Twice, Americans had the privilege of watching the greatest President of my lifetime, Ronald Wilson Reagan, sworn in as our nation’s Chief Executive.
First, President Reagan’s first inaugural address, delivered 30 years ago today, on January 20, 1981:
We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding — we’re going to begin to act beginning today. The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away. They will go away because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we have had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?
Four years later, on January 20, 1985, Reagan was sworn in for his second term and delivered what may be an even better inaugural address, although it has been overshadowed by his first inaugural address, delivered in the light of the release of the American hostages by the Islamofascist government of Iran, held captive for 444 days and making the U.S. look weak and impotent.
I vividly remember the Reagan years. The optimism, the feeling that American could and would do better than the malaise of Jimmy Carter.
And we did. Reagan’s policies rebuilt the national economy from the destruction of the Carter years, replete with runaway inflation, double-digit unemployment and skyrocketing interest rates.
And to think that only two years ago today, our long national nightmare began.
