From Reagan’s Hollywood charm to Nixon’s strategic depth, America’s most effective presidents surrounded themselves with brilliant advisors – a lesson Paul Mashatile, the likely next ANC president, would do well to heed as his party’s grip on national power continues to weaken, writes Tony Leon.
Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, who served two terms from 1981 to 1989, was a landslide vote winner in the days when presidential winners obtained an outright majority of popular votes. However, he also drew the scorn of heavyweight intellectuals of his time.
For example, John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist and fast friend of president John Kennedy (he served as his ambassador to India), said of Reagan:
“If you wade into his deepest thoughts, you wouldn’t get your ankles wet.”
Sardonic mockery is one thing; history is another. In a 2021 ranking of historians curated by C-SPAN, Reagan was ranked ninth among the top 30 best presidents, just one place behind Kennedy and two ahead of Barack Obama, both of whom, like Galbraith, were Democrats.
Reagan, even today, remains the best-rated modern Republican president by party supporters: he even shaded out Donald Trump, who, despite reshaping his party in his own image, lost out in partisan popularity to Reagan (41% v 37% according to the Pew Research Survey, August 2023).
In July this year, I visited the Reagan Presidential Library overlooking Simi Valley in Southern California. Though “library” is far too modest a word for this multimillion-dollar museum-shrine that contains many acres of halls and exhibits, and the original Boeing 707 that served as Air Force One.
Reagan’s core convictions
The “library” offers plenty of evidence why Reagan won such adulation from his voters and scorn from his intellectual and political detractors: he had a homespun philosophy (free markets, less government, strong armed forces, detestation of Communism) expertly communicated (he was a Hollywood actor whose fading movie career propelled – and prepared – him to politics). And he acted on his core convictions, melded with political pragmatism.
Yet, as opposed to Trump and his “American carnage” and “tariffs are the most beautiful word in the dictionary” mantra, Reagan managed to convey hardline views in an optimistic, even humorous, self-deprecating manner. Unlike Trump, he was also an internationalist and free trade advocate.
About 100km southeast of the sprawling Reagan presidential remembrance is the plainer and less visited Richard Nixon presidential library, located in his birthplace of Yorba Linda. It is hard to comprehend today, in true-blue California (where every statewide office is held by a Democrat), that the only two presidents who emerged from California politics were both Republicans. But then, both the state and certainly the GOP (as the Republicans are dubbed) have changed almost completely since the Nixon and Reagan eras.
Deep thinker Nixon
Nixon, by contrast to Reagan, had deep thoughts on the state of the world and a strategy for reimagining the role of the United States in it. He, though like Reagan, was staunchly anti-communist and an internationalist and conceived and executed the pivot to China as a hedge against the Soviet Union. We still live today with the results of his daring opening to China in 1972, even if “the evil empire” as Reagan dubbed the Soviets lies buried in the rubble of the Berlin Wall.
Republican Trump, by contrast to emollient and courteous Reagan and awkward and introverted Nixon (who kept his profanities to private use, though captured now on tape), is a trash-talking, extroverted New York real estate mogul, who, unlike the two Californians, had never held any elective office before becoming president. He was also not even a regular Republican voter before becoming the party’s presidential candidate.
And history jostles how to remember Nixon; for his fame as a statesman or his infamy as the disgraced president forced by Watergate to resign? He ranks a lowly 31st in the same C-Span survey. Though the predations of Nixon’s White House excesses seem mild beer by comparison with Trump’s weekly apparent abuse of office, from monetising his presidency to pushing aside constitutional guardrails.
Then there is the nexus of money and politics and influence – something of wearying familiarity to scandal-plagued South Africa’s top politicians.
Opulent testimony
Reagan surrounded himself with ultra-rich Californian business tycoons who shared and helped shape his conservative philosophy. They funded his campaigns, were dubbed the “kitchen cabinet” and featherbedded his retirement years. The splendour of his presidential library bears opulent testimony to their largesse. However, no stench of blatant scandal attaches to Reagan in terms of cash-for-access, now the pay-to-play calling card in today’s Washington.
Reflecting on two past and highly consequential US presidents leads to contemplation on the likely next ANC president in South Africa, though given the party’s tumbling at the polls, it is no sure bet anymore that an ANC presidency leads automatically to the SA presidency.
Still, Paul Mashatile, by precedent and party protocols, is the odds-on favourite to obtain the ANC top post in 2027, and even a disastrous election result in 2029 will still place the party’s top man thereabouts in the presidency.
Yet he remains an enigmatic presence in our public life.
The title of Pieter du Toit’s recent study of him The Dark Prince ambivalently can be referenced to both his shadowy accumulation of wealth, or access to it, via public office or to his unknowability. Or as the author suggests in his introduction, perhaps there is not much to know.
Du Toit writes:
“Up close, Mashatile seems disengaged and unserious, either incapable of grappling with complex issues or unwilling to do so.”
By contrast to Nixon or Reagan in America, who had decades on the public record before the presidency, and Trump, whose volubility on all topics was embedded in the nation’s consciousness. Or here at home where previous deputy presidents – Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa – enjoyed very high visibility.
And both Mbeki and Zuma held and then acted on a definite view of what to do as president. For Mbeki it was to both reform and reracialise the economy; for Zuma it was to reprise the adage of authoritarian plunderers “for my friends and me everything, for my enemies the law.” Both failed to fully achieve their objectives.
Ramaphosa, by contrast, had no visible view on what his presidency would entail beyond occupying office and offering cliches such as “reform”, “inclusivity” and “a new deal” en route to the top.
His public and political opacity meant outside observers and analysts weighed on him with hopeful expectations from being (based on his recent background, not ideology) “business friendly” or even, for the most fervent believers, a new Mandela. He has delivered on none of these expectations.
Back at the Californian presidential libraries, it was striking how such utterly different personalities (the thinking loner Nixon versus the less intellectual but sunnier Reagan) encased their presidencies with the very brightest aides, such as Henry Kissinger and James Baker, two of the most effective Secretaries of State (In Baker’s case he held two of the top cabinet posts under two presidents – Treasury for Reagan and then at State for his successor).
True, Nixon compensated for this by also having unflinching henchmen in his entourage. But both men were unafraid of the counsel from the best intellects and operators with matching egos. Trump has moved in the opposite direction.
Back home at the advent of democracy, there’s a telling anecdote by former PFP leader Van Zyl Slabbert in his book The Other Side of History. He describes a visit to Mbeki, on the eve of his deputy presidency (his first governmental office) back in 1994. Slabbert wrote:
“Eventually, I was alone with him, and he seemed quite awkward and out of place. ‘What would you do if you were to become deputy president?’ he asked. I said, ‘I would appoint a number of committees of experts in key areas to constantly remind me of how much I have to learn and how ignorant I am.’ This must have offended him. Why? I have no idea. But it was the end of our comfortable relationship.”
On Du Toit’s reading of Mashatile, the presidential hopeful is a cypher who has no original view on economic revival, bar reprising the ANC policy catechisms that have landed us deep in the ditch. Unlike even Ramaphosa, the only boardrooms he has ever sat around have been in Luthuli House. He has never had a career outside politics.
He might do well to take the spurned advice Slabbert offered Mbeki decades ago. He could hardly do worse given the state of things, not least the state of the state he hopes to lead.