Reagan never preached from the bully pulpit; he conversed with the people. He never thought he had all the answers or that he was put on this Earth to reveal and implement God's plan for the rest of us, neither when he was governor of California nor when he was president of the United States. His faith wasn't expressed in a rigid certainty of what God's plan was or how he fit into it but rather was faith-created and drove an intellectual honesty that allowed him to be remarkably flexible whenever it was necessary to adjust courses.
His flexibility was first revealed to me in 1979, when I saw him do a 180-degree turn on economic policy, reject the old-time Republican economic religion of fiscal austerity and embrace across-the-board tax-rate reductions to combat stagflation. As he said in his first inaugural address, "To paraphrase Winston Churchill, I did not take the oath I've just taken with the intention of presiding over the dissolution of the world's strongest economy."
Reagan had a hunger and thirst for the truth that led him to continually reassess the assumptions on which he was operating. He didn't agonize Hamlet-like or flip-flop from one position to another. He never wavered on principles, but his humble nature and affection for his adversaries meant he was always re-evaluating how he was applying those principles and how to achieve a practical result.
Reagan's hallmark - what made him a great politician while remaining true to his moral compass - was his ability to find practical outcomes without abandoning principle. With the Soviet Union, for example, we faced the most dangerous adversary America has ever confronted, a foe that not only possessed but openly brandished weapons of mass destruction. Yet Reagan was prescient when he said in a 1981 speech at Notre Dame University that, "The West will not contain communism, it will transcend communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we'll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."
Who else but Reagan could have foreseen the demise of that evil empire in our lifetime? With all due respect to William Manchester, one of Churchill's biographers who called the great British prime minister the "last lion" of the 20th century for defeating fascism, it was Reagan ultimately who was the true "last lion" of the 20th century for defeating communism without firing a shot.
Reagan's solution wasn't to defeat communism on the battlefield or best it diplomatically but to transcend it economically and morally. When the Soviet Union was almost prostrate economically and verging on civil war in its outer provinces, Reagan had the courage and the wisdom to seek peace through strength, not belligerency. He joined forces with Pope John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher to apply the most powerful kind of pressure - moral suasion backed by military strength - while at the same time providing the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, the maneuvering room to bring Soviet communism to a peaceful end.
Ronald Wilson Reagan was a peacemaker who loved freedom for all mankind. We loved you, too, Mr. President, and we will remember you always.