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Ronald Reagan Myths and truths

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential

This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio.

LOU CANNON: He had had a mystical streak in him. He just was sort of driven by something that I don't think any of us, including me or , ever fully figured out.

Reagan told me that when he was in college -- in -- that he had gone, I think just for fun, to this fortune teller who reads your hand. Anyways, the fortune teller predicted that he'd be president.

The fact that he remembered that 20 years later said to me that some part of him harbored a notion that, well, he could be.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That's .

And I'm Lillian Cunningham with . This is the 39th episode of “Presidential.”

PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: For such a recent president, there is something kind of surprisingly mystical and mythical, even, about the way that Reagan's legacy lives on in American .

So, for this episode, we're not going to spend too much time on the nuts and bolts of economic policy in the or what was going on in or the air traffic controllers strike.

No. We are going to focus instead on some of the myths and the narratives that have enveloped Reagan's legacy. So, politicians today invoke his name constantly, as you're sure to have heard many, many times this election year. So, we are going to take a look at where the image of Reagan today lines up with or veers off from the reality of who -- the man, the president -- really was. And with me here to help separate that fact from fiction is a reporter and a biographer who's considered the ultimate Reagan expert, and that is Lou Cannon.

LOU CANNON: Thank you.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Lou, thank you so much for doing this.

LOU CANNON: You're welcome. I'm happy to do it.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: You were The Washington Post senior correspondent covering the Reagan presidency. You covered his governorship. You've written five books about him. So, you know, to start off, why do you think it is that today there's so much collective nostalgia for Reagan?

LOU CANNON: I think there's a couple of reasons for that. One is I think people want to hark back to a time when things seemed better, when presidents were respected. In the actual time, there was a very partisan division in Reagan. But I think looking back at him, overall, people saw him as a leader of the country. The other reason is that the Republicans have not really had a successful two-term president since then.

George H.W. Bush might have been, but he was defeated in his re-election campaign; and President George W. Bush is still a very controversial figure, primarily over the . So, I think that, to the Republicans, Reagan represents success. And I think to all of us -- Republicans, Democrats, Independents -- and I include myself in that, there's a sort of a glow, a memory, of a time when Americans were able to come together and get things done.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Well, so now why don't we just back up more toward the beginning. I'd love to hear what you think were a couple of the most formative aspects of his childhood. What to you stand out as most important to know about his upbringing?

LOU CANNON: Ronald Reagan grew up in the great American midland in the very center of the country in Dixon, , which he considers his hometown. And it was a time before -- and right after -- the First World War, when Americans collectively felt a great sense of isolation from the rest of the world but also a collective sense of being safe in the world. And I think some of that is inside Reagan.

In his own specific growing up, however, even though, he has -- he would like to, in later years, represent it as some -- as he put it in his early , 'Huck Finn ,' it was a difficult childhood. His father was a nomadic salesman -- a shoe salesman, mostly -- and he had a drinking problem. They moved all around Illinois in all of his formative years.

So, Ronald Reagan grew up -- he didn't really have any company. You can't make friends when you're moving from one school to another every year. And he became happy, I think, in the company of himself. I think that's very important in his formative years. He also developed -- there was an outside to him. Nancy Reagan would call it 'The Barrier.' There was a part of him that you just couldn't get get through to, that he kept to himself.

So, I think that in both the ways that he was really a child of the country -- of the heartland of our country -- but an inner-directed person in many ways. I mean, there were always two sides to Ronald Reagan. He loved the stage, but he also liked his own company. And I think the combination of that is what made him what he was.

I don't want to leave this, though, without mentioning his mother, who was the decisive influence in his life. She was a religious person, but she also. had the flair for the dramatic. She would put on

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 all these theatricals at their church, which was a Disciples of Christ -- often called a Christian church. And Ronald Reagan was in them from the time that he was three. He always said he'd like the stage. There was sort of a ham in him, and his mom is the reason for that.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Something that seems just so easy to forget when you think about Reagan as the conservative icon is the fact that he grew up in a family of Democrats and that he, himself, was a Democrat for a good chunk of his life, right?

LOU CANNON: It's interesting that his parents were Democrats in a Republican county. But I think what's more significant is the fact that this was the depths of the , when Ronald Reagan grew up. And his father was put in charge of distributing relief in the county, and his also got a government job in the distribution of aid -- usually food aid -- to needy people. And so, Ronald Reagan grew up -- it wasn't so much a Democrat, as that he adored Franklin Roosevelt.

He gave a pretty good broomstick imitation when he was in Eureka College. He used a broomstick as a microphone and could do that paration of FDR saying, 'Everybody in my day knew: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.' He could do that very well, and do a passable FDR imitation.

It's an interesting thing about Reagan -- and I think it says something to loyalty and also childhood feelings -- he never, ever forgot his gratitude to FDR. Even when he became a conservative Republican, he never said a bad word. You can search all the Reagan writings and speeches and you'll never hear a bad word about Franklin Roosevelt.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, he ends up a radio announcer and then an actor then, eventually, he's president of the for five terms. And, I mean, his acting career always comes up as one of the first things when you hear about the story of Reagan and his persona. Do you think it was really a central to his skill as a politician as we tend to think that it was?

LOU CANNON: Let's not overlook the radio part of his career. His great asset was his voice. He knew how to modulate -- when to speak softly and when to speak dramatically. And although he did very well on , I think his gift was his voice, and it played all the way into his later-year politics because during the period after he was governor and before he was elected president -- and that's a six-year gap -- he kept himself in touch with the American people with these weekly radio programs.

I don't want to get too far ahead of this story, but I can remember a lot of people, including people in the Reagan White House, who thought that his insistence on doing the Saturday radio broadcast when he was president was a waste of time. Well, guess what? Every president since has done it.

It's a good way to reach a segment of the American people, and the segment was, of course, much larger when Reagan was an announcer. And when he came to Hollywood, he absorbed the culture of Hollywood without being changed by it. The directors liked him because he memorized his lines. He wasn't temperamental. He showed up on time. Then, he got his break in a movie called, ', All American.' He often got good reviews in pictures that were panned, and he connected with the American people.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Well, so maybe that leads into -- there's this question that I've asked on just about every episode: Humor me, but what do you imagine it would be like to go on a blind

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 date with Ronald Reagan?

LOU CANNON: Well, a lot of people did go on dates with Ronald Reagan between the breakdown of his first marriage and meeting Nancy Reagan. I've actually talked to a couple of people who did. They found Reagan lighthearted, charming, very sociable and polite and good mannered, and they liked that. Dressed well, kind and generous to the person he was with; but also -- and this was after a marriage that he thought was going to last forever -- a little bit remote, not eager to rush into a commitment. But he was charming to be with.

Reagan was one of the people that I've known whom women fell for and men liked. He had an assurance to him -- a self-confidence that people liked.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, you had mentioned that he could be difficult to know, and I've heard that said of him before, as well. What exactly is meant by that? I mean, if he was warm and charming, what's the part of him that struck people as unknowable?

LOU CANNON: I think I identify with that because I'm also a child of alcoholic; and if you are, you've seen things that you don't want to share, and you put that somewhere in the back of your brain. So, you allow people to get so close, but not closer. Nancy Reagan told me, 'You know, Lou, there are times when there's a barrier there that even I can't get beyond.'

This is not, Lillian, something that is exclusive to Reagan. There are lots of great men who keep a part of themselves always to themselves. The person who most readily comes to mind is Ronald Reagan's first idol, Franklin D Roosevelt.

I've read -- I don't know -- three or four dozen books on FDR, and in every one of them, you find some passage by people who knew him that they didn't know what he was thinking. There was some part of him that they could never penetrate.

I think it sort of added to the mystique of both presidents . It also can make him frustrating to deal with, but it's a quality that you do see replicated in other leaders.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, it wasn't until 1962, when Reagan was 51-years old, that he officially switched his party affiliation from Democrat to being a Republican. And a couple of years later, he gave a speech in support of Republican candidate , which basically garnered Reagan a ton of attention in the sphere of national politics. And here's a little clip from it.

RONALD REAGAN ADDRESS: Ladies and gentlemen, we take pride in presenting a thoughtful address by Ronald Reagan. Mr. Reagan.

RONALD REAGAN CLIP: Thank you, and good evening. The sponsor has been identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasn't been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own words and discuss my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks. I have spend most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines. Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used, 'We've never had it so good.' But I have an an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn't something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever -- '

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LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, it's not too long after this speech that Reagan ends up running for governor of and is elected in 1966. He then makes an unsuccessful presidential run in 1960 and, you know, doesn't get the nomination. He continues on as for a second term. And then, in 1976, he makes another run for president. He tries to edge out President for the Republican nomination. He comes a lot closer this time, but still doesn't quite get it. Turns out, third time is the charm in 1980.

Alright. So, Lou, how did he make that transition from acting into politics? And when did that interest in politics first actually really start to show itself?

LOU CANNON: Reagan was always interested in politics. He became interested in politics during the Depression, when his father's working and disbursing relief to other people. When he was in Hollywood, candidates -- even more then than they do now -- like to get Hollywood figures endorsing them or showing up at their events. And Reagan did a whole number of things for different candidates.

I once had a recording of a speech he'd given to , and I misplaced it, but it was as eloquent as anything he'd ever done on behalf of any Republican. It was when he was a Democrat. But I think that the real political training -- I think there were two political training grounds for Reagan, and both served him very well in different ways.

The first was the Screen Actors Guild. I think I, and all the other people who covered him in the governor's race in 1966, made a mistake in just assuming that Reagan had no political experience. Well, he had never held office, but the Screen Actors Guild in those days was just a great forum for all the issues in the land, and they would get up and yell and debate him. And I've known people who were at some of those meetings where Reagan presided, and they said he did very well.

And the other training ground was a more personal one. He was hired by when his Hollywood career was basically coming to an end, and he toured all these GE plants. GE was a very progressive company run by a man named Ralph Cordiner, whom Reagan admired. Cordiner was the sort of apostle of decentralization, and Reagan would go to all these different plants and speak to the employees and speak to the middle-level management and develop his speech.

And he had plenty of time to make mistakes and learn how to give an effective political speech. He had a great read on his audience. He could tell whether something was going down or not. He had a sense of the audience. So, that was a learning experience for him -- and at the same time, thrust him forward in a nonpartisan, political way because he was the host of this show.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And this was a popular television program at the time that was put on by GE, but Reagan was the host of it, right?

LOU CANNON: He was before the people every Sunday night. Now, this is in the 50s, and the GE theater was, for many years, the top-rated Sunday program. Reagan had many years where he is speaking to the American people, not as a partisan, but as the host of a much-watched television show.

You know, if you're looking at the campaigns today, one of the principal reasons that is the Republican nominee is that he was on shows, which had bigger audiences than the

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 5 turnout in any of these Republican primaries. So, I think Reagan -- he didn't know anything about state issues -- but he was more formed as a politician than any of us realized or gave him credit for when he started out.

Now, I don't think that Reagan ever planned to be governor. He was always interested in federal issues. But what happened in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was the nominee for the Republicans, the Republicans were kind of wiped out at all sorts of levels. There weren't many prominent Republicans standing after that election.

And in 1965, a group of people that Reagan knew, friends of his from the film days -- the most important was a car dealer named Holmes Tuttle. There wasn't, incidentally, a big-business person in the whole lot. The businessmen in there were entrepreneurs or small businessmen like Holmes, and they thought that Reagan should run against , the incumbent Democratic governor.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, you said that he wasn't as interested in state issues. So, was his decision to run for governor then a strategic decision just to help him toward the presidency?

LOU CANNON: It didn't have that kind of linear quality to it. It became a stepping stone. His daughter was in, I think, Washington at the time. She's trying to get her dad to run for governor. And there's a phrase she used, 'You could be governor, Dad.' And he writes back, 'Well, Mermy -- that was her family nickname -- if you're talking what I could do, I could be president.’

So, it was on his mind. But Reagan never sat down with a notepad and said, 'I get elected to this in this year, and one day I'll be president.' He didn't think that way.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, he ran unsuccessfully for president in '68 and '76 before the 1980 run. What do you think he learned the most from those losses that ended up sort of shaping his 1980 campaign and helping him evolve?

LOU CANNON: Well, Reagan was quite naive on the national political stage when he ran in '68. Reagan did not have a high view of 's prospects. And some people had sold him on the thought that Nixon wouldn't make it, and so he sort of half ran in '68. And what he learned -- I think are two things in '68.

One is he learned he was popular with the rank and file, and the other thing he learned is that there were a lot of these state bosses, particularly in the South, who you couldn't trust. They had said nice things to him, but they were secretly committed to Nixon. So he was a much wordlier candidate when he ran in '76. '76 was an adventure of a campaign. And he almost beat Jerry Ford. And I think that what Reagan really, really learned from '76 was he developed a confidence in himself.

He also developed a network of people who were genuinely committed to him. And I think he started in 1980 -- even if President Carter had not been weakened by various things -- Reagan started 1980 in a very strong position. I think he learned, you know, from two failures. He's a great example of, 'If at first you don't succeed, try again.'

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And, well, in terms of his campaign style, I read about how he, at one point, made kind of a disparaging comment about the former California governor, Pat Brown. And

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 6 an aide said to Reagan that kind of language was beneath him. And Reagan really took that to heart, and throughout all of his presidential campaigns didn't really make personal attacks.

LOU CANNON: You can disagree with anything Reagan said or did and still respect the way he campaigned. He never insulted anyone. He referred to his opponents respectfully. He thought that they were sincere but deluded or something. But he never, never questioned the integrity of anyone.

I know we tend to see things through a rosy glow, but there was a higher standard, I think, in the '70s and the '80s, generally. There were some vicious campaign ads, but I think that candidates generally showed more respect for the motives of their opponents than they do today.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, when you consider the arc of American election history, what's really most notable or exceptional about the 1980 campaign?

LOU CANNON: Well, I think the most important thing is Reagan had an idea of what he wanted to accomplish when he was president. David S. Broder, the great political correspondent for The Washington Post and my mentor, said that the '80 campaign was the most issue-oriented in the history of American politics. Reagan promised three things: He promised that he would lower taxes overall, that he would raise the defense budget -- which he considered had been neglected -- and that he would either balance the budget or reduce the deficit, which was then very small.

Essentially, he accomplished the first two promises at the expense of the third. But the interesting thing about Reagan, which some people haven't realized until this day, was that he was different from a lot of the Cold Warriors, in that he wanted to raise the defense budget for a purpose at a time that the CIA had very exaggerated estimates of Soviet capability. And a lot of people thought the was 10-feet tall. Reagan simply from his own research didn't believe it.

He thought that the Soviets couldn't afford to be in an with us, and they would come to the bargaining table. Reagan always had an idea. He didn't get it from Nancy. He didn't get it in the second term, like some people have written. He came into office believing if he could bargain from a position of strength, he could force the Soviet Union to give up or reduce its nuclear and its conventional military arsenal. So, he had a goal.

And, of course, he also had the ghost of a historical voice whispering his ear during that campaign, and that was FDR, 'Are you better off than you were four years ago?' Asked Ronald Reagan.

Well, FDR had used that line. He used it in a fireside chat after he was president in 1934. He's trying to get people to vote for Democrats for Congress, and he says, 'Ask yourself if you're better off now than you were when was president.'

So, I think he had both a purpose for becoming president, which helps, and there was a historical sweep that made him right for the moment.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Ronald Reagan decisively beat in the presidential election of 1980. And so, Reagan comes into the White House in 1981, and on Inauguration Day, he is on the eve of his 70th birthday. He's just still 69 -- and still, that makes him the oldest person, so far, in American history to take on the presidency.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 7 His vice president was George H.W. Bush, and Reagan easily ended up serving two terms in the White House, which meant that his presidency spanned basically the entire decade of the 1980s.

There's a ton that we could potentially talk about that takes place during his administration -- things like: He appoints the first female Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O'Connor. There's the invasion of . He was shot, and his would-be assassin actually just a couple of weeks ago was released from a psychiatric hospital.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, I'm going to put it on Lou. You know, what do you think are a couple of things that you would draw attention to as priorities that Reagan set as he entered the White House, and then, beyond even specific policies themselves, we talked about how FDR was kind of an early presidential icon for Reagan. So, when he enters the White House, what is his vision for the type of president that he wants to be?

LOU CANNON: He said that what he wanted to do was to make the American people believe in themselves again. You have to sort of recreate the scene of 1980. We had record interest rates, record inflation. Americans held hostage in .

And Reagan -- I don't want to be his cheerleader on this point because I wrote many, many critical stories about him in The Washington Post -- but I think that Reagan did have the idea of what he wanted to be as president, which was to trust the people and to get the people to feel better about themselves again.

And he focused on the economy. Everybody said that the economy was the most important thing. Richard Nixon had even written him a letter about this, and , Reagan's very competent chief-of-staff said, 'Well, if we get the economy right, we'll be able to do a lot of things. If we don't, we won't be able to do anything.'

And so, they focused on the economy. They didn't get it right, not at first. The supply siders, who believe that if you just cut taxes enough, that that would accomplish everything -- it didn't at first produce much. They spiraled into a . But I always thought that Reagan in the recession was particularly strong.

Paul Volcker was then the head of the . He was a Wall Street Banker -- a Democrat. Carter had appointed him, and Volcker once said that Reagan gave more support than Carter ever did. And Reagan actually reappointed him, and they broke the back of the recession in the traditional way, by raising interest rates. It caused a lot of -term harm, but we haven't had an inflationary problem, really, in this country since then. And it was the source of a lot of Reagan's popularity, and it did give him great running room to do what he did.

And I thought the most important thing that he did was forging an treaty in his second term with . Now, last year, a few miles from here where I live out at Vandenberg, [California,] Russians were going out and inspecting American missile facilities, and we were doing the same in . This limited arms control treaty that Reagan and Gorbachev signed in 1987 -- we have continued a regime with Russia, where we are still inspecting each other's weapons systems. And we're a long way from the nuclear doomsday we seemed to be facing when Reagan took office.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: How much credit do you think that we should give Reagan for ending the

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 8 ? Do you think we give him too much on the whole? Not enough?

LOU CANNON: Yeah, well, I think that Reagan is a leader in that. I don't think he did it all by himself. Conservatives like to give Reagan credit for the demise of the Soviet Union, but I don't think Reagan cared one way or another about that once the Soviet Union was defanged, once they were not a menace to the world. So, yeah I think he deserves accolades for ending the Cold War.

And Reagan would have been the very first, by the way, and did say that he didn't do it by himself. In his last speech, he gave credit for anything that he'd done to the American people. He was a fairly humble guy, and I see a lot of people who in a bragging tone talk about Reagan and proclaim themselves to be the heirs of Reagan. And they talk in a way that Reagan himself never did.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Could you talk a little bit about his management style as president? You know, the way that he interacted with staff and cabinet members? How much he delegated versus how much he had his hands in things?

LOU CANNON: Reagan's management style is kind of a key to the highs and the lows of his presidency. Reagan did not believe in sitting down over the maps and determining from the terrain where the next attack was going to be. He was a big-picture guy, and he also felt that staying in the office at all hours was kind of a ridiculous thing -- it wore you out. I mean, being president does mean working long, hard hours many times, and Reagan did.

But he didn't have a conceptual idea of doing that. And he also didn't think the adviser should be as important as the secretary of state. He believed in the Cabinet system. He was a delegator. He believed in delegating, and his idea of managerial style was to keep your eye on the ball, and let the subordinates handle all the small stuff.

The high of this style is it did enable Reagan to focus on his dealings with the Soviet Union, and Reagan spent a lot of time on that aspect of his presidency. And it was a pay-off.

But he sure as heck didn't pay attention to what his changing casts of national security advisers were doing. And one of the things that they were doing was getting involved in all sorts of dealings with the -- the opposition force in , whom Reagan admired and whom his national security adviser, Poindexter, and Col. on his staff took as a license to do a whole number of things they shouldn't have done.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And just to pause here for a second and remind listeners: the Iran-Contra affair was this joint scandal where the U.S. secretly sold arms to Iran as part of an effort to help free American hostages who were being held by in . And then on top of that, profits from this secret arms sale ended up going to fund rebels in Nicaragua called Contras, who were trying to topple the Nicaraguan government.

OK, so the common narrative, Lou, is that all of this was sort of able to happen in Reagan's administration because he was detached. He was oblivious. Is that the right read of him and his involvement in this scandal? Or is this a place where the common story is different from reality?

LOU CANNON: When you talk about Iran-Contra, the original sin in that is Reagan's. And it didn't come from his managerial style. It came from his tendency to put every issue in terms of human qualities and of protecting American citizens.

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And he saw all these people who had been taken hostage in Lebanon, and he was persuaded that there was an Iranian group of moderates who could get these people freed, and against the recommendations of both Secretary of State Schultz and Defense Secretary Weinberger, Reagan authorized these arms sales.

It was never a good idea. It violated common sense in Reagan's own policy, but he recovered from it eventually because he wasn't doing it for corrupt purposes. He was doing it because he was frustrated by his inability to help these Americans. I think there's a misconception about Ronald Reagan -- and mea culpa because I probably helped spread it. I think the biggest misconception of Reagan is that he was passive. And I think that misconception arises from the fact that he can sometimes be out to lunch and tell you an anecdote that had nothing to do with the problem at hand, or that he was calm and generally imperturbable when other people were getting excited.

I used to think that Reagan got into his trouble -- the Iran-Contra being an example, and the Lebannon experience where we lost all those Marines in the bombing -- I used to think those came out of a certain passivity on the part of Reagan. In fact, you could argue that it was the opposite. The reason we got into the Iran-Contra was that Reagan was passionate, so passionate about rescuing those hostages, that he didn't see the larger picture.

We had two deployments into Lebanon. The first one was was relatively successful. The second deployment occurred as was cutting its losses and withdrawing from Lebanon after its invasion. There were these awful massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, where the Israeli army stood by as these Phalangist groups in Lebanon massacred these women and children. And Reagan was watching the reports of this in the White House, and he was really angry. He felt that we needed to stop that, and it was that, I think, that fueled the second deployment into Lebanon, which ended so disastrously for Americans.

So, I think if there's a misconception about Reagan, it was that he was too detached. Sometimes it was the opposite. Sometimes he cared too much.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, we have this vision of Reagan as a conservative icon who's been, you know, an optimistic leader -- inspirational in that way. But what did this, you know, practically mean in terms of how he worked his will? You know, how much he was willing to compromise -- how little he was willing to compromise? I've read you describe him before as more of an idealist than an idealogue, but, you know, what do you mean by that?

LOU CANNON: Well, Reagan was a conservative. If you're going to compromise, you have to compromise from some set of principles. I mean, sometimes you have a call that people should be pragmatic. Well yeah, but pragmatic about what. And where what's their starting point?

But Reagan had formed the idea in California -- really as governor, I think he probably had it in the Screen Actors Guild -- that, in order to get some things done, you were going to have to give some things away.

Reagan agreed in his early months and Sacramento to the largest tax increase, not only in the history of California, the largest tax increase in the history of any state. He had been left with a deficit. And he sort of oversaw that it was a very progressive bill -- tax the corporations and the insurance companies.

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But when he was president, he did, essentially, some of that on Social Security. The last Social Security reform we've had in this country was in the Reagan presidency -- early in the Reagan presidency. And he got it in a bipartisan way. There was a commission that headed it.

He took some of what the Democrats wanted to do in Social Security and some of what the Republicans did. When the bill was signed, Tip O'Neill was there beside Reagan calling it a happy day for America.

And if you go through most of the legislation that's signed during the Reagan years, notably the tax bill in the second term, which is the last tax reform we've had in this country, you can see many hands on it -- Democratic hands as well as Republican ones. And on a narrow political level, Reagan was smart enough to realize that when you did this, it was the president who always got the credit. But more broadly, more idealistically, Reagan believed in this sorts of governance. Democrats had the majority in the House during the entire Reagan presidency. He was always looking for ways to accomplish his goals. And if he couldn't accomplish his goals, to accomplish part of his goal. And I think that's arguably the right way for a president to behave.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, Reagan said, on leaving the White House, something to the effect of that he didn't know how anyone could do that job without being an actor -- you know, could do the job of the presidency without being an actor.

And it reminded me that in our FDR episode, this quote came up where FDR said to Orson Welles that the two of them were the greatest actors in America. Do you think that the ability to act and to perform is actually a really fundamental skill for leaders and presidents to have?

LOU CANNON: Yeah, I think being an actor is one aspect of being effective in what called the bully pulpit of the presidency. The presidency is a unique office, you know. It has all these different roles, and one of the roles is to project a sense of leadership to the American people. Now, in addition to FDR and Orson Welles joking about we’re the two best actors, Reagan and Gorbachev – I think it was at , Gorbachev says, 'We are both actors. He is a good one.' And I found when I was doing my research that both Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, had dramatic interest when they were starting to study in the Soviet Union.

Reagan was a -- people felt, as they often do with celebrities, that they knew him and that they had a bond with him and that was a blend of the radio experience and the acting. And Reagan was an actor. He could take criticisms of his politics and his presidency much better than he could take criticism of his acting. And it was his life's work.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: When you think about his presidential legacy, what strikes you as something that maybe he tends to get too much credit for? And then conversely, something that you think he tends to get too little credit for as president?

LOU CANNON: He gets too much credit for -- it's a favorite of Republican -- reducing regulations and restrictions on business. He sort of gets this from the left, too – that he really removed too many restrictions on the environment. Actually, if you look at the number of regulations, they really piled up to every presidency. The most you could be said of Reagan is he slightly braked their increase, but if you just looked at the number of regulations without knowing

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 11 who was president, you wouldn't say that he'd done all that much.

I don't think he gets enough credit on the big picture, particularly on the Soviet Union -- because the Soviet Union didn't actually disintegrate and die on his watch, and the Cold War technically didn't end until George H.W. Bush's watch. But Reagan had put in motion all of the elements that caused it to end.

And I'm not sure he gets the credit that he deserves for restoring America's pride in their own country. Carl Schurz, in the 19th century, said: “Our country, right or wrong. If right, to be kept right; if wrong, to be made right.” I think that Reagan had a sense of this. He had a sense of the greatness of America. It wasn't vapid. I mean, he didn't think that everything in it was OK. He thought it was part of a process, and I think Reagan did a pretty good job in keeping us on this high-minded roll of American idealism: 'If wrong to be made right.'

We're sort of lacking that today, and to end this where we began -- maybe that's one of the reasons that there is this nostalgia for Ronald Reagan in this country. It's palpable. You can feel it. Ronald Reagan left the White House in 1989. And when he did, he had the highest approval rating of any American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

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