Breakfast With Reagan (The Reagan Legacy Foundation)

The innocence of a three year old daughter is nothing short - of glorious.  Sitting at the breakfast table, we often look out the patio doors to find a world of amazement.  We look, and she comments, on everything from hummingbirds to bugs to squirrels.  Yet today - was different.

Today we had breakfast - with President Reagan.

When she, my three year old, is asked who daddy's favorite President is, she responds with great confidence "Ronald Reagan".  (Although when she was two she responded "Wonald Weagan".)  And today, sitting at breakfast listening to excerpts of Reagan's 1977 speech to Hillsdale college, I asked a simple question.

"Honey do you know why Ronald Reagan is daddy's favorite President?"  

She responded that she did not.  And before I could answer something happened deep inside of me.  My throat tightened, tears came to my eyes, and I whispered the words, "because he believed in America."  Decades have passed, and still Ronald Reagan emotionally moves people.  But why?

I was at the innocent age of five years old when I followed in behind my mother to vote for "that actor from California."  It was 1980, I had watched a debate between that actor and a President from Georgia.  Yet like my daughter today, there was little I knew about those days.  My innocence protected me from what I would later learn.  But I liked that man from California.  Not only because my mother and father liked him, but because I liked him.  But why?

And over the next eight years, I would grow up with Ronald Reagan.  I wrote him a letter as a school boy - he wrote back.  It is now framed in my office.  In 1984 I stood for four hours in the cold, just to watch him drive by and give a speech.  The poster I held that day, is also framed - and in my office.  I remember when he told terrorists we will not negotiate.  I remember when he fired the air traffic controllers.  I remember when he declared, "tear down this wall."  I laughed, in 1992, when he spoke to the Republican National Convention declaring that "I knew Thomas Jefferson, and Governor (Bill Clinton), you're no Thomas Jefferson."  I sat silently as I read his farewell letter to America in 1994.  And I wept, in 2004 at his passing.  But why such emotion from a boy to a man - over a President?

The reason to the "whys" asked above is found in his farewell address to our nation.  Reagan said, 

    And in all of that time I won a nickname, "The Great Communicator." But I

    never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: It

    was the content. I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great

    things ... they came from the heart of a great nation - from our experience,

    our wisdom, and our belief in the principles that have guided us for two

    centuries. They called it the Reagan revolution. Well, I'll accept that, but for

    me it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a rediscover of our

    values and our common sense.

Ronald Reagan, as I told my daughter, "believed in America."  He believed in Life, in Liberty, and in the Pursuit thereof.  He did not simply state those three values as rhetoric - it was part of his core as a man.  He did not apologize for believing in the rights of the unborn.  He stood and spoke against the human rights travesty of the Soviet Union (in a time when many were trying to demonstrate both a Republic and a Communist state had equal value).  He told us that government did not enhance the pursuit of life and liberty - but that government did more to entangle that pursuit.

America loved, and continues to love Ronald Reagan because Ronald Reagan loved America.  And in these perilous times where foreign policy seems to be crashing, an economy that is more government driven then jobs driven, and our current President who has apologized for this Nation - we desperately need to be reminded of those three Basic values of our great Country.  We so need to hear a national figure/organization remind us, in the words of de Tocqueville that "America is great, because Americans are good."

Enter to national stage left - a foundation that bears his name, The Reagan Legacy Foundation.  There are very few Americans not familiar with the name Michael Reagan.  His founding of the Reagan Legacy Foundation is crucial in these times.  Not just to memorialize our former President, but to continue the education, discussion, and inspiration of freedom and liberty.  The Reagan Legacy Foundation is needed to continue the work of an "informed patriotism" where as, quoting the President's farewell address, "If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are."

From the opening of the Checkpoint Charlie museum in Germany to the Scholarship fund to the Liberty Education tours, this Foundation is crucial in the struggle for liberty.  They need our support, our prayers, and our belief in the basic message of freedom and liberty.  The Reagan Legacy Foundation can help lead these conversations "at breakfast tables" all over our great Land.  

I love my country.  I love Her with all that is within me.  I learned that love, in part, from Ronald Reagan.  The innocence I had as a five year old has long passed.  And now, it falls to me as a father to instill within my daughter, in this her time of innocence, the great values of a great country.  Sitting at our breakfast table I will demonstrate that freedom and liberty is not based in government, regimes, or suppression; that freedom and liberty comes directly from the hand of an Almighty Creator.  And in doing so, again, we will often turn to www.ReaganLegacyFoundation.org.

I know not the future of this current government and Presidential Administration.  But I know that Liberty and Freedom will always be a light into the darkness of governmental control, regimes, and malaise.  I pray daily for the opportunity to join in the battle with groups like the Reagan Legacy Foundation to stand, to speak out, and to be part of the leadership that, summarizing our former President, "will travel the road ahead with liberty's lamp guiding [our] steps and opportunity's arm steadying [our] way."

God bless the Reagan Legacy Foundation in its continuing work.