Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California

Following spring rain, vibrant hillsides along Malibu Canyon Road welcomed Julie and me rolling care-free in our Ford Escape.  It was the kind of country drive I remember taking in my Fiat 850 convertible in the 1970's, before greater Los Angeles highways became perpetually jammed.

Before reaching that beautiful stretch of road, we'd taken Pacific Coast Highway, which wasn't quite as relaxing, with road construction in Malibu resulting in bumper-to-bumper traffic for a few miles, but we were in no hurry.

Southern California Edison had scheduled a power outage for our building all day to upgrade utilities in the street, so we had the perfect excuse for our weekday trip to Simi Valley to visit the Ronald Reagan Library before meeting our son Jay for dinner at the Daily Grill in Santa Monica near his Universal Music office.

A few days earlier, Nancy Reagan had passed away.  Reporters at her funeral kept praising the beautiful landscapes surrounding the Library where her service was held, enticing our sojourn.

True to the hype, we found a handsome museum and setting, and it is well worth visiting.

Our  underlying motivation to visit was our great respect for the former President, but the significance of his First Lady's supporting role to his success should not be underestimated.

Visiting the Library provides an opportunity to learn more about his amazing life story, starting when he was a boy, guided by parents who taught him he could do anything he wanted with ambition and hard work. His mother's Bible was the one Reagan used for his Presidential oaths.

You can learn about his school days when he was a football hero as well as an actor on the stage.

His great voice and ability to communicate won him gigs on the radio after college, including one as the play-by-play announcer for the Chicago Cubs. In those primitive days of media, the station apparently didn't have the technology or at least the finances to put an announcer in a booth at the stadium, so Reagan sat in the studio and gave Vin Scully-like life to teletypes that actually said little more than strike or fly out to left.  It honed his acting skills.

There's plenty of memorabilia from his Hollywood career, but its time as President which is most intriguing.

You can walk aboard President Reagan's airplane, Air Force One, and see the "nuclear football" he carried everywhere. You can also walk aboard Marine One, though the one on display was actually President Johnson's helicopter, because President Obama still uses Reagan's, which has a forty-plus year life.

There's a mock-up of Reagan's Oval Office, including the Resolute Desk as seen in "National Treasure: Book of Secrets," a movie I saw in its entirety for the first time a few days ago and really enjoyed, despite the consensus of critics.

Every day while in office, President Reagan made diary entries in his own hand (this was before the age of computers and blogging), and you can see not only the actual diary but flip through the transcripts to see exactly what he did and what he thought about on any given day.

Along the way, there are little theaters where you can watch five minute documentaries about different aspects of his life, including the assassination attempt, when his sense of humor shined through to comfort Nancy and others by joking, "Honey, I forgot to duck."

It's impossible to evaluate the importance of Ronald Reagan without considering the pre-existing conditions under which he came to power.

The Vietnam War had torn our country apart in the 1960's, giving rise to peaceful protests by black-armband-wearing students to rioting at the Democratic convention in Chicago to outright terrorist groups like Students for a Democratic Society who bombed public structures like police stations.

American involvement in the Vietnam War had begun a decade earlier under President John Kennedy and escalated under President Lyndon Johnson, both Democrats.

The unrest opened the door for a Republican presidential candidate, who defeated Vice President Hubert Humphrey, whose political views at the time which were considered liberal would put him solidly in the Ted Cruz column today.

Republican Richard Nixon became President, and by the end of his first term, he had made the decision to end American involvement in Vietnam, which had taken the number one opposing position off the table.

During what became a landslide election once that decision to withdraw became public, his re-election committee stumbled significantly through unnecessary and utterly idiotic dirty tricks, including a break-in at the Watergate Hotel.

Had Nixon been Clinton and the Republicans been Democrats, undoubtedly the President would have soldiered on, possibly becoming as well-loved in retrospect as Bill Clinton, who was actually impeached by Congress but won that challenge despite the phrase that became a late night comedian staples, "I did not have sex with that woman," and "That depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is."  In the end, Monica-gate turned out legally to be more about the perjury and other lies to hide what happened than the underlying events, and Clinton turned out to be a pretty good, pragmatic President overall, through his co-operation with the Republican-led Congress spearheaded by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and balanced-budget-writing Representative John Kasich.

A replica of Regan's favorite Irish pub serves Guinness.

Whereas the Clintons have wiggled out of their scandals, including "Whitewater" and the mysterious death of White House Counsel Vince Foster, Dick lacked Bill's like-ability.

Rather than let his friends take the fall for him or embarrass the country by dragging it through impeachment hearings, Nixon resigned in shame, Republicans holding his feet to the fire.

I wrote a poem about it for an English class at Long Beach State at the time, matching the format assigned by the teacher for that week.

Martyrdom of Apostle Paul, Vatican Exhibit at Reagan Library

Nixon

Happy Confident.

Smiling Waving Shaving

Neck Nick Ellsberg Watergate

Denyling Crying Lying

Rejected Dejected

Dick

Let's just say I was not the president of the Richard Nixon Fan Club.

In retrospect, outside the haze of partisanship, Nixon, like Clinton, turned out to be reasonably pragmatic and a good President overall, with a clumsy cover-up more damning than the actual underlying events.

Vice President Spiro Agnew had previously been forced to resign in scandcal, so Gerald Ford, who had been brought in as Vice President, ascended to the Presidency.  Actually a graceful athlete, Ford stumbled on slippery old-fashioned airplane stares (like you can use at the Reagan Library), which immediately became a popular Chevy Chase gag as a Ford impersonator on SNL.

Just as SNL effectively lampooned Sarah Palin as someone who can see Moscow from her house, creating a false character believed to be real, the show made Ford a joke, possibly contributing to his defeat at the hands of Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Before facing Carter, however, President Ford had to win a hard-fought primary against California Governor Ronald Reagan, who took his fight for the candidacy all the way to the Republican Convention Floor. Ford had almost enough delegates, in fact a seemingly overwhelming  plurality, but he did not have the required majority, something that will probably come into play again this election cycle.

As a personal aside, when I was in the Air Force, I sent a letter to President Jimmy Carter.  I don't recall what motivated me to write to him, but at the time I remember being concerned about our reliance on Middle East oil and its relationship to potential hyper-inflation.

Then again, I had also begun exploring libertarian concepts through the writings of Milton Friedman and Robert Ringer, reinforced in discussions with my high school friend Pete Canfield, who had moved to Colorado at the same time I was stationed in Wyoming.  I held the seemingly contradictory position of being very much in favor of single payer health insurance along the lines of Air Force medical coverage, too, so who knows what I wrote?

Whatever the topic of my letter had been, a few weeks later I received a carefully typed and edited five page reply signed by Jimmy Carter.  He started by thanking me for my service in the Air Force and went into quite a bit of detail explaining his position on the subject, responding to my specific positions, as I recall.

Had I been more aware of exactly how rare such a document signed by a sitting President was, I would have taken greater care to treasure that letter, but somewhere between moving a few times and going through a divorce, I completely lost track of it, as well as my memory of the subject.

While Jimmy Carter was undoubtedly an intelligent and certainly accessible Christian with the best of intentions, the fact was that by 1980, the country seemed to be falling apart.

Inflation above 10% seemed to be ramping up toward hyper-inflation, and home mortgage rates were also in double digits.

American prestige internationally in the wake of Vietnam had already taken a hit by the time President Carter's State Department made the decision to withdraw support for our longtime ally, the Shah of Iran.  He was admittedly a heavy-handed ruler, but in retrospect the Shah obviously understood more about what's necessary to rule in the Middle East than our government.  His departure resulted in the rise of Islamic rule under Ayatollah Khomeini, setting the stage for decades of unrest in the region.

Iran even dared to take 60 Americans hostage for 444 days, a crisis resolved the day President Reagan, who many feared to be an out of control cowboy who would start World War III, took office.

By 1981, Americans no longer seemed optimistic about the future or even proud to be Americans.

President Ronald Reagan changed all that.

And he was almost universally loved by the time he ran for re-election against Carter's Vice President Walter Mondale.

Reagan won in a true landslide, 49 of 50 states, losing only in Mondale's home state of Minnesota.

Some now try to re-write history, but the fact is that America was becoming a basket case when Reagan became President, and during his time in office the United States returned to being the shining light on the hill, a beacon of freedom to the world.

It's that restoration of America that brought us to pay homage to President Reagan.

Shortly after President Reagan's second term ended and his Vice President George Bush was elected to be our 41st President, the USA's major adversary since World War II, the Soviet Union, collapsed, and Reagan's demand to "tear down this wall" came to be.




Just as a post script, I have to include the following clip to show why we now see Putin and Russia once again playing a major part on the world stage.  For a happier ending, skip down to the bottom to see Patti Davis's eulogy for her father.