21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence (12 page)

Learn from Dr. King. Lead like Dr. King. Tell them about the dream.

R
ONALD
R
EAGAN

The Great Communicator

I suppose I became a kind of preacher. I’d preach in my speeches about the problems we had and try to get people roused and to say to their neighbors, “Hey, let’s do something about this.”

R
ONALD
R
EAGAN

I
n 1976, former California governor Ronald Reagan waged a bruising primary battle against President Ford for the Republican nomination. Ford held a slight lead in the delegate count heading into the Republican National Convention in Kansas City—but he had failed to secure the nomination. If Reagan could persuade enough uncommitted delegates, he could wrest the nomination from the incumbent president.

The Reagan camp waged an epic behind-the-scenes battle for delegates, but Ford pulled out a narrow victory, winning 1,187 delegate votes to Reagan’s 1,070. The convention fight came close to splitting the party. On the night of President Ford’s acceptance speech, he invited Governor Reagan to the podium to address the delegates. As the band played “California, Here I Come,” Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, joined President Ford on the stage.

Amid the deafening celebration, Reagan turned to Nancy and said, “I don’t know what to say!” Nancy’s smile tightened.

Moments later, Reagan stepped to the microphone and began to speak. He talked about his vision for America—about restoring prosperity, eliminating the threat of nuclear war, and restoring constitutional liberties. Reagan spoke impromptu for five minutes—and when he finished, the hall interrupted in a thunderous ovation. Many delegates wept.

Reagan’s biographer, Edmund Morris, recalled, “The power of that speech was extraordinary…. [There was a] palpable sense amongst the delegates that we’ve nominated the wrong guy.”
¹

President Gerald Ford went on to lose the 1976 general election to Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia. But millions remembered Reagan’s impromptu remarks at the convention. That five-minute speech defined Ronald Reagan as a candidate with statesmanlike gravitas and political star power. In 1980, when Reagan ran again, he captured the White House.

Columnist George Will placed Ronald Reagan’s convention speech in a historical context, concluding that those five minutes defined Reagan as a leader:

Reagan quickly earned the title the Great Communicator. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Born in 1911, Ronald Reagan spent most of his youth in Dixon, Illinois. He served as a lifeguard on the Rock River for six years and is credited with seventy-seven rescues. In 1932, he graduated with a degree in economics from Eureka College in Illinois. He worked as a radio broadcaster until 1937, when he moved to Hollywood.

As an actor in such films as
Santa Fe Trail
(with Errol Flynn),
Knute Rockne, All American
(playing George “The Gipper” Gipp), and
Kings Row
, Reagan honed his skills as a communicator. Between 1946 and 1959, he won seven one-year terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild, where he practiced his leadership skills. Reagan hosted TV’s
General Electric Theater
and made countless personal appearances as the General Electric spokesman, sometimes delivering more than a dozen speeches per day.

In 1964, Reagan—a longtime FDR Democrat—endorsed Republican Barry Goldwater for president and gave a televised speech on Goldwater’s behalf. Though Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Reagan’s Goldwater speech vaulted him into the political arena. In 1966, he won the first of two terms as governor of California.

Another key Reagan speech was his address to the first Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 1974. There Reagan invoked the image of America as a “shining city upon a hill”:

Reagan won the 1980 election in a landslide. On January 20, 1981, he delivered his first inaugural address—a speech he drafted in longhand on a yellow legal pad. There he hammered home one of the core themes of his career: “Government is not the solution to our problems; government
is
the problem.”

On January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 took off from Washington National Airport then stalled due to icing on its wings. The plane clipped the 14th Street Bridge then plunged into the ice-encrusted Potomac River. Only four passengers and a flight attendant survived. Standing on the shore, a man named Lenny Skutnik saw passenger Priscilla Tirado in the freezing water by the tail of the plane, too weak to hold on. Skutnik dove in, swam to the plane, and pulled Tirado to safety.

Less than two weeks later, on January 26, 1982, Lenny Skutnik sat next to the First Lady as President Reagan delivered the State of the Union address. It was the first time a president recognized an American hero during the address, but it would soon become an annual tradition. It was a memorable object lesson in American values.

In a series of speeches in 1982 and 1983, Ronald Reagan spoke boldly about America’s chief adversary, the Soviet Union. On June 8, 1982, Reagan became the first American president to address the British Parliament, where he denounced the Berlin Wall as a “dreadful gray gash across the city…the fitting signature of the regime that built it.” He also shared his optimistic conviction that “the march of freedom and democracy” would “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.”
⁴

On March 8, 1983, Reagan delivered one of his most controversial speeches, his address to the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida—the “Evil Empire” speech. He urged his listeners to beware the temptation to “ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, and good and evil.”
⁵

Reagan’s speech sent shock waves around the world. The Soviet news agency Tass denounced President Reagan’s “pathological hatred of Socialism and Communism,” adding that Reagan could “think only in terms of confrontation and bellicose, lunatic anti-Communism.”
⁶
Television journalist Lesley Stahl called the speech a “diatribe” and “the Darth Vader speech,” reporting that even Reagan’s wife, Nancy, had urged him not to give the “evil empire” speech.
⁷

But deep inside the “evil empire,” in a miserable gulag called Permanent Labor Camp 35, a Jewish-Russian dissident, Natan Sharansky, heard about the speech when a prison guard read a Soviet news account to him. “We dissidents were ecstatic,” Sharansky later recalled. “Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth.”
⁸

On March 23, 1983, Reagan addressed the nation on the subject of the Strategic Defense Initiative—or “Star Wars.” Speaking from the Oval Office, he said, “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?”
⁹
It was nothing less than a plan to make nuclear war impossible by making nuclear weapons obsolete.

Reagan’s speech was greeted with howls of protest and derision. Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov declared that Reagan’s plan would “open the floodgates to a runaway race of all types of strategic arms, both offensive and defensive.” Senator Edward M. Kennedy said the speech was loaded with “misleading Red scare tactics and reckless ‘Star Wars’ schemes.”
¹⁰

President Reagan knew his most visionary idea would be controversial. In fact, every proposal he made was met with stiff resistance in the Congress and harsh criticism in the media. Yet Reagan got most of his agenda passed, from tax cuts to defense spending increases. How did he do it? By applying the Second Side of Leadership, communication skills.

He went over the heads of the news commentators and congressional leaders, taking his agenda directly to the American people. By creating support for his agenda among the voters, he put pressure on Congress to make compromises.

President Reagan continued to stir controversy throughout his presidency. On June 12, 1987, standing in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Wall, he delivered a speech that
Time
magazine listed as one of the Ten Greatest Speeches of all time.
¹¹
(Other speeches on that list included Socrates’s “Apology,” Frederick Douglass’s “The Hypocrisy of American Slavery,” Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” and Churchill’s “Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat.”) In his Berlin Wall speech, Reagan said, “General Secretary 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!”

It was not a polite request. It was an angry ultimatum—and the crowd of Berliners loved it. They applauded those lines for nearly half a minute.

Eighteen months later, the Berlin Wall lay in rubble. The first hammer blow was delivered by Ronald Reagan himself.

David Gergen, Reagan’s director of communications, explained in an interview with
Harvard Business Review
why his boss was such an effective communicator:

Huffington Post
contributor James P. Farwell summed up the historic importance of Reagan’s address to the nation following the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986:

Ronald Reagan had great empathy and insight into the American psyche. He put into words the hopes, dreams, and innate optimism of the American people.

Here are the lessons we can learn from Ronald Reagan, so that we can become “great communicators” in our own right:

1.
Use the power of communication to teach, inspire, and persuade
. When Michael Reagan appeared as a guest on my Orlando radio show in 2011, I asked him, “What was your dad’s greatest strength as a leader?”