The Autobiography

By Ronald Reagan

One summer’s day—and this is a story that I’ve probably repeated more times in my life than any other-my imagination was tested to its maximum. The Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals were locked in a scoreless ninth-inning tie with Dizzy Dean on the mound and the Cubs’ Billy Jurges at bat.

I described Dean winding up and releasing his pitch. Then Curly, telegraph operator, shook his head and passed me a slip of and I looked for a description of the pitch.

Instead, his note read: “The wire’s gone dead.”

Well, since I had the ball on the way to the plate I had to get it there. Although I could have told our listeners that the wire had gone dead, it would have sent them rushing toward their dials and a competitor. So, I decided to let Jurges foul off the pitch, figuring Western Union would soon fix the problem. To fill in some time, I described a couple of kids in the stands fighting over the foul ball.

When Curly gestured that the wire was still dead, I had Jurges foul off another ball; I slowed Dean down, had him pick up the resin bag and take a sign, shake it off, get another sign, and let him pitch; I said he’d fouled off another one, but this time he’d just missed a home run by only a few inches.

I searched Curly’s face for a look of encouragement, but he shook his head.

I described Dean winding up and hurling another pitch; Jurges hit a foul ball, and then another … and another. A red-headed kid in the stands retrieved one of the fouls and held up the ball to show off his trophy.

By then I was in much too deep to admit the wire was dead, so I continued to let Jurges foul Dean’s pitches, and his string of foul balls went on for almost seven minutes. I don’t know how many foul balls there were, but I’m told someone reported the foulslugging spree as a record to “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not” column.

Finally, Curly started typing again and I knew the wire had been restored. Relieved, I grabbed the slip of paper he handed me through the slot and read it: “Jurges popped out on the first ball pitched.”

For days, people stopped me on the street and asked if Jurges had set a record for foul balls. I’d just say, “Yeah, he was there a long time.” I never admitted a thing.

(Reagan 1990, 72-73)

I’d remain a Democrat for another two years, but by 1960 I had completed the process of self-conversion.

After that, the more I learned how some liberal Democrats wanted to rein in the energy of free enterprise and capitalism, create a welfare state, and impose a subtle kind of socialism, the more my view changed.

Upon reflection, I’m not so sure I changed as much as the parties changed.

One of the greatest of liberals, Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the Democratic Party, once remarked: “A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned—this is the sum of good government.”

My first vote at the age of twenty-one was for Franklin D. Roosevelt. His platform called for a twenty-five percent cut in federal spending and returning to people in the states and local communities authority and autonomy that had been taken over by the federal government. He also declared: “The federal government must and shall quit this business of relief. Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.”

Many of the relief programs FDR instituted during the Depression were necessary measures during an emergency, but I remain convinced that it was never his intention—nor those of many of his liberal supporters—to make giveaway programs that trapped families forever on a treadmill of dependency a permanent feature of our government. “Doing for people what they can, and ought to do for themselves, is a dangerous experiment,” the great labor leader Samuel Gompers said. “In the last analysis, the welfare of the workers depends on their own initiative.”

The classic “liberal” believed individuals should be masters of their own destiny and the least government is the best government; these are precepts of freedom and self-reliance that are at the root of the American way and the American spirit.

But then came the newfangled “liberals” who rejected these beliefs. They claimed government had a greater wisdom than individuals to determine what was best for the individual and it should engineer our economic and business life according to its goals and values; dictate to states, cities, and towns what their rights and responsibilities were; and take an increasing bite out of the earnings of productive workers and redistribute it to those who are not productive. To them, government was the fount of all wisdom the bigger government was, the better—and they rejected the principles of Democrats who had gone before them.

“Liberty has never come from government,” Woodrow Wilson, one of FDR’s predecessors and another Democrat, said. “The history of liberty is the history of limitation of government’s power, not the increase of it.”

(Reagan 1990, 134-135)

By tightening eligibility standards and eliminating loopholes, turned a monthly increase in the welfare caseload of forty thousand to a monthly decrease of eight thousand, California was no longer the welfare capital of the country,

We obtained authority from the federal government, which set a lot of the rules regarding welfare, to let us try an experiment in which able-bodied welfare recipients were given a job. We contacted every level of government throughout the state and asked if there were things they would be doing if they had the money and manpower to do it. We got all kinds of affirmative replies, none of them boondoggles, Washington gave us permission to go ahead with the experiment only after President Nixon intervened on our behalf. We took the able-bodied welfare recipients, assigned them to these jobs in return for their welfare grants, and as they learned some job skills, they were moving into jobs in the private sector.

During the 1973-1974 recession, this program got seventy-six thousand people off the welfare rolls and put them into productive jobs. Later, a lot of them wrote and thanked me for the program, saying for the first time in their adult lives they had felt a sense of self-respect because they were doing something in return for their monthly check; the remarks reminded me of the smiles I’d seen on the faces of the men my father helped find jobs during the Depression.

(Reagan 1990, 190-191)

I tried to focus the campaign on the things that had gone wrong with the economy, and to present my vision of how, working together, we as a people could get our country back on track again and advance it toward the fulfillment of its destiny.

Carter took a low road of personal attacks on my character.Because I said I believed states should be allowed to regain the rights and powers granted to them in the Constitution, he implied I was a racist pandering to Southern voters; because I opposed Senate ratification of the SALT II treaty in the belief it had serious weaknesses that would leave the Soviets with a dangerous preponderance of nuclear weapons—I wanted true arms reduction—Carter went around the country suggesting I was a warmonger who, if elected, would destroy the world.

I think the voters saw through these false and often mean-spirited personal attacks; I do know that they made me even more anxious to beat him. Nothing has ever aroused me more than competing against someone who I think isn’t fighting fairly.

During the 1976 campaign, Carter had come up with what he called the “misery index” to attack Gerald Ford. He’d added together the rates of inflation and unemployment (it had come to something like twelve percent), called it the misery index, and claimed no man responsible for giving the country a misery index that high had a right to even ask to be president. Well, he didn’t mention the misery index in 1980, probably because it was then more than twenty percent.

I was anxious to get Carter into a nationally televised debate, but his people wouldn’t go for it. In late September, John Anderson, who was running as an independent candidate, and I had a televised debate in Baltimore but Carter stayed out of it. Stu Spencer said that if we kept challenging him to a debate, sufficient public pressure would eventually build up on him and he would be forced into a debate; but from our point of view, the timing of the debate was critical: The closer it was to election day, the more impact it would have.

When Carter finally agreed to a debate, the date was set for October 28, one week before the election, and we were delighted. The debate went well for me and may have turned on only four little words.

They popped out of my mouth after Carter claimed that I had once opposed Medicare benefits for Social Security recipients. It wasn’t true and I said so:

“There you go again …’

I think there was some pent-up anger in me over Carter’s claims that I was a racist and warmonger. Just as he’d distorted my view on states’ rights and arms control, he had distorted it regarding Medicare, and my response just burst out of me spontaneously.

The audience loved it and I think Carter added to the impact of the words by looking a little sheepish on the television screen. The finish of the debate was probably more significant: In my closing statement, I asked people if they thought they were better off now than they had been four years earlier. If they were, I said they should vote for my opponent; if not, I said I thought they’d agree with me that it was time for a change.

(Reagan 1990, 220-221)

Later, I peeked into the Oval Office as its official occupant for the first time. I felt a weight come down on my shoulders, and I said a prayer asking God’s help in my new job.

(Reagan 1990, 229)

Excessive tax rates were at the heart of the problem. Back in the fourteenth century, a Muslim philosopher named Ibn Khaldoon wrote something about taxes in ancient Egypt: “At the beginning of the dynasty taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments.” In other words, when rates were low, the revenue was great; when rates were high, the revenue was low.

During the 1980 campaign, a new term, supply-side economics, came into vogue. People said I embraced this theory, and several economists claimed credit for inventing its principles, which they said I had then adopted as the basis for my economic recovery program.

To set the record straight, that wasn’t true. At Eureka College, my major was economics, but I think my own experience with our tax laws in Hollywood probably taught me more about practical economic theory than I ever learned in a classroom or from an economist, and my views on tax reform did not spring from what people called supply-side economics.

At the peak of my career at Warner Bros., I was in the ninety four percent tax bracket; that meant that after a certain point, I received only six cents of each dollar I earned and the government got the rest. The IRS took such a big chunk of my earnings that after a while I began asking myself whether it was worth it to keep on taking work. Something was wrong with a system like that: When You have to give up such a large percentage of your income in taxes, incentive to work goes down. You don’t say,“I’ve do more pictures,” you say, “I’m not gonna work for six cents on the dollar.” If I decided to do one less picture, that meant other people at the studio in lower tax brackets wouldn’t work as much either; the effect filtered down, and there were fewer total jobs available. I remember one scene in the Knute Rockne picture that had only a farmer and a horse in it: Shooting it on location created work for seventy people.

The same principle that affected my thinking applied to people incentive people have to work. What coal miner or assembly line worker jumps at the offer of overtime when he knows Uncle Sam is going to take sixty percent or more of his extra pay?

And the principle applies as well to corporations and small bug nesses: When government confiscates hall or more of their profits, the motivation to maximize profits goes down, and owners and managers make decisions based disproportionately on a desire 10 avoid taxes, they begin looking for tax shelters and loopholes that contribute nothing to the growth of our economy. Their companies don’t grow as fast, they invest less in new plants and equipment, and they hire fewer people.

Any system that penalizes success and accomplishment is wrong, Any system that discourages work, discourages productivity, die courages economic progress, is wrong.

If on the other hand, you reduce tax rates and allow people to spend or save more of what they carn, they’ll be more industrious, they’ll have more incentive to work hard, and money they earn will add fuel to the great economic machine that energizes our national progress. The result: more prosperity for all–and more revenue for government.

A few economists call this principle supply-side economics. I just call it common sense.

I have always thought of government as a kind of organism with an insatiable appetite for money, whose natural state is to grow forever unless you do something to starve it. By cutting taxes, I wanted not only to stimulate the economy but to curb the growth of government and reduce its intrusion into the economic life of the country.

By the way, that philosopher, Khaldoon, and I weren’t alone in believing lower tax rates result in higher revenues for government.In 1962, President John F. Kennedy said, “Our true choice is not between tax reduction on the one hand and avoidance of large federal deficits on the other, it is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, as long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance the budget-just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits. In short, the paradoxical truth is that the tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now.”

(Reagan 1990, 231-233)

Like Jerry, Tim McCarthy had also bravely put his life on the line for me. Some weeks later I was shown the TV shots of what happened that day. As I was being thrown into the limo, there, facing the camera between me and the gunman, spreadeagling himself to make as big a target as possible, was Tim McCarthy. He was shot right in the chest. Thank heaven he lived.

I thanked God for what He and they had done for me, and while I was waiting to be taken into the operating room, I remembered the trip I had made just the week before to Ford’s Theater and the thoughts I’d had while looking up at the flag-draped box where Lincoln had died. Even with all the protection in the world, I’d thought, it was probably impossible to guarantee completely the safety of the president. Now I’d not only benefited from the selflessness of these two men; God, for some reason, had seen fit to give me his blessing and allow me to live a while longer.

…

After I left the hospital and was back in the White House, I wrote a few words about the shooting in my diary that concluded: “Whatever happens now I owe my life to God and will try to serve him in every way I can.”

(Reagan 1990, 262-263)

Although it didn’t bring as much simplification to the tax code as I had hoped, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 reduced the number of personal income tax brackets from fourteen to three, and lowered the top personal tax bracket (which had been seventy percent in 1981) for most Americans to twenty-eight percent, the lowest rate since 1931.

Knowing they could now keep seventy percent of what they earned instead of paying seventy percent of it to the government, the most affluent Americans invested in new projects and new ideas; but contrary to what some of the tax-and-spend liberals have said, tax reform didn’t create a windfall for the rich at the expense of the poor; instead, it was the other way around.

Under the new laws, more than eighty percent of Americans paid the lowest tax rate, fifteen percent, or no tax at all; the households of four million lower-income working Americans were excused from paying federal income taxes altogether. Meanwhile, the proportion of personal income taxes paid by the top-earning one percent of Americans increased by more than a third between 1981 and 1987—from 17.9 percent to almost twenty-five percent. During the same period, the tax burden on the poorest half of American taxpayers fell by almost twenty percent—from 7.4 percent of the total to 6.1 percent. More than eighty percent of the increased personal income tax revenues since 1981 have come from taxpayers with incomes of over $100,000 a year, while the amount paid by those earning less than $50,000 dropped by billions of dollars.

By and large, the jobs created during the expansion were good jobs: more than ninety percent were full-time jobs; more than half paid salaries of over $20,000, and a large proportion of these were in managerial and professional occupations with a median income of more than $27,000. Many of the best of the new jobs went to women and minorities. During those six years, the median income for American families increased twelve percent, compared with a decline of 10.5 percent during the previous decade. The nation’s real gross national product (the value of all goods and services produced in the United States, adjusted for inflation) went up twenty-seven percent; manufacturing production went up thirty-three percent. American workers became more productive each hour they worked and made their employers more competitive in world markets.

We got government out of the way and began the process of giving the economy back to the people, but I don’t take credit: The American people did it themselves, responding to incentives inherent in the free enterprise system. I watched in wonder and awe as they responded and excelled and produced. There is no limit to what a proud, free people can achieve.

(Reagan 1990, 334-335)

Deficits, as I’ve often said, aren’t caused by too little taxing, they are caused by too much spending. Presidents don’t create deficits.Congress does. 

Presidents can’t appropriate a dollar of taxpayers money; only congressmen can–and Congress is susceptible to all sorts of influences that have nothing to do with good government.

Presidents can propose a budget, lobby to get it passed, and do their best to make sure that government agencies under their control within the executive branch don’t waste the money appropriated by Congress. They can veto spending bills passed by Congress.But under our system of separation of powers, it is Congress that determines the programs government finances and how much money is appropriated for each of them.

Spending for government “entitlement” programs-money committed by Congress for various programs in past years that is as good as spent before the administration ever gets a shot at writing its budget-accounts for forty-eight percent of federal spending.To many members of Congress, this money is off-limits forever: Once a program gets started, it’s virtually impossible to reduce or stop it. Every one of these programs-most of which were born or expanded enormously during the explosive growth of big government in the 1960s and 1970s-develops a powerful constituency in Congress, and a bureaucracy that is dedicated to preserving it.As I once said in a speech, the tendency of government and its programs to grow are about the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.

…

Congress has the power to prevent even as basic a thing as the adoption of a budget for the federal government, and it does so routinely almost every year. Every budget I submitted to Congress outlined spending reductions; if I’d gotten cuts I proposed in 1981, for example, the cumulative deficit between 1982 and 1986 would have been $207 billion less than it was. But I could never get a complete budget passed. Instead, we got a succession of “continuing resolutions” that allowed the government to stay in business and keep on spending money without a formal budget. Meanwhile, Congress, posturing and playing cynical games with the truth, blamed the White House for the deficit, and at the same time slipped costly gifts for special interests into these makeshift spending resolutions, preventing any real progress in cutting the deficit.

When one of these spending resolutions would go through Congress, it would be a foot thick and fourteen hundred pages long. (Ionce sprained a finger picking up one of these hefty budget resolutions.) I don’t believe any congressman on Capitol Hill ever reads all those fourteen hundred pages. The press, which tries to keep an eye on everything in Washington, seldom digs deeply into the process. Yet there are things contained in these budget resolutions that cost taxpayers billions.

Congress put virtually every one of the budgets I drafted on the shelf and sent me a continuing resolution. If I had vetoed it, the government wouldn’t have been able to write a paycheck or a Social Security check. The whole government might have ground to a halt, and the baby would have gone out with the bath water. So, they’d have me. I’d have to sign the next continuing resolution and, as a result, I never got the things we were asking for with regard to major cuts in spending and I wasn’t able to persuade Congress to balance the budget.

I don’t think we’ll solve the problem of the deficit until three things happen: We need more discipline on spending in Congress.We need a constitutional amendment requiring Congress to balance the budget. And we need to give our presidents a line-item veto.

(Reagan 1990, 336-337)

Usually at summit conferences, the real work is done in advance by diplomats and specialists on each side who, based on from their superiors, do the spadework and work out any agreements that are to be signed at the meeting, after which the top leaders come in and preside over the formalities.

Starting with Brezhnev, I’d dreamed of personally going one-on one with a Soviet leader because I thought we might be able to accomplish things our countries’ diplomats couldn’t do because they didn’t have the authority. Putting that another way, I felt that if you got the top people negotiating and talking at a summit and then the two of you came out arm in arm saying, “We’ve agreed to this,” the bureaucrats wouldn’t be able to louse up the agreement.Until Gorbachev, I never got an opportunity to try out my idea.Now I had my chance.

(Reagan 1990, 634)

After I finished my rebuttal, our arms control experts were given the floor, and it was during this pause that I suggested to Gorbachev that the two of us walk down to the boat house for a breath of fresh air and a talk. He leaped out of his chair almost before I finished.

The fire was roaring when we got to the cottage and sat down across from each other in stuffed chairs beside the hearth. I had considered suggesting to him that we go on a first-name basis, as our group did at economic summits, but our experts had told me he wasn’t likely to appreciate such a gesture of informality at our first meeting, and so I addressed him as “Mr. General Secretary.”

It was during the first moments of this fireside chat that I said I thought the two of us were in a unique situation. Here we were, I said, two men who had been born in obscure rural hamlets in the middle of our respective countries, each of us poor and from humble beginnings. Now we were the leaders of our countries and probably the only two men in the world who could bring about World War III.

At the same time, I said, we were possibly the only two men in the world who might be able to bring peace to the world.

I said I thought we owed it to the world to use the opportunity that had been presented to us to work at building the kind of human trust and confidence in each other that could lead to genuine peace.

I watched as Gorbachev listened to the translation of my words, and he seemed to nod in agreement.

(Reagan 1990, 636)

Gorbachev is an intelligent man and a good listener. He didn’t comment on my remarks, but launched into criticism of the United States, saying, in effect, that I had no place talking about human rights in the Soviet Union because Americans lived under far worse conditions than Soviet citizens. He quoted statements by some of our more extreme feminists who claimed American women were downtrodden and argued that we treated blacks like slaves.

The “most basic human right,” he said, “is everyone’s right to a job.” In the Soviet Union, everyone had a job-and that couldn’t be said for the United States. (He didn’t say that the Soviet people couldn’t choose their jobs, that they had to do whatever the government told them to do—if they were handed a broom, they started sweeping.)

It seemed clear Gorbachev believed propaganda about us that he had probably heard all his life. In some things he said there was a grain of truth, but a lot of the “facts” he came armed with and cited so authoritatively about America—such as those about the treatment of blacks in the South-were long out of date, and he didn’t know, for example, about the vast improvements we’d made in race relations. “Things have changed,” I said, and told him what I had done in California as governor, appointing to policy-making and executive positions more blacks than all the previous governors put together. I spoke about the dynamic energy of capitalism and said it provided an opportunity to all Americans to work, apply themselves, and get ahead; whenever I alluded to the economic problems that by contrast were hounding his country, Gorbachev emphasized that he believed in the Communist system, but he seemed to say mistakes had been made in running it and he was trying to correct them. He was an eloquent debater as well as a good listener, and despite our disagreements, our conversations never turned hostile—he stood his ground and I stood mine.

(Reagan 1990, 638-639)

Looking back now, it’s clear that there was a chemistry between Gorbachev and me that produced something very close to a friendship. He was a tough, hard bargainer. He was a Russian patriot who loved his country. We could—and did-debate from opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. But there was a chemistry that kept our conversations on a man-to-man basis, without hate or hostility. I liked Gorbachev even though he was a dedicated Communist and I was a confirmed capitalist. But he was different from the Communists who had preceded him to the top of the Kremlin hierarchy. Before him, every one had vowed to pursue the Marxist commitment to a one-world Communist state; he was the first not to push Soviet expansionism, the first to agree to destroy nuclear weapons, the first to suggest a free market and to support open elections and freedom of expression.

(Reagan 1990, 707)

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References

Reagan, Ronald. 1990. An American Life. N.p.: Hutchinson.

ISBN 9780091745073