Those who underestimate Reagan just don’t understand intelligence

WHAT was the secret of Ronald Reagan’s success? Was it his timing and theatricality? His charisma? His optimism? His circle of advisers? Or was it that, time after time, people underestimated him?

Three years into his presidency, Reagan hosted the G7 summit of industrialised nations. He had to chair the group and conduct intricate one-to-one negotiations with world leaders. Lengthy briefing papers were prepared for study the night before.

The problem was, Reagan had the actor's habit of committing material to memory and he read very slowly. His advisers knew that if he stayed up late, he would be exhausted the next morning and Nancy would be on the warpath.

"Mr president, try to go over this material quickly," said his chief of staff, James Baker. "Don't stay up late reading it."

Reagan appeared for breakfast at 7.30 the following morning with puffy eyes and his staff feared the worst. But then the confession. "Fellas, last night I sat down with your briefing book, which was good. But around nine o'clock I turned on the TV and The Sound Of Music was playing. That's one of my favourite movies... I'm sorry, I never got through the briefing papers."

Now we arrive at a fork on the road. Reagan's detractors might want to leave now, satisfied in their conclusion that Reagan was an airhead. They won't want to hear how he impressed his fellow leaders that day. How he stayed above the forest of facts his advisers had provided and focused on the larger goals he wanted to pursue. How, as his former director of communications David Gergen put it, "Reagan wasn't just comfortable in his own skin. He was serene."

It was commonplace in those days, and still is, to portray Reagan as stupid. "The president's brain is missing," was a popular catchphrase.

This analysis was especially popular in Irish and British media.

This analysis suited the liberal-left because they couldn't win against his ideas. They were up against one of the most popular presidents in history, a man who had made conservatism electable. They hated his economic philosophy of tax cuts, high military and low social spending, his good-and-evil view of the world, his eyeballing of communism, his support for dubious regimes in Central America in preference to communism, his resistance to gay rights. Above all, they hated his way with words and people. But those who bought into the idea that Reagan was stupid didn't understand Ronald Reagan and they didn't understand politics.

Reagan's powerful conservative platform had won him two terms as governor of California and brought him to the White House. As president, he picked a superb team to implement his grand vision, bringing in moderates who had worked against him, campaigning for George Bush and Gerald Ford.

He even managed to defang the press. Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill grumbled that he handled the media "better than anyone since Franklin Roosevelt, even Jack Kennedy". And O'Neill himself was vulnerable to the Reagan charm. Mortal enemies by day, the president and O'Neill joked and swapped stories after work. Reagan's success with Congress was such that he got all the major features of his economic agenda through within months despite the fact that Democrats controlled the House of Representatives.

He was also clever enough to take responsibility for mistakes and crises such as when 241 US Marines were blown up in Lebanon in 1983. And when the Iran-Contra crisis revealed that he had falsely reassured the public that arms would not be traded for hostages, his explanation was masterful: "My heart and my best intentions tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it's not."

Margaret Thatcher said of Reagan that he "only had five or six ideas, but all of them were big and all of them were good". Not everybody agreed about the quality, but the impact was undeniable. Over 25 years, he had nurtured and polished these core beliefs: that America was a chosen nation; that America had let its strength deteriorate and this had contributed to the emergence of Marxist states; that the only way to deal with communism was to outpace the Soviets economically and militarily; that freedom at home was threatened by too much interference by government in the lives of citizens; that values mattered belief in God, family and individual self-reliance.

Those ideas may sound dangerous or simplistic to some. But America which had come through the assassination of a president, humiliation in Vietnam, and an oil crisis in the 1970s was dying to hear more. Reagan had the charisma to make those ideas credible. But he was a president of the big picture inattentive to detail.

"I can remember when sleeping with the president meant going to a cabinet meeting with Ronald Reagan," quipped his former chief of staff, Ken Duberstein, years later during the Monica Lewinsky affair. Errors of fact sometimes found their way into the president's stories. And when it was revealed that arms had been traded to Iran to secure the release of hostages in Lebanon, and the proceeds slipped to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, he was to blame if not for deceiving the American public, then for not being sufficiently vigilant to prevent others from doing so.

REAGAN chose to avoid the detail of government because he epitomised what leadership in politics was really about: making ideas saleable. After all, if Bertie Ahern becomes president of the European Commission this year, it won't be because he understands all the intricacies of European policy-making. It will be because he can take an overview of what people want and because, like Reagan, he has the negotiation skills to get the job done.

Understanding the likes of Reagan involves accepting that there is more than one kind of intelligence. Using the framework of multiple intelligences put forward by the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, Reagan would rank higher than any modern politician in the interpersonal and language intelligence categories but much lower in the logical-mathematical areas in which lawyers and academics normally excel.

His defining characteristic was emotional intelligence, which experts say is down to self-awareness, self-regulation, personal motivation, empathy for others and social skills.

Using this category we can see how Reagan, who would not compare well with Bill Clinton on our traditional understanding of intelligence, actually outshone him in emotional intelligence. Bill was good on empathy and social skills. Reagan had those too, but also had the self-discipline which Clinton obviously lacked.

There were many other dimensions to Reagan's popularity. He was physically strong and personally courageous. His bravado on the day he was shot in 1981 "Honey, I forgot to duck" endeared him to people.

Nothing became him like his final letter to the American people in November 1994, when he announced that he had Alzheimer's disease. Already popular, sympathy for him rocketed.

"I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead." It was classic Reagan, combining sadness with optimism the way he had done so effectively at the D-day commemoration in 1984, and when the space shuttle Challenger crashed in 1986. But the pathos was real.

When former secretary of state George Shultz visited the Reagans some years later, he was spotted by the former president as he crossed the lawn with his nurse.

"Who is that man?" Reagan asked. "I think he was very famous once."

Americans could not fail to be moved.