The following are the remarks of former U.S. Transportation Secretary Jim Burnley keynoting the Charlottesville Reagan Day Dinner on 07 April 2013. Secretary Burnley gratefully agreed to have his remarks reposted here at Bearing Drift.
I am delighted to be with you tonight. Any trip to Charlottesville brings back warm childhood memories. Additionally, I always enjoy the company of Republican activists; I have been one since I was 13 years old. You are here tonight because you care about our country and you are working to get it back on the right path.
We gather on this occasion to honor a President who did just that: put the country on the path to economic growth and prosperity, along with peace through strength. It is an honor to be asked by the dinner’s organizers to talk for a few minutes about President Reagan, but it is also humbling. For many people, attempting to describe and interpret President Reagan apparently comes easily. After all, over a hundred books have been written about him, and I’m sure more are in the works.
But as I collected my thoughts and then began to write them down, it has been a real challenge. In my view, he was one of the giants in American history. Furthermore, he was a great leader and a great man. It isn’t possible for me to cover in a few minutes all of the evidence to support my view of him. So I will touch briefly upon his key traits that I think led to his greatness.
First, he was comfortable in his own skin. He had tremendous self-confidence, but he wasn’t at all arrogant. We are all familiar with a legendary example of his self-confidence. In the face of strong objections from the State Department and several members of his White House staff, on March 8, 1983, he delivered a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in which he said this:
“So in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride– the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”
The next day the howling began. A left wing columnist for the New York Times called his statement “primitive” and “dangerous”. Tass, the Soviet propaganda outlet, said President Reagan “can think only in terms of confrontation and bellicose, lunatic anti-Communism.”
But President Reagan not only made no apology, he continued to characterize the Soviet Union for what it was; and as he rebuilt our armed forces, strengthened our nuclear capabilities and launched the Strategic Defense Initiative, he put so much pressure on the Soviet system that a few months after he left office, it collapsed. As he told the British Parliament early in his Presidency, he had “a plan and a hope for the long term– the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”
I can tell you that very few people outside his administration and not many of the foreign policy officials in his administration shared his vision and belief. Ronald Reagan was a visionary, although even he must have been astonished at how quickly his vision became reality.
Both of these quotes underscore the second trait that contributed to his greatness: his appreciation of the importance of his words. Of course, every President knows that his rhetoric matters. But you can count on one hand the number of Presidents who worked as hard as he did on getting their words right and who understood as he did how to connect with the American people. Recall the way in which he perfectly captured and articulated our national grief after the Challenger disaster. His brief televised speech concluded, “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God’.
When you get home tonight, take a few minutes on the internet to read his first Inaugural Address. As you do so, remember what a funk we were in as a country: hostages in Iran, runaway inflation at home and an economy on the brink of a recession. But just in case you don’t have the time to pull it up, let me share a few passages:
“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe our society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”
“We hear much of special interest groups. Well, our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes and heal us when we’re sick– professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truck drivers. They are, in short, “We the people,” this breed called Americans.”
And then there is a passage that particularly resonates in Virginia tonight, because our candidate for Governor, Ken Cuccinelli, shares President Reagan’s fundamental understanding of a bedrock principle upon which our Constitution is based. As the President said on January 20, 1981:
“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 to the States or to the people. All of us need to be reminded that the Federal Government did not create the States; the States created the Federal Government.”
The concept of federalism has never been more perfectly described.
I want to underscore one other point. President Reagan’s detractors, and there were legions of them while he was in office, often suggested that he was an amiable dunce, mouthing the words spoon fed to him by talented speechwriters. To put this libel to permanent rest, a remarkable book came out in 2001, entitled “Reagan In His Own Hand”. It is based on the hundreds of five minute syndicated radio broadcasts that Ronald Reagan made between 1975 and 1979.
More specifically, it revealed that 670 of his original handwritten texts were saved. They covered every imaginable topic from that era. They are remarkable, and they were undeniably his work. By the way, the book is still available on Amazon. You should read it.
I count among my friends several of his White House speechwriters, all of whom will testify that President Reagan worked as hard on his speeches after he became President as he did before being sworn in, polishing draft after draft. He knew how much words matter, particularly those of a President.
The Introduction to the book begins with a quote from Nancy Reagan:
“He wasn’t a complicated man. He was a private man, but he was not a complicated one. But he was a very sentimental one. And he was a very, very good writer. All of his ideas and thoughts were formulated well before he became Governor or certainly President.”
Of that, there can be no doubt. On the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President, he was not a work in progress. He had fully formed his basic philosophy many years before. Again, turning to his Inaugural Address, his vision for his administration was crystal clear:
“In the days ahead I will propose removing the roadblocks that have slowed our economy and reduced productivity. Steps will be taken aimed at restoring the balance between the various levels of government. Progress may be slow, measured in inches and feet, not miles, but we will progress. It is time to reawaken this industrial giant, to get government back within its means, and to lighten our punitive tax burden. And these will be our first priorities, and on these principles there will be no compromise.”
I was there, and I can assure you that he meant what he said. President Reagan was often pragmatic, willing to compromise with Congress to make progress toward his goals, recognizing that it sometimes came, as he said, “in inches and feet”. But when it came to his principles, he was steadfast. In August of his first year as President, the air traffic controllers union made the terrible mistake of not taking him seriously when he said that public employees had no right to strike. They were all fired and replaced, even though the union had endorsed him in the election the year before! Both his adversaries in Washington and internationally were put on notice that when he spelled out his bedrock principles, anyone who ignored his declarations did so at great peril.
And because of his leadership, within two years, “this industrial giant” was reawakened, leading to more than two decades of economic growth.
He had one other trait that I believe was essential to his greatness. No President ever had more respect for the American people. A few moments ago, I quoted his reference in his first Inaugural Address to “we the people”. As he started his Presidency by emphasizing that the people, not government, are supreme, he ended it on the same note. On January 11, 1989, he delivered his farewell address, and he said:
“Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: ‘We the People.’ ‘We the People’ tell the government what to do; it doesn’t tell us. ‘We the People’ are the driver; the government is the car, and we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world’s constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which ‘We the People’ tell the government what it is allowed to do. ‘We the People’ are free. This belief has been the underlying basis for everything I’ve tried to do these past 8 years.”
This wasn’t empty rhetoric. He sincerely meant every word of it. I had an opportunity a few months before to see just how profound his belief was in this principle. At my invitation, he was the commencement speaker at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in the spring of 1988. The Academy is in New London, Connecticut, which is about 25 miles from the Hartford airport, where Air Force One landed. I rode with him from the airport to the Academy. As we pulled through the airport gate, we were beginning to chat.
Suddenly, the President turned away from me and looked out the window of the limousine at the crowds that were lined up along the road. He began to wave to them, first on one side and then the other. He continued to talk with me, after explaining, almost apologetically, that while he wanted to continue our conversation, he felt an obligation to acknowledge the people lining the road, noting that many of them had probably been waiting for a couple of hours to get a glimpse of him. He did not stop waving to those along our route until we arrived at the Academy.
Please think about this for a moment. He was in the final year of his Presidency. He would never run for office again, so there was no political reason for him to be so attentive to what he clearly viewed as his duty. The only explanation possible was his conviction that “we the people” are supreme and deserve to be acknowledged and respected. And “we the people” knew how he felt about us. Recall the overwhelming outpouring of respect and emotion upon his death.
I want to close by touching upon one of his greatest gifts to us. On November 5, 1994, in one of the most poignant letters in American history, he informed us that he had Alzheimer’s Disease. He said that Nancy Reagan and he felt “it is important to share it with you”. “In opening our hearts, we hope this might promote greater awareness of this condition”. He closed by writing, “I now begin this journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.” In characteristic fashion, he closed on an optimistic note.
This was the ultimate gesture of respect for “we the people”.
I want to thank you for letting me join you tonight to honor and reminisce about my President, our President, Ronald Reagan.
Mr. James Burnley IV served as Deputy Secretary of Transportation during the Reagan Administration until he succeeded Elizabeth Dole as the 9th U.S. Secretary of Transportation from 1987 – 1989. Since then, Mr. Burnley served as Vice Chairman of the Board of Commissioners of the Virginia Port Authority, a Trustee and former Chairman of the Jamestown Foundation and also a Trustee and past Chairman of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Burnley also served as Chairman of the Roe Institute Advisory Committee of the Heritage Foundation and is on the Board of Directors at FreedomWorks.
