While most in the country are thinking of Ronald Reagan’s eight years in the White House, several with Lawrence ties are thinking of the country’s 40th president in a personal light.

“Gosh, where do you begin?” said Richard Norton Smith, presidential historian and former director of Kansas University’s Dole Institute of Politics.

Smith, now director of the new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., was in charge of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and the Reagan Center for Public Affairs in Simi Valley, Calif., in the early 1990s.

Reagan wrote most of his own speeches, but Smith spent 2 1/2 years writing them just after Reagan finished his two terms of office in 1988.

Reagan was the kindest man, Smith said.

In August 1992, while Smith was still director of the Hoover Library in Iowa, Reagan agreed to take part in the rededication of the library. He secretly flew from California to the Midwest the night before the ceremonies. When he arrived, the two spoke.

“He leaned over in a semi-conspiratorial tone and said, ‘I understand you’ve been helping us on that speech,'” Smith recalled. “I said yes, and he just winked and said, ‘Thanks.'”

As former actor, Reagan didn’t need to be president, Smith said. He ran because he had ideas.

“He didn’t want to manage the Cold War; he wanted to end it. … He didn’t want to accept the status quo that power must irreversibly flow to Washington, he wanted to reverse it,” Smith said. “Even those who doubted the ideas never doubted the spirit or the authenticity of the ideas.”

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Reagan’s presidency gave the American people a turning point, said Francis Heller, Roberts Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Law and Political Science at KU.

After the country had spent decades trying to get along with the Russians, Reagan ended the Cold War. He rearmed the United States and drove the Soviet Union to stockpile themselves into a debt that caused the country’s economic collapse, Heller said.

Reagan enacted the country’s first tax cut in years in 1981. Two years later, the nation had a deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Reagan was investigated for arming Iran and Nicaragua after violence exploded in both countries. But not many of Reagan’s constituents were thinking about all that, Heller said.

“Reagan could make people forget that actually not everything was well,” Heller said.

Local influence

While Reagan pivoted the nation in a new direction, he also created the turning point of one Lawrence woman’s career.

He appointed Deanell Reece Tacha to the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in 1985. In 2001, Tacha became chief judge for the circuit.

“I felt very fortunate to have known a man of that integrity,” she said. “He had such clear views of what he thought was right and an enormous sense of patriotism.”

Tacha remembers the day of her nomination. It was Halloween, a few days after the Royals had trounced the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series, and she was told the president would be calling her soon.

“I told my sons, and they said, ‘Well, that makes you as good as Brett Saberhagen,'” Tacha recalled, laughing.

She told the president when he called about her sons’ nonchalance with the honor their mother had received. Each meeting with him after that call, the president cracked a joke about baseball.

“He was a huge sports fan; he talked to me a lot about that night,” Tacha said.

Reagan rhetoric

After she helped a graduate student teach a class on Reagan about 10 years ago, Ellen Reid Gold became almost obsessed with Reagan’s ability to woo an audience.

“People focused more on a critical view of his intellectual capacity,” said the associate professor of communication studies at Kansas University. “This genuine language bent, I think, escaped him when he was president.”

Gold teaches an undergraduate seminar called “The Rhetoric of Ronald Reagan.”

In 1980, Gold shook Reagan’s hand in New Hampshire while he was campaigning for president.

“I talked to him and shook,” she said. “I had not realized what a fantastically good speaker he was, and what a charming personality.”

Maybe the reason historians are ranking him as the 10th-best president is that he was successful at getting his legislation passed, she said. Tax reform, rearmament and making peace with the Soviet Union weren’t easy to accomplish, she said.

When Reagan was elected, the Vietnam-era public was jaded. The United States did not have as strong a foothold in the world ranks, and people wondered if the presidency was too big for one man, Smith said.

“I think not only he dispelled the doubts, but he established a bond with the American people,” Smith said.

The bond was defined early in Reagan’s presidency, when John Hinckley Jr. fired a bullet and hit the president on March 30, 1981, Smith said. The moment parallels George W. Bush standing at a pulpit with smoldering World Trade Center towers as a backdrop, Smith said.

“All the spin doctors and all the speech writers disappear, and you see him pure,” Smith said. “People were impressed by what they saw.”