I appreciate this opportunity to comment upon Will Bunch's "Tear Down This Myth" dealing with the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Mr. Bunch's commitment to honest historical appraisal is something I share, so it is good of him to let a Reagan witness give his account.

While my most recent incursion into national politics puts me strongly behind President Obama, I was drawn to work for the Ronald Reagan as his legal counsel because of five words he articulated in 1980: "family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom."

Each of those words was an aspect of the Reagan philosophy: family, as the building block of culture and society; work, as the extension of the human personality into the created universe; neighborhood, as an extension of family and a recognition that men and women are not expected to live alone, but rather thrive only inter-dependently within community; and peace, as not merely the absence of war, but as St. Augustine would suppose it, the tranquility that is derived from civil order.

It is sometimes said that Ronald Reagan was a great communicator. Reagan himself denied this saying that it wasn't his communication skills that were great but the ideas that he was privileged to convey -- ideas that were timeless in truth and value. Measuring Reagan by dramatic cuts in the tax rates and the debate over whether that does or does not lead to long-term economic prosperity or merely the accumulation of wealth at the high end of American society is an important debate to have especially now as our president is making efforts to address one of the nation's most severe economic crisis. Yet, in this initial post, I believe, it is only fair to measure Ronald Reagan by the extraordinary gift he had to articulate, as he put it, great ideas.

Of the five words mentioned in 1980, probably the one that Reagan returned to repeatedly during his administration was freedom. He would remind us that "progress is not foreordained," and were it to have a reasonable chance, the key "was freedom --freedom of thought, freedom of information, and freedom of communication."

He would tell students during a visit to the former Soviet Union, for example, that the "explorers of the modern era" were "the entrepreneurs" -- men and women who had the capacity to perceive an unmet need and to take any risks to meet it. His aversion to the intervention of the government often seemed somewhat overstated to me, but his best justification for being wary of government related to the power government has to steal -- one man from another -- and thereby to deprive a risk-taking entrepreneur of the incentive to carry on important work. As we scratched our collective heads watching the Bush administration give away $350 billion to the financial industry without accounting, it occurs to me that this is merely a brazen example of Reagan's point and of all the subtle rent-seeking that is invited when regulation is deployed more to harm a competitor rather than to maintain an even playing field. I'm not sure how many people will be on President Obama's oversight task force for the automobile companies, but whomever serves should keep in mind how year after year the automobile companies used their influence over Congress to keep CAFÉ and other environmental standards to a minimum.

Reagan would have resented the fraudulent way in which subprime mortgages were
marketed, and would have, I believe, taken steps to punish unconscionable behavior. However, I doubt very much whether he would have had any patience for rescuing those whose losses came from a complete lack of their own due diligence. Freedom for Reagan depended on both the ability to succeed and fail. The losses that are sustained in a fair, but free, market Reagan would have seen as inescapably important to ultimate success. "Like an athlete in competition or a scholar in pursuit of the truth," Reagan would say, "experience is the greatest teacher."

There are apparently intimations in Mr. Bunch's book that Reagan was an "empty suit" or fundamentally lazy. There's no question but that Reagan was a senior citizen and did not possess the energy of our incumbent president. President Obama and President Reagan would have enjoyed each other's company, however, because both relish asking questions, learning about something they have not yet encountered, and both possess an empathy and a kindness toward those they meet - whether the lowly maintenance worker or an exalted executive. Obama by the uniqueness of his personality and his personal history has understanding of both black and white, East and West, baby-boom and non-baby boom generations - and for this reason is more accessible to a larger number and more diverse base of our citizens, but Reagan never let the well off citizens of his inner circle erase his common touch.

Reagan did have a special gift that I have not yet seen in a pronounced way in President Obama -- and that is a gift of story or narrative. Perhaps this was an aspect of Reagan's acting preparation; perhaps it was just part of his upbringing in the Midwest where storytelling was and is an art. Yet, there was seldom a day, perhaps even an hour, that went by without a Reagan story more often than not illustrating an aspect of his philosophical approach. Reagan, for example told a story about a town "with a bureaucrat who is known to be a good-for-nothing, but he somehow had always hung on to power. So one day, in a town meeting, an old woman got up and said to him: "There is a folk legend here where I come from that when a baby is born, an angel comes down from heaven and kisses it on one part of its body. If the angel kisses him on his hand, he becomes a handyman. If he kisses him on his forehead, he becomes bright and clever. And I've been trying to figure out where the angel kissed you so that you should sit there for so long and do nothing."

Examine virtually any compilation of presidential records in either of Reagan's terms and one has a compendium of humorous insights about the human condition that convey with sincerity and good will much of the philosophy of Ronald Reagan, and I venture to say, America. If you spend any time at this research whatsoever, you'll come away liking the man.

Reagan of course championed free elections and the democratic process, but he would also frequently point to the freedom of religion. He especially liked that faith community brought Americans of vastly different ethnicities and nationalities together. This, he knew, was not an accident pointing instead to the schoolroom, where, he said, "you will see children being taught the Declaration of Independence, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights -- among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -- that no government can justly deny; the guarantees in their Constitution for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion."

Freedom for Reagan also depended upon the rule of law. At the office of legal counsel, it was occasionally my responsibility to tell the President that a pet project couldn't be pursued under law or that it exceeded the constitutional parameters in one way or another. This was the task of the office of legal counsel with respect to the line item veto that the president thought essential to controlling spending. He could have such an item veto, we told him, but it had to be by constitutional amendment and the various theories that some in his administration were propounding that he could already veto line by line by virtue of inherent executive power -- well, no, that wasn't right in terms of text, history, and practice. Unlike President Bush and his advisers who too easily claimed the ability to go beyond the law as written, I never once encountered President Reagan insisting that I set aside or modify a legal opinion because it didn't coincide with his ideological presuppositions. When I reversed the opinion of my predecessor and found that those with HIV-AIDS should be treated as handicapped for purposes of the federal rehabilitation act, there were many in his administration that thought that bad policy and advised not to follow OLC's direction. He followed the law. Reagan may have had some doubts as to whether or not Congress had fully comprehended an insidious disease like AIDS when it drafted the rehabilitation act, but he understood how a law needed to be applied objectively to new facts.

Reagan understood that the law protected more than his favored side. Again, he would say, "Go into any courtroom, and there will preside an independent judge, beholden to no government power." In these days, when the Screen Actors Guild can't seem to agree on its own leadership let alone settle a long festering labor dispute, they might do well to remember Reagan as union leader. Yes, the right to strike was protected by law, he would note and then continue: "as a matter of fact, one of the many jobs I had before this one was being president of a union, the Screen Actors Guild." And then he would say, "I led my union out on strike, and I'm proud to say we won."

There was nothing "mythical" about these ideas for me as they were expressed by Ronald Reagan in my presence. I saw him articulate these beliefs many times in small groups and large, and each time the sincerity and authenticity of his attachment to the ideas expressed confirmed the fact - not myth - that he was "the great communicator." When so much of the necessary leadership associated with the presidency is communicating a sense of confidence and direction, it is deeply mistaken to understate the significance of this gift. We certainly missed it during the last eight years profoundly. When questions of integrity clouded or wrongfully diverted the leadership in the previous eight, we missed it as well. While the leadership born of communication dimmed in Ronald Reagan because of age and advancing illness, it was no myth when it was in full voice -- which it was for most of his presidency.

Ronald Reagan even had contemplated the meaning of something much in vogue right now -- "change." Consistent with the idea of conservatism -- conserving the best of what has gone before -- Reagan would remind us that "change would not mean rejection of the past." Instead, he said, "like a tree growing strong through the seasons, rooted in the Earth and drawing life from the Sun, so, too, positive change must be rooted in traditional values -- in the land, in culture, in family and community -- and it must take its life from the eternal things, from the source of all life, which is faith. Such change will lead to new understandings, new opportunities to a broader future in which the tradition is not supplanted but finds its full flowering."

At this moment, when the nation seems down on its luck and confidence is at low ebb, remembering the power of Reagan's inspirational embrace of those five words, and especially all that he emphasized was represented by the word "freedom," would we not want to borrow from his authentic past to make a more sure footed investment in the future?