Tribute to Former President Ronald Reagan

CONGRESSIONAL RECORD
SENATE
TRIBUTE TO FORMER PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I rise today because a mighty oak has fallen. Ronald Reagan has left his life here on Earth, but oh what a life it was. Born in the middle of our great Republic in the beginning of the last century, his was an American tale from start to finish.

Jack and Nelle Reagan brought a son into the world in Tampico, IL, in 1911. Jack was a shoe salesman with an Irishman's flare for storytelling. Nelle was a devout Christian who made ends meet by doing other people's sewing out of their home. When Jack first saw their healthy baby in his crib, he looked at this little baby and said he looked like a "little fat Dutchman." And the nickname stuck, "Dutch."

Times were hard for the Reagans. He commented years later that:

Our family didn't exactly come from the wrong side of the tracks, but we were certainly within sound of the train whistles.

Even then, it was in Ronald Reagan's character to look for the Sun behind the clouds. Growing up, he lived a typical American boy's life. He was a lifeguard in the summer and a football player in the fall. In the fading years, when Alzheimer's robbed him of most of his memory, he could still summon up his youth in Illinois, proudly recalling the 77 lives he saved as a lifeguard from the teeming Rock River, notching each one on a log on the shore.

In Illinois, he discovered there was more to life than just football and lifeguarding. There was also acting. Connecting with an audience plugged him into a broader world. As he later said:

For a kid suffering childhood pangs of insecurity, the applause was music.

Ambition led him westward out of Illinois; Hollywood, to be exact. There, as we all know, he started his successful acting career and, more importantly, met a young actress from Chicago named Nancy Davis. She became the love of his life. Nancy was focused, smart, and loved her Ronnie. Jimmy Stewart once remarked:

If Ronnie had married Nancy the first time, he would have won an Academy Award.

But gradually his time in front of an audience changed from the stage and screen to the assembly hall. Time constraints prevent me from following his ascent to the highest office in the land. Let me simply comment that for most of us being a successful actor and pitchman, union president, two-term Governor of our Nation's largest State, and a national figure to boot would have been enough of a career, especially at the age of 69. But Ronald Reagan had other thoughts, and so began his run against President Jimmy Carter for the Presidency in 1980.

Neck and neck until the debate a week before the election, Reagan broke it wide open when he closed by asking Americans a simple question: Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?

On election day, Reagan won a smashing victory, winning 44 of 50 States. He would top that mark in 1984, winning 49 out of 50 States.

I have listened to and read countless people reflecting on what President Reagan meant to them and to America. Were there enough time, I would fill up the rest of the afternoon with my thoughts about this great man. But I will limit my observations to what I think will be, in addition to restoring America's faith in itself, the way history will remember Ronald Reagan, the peacemaker.

I want to address the question, What does it mean to have won the cold war? Revisionists suggest that Ronald Reagan had little to do with the Soviet Union's fall which they now claim was just inevitable. I can tell you no one thought that in 1979. Communism was on the rise and freedom was in retreat. The United States was the toothless tiger with the uncertain future. Energy shortages crippled us, and rampant crime hunted us down. Interest rates for homes, cars, and businesses were sky high. Our economy was wrenched back and forth between bouts of recession and inflation, both at the same time. America's decline was marked by new, unfamiliar words. We learned stagflation, "taxflation," and, of course, we learned malaise.

America's economy was not the only thing in decline. So, too, was our foreign policy. Still suffering from a Vietnam syndrome, we watched and did nothing as Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviets, as hostages in Iran were seized, and as Cuban puppets invaded Africa and Central America. Our Navy was weak. Our planes couldn't fly. Our Army lacked volunteers and morale. The nuclear balance was tipping, and our intelligence services were ravaged by firings and mismanagement.

We were declining and the Soviet Union was rising. Some people were ready to give up. Others suggested the Presidency was too big and complicated a job for any single person. It seemed as if we had lost our nerve. But not Ronald Reagan. You see, he had a vision.

In 1982, he explained his "sick bear" theory:

The Soviet Empire is faltering because rigid centralized control has destroyed innovation, efficiency and individual achievement. . . . The Soviet dictatorship has forged the largest armed force in the world . . . by preempting the human needs of its people and, in the end, this course will undermine the foundations of the Soviet system.
With his customary humor, he had a memorable way of explaining this. He talked of a Soviet citizen who went to a Soviet bureau of transportation to buy a car. After paying and filling out all the forms, he is told by the seller of the car: Come back in 10 years to get your car.
The man asks: In the morning or the afternoon?
The official responds: Well, we are talking about 10 years from now; what difference does it make whether it is the morning or afternoon?
The man replies: Well, the plumber is coming in the morning.
Beneath the humor, President Reagan knew the serious truth. The Soviet Union was as inherently weak as the U.S. economy was inherently strong, a fact too few recognized. So when President Reagan's policies began to revitalize our economy, the confidence restored here was matched by new uncertainty over in the Soviet Union.
Others have and will talk about the Reagan revolution here at home, but in terms of our victory in the cold war, the Reagan economic recovery was the first body-blow that eventually exorcized the demon of communism from the Soviet Union.

The real trouble for the Soviet Union was not Reagan's policies, but Reagan's values, his courage, and his willpower. Before he was ever elected, President Reagan recognized that the Soviet Union was an "arsenal of anarchy" throughout the world. It was a sickness of the human condition, he said. And President Reagan was never afraid to do that which so many leaders lack the courage to do: look at evil and call it by its name. In this regard, Reagan was like Churchill. Reagan was the nemesis of communism, just as Churchill was of nazism. He understood the evil that communism represented and what it would do if unchecked.

Interestingly, Reagan's understanding of this evil did not begin with the fate of millions, but of just one. In May of 1975, a 5-year-old boy fell into the Spree River, which divided then-Communist East Berlin from free West Berlin. As firemen from West Berlin-firemen, not soldiers-started to go to the boy's rescue, an East German patrol boat barred their entry into East German waters. The boy drowned.

The mayor of West Berlin described that refused rescue as "an incomprehensible and frightful act, placing political considerations before the saving of a human life." But for Reagan, it was the sad personification of a harsh and enduring reality: Communism is a system where every human life is sublimated to the ruthless needs of the state.

Focused on the value of a single human life, Ronald Reagan looked across the globe and saw 600 million people living like slaves under the Communist lash. He did not mince words or deeds. He dubbed the Soviet Union the "evil empire," a description brutally accurate, yet offensive to the tender sensibilities of most of the media and intelligentsia here at home. He called for a massive defense increase-"peace through strength," he called it-and some even in his own Cabinet opposed it.

In the face of criticism, Reagan strengthened our defense. He quoted Demosthenes in dismissing the Soviets' empty assurances of their good intentions on arms control:

What sane man would let another man's word rather than his deeds tell him who is at war and who is at peace with him?

He then translated that demand into a Russian saying of no uncertain words-doveryai, no proveryai. In Russian, that means "trust but verify."

Ronald Reagan did not have timid dreams. He wasn't interested in slowing the decline of freedom or just holding its position steady; he wanted freedom to ring across the globe and communism to be relegated to the ash heap of history. So he went to the Berlin Wall to call out in front of that colossal affront to freedom: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

He left Reykjavik when it was clear that Mr. Gorbachev was only bargaining for the end of the Strategic Defense Initiative, which matching, the Soviets knew, would spend them into oblivion. Margaret Thatcher notes that Reykjavik, deplored as a loss by Reagan's critics, particularly by the European and American intelligentsia, marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union.

Of course, all the significant arms control reductions came after Reagan walked away from Reykjavik. But today, President Reagan is vindicated by some 600 million people who breathe freely because of the collapse of the Soviet empire.

So what does it mean to liberate almost 600 million from fear and terror? It means 49 million Ukrainians will never again worry about a class purge.

It means 17 million former East Germans will never be grabbed in the night by the STASI, the secret police of Eric Honneker.

It means 38 million Poles will never fear General Jaruzelski attempting to crush the Solidarity free labor movement.

It means 22 million Romanians will never know the tortured madness and human experimentation of Nicolae Ceausescu.

It means 16 million in the Czech Republic and Slovakia will never hear tanks rumbling through their city streets to crush self-rule.

It means tens of millions of former West Germans lead lives oblivious to the cosmic nervousness that gripped their mother's and father's generation.

It means that 5 million in Finland no longer look across the Gulf of Finland with dread at 7.2 million people in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, who lived in slavery as a warning to any neighbors who would dare dissent from the Soviet world view.

In all, 600 million lives were emancipated by the victory in the cold war-the greatest liberation in the history of mankind, and hopefully for all time.

Now, having said all of that, let me just mention how much I miss that sweet-hearted man, especially his sense of humor. I have been reminded from all the replayed speeches just how wonderful he was. For example, during an exchange with the press one day, he said:

I have given my aides instructions that if trouble breaks out in any of the world's hot spots, they should wake me up immediately-even if I am in a cabinet meeting.

It makes you wonder what President Reagan said to Saint Peter. Something witty, no doubt, and delivered with a warm smile.

So now the long goodbye that Mrs. Reagan, his rock and strength and the love of his life, has spoken of so movingly is nearly complete. So I will close with President Reagan's own words in his courageous letter to the American people upon discovery of the disease that would ultimately bring about his fall. President Reagan said 10 years ago:

When the Lord calls me home, whenever that may be, I will leave the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future. I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.

God bless Ronald Reagan, an American hero.

Madam President, I yield the floor.