Liberty and Leadership
TFAS has reached 53,000 students and professionals through their academic programs, fellowships and seminars. Representing more than 140 countries, TFAS alumni are courageous leaders throughout the world – forging careers in politics, government, public policy, business, philanthropy, law and the media. Join TFAS President, Roger Ream, as he reconnects with these outstanding alumni to share experiences, swap career stories, and find out what makes their leadership journey unique. The Liberty and Leadership podcast is produced at Podville Media in Washington, D.C. If you have a comment or question for the show, please drop us an email at podcast@TFAS.org.
Liberty and Leadership
Lessons from Ronald Reagan's Presidency with Dr. Donald Devine
What can new generations learn from Ronald Reagan? This week, Dr. Donald Devine, President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director and TFAS senior scholar, joins host Roger Ream for a discussion of his latest book “Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles: How They Can Promote Political Success Today.” Delving into his experiences working alongside the president, Devine shows the interconnectedness between Reagan's morals and his vision for a balanced government. As one of the most prominent proponents of the philosophy of fusionism, Devine also discusses how he himself has applied the concept of balance to his own world views. Drawing from his distinguished career and time at TFAS, Devine traces how conservative and libertarian thinking has evolved and articulates the most important values for young conservatives to nurture.
Dr. Donald Devine served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during the president’s first term. The Washington Post labeled him “Reagan’s Terrible Swift Sword” for his success in reducing billions in spending by cutting bureaucratic excesses. Devine was an associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland and a professor of government and politics at Bellevue University. He is the author of 10 other books, including “The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order.” Devine is a columnist and his work appears regularly in The American Spectator, The Imaginative Conservative, and Law & Liberty.
The Liberty + Leadership Podcast is hosted by TFAS president Roger Ream and produced by Podville Media. If you have a comment or question for the show, please email us at podcast@TFAS.org. To support TFAS and its mission, please visit TFAS.org/support.
Welcome to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty and friends who are making an impact. Today I'm your host, roger Ream. Today I have the great privilege of welcoming back to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast, dr Donald Devine. Don is a colleague of mine and senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington DC. Don's impressive career includes serving as director of the civil service during President Reagan's first term. During that time, the Washington Post labeled him Reagan's terrible swift sword for his success in reducing billions in spending by cutting bureaucratic excesses from government. Don also has an impressive career in academics, as a professor at the University of Maryland and Bellevue University in Omaha, nebraska. Don's a prolific writer as well. He's written 11 books, including his most recent, ronald Reagan's Enduring Principles how they Can Promote Political Success. Today, his work regularly appears in the American Spectator, the Imaginative Conservative, and Law and Liberty.
Speaker 1:I'm looking forward to this conversation on a number of timely and important topics. Don, it's great to have you back as a guest. Great to be here. Well, let's start somewhat toward the beginning. You began your career. I know it involved military service and graduate work and getting into the academic field. Did your study of government and politics inform your political and economic philosophy.
Speaker 2:No, actually I started work. I worked all the way through going to college. So I worked at an insurance company for five years or so before I went into the military or the graduate school and actually I learned my biggest lesson there. I was a claims adjuster in both the government program that they ran and in their own private one.
Speaker 2:I start out in the government plan, even though we're basically the same kind of thing, but we were much more generous on the private side than the government, because on the government side you just followed the rules, all right, and no discretion, discretion. It forced decisions you didn't want to make really, that you knew weren't the right ones to make, but you had to do it because the law said you had to do it. So I learned most about how the world works in economics through that experience. I was also very lucky at St John's University to have a great professor, one for economics, another two for philosophy. So I did get a lot from my academic career too, but it was really the practical dealing with it and recognizing that the government has to settle all these bureaucratic rules whether they make any sense or not.
Speaker 1:We'll get into some of who your influences were on your thinking as we talk today, I think. But you perhaps are the most prominent thinker in the world today with regard to what is often called the philosophy of fusionism. Your recent books have explored that concept and deepened the thinking around it. Could you explain what is meant by fusionism?
Speaker 2:Fusionism is a horrible word, right, all of the people who helped develop it back in the 50s and 60s didn't want to use it. Fusion is actually a progressive ideal Hegel and his whole school of thinking but we tried to make a distinction between fusion and fusionism. Fusionism was something very different. Synthesis is actually a better word, although Hegel messed that up too, but the idea really comes from the philosopher Frederick Hayek. I mean, hayek basically invented modern conservatism. He put a book out, an academic book in England that was picked up in America by a Reader's Digest editor and sent to millions and millions and really turned a whole generation of conservatives around.
Speaker 1:And that was the Road to Serfdom, the Road to Serf 1945. Right.
Speaker 2:And it's basically the idea that normal progressive rational thinking is too simplistic. Find some motivating principle and everything else drives it. Hegel was probably the best. Marx was one of his students, not in the classroom. What Hayek did is so dramatic is he just took on that whole way of thinking. He challenged the whole thing. There is some first principle, but it's very vague, that there's some order to life, to human being. But there are two sub-principles, the principle of freedom and the principle of tradition, and you can't only have one of them. You need to balance them in a practical way. Some people look at fusionism or Hayek or Meyer as some kind of freedom. Only it's not. It's both of these ideals intention. Meyer actually made it very clear that freedom was only an opening principle and it had to be balanced against prudential things. You come into different situations. You give freedom some influence here, all influence there, some balance here. Both the Western tradition and the concept of freedom basically comes from Western civilization too.
Speaker 1:And so this tension. You use that word as the title of your previous book, the Enduring Tension. I think you said Meyer didn't like the word, or use the word fusion or fusionism. It was really at National Review that this all kind of developed, right?
Speaker 2:Right, well, listen, I grew up there. I mean that was the greatest experience of being in New York City while these people were inventing modern conservatism. I mean they used to have forums around the city and go to them. I was standing out there at one o'clock in the morning with Anne Rand, an advocate, one time. I mean it was just so alive and being unfortunately high. I had some background, as we talked earlier, and we read, we read. Everybody had a book when they were going to these things. You and I were in a meeting recently where one of the students not me, but another professor was talking about books and this guy said you know, the difference between your generation and mine is you read books. And it's true.
Speaker 1:We listen to soundbites now on our phones. You wrote another book, your newest book, which I have here Ronald Reagan's Enduring Principles how they Can Promote Political Success Today. It's a very intriguing title. As I said in the introduction, you worked for Ronald Reagan. You read his side when he made a lot of important decisions, especially in that first term when he had you overseeing the civil service and reduced by I think, over 100,000, the number of government employees. What inspired you to write the book? Is there a lot we can learn from those enduring principles of Ronald Reagan today?
Speaker 2:It's more to me Ronald Reagan rather than his principles. Principles are the important part of it, but Reagan is just such an incredible person and he had the most important attribute a human being can have, and that's courage. That's the thing to learn most about him. He read books too. He was only a B student but he read. You know some modern presidents I won't name names. They had to get an assistant in the White House to get them to start reading some serious books. When you're in the White House it's a little late. The great thing is to go to the Reagan Ranch and see Ronald Reagan's bookshelf and just see what he took to read.
Speaker 1:I mean Don, I remember reading a book about Reagan's GE years forgotten who the author was, but he told the story of Reagan was afraid to fly at that time 1950s and early 60s I guess so he'd take the train everywhere and he'd bring a pile of books with him and he'd read books on those long train rides across the country when he went speaking at GE plants. And yeah, the evidence has come out more of it, even after he died, that he was just an avid reader and had read the people you're talking about Henry Hazlitt, hayek read Nash Review and that is incredible and important for you to be highlighting.
Speaker 2:The thing that knocked me over here. I'm a college professor, I'm sitting at a conservative political action conference just after Reagan was elected president in 1980. And he goes up there and he gives a speech about what he believes, what is conservatism to him, and he mentions Frank Meyer, one of the main thinkers of our thing, and he said he told us what conservatism was. It was this balance between freedom and tradition. He used the term synthesis, sitting in the audience and I said to the people next to me I hear right, he used synthesis that a politician, a governor and I'm going to be president is using this formal word. And they all said, oh no, it wasn't him. It was one of his speechwriters or something. I know three or four of them and were there and I went over to him. I said how did that thing, fusion, get in there? Is that something? They said Fusion? What is that? I mean it was. He understood it better than they did, his so-called academic writers. He was just such an amazing man. His experience when he was shot.
Speaker 2:Ronald Reagan comes out. He's shot outside of a hotel after giving a speech in Washington. The Secret Service picks him up, puts him in a car. There's a tank, actually looks like a car and take him to the hospital. And he says, hey, we're not heading off to the White House. He says, no, sir, you've been shot, we're taking you to the hospital. He says no, no, sir, you've been shot, we're taking you to the hospital. He says no, america doesn't want their president to be in the hospital. They want him to be active running the country. Well, thank heaven they didn't pay any attention to him and they took him.
Speaker 2:So still, when he gets to the hospital, the president tries to get up out of there. There's a gurney out there waiting for him. He tries, he takes two steps and he falls down and they take him inside. He wakes up inside and the nurse is taking his pulse and he looks at her and he says Does Nancy know about us? Nancy is wife, all right. He goes blank again. Next time they have to artificially wake him up and give him a thing and say you have to sign this as the president. He says what is it? It says you're passing the power over to your vice president because we don't know if you're going to make it through this thing. He looks at that and I'm thinking this You're just being told you may not come out of this, all right. What is he doing? He looks around the room at the doctors and nurses around the table and he says I sure hope all you guys and gals are Republicans.
Speaker 2:Once in his life he was overdone. The head doctor said we all are today, sir, and he was a Democrat. So he goes in two or three days. Who knows if he's going to make it or not? His wife, who is a big fancy dresser, has been three days without changing clothes. Looks on him. He comes out, he sees her and he says sorry, honey, I forgot to duck. I mean this is a man you got to admire. He's a man you mentioned. I was in government. I've been in Washington most of my life here and it's been a long one, as you can tell. So few do it. I mean I used to give a thing to personnel coming into the government. You want to be successful in Washington. They all say oh yeah. I say don't do anything.
Speaker 1:What.
Speaker 2:What do you mean? Don't I say well, if you do something, somebody's going to complain about it. You don't do anything, nobody will complain. And I'd say 80, 90% of people who go into the government think that way, maybe more, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Some rise above it, but let's get back to the book and the principles you know and why you wrote the book. Because it seems like that among conservatives today, some not many, but some have in a sense disparaged Reagan or said that's the past, that was 50 years ago, Time to move on. But you're writing a book here saying, no, wait a minute, there's some important things here that we got to focus on. What would you say about his enduring principles that we need to rally around today, or how can they help us today?
Speaker 2:The two principal ones are freedom and tradition, myers I think he put it best. We're talking about Western civilization and understanding Western civilization and why it's different. So many people on the left today. They want to change the whole world and you can't do it that way. This took thousands of years to develop this. The principle that makes it different is the principle that defends freedom, and that is the principle that is a creator and according to this tradition, the Judeo-Christian tradition, it came from God, even allowing him to disobey him. All right. No other tradition has that kind of thing that you're supposed to fear gods and they don't want you to do anything. They don't want you to do and if they do, they go to war with you.
Speaker 2:It's a different way of looking at the world. That's why our founders put creator right in the Declaration of Independence. It's having some kind of base. Principles aren't just flowing around in all directions and they aren't rigid first principles to last principles. It's this creative tension that the West has seen and why it's so much more successful than anybody else. And what I want with the book is to realize that those principles have been there a long time. They work. Reagan brought them back for a while and it basically lasted from him until 2008 with the big recession, and we've gone much further down that road and the only way we're going to get back, if we understand how we got there, is going to have a different application, and even some of the critics, I mean it may need some rebalancing between tradition and freedom, although it's really freedom that's suffering more than the tradition, in my opinion. Freedom, I mean the government just makes every major decision today and it's got to change and if it doesn't, western civilization is going to be gone.
Speaker 1:One discouraging thing I saw last week. A reporter for Politico, heidi Prisbala, on MSNBC, said the problem we have today is we have these nationalist Christian conservatives who believe our rights come from God. Instead of that, our rights come from the government, from the Supreme Court and from the Congress. I mean, when you have prominent political reporters thinking our rights are ours because of government and the Supreme Court and not because of God, they're just rejecting, as you said, the Declaration of Independence and our founding ideas, and Reagan anchored himself on those ideas.
Speaker 2:Oh, he did, Reagan. You know some people are trying to make him out of some kind of cold warrior out always looking for a fight. It's in my book with a Navy research library I don't remember the exact name of it Did a study of all the presidents, from George Washington, taking into account some of the size of the country and things. But Ronald Reagan had one of the lowest use of American troops outside of America for the shortest period of time and when he made mistakes, like he got too involved in the Middle East, he took them out of Lebanon. He went in and picked on a little puny country in South America he knew he couldn't get in trouble with. He came right out. He said in his final speech in London he says we're not here to start a war with Russia, we're here to beat them through moral strength and courage.
Speaker 1:Don describe your experience working side by side with President Reagan. He appointed you the head of the Office of Personnel Management, which is a very important agency, and you took it under your wings there and made tremendous successes for the president carrying out his agenda. You know what were some of the challenges you faced. Talk a little bit about that experience.
Speaker 2:Actually I was so lucky. It's unbelievable. I walked in the first day and there I walked into the outgoing Democrat who is the head of the Office of Personnel Management and I walk and he says you S-O-B. I'm allowed to say that here. Here I am. I fixed up the whole civil service to make it workable again and you are walking in and implementing because it's taken me this long to get it ready. Only a couple more months to go. Who was it? He was my former professor at the Syracuse University. We used to call it the Syracuse Agency.
Speaker 1:He was appointed by Carter President. Carter President. Carter and he pushed reforms of civil service and he did reform the whole thing.
Speaker 2:He in fact taught me what government was really about. It's not about what any Republicans say, or almost every Republican thinks, and that is that you run it like a business. It's totally different than running as a business. It's a political operation and you don't need businessmen, you need savvy political people or people who understand politics. So he taught me about it.
Speaker 2:I was lucky. I was with President Reagan in 1978 when he lost and I was lucky that that whole next year a guy named John Sears set me up to put together a whole transition project for over four years and I really learned what government was about and how to make it work. Great, great opportunity. Unfortunately, he didn't make it in the administration. I did in the personnel. I was in the transition team and we got so much of it done even before we walked in the office. And then I walk in the office and all I had to do and fight were mostly people in the Reagan administration who were from the earlier Ford administration who were trying to stop us doing anything substantial. The great thing about Reagan is he had me in three or four times to talk to the cabinet to tell them to take care of their person. We promised to cut back 100,000 employees, and every time after it was over one time, he was out of the room and then came back into the cabinet room.
Speaker 2:You always say huh, just get those bureaucrats, make them work.
Speaker 1:Were you involved in the whole issue with the air traffic controllers going on strike right early in his administration? Right, they were going to shut down our airline system by going on strike.
Speaker 2:Well, that was an opportunity. No one else, of course, wanted to defend that thing except him.
Speaker 1:Which is his decision was to fire them right.
Speaker 2:All of the other people, the Aviation Administration and Transportation which is under them. They wouldn't want to go out. Nobody in the White House wanted, so I was the pincushion Everybody was going after.
Speaker 1:And the decision was do we give them a big raise that they're demanding if they don't gun strike, or do we fire them?
Speaker 2:Well, what happened was the FAA and Transportation Department first of all. They get paid more than off the general schedule. They get paid extra to begin with and we had to give more money to them, and that was fine because we didn't need to pay them more. My final offer they turned down, but then the transportation secretary and FAA gave it to them. They got it passed. It didn't get up to the president, but anyway, they gave in to that. But they were too greedy. They wanted even more. So they threatened to go on strike and we had a big meeting in the White House with them and me. The only one defending a fire was me and him and the president they had taken an oath to not strike right.
Speaker 2:One of my assistants was there and actually he asked don't they have to sign something? They won't go on strike? Well, this guy was smart, joe Morris, if you know him. He came out with the actual thing we handed to him. That was the end of it. It just showed that they had to sign right on the document. So he said they're gone, that's it.
Speaker 2:They're violating their agreement and actually I even wanted to hire him back after a while because you know, if there was one airplane crash in the two years or so we were on demand, there would have been the end of Reagan period. But he was even tougher than me. He told me to stop when I was trying to work with the unions in the back because it got into the stupid union, told the papers about it, but any event, everybody thinks I was so tough on there. I was only the second by far. Reagan. He's just courageous, really amazing guy.
Speaker 2:Very, very few people are so well-read, tough, willing to make compromises too. You know, when he did one of the big treaties to limit the arms, one of the Republican conservative leaders you know well, he's dead now called him I forget the word. It was something terrible about traitor or something close to that for making this deal with the Soviet Union. He wasn't a rigid, always go to fight, he was very balanced guy very rare kind of thing in politics. And you know he was kind of a fluke. He couldn't have made it onto today's thing if it wasn't for a bunch of intellectual, smart Californians who supported him economically in his political things, which you couldn't do. Maybe through some other reason, but you couldn't do it directly.
Speaker 1:In your book you cite a Pew Research article that shows that Republicans still have a very high view of Reagan as one of the country's best presidents. Why do you think Reagan's presidency was so successful?
Speaker 2:Well, it wasn't just Republicans too. I mean, when he's named by everybody, he comes up on the top, Unless they just ask professors of history and stuff like that. Then he's way down the bottom.
Speaker 1:He was anchored with principles that he believed.
Speaker 2:And he had courage. Courage is a very rare believed and he had courage. Courage is a very rare thing and it's understandable. People want to be successful. There's no guarantee of success if you're courageous. In fact, in my book I mentioned four or five agency heads that were all courageous and none of them lasted through eight years Not one of them. I've mentioned a bunch of senators. There was only one Senate vote in my four years as head of OPM and we only got maybe 12, 15. I don't remember the exact number of senators who voted for it and almost all of them lost the next time they ran. I mean, so the courageous ones don't last. You got to, you know, have some kind of courage to say no, I'm going to do what's the right thing to do rather than the right thing for me. It goes against human nature.
Speaker 1:Well Don, as a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies at TFAS, what advice would you give to past, present and future TFAS fellows and scholars? Read.
Speaker 2:Read, read, read books Right, especially books. I mean, that's again. Go out to the Reagan Ranch Young America's Foundation you and I have both been to and just look at his bookshelf and see what he read. You read that. You're never going to go wrong.
Speaker 2:And the other thing I'd say, especially of the students and young people if you're listening to this, you've come a long way. You've gotten through or at least part of college. You survive somehow to be willing at least to listen to what the positions are on the conservative right, and we have a set of programs, what we call continuing education, and I think that is the solution. We want to drag the people that are tough enough to have gotten through universities in America, as far left as they've gone and narrow views of life and politics, and get them to be a group of leaders for the future. We have several different programs for that.
Speaker 2:We tend to think that you need a bunch of people to win. You don't. You only need a relative few. Remember the communism which ran the whole 20th century, started by a dozen people under Lenin. They changed the world. Or Jesus had 12. In fact, only 11 stuck with him all the way through. And that's what we need to do is to build a group of future leaders that understood the world somewhat, as did Ronald Reagan, and to why we have been the greatest civilization since the beginning of the world and what we can do to keep it not to change the whole world necessarily, but at least to get us not to change the whole world necessarily, but at least to get us back on the right track.
Speaker 1:Well, that's great sentiment to end this on, because, even as you touched on in the previous question, reagan, with the small group around him in California, really boosted his career and led to the changes that we saw. That gave us tremendous prosperity for decades. And these programs that you touched on there I was talking to someone on the telephone today who supports us about the fact that you've got a luncheon discussion group with 20 to 25 young people that come to our office and they sit down with people that they read. You give them articles to read and to talk about. They get a chance to ask questions of key opinion molders in our world today. You've got the evening fusionist society meetings you hold with young people who are conservative and libertarian and everything in between, getting together to debate and discuss important ideas and articles. We've got the Public Policy Fellows Program that's been out to Mecosta to look at the ideas of Kirk, the Constitution Center, to study the Federalist Papers and read Hayek, and these things I think that you're touching on are just so important and you take that base of ideas that you have, that Reagan and Frank Meyer have, and you infuse them into young people and then give them the courage to act on those that can really change the world.
Speaker 1:That's the hope. Yes, yes. Well, thank you, don. It's been great to have a conversation with you. It's a privilege for all of us at TFAS to work with you to perpetuate these ideas for future generations to come. Thank you, thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to the Liberty and Leadership Podcast. If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast at tfasorg, and be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five-star review. Liberty and Leadership is produced at Podville Media. I'm your host, roger Ream, and until next time, show courage in things, large and small.
