In search of Reagan.

• Author: Bresler, Robert J.
• Position: STATE OF THE NATION - Ronald Reagan's great legacy

AT THE FIRST TELEVISED Republican presidential debate held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the candidates stumbled all over each other paying homage to Mrs. Reagan and claiming the right to wear Reagan's mantle--a leader with a growing historic aura of greatness. No other Republican president of the second half of the 20th century quite lives up to "The Great Communicator." Dwight Eisenhower, perhaps the best prior to Reagan, was an effective steward but could not lay claim to any great historical deed. Richard Nixon became an embarrassment to the office. Gerald Ford restored dignity and integrity to the presidency, but there will be little engraved in the history books. George H.W. Bush steered American foreign policy carefully at the end of the Cold War, but lacked, in his own infelicitous phrase, "that vision thing."

Ronald Reagan has become the Republican Franklin D. Roosevelt. Reagan and Roosevelt had the good fortune to succeed two dour and failed presidents. Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter left behind an economy in shambles and had little idea how they were going to improve it. The U.S. in the 1930s was experiencing an economic catastrophe. During the 1970s, Americans, in addition to economic dislocation, had been shaken badly by double-digit inflation, humiliation in Viet ham, Watergate scandals, Soviet advances in Africa, Afghanistan, Granada, and Nicaragua, and, finally, the Iranian hostage crisis.

In their invocation of themselves as Reagan's heir, the current crop of Republican presidential hopefuls claims to have the ability to restore the country with Reagan's sense of optimism. They may have forgotten how many had sneered that Reagan's sunny optimism came out of one of his Hollywood movies. Reagan understood that invoking a sense of optimism did not simply create one. There was far more to Reagan's leadership than cheerleading. He had a powerful vision and a plan. He thought the past policies of containment and detente were defensive and, over time, debilitating. He rejected the psychiatric school of strategy. This misbegotten notion started with the belief that the Soviets essentially were paranoid and defensive. Therefore, the West should reassure them concerning our intentions and avoid threatening them. Such reassurance would, it was hoped, result in their mellowing and a more full-blown detente.

Reagan thought such thinking was nonsense. He strongly asserted that the Soviets were not defensive and paranoid and...