It's My Party Read Free

“Ronald Reagan’s beliefs were as simple, unchanging, and American as the flat plain of the Midwest where he grew
     up. He placed his faith in a loving God, in the goodness of the country, and in the wisdom of the people. He applied those
     beliefs to the great challenges of his day. In doing so he became the largest and most magnificent American of the second
     half of the twentieth century.”
    If any of my friends see the program, I suppose they’ll take it for granted that I was overstating the case for public consumption—they’ve
     certainly never heard me talk that way over lunch on the Stanford campus or at dinner parties in Palo Alto, where we always
     lace our conversation with a knowing dose of cynicism
.
    The odd thing is, I meant every word
.
    I n AD 578, the monk John Moschos left the desert monastery of St. Theodosius, set upon a hill or low mount near Bethlehem, to travel
     the Byzantine world. Inside the monastery, every aspect of existence seemed straightforward for John Moschos, his beliefs
     enshrined in the teachings of the church, his life ordered by the monastic disciplines of work and prayer. The moment he left
     the monastery, he stepped into confusion. The Byzantine empire through which he journeyed was under assault, from the west
     by Slavs, Goths, and Lombards, from the east by Persians. The cities he toured proved raucous, gaudy, decadent. Even when
     he visited monasteries he often encountered evidence of strife, on occasion reaching an abbey where he intended to spend the
     night only to find that it had been burned, its inhabitants marched off to slave markets. In his writings, John Moschos records
     the teachings of the desert fathers, his intention when he set out. But he also presents long passages in which, amazed and
     perplexed, he describes his travels, as if unable to believe his eyes unless he set it all down.
    I know how the poor monk felt. Just as John Moschos had a place, his desert monastery, that made life seem straightforward,
     I had a person, Ronald Reagan, who made the Republican Party seem straightforward. I admired Reagan when I was in college
     and graduate school, then I spent six years working in his White House, devoting a year and a half to writing speeches for
     Vice President Bush, then four and a half years to writing speeches for President Reagan himself. While Ronald Reagan led
     the Republican Party, all the important questions for the GOP appeared settled to me. I knew who was in charge. I knew where
     the GOP stood on every issue. Just as John Moschos, confused on a point of doctrine, needed only to consult his abbot, I,
     wondering about a point of Republican philosophy, needed only to consult Ronald Reagan’s old speeches, radio talks, and newspaper
     columns. Today nothing about the GOP appears settled to me, and if you are to understand why in the following pages I, like
     the monk, often sound amazed and perplexed, you will need to take into account my point of departure. John Moschos began on
     a mount near Bethlehem. I began, if you will, on Mount Reagan.
    * * *
    Probably the best way for me to tell you about Ronald Reagan is to describe the events leading to his 1987 Berlin Wall address.
    You may be familiar with the address. The president stood on a blue platform directly in front of the Berlin Wall. In recent
     months, the president explained, we had been hearing a great deal from the Soviet Union about a new policy of glasnost or
     openness. If General Secretary Gorbachev was serious about his new policy, the president said, he could prove it. The president
     set his jaw, then spoke with controlled but genuine anger—not long before, he had learned that a crowd had gathered in East
     Berlin to hear him, then been forcibly dispersed by the East German police. The last four words of his challenge, each just
     one syllable, sounded like blows. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
    In May 1987, when I was assigned to write the speech, the