Tag: Reagan

Another Reagan-Trump Comparison

  

There’s been a lot of commentary on the number of people in the Trump administration who have been shown the door and/or have voluntarily resigned during his first year in office. is it unprecedented? I think back to the Reagan years and can think of only two individuals who stepped down during or shortly after the first year. Richard Allen, Reagan’s national security advisor, resigned when accused of taking a bribe, but that accusation was later proven to be false…. Read more »

Russia’s New Cold War

  

Ronald Reagan, with invaluable help from Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, brought the Evil Empire to its knees by the end of the 1980s. He was ridiculed by many when he said that communism and the Soviet version of it would soon be on the ash heap of history. But he was correct. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The USSR ceased to be officially on January 1, 1992. For a while, it looked as if it might… Read more »

A Witness, Not a Testimony

  

The most fascinating autobiography of the 20th century was Whittaker Chambers’s Witness. I’ve re-read it numerous times, particularly in tandem with the course I teach on him and his writings. Why did Chambers decide to call his book Witness? His testimony before HUAC was an accounting of what he knew about the underground—but that is all a testimony is. It tells what happened; it provides facts. Chambers saw what he was doing as something more, something deeper. A witness is… Read more »

Presidential Greatness: A List to Ponder

  

Presidents Day apparently was a prime time to release the new rankings of presidential greatness. Who is judging which president is greater than another, you may ask. The answer: 170 members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. You may ask further: what are the political leanings of these 170 members? The answer with respect to political party: 57.2% of respondents were Democrats, while 12.7% were Republicans, 27.1% were Independents, and 3% selected Other… Read more »

A Presidents Day Reflection

  

On this Presidents Day, I’d like to honor some of the men who filled that post with integrity. Let’s forget, for this one day at least, those who degraded the office and focus instead on those who gave it a degree of eminence. One must always begin with the man who set all the precedents for what a president should be: George Washington. At the end of the Revolutionary Era, in the midst of economic chaos and a woefully weak… Read more »

Faith in God or Faith in Man?

  

Where does our faith reside as a nation? Simply putting “In God We Trust” on coins doesn’t really mean that we trust in God, does it? The god of America currently might be no more than a benevolent grandfather who isn’t really all that upset with what’s happening and who certainly wouldn’t want to damage anyone’s self-esteem. However, that’s not the God of Scripture. In my book on Ronald Reagan and Whittaker Chambers, I try to deal with the views… Read more »

The Hallmark of Humility

  

Ronald Reagan, on his desk in the Oval Office, kept a small plaque with the following words: “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he does not mind who gets the credit.” The first time I read those words, they struck a chord in me—not because I naturally lived those words, but because it was a striking reminder that too often I didn’t. On one of my visits to the Reagan… Read more »