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During the past 20 years, the author has watch China move from being a developing country into an industrial superpower
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Get Four
|  | JUNE 8, 2004
By Roger Franklin The Simple Truth About Ronald Reagan [Page 2 of 2] TAKEN BY SURPRISE. It robbed its people of their right to be heard and to object -- and it would still be doing so today if Reagan had not underlined for Gorbachev what the Soviet leader already knew: That in the face of implacable resolve, resistance was futile. Whatever resources the Soviets put into the arms race, the U.S. was going to match, and then some. It was a contest the commissars couldn't win, nor even contemplate prolonging. So faced with a rumored simpleton's resolve, the Soviets closed up shop, and for the Evil Empire's hundreds of millions of former subjects, democracy arrived. Simple as Reagan, simple as that. Armageddon's clock retreated several minutes from thermonuclear midnight, and every backward click was the Gipper's doing. And Squirt probably was thinking also of a family vacation we had taken in Grenada. Bored with the beach and curious to learn how the war there had unfolded, I hired a cab driver to tour the tiny island's battle sites and taken my son along for the ride. The driver had shown us where the Cuban engineers held out, where the bleached carcass of a shot-to-pieces Soviet transport plane still sat by a tropical clearing, the beach where SEALS slipped ashore. "A SAINT." A glorious victory of America arms? No, in military terms, a pathetic joke, and I had written with no small joy for foreign audiences about the invasion's snafus and murderous incompetence, and of the red faces it prompted at the Pentagon. Marine choppers mistook the lunatic asylum for military headquarters and repeatedly rocketed the howling unfortunates. What should have been a couple of hours of easy work for the U.S. turned into days of chaos, collateral damage, and friendly-fire casualties. "So you must really dislike the Yanks," I said to the cabbie. The look he shot me said that I was mad. "Please, don't call it an invasion," he began. "It was a rescue mission. Mr. Reagan saved us." For the rest of the tour, he recounted horror stories of life and death under the Marxist academics and petty thugs whose best efforts had produced a bloody coup. He told of terror and mutilations, the rule of the machete, hunger, shots and screams, neighbors disappearing in the night. Every other Grenadan echoed the same thoughts. "Ronald Reagan," said a service manager at our hotel, "bless him for a saint." Even the tourist-trap touts at the waterfront had only good words to say. "Reagan, bless the man," was the common refrain. Somewhere on Grenada there may have been someone on Grenada who didn't like Reagan, but I couldn't find him. SIMPLE TRUTHS. So now, years later, I've dragged out the little bronze Gipper, and he's sitting here beside the keyboard, that optimistic smile as big as ever. He might not have been a genius, and he wasn't without his faults -- the Iran-Contra debacle tells you that. But an inability to know right from wrong, good from evil? Well, that wasn't one of the Reagan's faults. Simple as he was painted by those who speak of hegemons and post-colonial oppression, he knew enough to understand that evil has to be opposed because to accommodate it contaminates all who try. In his innocence, my son was right. I did like Ronald Reagan, even if I didn't know it at the time. So here's a toast to a simple man who had the wit to ignore his betters and leave the world, all things considered, a finer, safer place than he found it.
 Franklin, a native of Australia, is Small Business editor at BusinessWeek Online Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | |
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