RUSTLINGS

'Tis a New Year with many uncertainties. The only certainty is that "in the long run we are all dead" ... and that man has some, but little control over his future.

"Yet this corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in (Edmund) Burke's words, a man to his country with "ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron." That is why young men die in battle for freedom's sake, and why old men plant trees they will never sit under.

--Walter Lippman 1955

* * * * *

"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."

--John Milton

* * * * *

This has been good weather for reading--so after I've finished my newspapers, magazines, and trade publications--I've been reading "An American Life" the autobiography by RONALD REAGAN. The reviews I'd seen have been poor, and the sales haven't been great, so I picked it up only after reading an excerpt in Time magazine.

I RECOMMEND it. Some of the reviews were not only inaccurate...they were intentionally so, because they were completely non-factual to the book's contents.

The early part is light, simple, and didn't present a great deal of new information. But ... the chapters on Iran, the Middle East, negotiations with Russia, Grenada, Margaret Thatcher, the Falkland Islands, Tip O'Neill, and the Congress ... give you a different portrait of President Reagan than generally portrayed by the media.

It's a must read book for anyone who truly wants to understand the Reagan years and their significance.

* * * * *

Ronald Reagan:

An All-American President

By LEE EDWARDS

Why do liberals rage so about Ronald Reagan?

Why does the New York Times' Maureen Dowd, reviewing his autobiography, An American Life, sniff that a better title would be "The Mannequin Speaks"?

Why does the Washington Post's David Broder dismiss the book as a "self-sculptured statue of Ronald Reagan as Tom Sawyer, Tom Mix and Tom Terrific"?

IP2,1"An American Life:

The Autobiography"

By Ronald Reagan

Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, N.Y. 10020

748 pages, $24.95

Why do liberals caricature Reagan as a modern Louis XVI and his Administration as a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich?

Why do they blame all of our current problems, foreign and domestic, on the Reagan years, a.k.a., "the decade of greed"?

IP2,1Because, I submit, they cannot accept the fact that the man whom they mock as a mannequin, a Hollywood actor and the Great Protector of the rich was ("how shall I put it?) right about so many things during his presidency.

IP1,0Domestically, Reagan urged that if you cut income taxes and allowed people to spend or save more of what they earned, they would work harder and "add fuel to the great economic machine that energizes our national progress."

He was right: Reaganomics produced the longest economic expansion in the nation's history, including the creation of 18 million new jobs during his eight years in office.

In the field of national security, Reagan insisted, paradoxically, that the best way to achieve arms reduction was to begin with an increase in arms. He did not undertake a military buildup to show how "macho" he was or because he was a pawn of the military-industrial complex but because he wanted to negotiate with the Soviets from a position of strength, not weakness.

He was right: Mikhail Gorbachev came to the bargaining table despite the deployment of Euromissiles and although Reagan made it very clear that SDI was not a bargaining chip in arms control talks.

In An American Life, Reagan gives his version of his presidency. Like all presidential autobiographies, it is understandably self-serving and written with an eye on history. Accordingly, it is serious and even dull in places (Reagan frequently gives the full text of long letters between himself and Gorbachev when some paraphrasing would be welcome). But Reagan is not seeking to entertain but to prove that he had a plan for his presidency from day one.

He lists four major goals that he had: to cut taxes, to modernize U.S. military might, to help America recover its faith in herself, and to balance the budget. He acknowledges that his failure to accomplish the latter "was one of my biggest disappointments as President." He blames his lack of success on special interests, the bureaucracy (which he calls the "permanent government") and the Congress.

To balance the budget, Reagan argues, three things must happen: (1) Congress will have to demonstrate "more discipline on spending"; (2) there must be a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget; and (3) "we need to give our Presidents a line-item veto."

Liberals say silly things about Reagan. They speedread his autobiography, looking for political gossip and personal revelations. When they find "only" an in-depth account of presidential decision-making, they declare the book contains nothing that is not already part of the public record. But here, for example, are two important, not generally known details which Reagan reveals about his presidency:

* OMB Director David Stockman was "clamoring" for a tax increase as early as 1981. This fact, recorded in Reagan's scrupulously maintained personal diary, undercuts the widely accepted argument that Stockman was doing all he could, including pushing tax cuts, to reduce the size of government. Stockman is revealed as a Keynesian in Reaganaut clothing.

* Reagan agreed in 1983 to give the position of national security adviser to White House Chief of Staff James Baker after William Clark asked to be relieved. The President reversed himself under strong pressure from CIA Director William Casey, Edwin Meese, Clark and others, finally naming Robert McFarlane. There is little doubt that Baker, the super-pragmatist, would have prevented any Iran-Contra scandal from developing to protect the president, and himself.

IP2,1Let's be honest: Liberals don't like Ronald Reagan because he is an unabashed, unashamed conservative, the most ideological President of the 20th Century and perhaps U.S. history. For him, true ideas have enduring consequences.

IP1,0What also comes through in his autobiography is that Reagan is a realist as well as an idealist, settling for 75 or 80 per cent if he can't get 100 per cent of the loaf, as he did with his tax reform programs of 1981 and 1986.

Liberals do not want to hear it, but President Reagan resembled some of their favorite Presidents.

He was like Franklin D. Roosevelt (whom he quotes more than any other chief executive) in arguing that the only thing America had to fear was fear itself. With his unflagging optimism, Reagan brought the nation out of a great psychological depression that had stretched from John Kennedy's assassination to Jimmy Carter's malaise.

He was like Jefferson in his commitment to limited government and like Lincoln in his belief that "freedom is (the) inalienable right of all human beings."

Reagan's reputation is presently diminished because of a few post-presidential mistakes, like accepting a $2-million fee to speak in Japan. But on his recent trip to Eastern Europe, he (and not Gorbachev) was rightly hailed by the people and leaders like Czechoslovakia's Vaclav Havel as the man who brought about the collapse of communism.

Liberals may ignore such encomiums, but they had better prepare themselves for the inevitable evaluation of Reagan as a shrewd, hard-working, hands-on leader (yes, hands-on, when the issue demanded it, as arms control did) who belongs in the first rank of Presidents. Historians will find An American Life to be a most useful and revealing source about a man who proved it is possible to be right and President.

Mr. Edwards, an author and editor whose articles have appeared in many publications, wrote the first political biography of Ronald Reagan. His latest book is "Missionary for Freedom, The life and Times of Walter Judd."