Winston Churchill recalled in his World War II memoirs that when the news of President Franklin Roosevelt's death reached him in London, "I felt as if I had been struck with a physical blow . . . I was overpowered by a sense of deep and irreparable loss." Notwithstanding his long tragic illness, the passing of Ronald Reagan, who ranks next to Roosevelt as the most consequential president of the 20th century, will be felt no less severely by the millions of Americans who came to love him, and especially by conservatives, for whom there has been no greater champion.
While Reagan will be compared politically to Roosevelt because he represented a turning away from New Deal liberalism, as a man he deserves to be reckoned on the same scale of large-souled greatness as Winston Churchill. With the passage of time the similarities between Reagan and Churchill have become more evident. Some similarities are merely superficial. Both changed parties. Both had a flair for fine-tuning the English language, reaching for the right word, and achieving an economy of expression. The criticisms of their thinking are remarkably alike. Churchill, critics said, was a romantic refugee from the past, given to heroic imagery that was out of step with modern realities; he was reckless, and not to be trusted with supreme office. The same was said of the "cowboy" Reagan.
The deeper similarity between the two men was their extraordinary imagination, which extended to matters large and small. Above all, both Reagan and Churchill foresaw the end of the Cold War long before anyone else in high office. Foreign-policy sophisticates guffawed when Reagan said that Marxism was destined for the ash heap of history, and was "a sad, bizarre chapter . . . whose last pages are even now being written." In 1953, when Churchill was prime minister for the second time, he told his young aide John Colville that if he lived his normal span of life--which would take Colville into the 1990s--he would surely see Eastern Europe free from Communism.
Churchill and Reagan believed this because they both understood that Soviet Communism was doomed for metaphysical reasons, though neither of them put it in this kind of precious intellectual way. There is lively debate about whether Reagan himself thought the Soviet Union would collapse so quickly if pressed. His critics think he was more lucky than prescient; his view that the Soviet Union could be "transcended" was a matter more of narrow ideology than of insight, though it is never explained why Reagan, almost alone among conservatives, thought this. But Mikhail Gorbachev himself told the History Channel that "I am not sure what happened would have happened had he [Reagan] not been there." This is an argument without end, and it misses the most important point: Reagan had the insight and political will to say it could be done, the courage to try to make it happen, and the fortitude to stick it out when the going was rough.
Beyond the overt similarities and differences that can be described, there rests the more important question of human greatness, and whether Reagan belongs in the same company as Churchill. Despite Reagan's improving reputation since leaving office, this comparison will strike many as a stretch. This tells us more about how political life at the highest level is thought about today than it does about Reagan--or Churchill. Churchill's most popular biographer, William Manchester, employed as a hortatory theme the viewpoint that Churchill was "the last lion"--the last man of superlative virtue and courage, whose supreme greatness shall never be seen again on the human stage. Manchester attributes Churchill's greatness precisely to the extent to which Churchill was a Victorian anachronism in 1940, just as even some of Reagan's own senior staff and public admirers see him as an American anachronism.
Of course all of us are powerfully affected by our environment, yet the case of Churchill and Reagan offers a decisive refutation to the historicist premise that human beings and human society are mostly corks bobbing on the waves of history. Churchill and Reagan prompt this question: Given that both had numerous capable contemporaries from similar environments, why were they virtually alone in their particular insights and resolves? The answer must be that they transcended their environments as only great men can do, thereby bending history to their will. The political philosopher Leo Strauss wrote of Churchill: "A man like Churchill proves that the possibility of megalofuxia [greatness of soul] exists today exactly as it did in the fifth century B.C." Likewise Reagan should be considered another lion--"the lion at the gate"--and never more so than at his famous moment at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin in 1987, when Reagan said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" As we came to learn, virtually the entire foreign-policy apparatus of his administration, including the new national security adviser, Colin Powell, tried to stop Reagan from saying, "Tear down this wall!" But this lion's roar would not be muted.
Just as Reagan always said that America's greatest days were ahead, he would understand that it is always possible to summon the courage and roar of a lion when the times demand it. Reagan would resist being called our last lion; to those conservatives dispirited that there can never be another Ronald Reagan (forgetting that so many thought there could never be a Ronald Reagan in the first place), Reagan would say: Of course there can. To borrow from his first inaugural address, you "just don't know where to look."
Steven F. Hayward is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is presently at work on The Age of Reagan: Lion at the Gate, 1980-1989, from which this article is adapted.
