Scripture for a New Religion

By Hugh Sidey

Ronald Reagan's new beginning was not born, like the New Deal, from chaos or, like the Great Society, from the Texas-size ambition of a man who thought there was no limit to American cando. But Reagan's vision was inspired by a little of each. He saw clear signals of profound economic stress ahead; he also carried in his head, for nearly two decades, the conviction that Government need not be so big and so expensive and he could do something to change it. A calamity loomed. Reagan supplied the religion. His experts wrote the scripture, verse by verse, for his approval.

That old pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, whom Reagan idolized from the prairie long ago, was not at all sure just where he was headed; events swept him along, and he improvised to meet them. Some of Roosevelt's aides are still around town. They recall drafting new legislation in the Mayflower Hotel even as F.D.R. gave his Inaugural Address, then rushing the documents to members of Congress still in their toppers and frock coats.

Reagan's pace early last week was less frenetic, but it was urgent. He roamed from the Oval Office to the Cabinet Room to the Roosevelt Room, persuading, listening, editing. He breakfasted and lunched and dinnered with friends and adversaries and sent memos and made phone calls and ate an estimated 112 jelly beans. Even as he grew weary in those hours before the speech, he grew more exuberant and certain, bolder and more determined.

It is one of the fascinating phenomena of power to watch the adrenalin build even as the flesh wants to sag. An aide going over the final version of the speech with Reagan was suddenly struck by the fact that this 70-year-old man "was enjoying the job of being President far more than he thought he would." The observer mused to himself that "few men get this special sense of satisfaction in their lives, the chance to do what they have been thinking and talking about for so long." Time and time again, in making decisions on budget and tax cuts, in giving instructions to his troops, Reagan would sigh, "I've been wanting to do that for a long time." His energy seemed to kindle with each thrust.

L.B.J. might have appreciated the upstart actor turned politician. Some indestructible core of optimism that was forged in the mad '20s and the Great Depression surged in Johnson, as it does in Reagan. One night Johnson ordered his aide Richard Goodwin to redesign the U.S. to abolish disease, ignorance and poverty. Goodwin wrote it out on his Smith-Corona, and Johnson gave it voice at the University of Michigan stadium. Reagan was a bit more in scale than the flamboyant Texan last week, but his people in his arena, a joint session of Congress, cheered and whistled as if their team were on the 10-yd. line and heading for a score. That Reagan was proposing to undo a lot of Johnson's "too great society" was another of the wonderful ironies of this risky moment in U.S. affairs. "Reagan is not the first person to talk this way," points out Harvard's Roger Porter, who worked in Gerald Ford's White House, "but Reagan is the first President to act this way." Reagan has burst upon the academic reveries of the historians and political scientists as something--at last--real. He is no longer celluloid. "There is a logic to his boldness," says Porter. "Something less would lead to a feeling of uncertainty. It is more difficult to achieve a modest change than a broad change where everyone is involved."

There comes a time in the business of playing poker and being President when you have to push in your whole stack, as L.B.J. used to say. Reagan has. Now the only way he is going to succeed is with success itself. Barber Conable of New York, the ranking Republican of Ways and Means, observes that soon there must be a perception of progress, of change no matter how small, if the "new beginning" is going to take root and grow. That feeling can come a hundred ways--from action on the Hill, from Reagan's speeches, from lucky outside events or from the simple desire of Americans for a nice guy to make good. But without some transfusion of hope in the early days of this crusade, it could collapse and bring Reagan and his movement to a sorry pass.

The new President has summoned the nation on an adventure full of risk. That is the way he remembers it always was and believes it always should be.

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