Ronald Reagan’s favorite think tank, the Heritage Foundation, has this page setup for reminiscences of the man who won the Cold War.
When Reagan was in office, I wasn’t smart enough to appreciate what a great president he was, and made all the standard jokes about ketchup as a vegetable and Nancy and Ed Meese pulling the strings. But as I’ve learned more about politics – much of it from liberals he worked with in the legislature in Sacramento – I’ve come to appreciate the fact that he was our greatest president since Roosevelt, a man with high principles and the ability to fashion a good compromise, and somebody who never held a grudge. Every president (and every California governor) following Reagan has been measured by the standard he set, and they’ve all been found wanting.
The thing I’ll always remember him for is his stopping the orgy of national guilt about the failure of our Vietnam strategy that was threatening to erode our national will to a disastrous degree. Sure, Vietnam warranted some soul-searching, but we carried it way too far. In essence, it was just war poorly fought, not a symptom of moral rot at the heart of the American character.
If we’d been more patient and restrained on the military front, and more selective on the political front, the outcome would have been different, and that would have been good for America, good for Vietnam, and good for justice. But it was what it was, and after some time, you just have to move on.