John F. Kennedy had to wait until he was dead to have New York City’s Idlewild Airport named after him, but they renamed Washington’s National Airport after Ronald Reagan even before he died. Now that he’s gone it won’t be long before his face is on the $10 bill, and there is already a campaign to carve his likeness on Mount Rushmore. It makes sense, in a way: nobody has ever played the role of president of the United States of America as well as Ronald Reagan.

In fact, he re-defined it. His successor, the elder George Bush, was a throwback to the old political style, but both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush exude the folksy charm that made Reagan the best-loved of former presidents. They all made the cold-blooded political calculations that are necessary to partisan politics, but they all managed to seem as if they didn’t.

Reagan did it best because he was a professional actor, but also because he was a genuinely nice man. A nice man with a mastery of doublethink, perhaps, but you really believed that he didn’t grasp the negative implications of his own political strategies.

When the Democrats abandoned their traditional base among southern whites in the Sixties by backing civil rights, Reagan fully accepted the Republican “southern strategy” of winning over those votes with coded support for segregation. He opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Running for governor of California in 1966, he attacked the Fair Housing Act, saying, “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.”

Sunshine man

Yet Reagan wasn’t a racist. He was just very good at playing the political game, and even better at persuading people (probably including himself) that he was doing no such thing. The same applied to his tax cuts, a trend that has continued under Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

Still, that only explains why Americans liked and trusted Ronald Reagan. His claim to be a great president rests on three assertions: that he won the Cold War; that he created the great economic boom of the Eighties; and that he made America (or at least white America) feel good about itself after the traumas of the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, and the Iran hostage crisis.

His sunny disposition doubtless cheered Americans, but the key factor in his success was the fall in oil prices in 1981, just as he took office. That fuelled the economic boom and the good feeling — and also ended the Cold War.

The old Soviet Union was finished long before Reagan became president. The Soviet economy had effectively ceased growing by the late Sixties. As a result, Soviet military spending swelled in relative terms until it was absorbing 30-35 per cent of the economy. High oil prices plastered over the cracks for 10 years — the Soviet Union was the world’s second-biggest producer — but when the oil price collapsed in 1981, Communist rule was doomed.

The big idea

It was the moderate Nixon and Carter defence budgets in the Seventies that dug the Soviet Union’s grave; Reagan’s big increases in defence spending were just flogging a horse that was already dead. Reagan’s great achievement was to figure that out for himself, with little help from the state department and the intelligence services, and act accordingly.

Reagan knew One Big Thing: a mutual suicide pact is a lethally stupid idea. He probably didn’t realize that the old Soviet Union was going down fast until the very end of his second term in 1988 but he did know that a nuclear war would be very bad, and that you need to establish a relationship of openness and trust with your partner in the suicide pact. So we are all still here.

The period of maximum danger is when empires collapse, but we all sailed through the end of the Soviet Union without as much as a torn fingernail. Reagan’s genuine goodwill and common sense were what made the happy outcome possible. He didn’t destroy the Soviet Union, but he probably saved my children’s lives. If they want to carve his face on Mount Rushmore, it’s all right with me.