Thank you Larry, Mrs. Reagan, ladies and gentlemen, good friends. It is a great pleasure to be here at the Reagan Library today. I am proud to have been given the honor of speaking on the occasion of the 87th birthday of President Ronald Wilson Reagan, whom I served and much admire.

At the outset, I desire to acknowledge the presence of Nancy Reagan, for eight years the first lady of our land, who stood side-by-side with President Ronald Reagan, encouraging, supporting, helping him in his great endeavors on behalf of our country.

So great was Ronald Reagan's impact on our country and our world that few persons can even remember what the world was like in November, 1980, when the American people shocked the experts by electing the former governor of California, president of the United States.

That was a time when America's defenses, its economy, its influence in the world had seriously declined. When, as Ronald Reagan put it, we had planes that couldn't fly, ships that couldn't leave port, and chief petty officers on welfare -- a time when inflation climbed and unemployment increased while productivity dropped. Government was our only growth industry.

It was a time when defeatism and self-doubt had displaced traditional American self-confidence and the superiority of democratic governments no longer seemed self evident to many.

While abroad, Soviet power was at an all time high: its empire had spread from Europe to Africa, Asia, South America, the Middle East. Soviet military strength had grown until it equalled that of the United States and it was deployed in a much more threatening fashion: with SS-20s aimed at the undefended capitals of Europe and Soviet ICBMs targeting America.

Napoleon (I) once said, "A leader is a dealer of hope."

In the campaign of 1980 Ronald Reagan offered the American people hope. He had a vision and a plan. He promised to reduce taxes and end the growth of government and government regulation. He promised to restore American military strength. He promised to treat threats to American security with firmness and resolve, and he did.

He approached the presidency with a sense of purpose, a vision of the public good, and the political skills needed to pursue them.

The plan was not new. Ronald Reagan's sense of who we were, where we were, and what was the nature of our problems had already been articulated. He had shared his vision -- not for the first time -- in what came to be called "the speech" in October 1964, saying, "We are at war with the most dangerous enemy ever known to man."

Now, he wasn't just talking about Communism. He was talking about collectivism, about a powerful trend to the centralization of power in government. Communism was one dangerous manifestation, of this trend. Reagan was worried about all the manifestations of the trends that contributed to the growth of bureaucracy and the loss of control over our own lives.

He warned in 1964, the hour was already late. I quote:

"The government has laid its hand on health, housing, farming, industry, commerce, education, and to an ever-increasing degree, interferes with people's right to know. The truth is that outside its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well and as economically as the private sector of the economy."

If that sounds like a cliche, it is only because it has been repeated so often. No where, Reagan said, could government's inferior performance be clearer than in agriculture.

In 1981, he would say it again, this time as president. I quote:

"The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we've had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom. In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem."

And added:

"It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved for the states or the people."

Real leaders, leaders who change history have a strong sense of purpose based on a vision of how things should be, could be.

Ronald Reagan's purposes, and his understanding of what was needed to deliver America from her problems, had been articulated in earlier speeches to the Chambers of Commerce of various cities, in various states in which he emphasized, again and again, that it is individuals who create wealth and growth, not governments, that raising taxes will encourage more government spending and less private investment, that it will slow economic growth, reduce production, destroy future jobs, making it more difficult for those without jobs to find them.

Higher taxes will make it more likely that those who have jobs will lose them. Reagan had concluded that the genius of the American Constitution was that it protects people from government tyranny, that freedom and free government is worth dying for, but never unnecessarily. No one more ardently supported an adequate capacity to defend ourselves.

Some people imagined that these were merely words some speech writer had provided him. Some people even imagined that someone other than Reagan himself was the true author of the Reagan revolution.

Those who held such views were too careless to notice that while advisers and speech writers came and went, Ronald Reagan's message and policies remained basically the same for three decades.

They were built on one basic idea -- that a free individual is the creative principle in the society and the economy, that governments inhibit creativity, while free markets and free societies stimulate imagination, invention, effort. They are best because they leave most people most free.

"The most original thing about Ronald Reagan was his uncompromising unoriginality," wrote Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post. "Tax cuts, get government off the backs of the citizens. It was so old it looked new."

Haynes Johnson was right. Reagan's central ideas were not original. Aristotle had proposed these ideas, and Adam Smith, and James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson.

But Johnson did not understand as clearly as, say, Franklin Roosevelt the relation of old ideas to new leadership. Roosevelt had said, (I quote),

"All our great presidents were leaders at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified. This is what the office is, a superb opportunity for reapplying and applying in new conditions the simple rules of human conduct to which we always go back."

But not all simple rules are equally important or equally timely. Those that Ronald Reagan adopted as his own were basic to the American idea and had been ignored for half a century. They were needed badly at just that time.

These principles gave Reagan's presidency focus and meaning. Specific policies like deregulation, decentralization, support for people fighting for their freedom, flowed naturally from these principles.

As James McGregor Burns wrote, "essential in a concept of power is the role of purpose" (in his masterful book called Leadership). Ronald Reagan had it. Like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Charles DeGaulle, he had a central, clear, overriding purpose.

Vision and purpose are not the only requisites for political success. Political leaders also need the skill to communicate their vision, to inspire confidence, to mobilize followers and supporters. In the American political system (as in other democratic systems) power comes to those who seek it.

Ronald Reagan worked hard to win and retain the power needed to reshape America's policies -- in the Screen Actor's Guild, in the Republican Party of California, and in the United States.

This man who changed parties was elected governor in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans three to one, and, once elected was reelected by a larger margin. He fought his way through long, grueling nominating contests in 1976 and 1980, when he became the Republican nominee.

It wasn't clear to everyone that this "amiable winger," as he was sometimes called, could survive presidential debates or win the nomination and election against people who thought themselves so much smarter than he. Some thought him somewhat out of touch with contemporary realities. He seemed to prefer a simple, rather old-fashioned conception of the world and its needs.

But though Ronald Reagan's vision of what America needed was incompatible with the dominant liberal opinions, it resonated with voters who knew that the more fashionable approaches hadn't worked. They had produced stagflation, an expanding Soviet empire and "malaise." More remarkable than the fact that Reagan had strong, clear purposes was that he implemented them, and they worked.

Washington Post columnist David Broder, no supporter of Ronald Reagan, wrote that in several important domains, Reagan had turned around entrenched policies.

Taxes, which had been rising since the New Deal, were reduced, and, for a time, the principle of progressive taxation on income -- dominant in the United States since the New Deal-- had lost ground to alternative principles.

The seemingly uncontrollable trend to greater centralization of power in the national government was reversed.

In foreign affairs Reagan demonstrated clearly how American strength could serve peace and freedom. The myth that Communist conquests (or "revolutions") were "irreversible" had never been challenged until Ronald Reagan decided that it was appropriate for the United States -- a country built on freedom to support "freedom fighters" fighting to protect their own independence and self-government. "Reagan Doctrine" was the product of this conviction.

The impact of Ronald Reagan's ideas was also felt in unlikely places, such as the IMF and the World Bank and the United Nations, itself, where market strategies had been ignored for decades. Before the end of Ronald Reagan's tenure, market strategies had begun to replace statist and collectivist assumptions about how economies grow. His stirring statement of the case for democracy -- delivered at Westminster -- had reinforced the democratic aspirations of many.

I shall not forget the occasion, when at the President's request, I delivered the United States speech on the market strategy of development at the United Nations Economic and Social Council meeting in Geneva in which I observed that every developed country in the world had relied on Market strategies for development and that the President wanted less developed countries to profit by the lessons of our success.

When I finished, the Ambassador of a close ally said to me as we walked out of the hall, "Jeane," he said, "you know how fond I am of you and your country, I know you'll take my remarks in the spirit I intend them."

"Well," I thought, "maybe, we'll see."

"You're new in the UN, and you don't understand its culture. No one talks about market strategies or free markets in the UN. It is /considered a very outdated idea; it makes everyone uncomfortable. I thought you'd want to know and find another topic next time."

"Actually," I said, "it wasn't just my idea. It is an idea that is very important to our president and his administration."

While we didn't desire to make people uncomfortable, I had a strong feeling that those in international institutions were going to hear a lot more discussion of free markets and market strategies for development from Ronald Reagan and his Administration. And they did.

By the time I left the UN in 1985, all the major committees concerned with development were talking about market strategies. There had been a breakthrough. This politically incorrect idea had been added to the agenda for discussion in international arenas.

President Reagan himself had discussed market strategies of development in Cancun and around the world. More and more frequently free market assumptions began to replace statist and collectivist assumptions and theories about how economic growth occurs, and how growth can be stimulated. After decades of dominance Marxism was in retreat.

No where were mistaken policies more firmly entrenched than concerning U.S.-Soviet relations where dire predictions had warned that President Reagan's ideas about our allies deploying Pershing and Cruise missiles to defend NATO capitals against Soviet SS-20 missiles were very dangerous and provocative.

The same voices warned that strengthening our military forces to defend the West against more powerful and numerous Soviet missiles and forces was provocative and dangerous. That helping Afghans and Nicaraguans and Angolans defend their independence against Soviet-dominated Marxist regimes was too dangerous, too provocative.

Or that seeking to give America the capacity to defend the nation and its allies against ballistic missiles through the SDI program was too provocative.

In each case, the nay-sayers predictions proved wrong. Events develop as Ronald Reagan had predicted.

In spite of all the accomplishments achieved on the basis of Ronald Reagan's own ideas and purposes, there remained at the end of his term, as at the beginning, people who saw him as only an actor whose performance was due largely to script writers, directors and producers.

In its coverage before a major meeting with Soviet leaders, The Economist made clear that they saw Mikhail Gorbachev, almost all of whose ideas about society and government would fail, as more intelligent and interesting than Ronald Reagan, who led the United States and the Western world to an extremely impressive recovery -- in spite of a Democratic Congress.

Not since Dwight Eisenhower had a president who enjoyed such widespread popular approval also won such little respect from pundits.

Most conceded him some achievements, but they tended to attribute these to his good advisers, and his good luck, never noting that these advisers changed repeatedly.

At the end of his eight years, as at the time of his first inauguration, many commentators resented Ronald Reagan's unflappable calm, his unshakable optimism, his irrepressible good humor, his failure to understand that he really wasn't up to the job.

For eight years, our President took this criticism, even contempt, and emerged virtually unscathed. "The breaking of the President," Broder called the ordeal by which the Washington press and the political opposition undermine, demoralize and finally destroy our chosen leaders.

But they never laid a glove on Ronald Reagan. They could not make him stop smiling, stop kidding, stop enjoying himself and them and their situation.

Both Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower managed to inspire confidence in broad public and maintain high approval ratings that puzzled our overwhelmingly liberal political observers.

Neither seemed like politicians. Both were extraordinarily successful in seeking power without seeming to need it. Fred Greenstein outlines this process in his interesting book on Dwight Eisenhower's presidency called The Hidden-Hand Presidency, in which he documents Eisenhower's self-conscious use of distance to insulate himself from the problems that consumed Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter.

Both Eisenhower and Reagan prove that the experts have a great deal to learn about American politics and, especially, about leadership.

Clearly, Ronald Reagan was the most successful American president since Dwight Eisenhower. Neither of these enormously successful presidents seemed to be in charge. Both appeared to delegate the presidency to strong chiefs of staff who were more than happy to give the impression that they were the ones who were really running things.

But when the time came, Eisenhower demonstrated that his presidency could survive and thrive without Sherman Adams. And Ronald Reagan demonstrated that he could do very well, thank you, without any of the particular chiefs of staff or cabinet associates who passed through the White House.

Both, I think, were living reminders that the requirements for political leadership, especially presidential leadership, are very different than those described in treatises on the presidency. They're very different from the requirements for success in, say, a top flight journalism school or a news room. They are more mysterious.

Leadership defies definition. Either you have it or you don't; most people don't. Ronald Reagan did. And because he did, he inspired and mobilized millions of others who shared his vision, believed in it and were gratified to see it realized.

We can identify some qualities associated with his kind of leadership.

Some he shared with Margaret Thatcher, who was also determined to downsize government and restore her country's morale. Thatcher and Reagan were both conviction politicians from the beginning of their careers until today.

Both wanted power for purpose not for its own sake. Both had long experience in politics and were unusually persistent. Both were the object of unusually bitter criticism, and survived hard struggles for power.

That is typical of leaders who go against the grain of entrenched establishments, who change the directions in which their country is traveling.

Both had first to defeat the establishment of their own party. Both knew how to wait. Both of them have demonstrated flexibility and a capacity to compromise when that's necessary.

Both knew how to delegate. Both enjoyed politics, and both enjoyed baiting liberals.

Ronald Reagan was the president who brought Calvin Coolidge's portrait into the Cabinet room the first week of his presidency observing, as he did so,

"Now you hear a lot of jokes about how silent Cal Coolidge didn't do much, but I think the joke is on the people that make the jokes. Because if you look at his record, he cut taxes four times. We had probably the greatest growth and prosperity record we've ever known, and I have taken heed of that because he did nothing. Maybe that's the answer for the federal government."

That's baiting liberals.

Like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan knew how to fight when necessary, how to cooperate, and how to enjoy life. He understood his world. He understood that we were engaged in a deadly serious contest that would determine which of two conceptions of the world and two civilizations would prevail.

Because he was very serious and held views incompatible with those of the liberal establishment, Ronald Reagan expressed views that outraged his opponents. He spoke of "consigning Communism to the ash heap of history." "Ending the evil empire." "Tearing down that wall." And each time he expressed those provocative, prescient views, he did it deliberately.

Anyone who has seen Ronald Reagan's speeches before he delivered them knows that he revised the texts substantially. Sometimes he sent drafts back, and when he received a new draft revised it again and again and interspersed his own revisions.

This was a president with the strategic imagination to grasp the importance of a defense against nuclear weapons, and the savvy to know which experts to believe, and who had the tenacity to persist in his support when a chorus of experts called it "Star Wars," suggesting it was science from comic books.

That didn't spoil Ronald Reagan's satisfaction in working toward an effective missile defense for America.

Ronald Reagan had skill, will, vision, imagination and a passion for freedom. And he was a Great Communicator.

Did he win the Cold War? Well, not alone. Various people and factors contributed to the collapse of Communism and the dismantling of the Soviet Union. One was the economic failure of socialism which Reagan had tirelessly predicted and emphasized. Another was the arrival in power in the Soviet Union of a more flexible man from another generation.

But there were also the unique contributions of Ronald Reagan that grew out of his own conceptions of the world.

It was a personal decision of Ronald Reagan to reopen the debate on the superiority of democracy and to carry the criticism of Communism to the Kremlin itself.

It was his own personal decision to combine this ideological challenge with the rebuilding of Western strength.

At a time that there was fear and trembling in the Western world, Ronald Reagan pushed hard the case for the deployment of Pershing and Cruise missiles in Western Europe, whose cities were totally vulnerable to Soviet SS-20's and when Mikhail Gorbachev's representatives in Geneva walked out of the arms control talks, announcing that they would not participate in negotiations until the Pershing and Cruise missiles had been withdrawn, it was Ronald Reagan's personal decision to stand firm.

It was his personal decision to provide military assistance to peoples fighting for their independence and to rescue Grenada from a band of murderers who held the island in terror.

These were bold and important positions which put Soviet leaders on notice that they could not simply assume that their march toward military superiority would continue uncontested.

Then came the most crucial and probably the most personal decision of all -- at the conclusion of the negotiations at Reykjavik. I wasn't present but close associates described to me at the time how, when after days of successful conversations in which the two sides agreed to mutual concessions, Mikhail Gorbachev unexpectedly made one heap of all his winnings and announced that it was all or nothing: Either President Reagan agreed that the United States would cease efforts to develop a defense against the thousands of Soviet ICBMs aimed at us or there would be no arms reduction treaties.

It was said that the room fell silent, that some minutes passed while President Reagan made a decision with which most of his principal advisers disagreed.

It was said his jaw tightened as he pushed his chair back from the table, then stood up saying, "This conversation has gone on long enough," and walked out.

In the process he demonstrated that not even in pursuit of his own fondest dream of a nuclear free world would he forego the right of Americans to defend themselves. I believe that was the turning point in the Soviet decision to seek another pathway to development, to try Glasnost and Perestroika and liberalization and, I think, Ronald Reagan brought it to pass.

He was a great President and a great political leader, who changed accepted ideas and practices, who reversed trends and who left America much stronger.

I expressed my opinion of this President succinctly in a citation I wrote for the honorary doctor's degree presented to him by Georgetown University. This is what I said.

"Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th president of the United States, believed the American dream because he has lived it.

Born above a store in Tampico, Illinois, in the course of a long life Ronald Reagan was Democrat and Republican, union president and businessman, new dealer and free marketeer -- each in its season. He lived in the mid-West, West and East. He was hard up and well off. He worked variously as sportscaster, movie and TV actor, rancher, commentator, and Governor of California. Like Walt Whitman he `heard America singing its varied carols.'

From this diverse experience he forged a philosophy that was optimistic, democratic, internationalist, and 20th century American. At its core is faith in the free individual.

Throughout his presidency, Ronald Reagan worked with strength and candor against what he termed `the two great threats to life in this century - nuclear war and totalitarian rule.' Though it is rarely possible to determine definitively what causes what in history, it cannot be denied that totalitarian controls were loosened and that the threat of nuclear war dramatically receded during the years Ronald Reagan worked on the problems.

His good friend, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, spoke for many when she said,

"...you have done the greatest possible service not only to your own people but to free people everywhere, you have restored faith in the American dream, a dream of boundless opportunity built on enterprise, individual effort and personal generosity. When we compare the mood of confidence and opportunity in the West today with the mood when you took office in 1980, we know that a greater change has taken place than ever we could have imagined."

Because you worked so hard and so successfully for freedom, prosperity and peace, I want to say on behalf of millions of Americans and others, "thank you, President Reagan and Happy Birthday."

You kept your rendezvous with destiny.