An Interview With Dinesh D'Souza

By Christopher Pearson | Wednesday, November 19, 1997

Editor's Note: Dinesh D'Souza '83 is a former Editor-In-Chief of the Dartmouth Review and served as a domestic policy analyst in the Reagan White House. He is currently a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Q. What are your motivations behind the book?

A.There are two. Ten years ago, Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and said 'Mr. Gorbachev, take this wall down.' Very few people at that time thought the wall would come down, but it did. So ten years later, I began to see the eighties as an extremely important decade in which pivotal changes took place: the taming of inflation, the economic turn-around, the beginning of the end of the Cold War. The book is an attempt to explain how a seemingly ordinary man like Reagan could have achieved such extraordinary results. I wanted Reagan to get some of the credit for what he has achieved during his lifetime. I think history will record him as a great leader, but I wanted him to get some of that recognition now.

The second is that it has been a real mystery why none of Reagan's would-be successors — Bush, Dole, the Republican Congress, and presidential hopefuls on the Republican side — seem to have captured the Reagan magic. The question becomes, why are these would-be Reaganites failing to achieve what Reagan did? What can we learn from Reagan that can be useful now? Those are the two reasons for writing the book: to defend Reagan's record and to relate it to the vacuum of leadership in Washington now.

Q. What achievements stand out from Reagan's tenure?

A. Margaret Thatcher said of Reagan that he won the Cold War without firing a shot. He made the world safe for capitalism and democracy. He restored the American economy after a decade of slow growth and double-digit inflation. Finally, Reagan revived the American spirit through his sense of optimism and his unifying moral vision for the country. To some degree, we are living with the benefits of all that now. We are living in an era of peace and prosperity that is to a large degree the creation of Reagan. On the other hand, we are also missing that kind of unifying moral vision today that Reagan supplied so well in the eighties.

Q. Why, do you feel, Reagan has been so consistently denied status as a great leader?

A. There has been a deep antagonism on the political left toward Reagan. There's a whole generation of activists whose politics were shaped in the sixties who have defined themselves in relationship to Reagan. If they concede that Reagan was right, it means that they have been wrong on almost everything all their lives. This is a terrible concession to ask them to make. I do not think that this generation of academic activists is going to change its mind about Reagan. They might be willing to concede on some things. 'Well he was a nice man. Well he was a great communicator.' But it's too much of a blow to their psyche to concede Reagan's greatness.

Q. It is remarkable, you note, that Reagan's dealings with the Soviets followed a path that even few conservatives agreed with at the time.

A. Reagan's accomplishments vis a vis the Soviet Union, were so impressive because he was tough against the Soviet Union in the first term, when the liberals or the doves were against him and he was soft against the Soviet Union in the second term. He supported Gorbachev's policies when many conservatives were harshly critical of Reagan. At the time, George Will, William F. Buckley, and many others, basically said to Reagan, 'You are being naive, Gorbachev is masterful chess player, he may have sacrificed a pawn but he is about to announce check mate three moves ahead.' Little did these pundits know, it was really Reagan who was playing Gorbachev like a fiddle. In retrospect, Reagan's diplomacy in regard to the collapse of the Soviet Union was counterintuitive but was right on target.

Q. What is your opinion of His Holiness , Carl Bernstein's and Marco Politi's book published last year on the anti-communist 'holy alliance' between Reagan and Pope John Paul II?

A. Reagan and the Pope had a certain rapport with each other because both were strongly anti-communist. Remember that both had recently been victims of assassination attempts. It is true that they did collaborate on some strategies to keep solidarity alive during the very difficult times of the martial law imposed in Poland.

There's a recent book by Jonathan Kwitny that argues that John Paul is the man of the century because he destroyed the Soviet Union. Although my admiration for the Pope is considerable, I don't think the fall of the Soviet Union can be attributed to what happened in Poland. Reagan had help in defeating the Soviet Empire from the Pope, Margaret Thatcher, Walesa, and Havel. Reagan, however, was the prime architect.

Q. How do you respond to the claims in the media and elsewhere that the Soviet Empire fell of its own accord and that Reagan just happened to be in the right place at the right time?

A. With regard to the Soviet Union, that is Reagan's greatest accomplishment. For everyone who says that the Soviet Union collapsed by itself, I have a question. Can you name one great empire in human history that has collapsed solely for economic reasons? The Roman Empire only ended when the barbarian hordes invaded and destroyed it by force. Similarly, the Ottoman Empire was only destroyed by World War I. My point is that since 1917 the Soviet Union had had economic problems. Yet it endured. There was no reason to believe that the Soviet Union would collapse by itself.

Strobe Talbot, a former journalist at Time magazine who works in the Clinton administration, now says 'Oh the Soviets fell by themselves.' In the eighties, in fact, he was saying the opposite: 'Reagan is very naive to believe the Soviets can collapse. We have to learn to deal with them because they are going to last forever.' Most of these critics will not survive the documentation of their earlier statements. It shows how Reagan, while seeming the fool, made fools of all of them.

Q. What, do you feel, were Reagan's primary leadership skills?

A. Reagan wasn't a scholar and he could be fast and loose with the facts. It is true that he put in a nine to six day not an eighteen hour day like Carter or Clinton. Reagan himself used to joke that 'They say that hard work never killed anyone, but why take the chance.' But none of that mattered because Reagan had the three important characteristics of a leader: He was a man of vision who could see the world differently than it was. In other words, he was a conviction politician. He was a man of action who was willing to get things done. He didn't care that much what the polls said. He would set his course and stick to it. Finally, he had an ability to go over the heads of elites and the media to communicate his ideas to the American people. These were the three characteristics — vision, action, and consent — which established Reagan's greatness.

Q. RR has many anecdotes about Reagan's famous sense of humor. How did Reagan's often joking manner factor into his leadership skills?

A. One of the striking things about Reagan's humor is that many of his best jokes were spontaneous. When you look at them, you realize the man's intelligence. To be able to come up with effective one-liners on the spur of the moment, is not easy. I'm not talking about lines scripted by speech writers.

I'll give you a case in point. During the 1982 recession, Reagan had supported a tough anti-inflation policy that did slay the inflation dragon but sort of drove the economy into a recession. Unemployment went up, poverty went up. Sam Donaldson cornered Reagan after a press conference and said, 'Mr. President, in talking about the recession tonight, you have blamed the mistakes of the past and the Congress, does any of the blame belong to you?' Reagan, without missing a beat, says, 'Yes, because for many years I was a Democrat!' This is off the top of his head, a devastating counter punch. Reagan had that ability to deflect criticism.

Q. How do you account for Reagan's great rapport with the American people while his relationships with the people around him were always somewhat strained?

A. The reason is that Reagan was basically a loner, a fact camouflaged by Reagan's outward gregariousness. People didn't realize that fundamentally he was detached. Not in his management style, but he was detached personally and emotionally. Reagan had troubled relationships. He had a good second marriage with Nancy but he even his kids felt Reagan's withdrawal. He rarely saw his grandkids.

My book, although a celebration or a diagnosis of the ingredients of Reagan's leadership, is by no means an uncritical book about Reagan. It makes the case that, even though he was a flawed man in many ways, he was an effective leader. You can contrast Reagan with Bush. Bush was a wonderful man with a lovely family and countless friends but much more weak and ineffectual as a leader.

An Interview With Dinesh D'Souza

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