[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 80 (Wednesday, June 9, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6639-S6640]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            TRIBUTE TO FORMER PRESIDENT RONALD WILSON REAGAN

  Mr. FRIST. Mr. President, I wish to make a few remarks regarding 
President Ronald Reagan. It was in January 1977, as Jimmy Carter 
prepared to take the oath of office as President, that Ronald Reagan 
met with the man who would become his chief foreign policy adviser for 
the next several years, Richard Allen.
  The two spent several hours together discussing in detail the vast 
array of issues. As Allen recalls--and some people have heard this on 
the news--as he has recounted it, Reagan said a whole range of 
memorable things, but none was more profound than this:

       My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is 
     simple and some would say simplistic. It is this: We win and 
     they lose. What do you think of that?

  Ronald Reagan's words would have been shocking to the trained ears of 
any foreign policy expert of that day. The consensus was the cold war 
simply could not be won. We could not defeat communism. That is what 
people thought. That is what they felt. All we could do was to hope to 
contain the Soviet Union and chip away at the fringes of its influence.

[[Page S6640]]

  After his meeting with Ronald Reagan, Richard Allen never looked at 
the world in the same way. When Ronald Reagan entered the White House 
and laid out his vision for winning the cold war, America never looked 
at the world the same way. And when Ronald Reagan left the White House 
and events he helped put in motion came to pass, the world, indeed, 
would never be the same.
  What were the reasons for Ronald Reagan's historic foreign policy 
success? How did he come to leave a more indelible mark on the world 
than any American President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt?
  First, Ronald Reagan believed in a strong military to defend our 
Nation and to protect peace. He marshaled the resources from this body 
for a remarkable 35-percent increase in defense spending during his 
Presidency. Critics accused Reagan of unnecessarily provoking the 
Soviet Union and putting America on a path to nuclear war. But for 
Ronald Reagan, a strong national defense was an instrument for peace. 
It was Government's first and foremost duty to its people. He knew the 
Soviet Union could not match our capacity to fund our national defense, 
and should the Soviets attempt to keep pace, as they did, the Communist 
state would be unable to sustain itself.
  Second, Ronald Reagan believed that America, our allies, and our 
common values were on that winning side of history. The destiny of 
mankind was not to live in the shadow of tyranny, dictatorship, but to 
be guided by the light of liberty, by the light of democracy. That was 
the destiny.
  As Reagan said in his watershed Westminster speech:

       The march of freedom and democracy . . . will leave 
     Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left 
     other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-
     expression of the people.

  Third, Ronald Reagan viewed the world through a lens of moral 
clarity. He believed there was right and wrong and good and evil, 
strength and weakness, but, most importantly, he was not afraid to talk 
about the world as he saw it or use his words to help shape the world 
in that vision.
  He called the Soviet Union the ``evil empire.'' Why? Because the 
Soviet regime was repressive and godless and imperialist.
  In 1987, he stood before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and 
challenged the Soviet leadership:

       Mr. Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity 
     for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek 
     liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open 
     this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

  Within months, the wall was torn down. The cold war was won, and the 
new and lengthy era of peace for America and among the major powers of 
the world was born.
  In this week of tribute to the life of Ronald Reagan, let us remember 
the simple ideas upon which his foreign policy was based: a strong 
military as an instrument of peace; liberty and democracy as the 
destiny of mankind; and the moral clarity to see the world as it was 
and what it should be.
  Let us also remember that without the courage and the character of 
Ronald Reagan, his ideas would have remained just ideas, and the world 
would have remained the same.
  As Reagan once wrote of his determination to stand up for what he 
believed:

       But bearing what we cannot change and going on with what 
     God has given us, confident there is a destiny, somehow seems 
     to bring a reward we wouldn't exchange for any other. It 
     takes a lot of fire and heat to make a piece of steel.

  I yield the floor.

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