HAVING written, speeches, statements and communications strategies for politicians here and in Papua New Guinea for over 30 years I perhaps have a greater appreciation than most of good communicators.
I am old enough to have heard Sir Robert Menzies speak at Brisbane City Hall, and listen in to his parliamentary addresses on radio, but as an effective communicator not even Menzies at his best surpassed Ronald Wilson Reagan who died at the weekend.
Others can debate the domestic and international policy successes and failures arising from the Reagan presidency but my interest has always been in his extraordinary communications skills – not only the prepared texts, but the Presidential debates, and the media interviews.
However, in assessing the life and times of Ronald Reagan, a couple of points need to be kept in mind. Firstly, he came to the world’s most demanding public office at the age of 69, leaving it aged 77.
Secondly, if Presidential popularity is measured by votes and states won, then Reagan has no peer. Not only did he trounce the incumbent President, Jimmy Carter, in 1980, four years later he defeated Walter Mondale by the largest majority in US history – winning every state but Mondale’s home state and the District of Columbia.
If part of the role of a national leader is to deliver the “feel good” factor to his or her community, then Reagan delivered in abundance. After the divisive Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, and a depressed economy, Reagan re-built the confidence of the American people in themselves, and their place in the World.
I have always thought that while this was achieved through a mix of policy and PR, the PR was the pivotal factor.
Perhaps his best-remembered speech was delivered in the shadow of the Berlin Wall – “Mr Gorbachov tear down this wall!!”
I though his best response was during one of the 1984 debates against Mondale. A panellist raised Reagan’s age (73) as a campaign issue.
The response was classic Reagan:
”I won’t make age an issue in this campaign. I won’t talk about my opponents youth and inexperience”. Mondale laughed as loud as anyone.
It is true that Reagan’s Hollywood years gave him communication skills most leaders could only dream of…………..but he honed his skills to suit the domestic and world political stages with remarkable skill.
Perhaps only John Fitzgerald Kennedy comes close as a communicator.
There is another point that needs to be remembered about the Reagan presidency – in the first year of his first term he survived the assassin’s bullet.
I suspect that history will judge Ronald Reagan more kindly than his contemporaries. The Iran-Contra scandal and his lack of attention to detail, and record deficits, will not really rate when compared with his communications skills, his capacity to deliver the “feel good factor” in spades, and his role in ending the Cold War and securing freedom and democracy in Eastern Europe.
Neither this country, nor the wider world, has seen many genuinely high class communicators in the last fifty years or so. We are poorer for that – but richer that we lived in the era of one of the greatest of all.