Camp and there were two young too green, and there were bad rumors about him. The pickings were thin. Bob Dole didn't bring anything to the ticket because Reagan was going to carry the farm country anyway. Reagan knew that a winning convention is a unified convention. Unified conventions tend to win in the fall. Divided conventions tend to lose in the fall. Is that sixty four, the Republicans are united, they lose. Sixty eight, the Republicans are united, they win. Seventy six the Republicans are divided, they lose. Eighty the Republicans are united, they win. And the same thing for the Democratic Party and seventy two the Democrats were divided, so they lost. In sixty four they were united, so they won. In sixty eight they were horribly divided, so they lost. So Reagan knew this, but the pickings were thin. But the one guy that I wish he had thought about who took himself out of the running early was Senator Dick Schweiker of Pennsylvania. I got to know Senator Schweiker and his wife Claire, while I was working on my first book, Delightful, Delightful People. They've now both passed away, unfortunately, but they were lovely, lovely people. And you know, he changed radically in the four years. It was a moderate Republican senator in seventy six when Reagan picked him.
I'll tell you what he was good on.
He was pro life, he was pro Second Amendment, he was strong on captive nations, strong on national offense. And as a bonus, he was on Nixon's enemy list, which I considered to be a bonus. He helped Reagan seventy six, but he wasn't considered a nineteen eighty and I wish he had been, because in those intervening four years he'd grown to become a rock rib conservative on everything, on Kemp Roth and on national defense, on everything right down the line. You're absolutely right, picking Bush created a mess.
It's something we're still struggling with. In a sense, there's been a Reagan Bush wing.
Yes, well, Bush wing slash neo conservatism, the internationalist Bill Crystal, John Bolton, the wing of the party.
To sort of drag you into controversy for a second. How do you think Reagan would have dealt with Ukraine.
Better than Joe Biden? That's for sure.
Joe Biden has really never told the American people what's a stake, what is really truly state? First off, Reagan was president. I don't think Putin would have invaded anyway, and Hamas would not have attacked Israel. They've been too scared of Reagan, the strong man. They would have been too scared of what he would do, how he'd retal you, that was his image. He would have been broadcasting many inspirational messages as he did with the old Soviet Union, a lot of strong diplomacy against Putin. Not sanctions because sanctions don't work, but certainly the threat of war that Putin couldn't win if the US got involved.
Couldn't agree with you more. I want to urge everybody who's listened to us. Craig is I think the leading expert on Ronald Reagan, who was the most important president since Franklin Roosevelt, and a man who genuinely changed history. And I want to thank you for joining me today. Your new book, The Search for Reagan, The Appealing intellectual Conservatism of Ronald Reagan, is an important contribution, and of course we might as well as fellow authors. I will also point out they can buy the other five volumes, not to mention the terrific books you've written about nineteen forty one and nineteen forty five. You're one of the leading conservative historians of our generation, and it is really important for people to understand how central Reagan was, and you have done more than any other single person to do that. So, Craig, thank you very much for spending this time with us.
Thank you so so much. That's so kind of you.
I could talk with you for hours about this subject, but thank you for this time.
Thank you very much.
Thank you to my guest Craig Shirley. You can get a link to buy his book The Search for Reagan on our show page at Newtsworld dot com. News World is produced by Gingrid three sixty Niheartmedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingrish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of news World can sign up from my three freeweekly columns at gingrichthree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm new Gingrich. This is Newsworld
