The following is adapted from R. Emmett Tyrrell’s memoir, How Do We Get Out of Here?: Half a Century of Laughter and Mayhem at The American Spectator―From Bobby Kennedy to Donald J. Trump.

The American Spectator’s “big picture” includes the notion that culture is more important to politics than politics is to politics. At least during my lifetime, political struggles usually have begun with cultural struggles. Maybe this was not true in Aristotle’s time when the Greek philosopher was writing The Politics, or in Machiavelli’s time when the Florentine was at work on The Prince. Yet, for certitude in modern times, what is to be decided today in politics was decided yesterday in culture, especially pop culture, often by illiterate adolescents. For instance, the values of rock ‘n’ roll steamrolled the values of “The Hit Parade” decades ago. Or when the values of nihilism replaced the values of the Broadway musical long before any election had taken place, and most emphatically before the values of a 1960s ithyphallic draft dodger replaced those of war heroes such as George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, or John McCain. In these instances, one sees how culture preempts politics in modern times. 

The stirrings that accompanied the rise of Ronald Reagan put political observers in mind of the stirrings that accompanied the rise of FDR and perhaps JFK. We know that Ronald Reagan had three political goals: the defeat of the Soviets, the lowering of taxes, and the restoration of American greatness. Yet we also know that he was disturbed by the coarsening of American culture. I saw it as an opportunity at least to dilute the nihilism that was poisoning our education system and our entertainment. I noted the stirrings of the late 1970s as an opportunity to influence the culture, and I believed that the president saw it that way, too. He was unhappy with the recent Hollywood emphasis on zoo sex and violence. On several occasions, I saw him demonstrate with his hands how the famous director Ernst Lubitsh would dramatize an intimate love scene for his actors using only his hands. The former actor would reproduce Lubitsch’s scene by hanging an imagined “Do Not Disturb” sign outside an imagined hotel room door. The president and Nancy watched movies, but for the most part, the movies they watched were a product of the past, not the tawdry present. 

My scheme to bring conservative values into the 1980s began on the afternoon of August 6, 1982. I had just entered my home office soaking wet from a noon handball match. As I was recording my game, I was interrupted by a call from the White House. A silken voice told me the president wanted a word with me. So, standing in my home office dripping with perspiration, I was perfectly calm as the president questioned me from the White House. 

I had a column in the Washington Post the week before arguing that the White House’s assistant presidents were undercutting the president’s plans for tax cuts and causing a rift within the conservative community. He insisted that a tax increase, then being pressed upon him by congressional Democrats, would ensure three dollars of congressional budget cuts for every additional tax dollar. He disputed the news stories that the assistant presidents were conspiring to enfeeble conservatives and asked how a rift with them could be avoided. It would take six years and the publication of assistant president Mike Deaver’s egregious memoirs before any of the others would come clean and validate my claim that some of his staff had committed various acts of betrayal. As for Congress’s promises of budget cuts, the Hill never made good on them. We did, however, end the rift dividing the president from his friends. Our solution was lunch. Reminding the president that he stayed in touch with conservative economists by holding a series of luncheons with them, I suggested a similar series of luncheons with conservative editors to keep the president and the conservative editors au courant with one another and, à la FDR and JFK, to put the presidential seal on our attempts to create a conservative counterculture — a counterculture to the Kultursmog was what we needed, as I shall explain in due course.

This article is taken from The American Spectator’s fall 2024 print magazine. Subscribe to receive the entire magazine.

On September 22, 1982, we lunched in the cabinet room with the president. All was going well, though I was somewhat startled by the retinue that accompanied him. I had editors from the major conservative publications: Commentary, National Review, Policy Review, and the Public Interest. The president had his chief of staff, James A. Baker; his national security advisor, Bill Clark; his deputy chief of staff, Mike Deaver; his chief counsel, Ed Meese; his director of the Office of Management and Budget, David Stockman; and David Gergen, then serving as his director of communications and planning. Irving Kristol, who was one of my guests, had convinced me that Gergen was one of us. He would help us do with conservatives what FDR and JFK had done with liberals, to wit, lend presidential prestige to political culture. 

Art by Bill Wilson

The lunch was very agreeable, except when I would accidentally lock eyes with one of these grim assistant presidents. For his part, the president was in fine fettle. So, I was emboldened to proclaim to the leader of the free world:

You have won the political campaigns. The intellectual battles have been won, too. Your adversaries have no spellbinding dreams or revivifying policy initiatives that have not been tried. The terms of political debate have become conservative. No longer do we hear calls to limit economic growth, radically redistribute income, or to negotiate with every hostile country.

Now is your (dare I say it?) Moment in History. It is time to implement the policies of limited government, economic growth, deregulation, and a strong foreign policy. You have the ideas and the power.

Wow. I still remember the thrill. I had lived to deliver a stirring exhortation to the president of the United States in the privacy of his own home, and I delivered it while seated in the very spot in which Vice President Calvin Coolidge had slept while President Warren Harding had droned on. This was history in the making. The beginning of Ronald Reagan’s conservative counterculture. 

After the luncheon, Gergen came shivering toward me (Wlady always called him Mr. Potato Head), and, to my amazement, blurted out that I probably would be more comfortable dealing with a staff member “friendlier” than he. Friendlier than he? He could not keep his hostility under wraps, even when there was no reason to admit his hostility. Gergen had obviously thrown in with the assistant presidents, and they had no appetite for a conservative counterculture. All my talk of “ideas” and “culture” was only seen by them as menacing. Our group never met in the White House again. 

I continued seeing the president off and on, though only one more time did I mention the derelictions of his assistant presidents. That would be on March 30, 1987. I went to the Oval Office charged with reassuring the president about the Iran-Contra affair, but before I went into his office, I encountered one of his speechwriters, who told me that the speech writing staff, composed of solid conservatives, had been barred from quoting conservative intellectuals and public figures in the president’s speeches. The assistant presidents were being vigilant. I was urged to mention this censorship when I sat down with him. Well, I tried, but the commander in chief had other things on his mind. I never brought up the disloyal assistant presidents again. He would have none of it. His mind was burdened with something else. 

*****

There was one remnant of Ronald Reagan’s liberal past that he had brought to conservatism: his surviving political libido. We saw it in his tenacity for focusing on the Soviet Union, tax cuts, and renewing the promise of America. I personally saw it in his efforts to create a conservative culture to oppose the Kultursmog. That was one goal too many for him, and anyway, there were not enough conservatives who shared his unique political libido. Of course, the president was no ideologue, much less a utopian; those values were buried long ago in his liberal past.

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