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The night Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term, I was watching the returns at the United States embassy in London. Some diplomats had arranged a link to bring in U.S. network television coverage — no easy task with the technology of 1980 — and invited some of us in the press corps to join them.

The ballot numbers didn’t start trickling in until after midnight, but the results were never in doubt: President Jimmy Carter was headed for spectacular defeat. My diplomatic colleagues, publicly so balanced and nonpartisan, were privately appalled. They were about to work for a president who, unlike Carter, had no foreign policy experience, disliked government, and was a Hollywood actor. The next morning the London papers were awash with similar disdain: A cowboy had captured the White House. Who was he? What could U.S. voters have been thinking?

As a foreign correspondent, I was fascinated by the British response. Part of my task was to interpret the “special relationship” between Great Britain and the United States to readers back home. The question underlying each story I filed was one of identity: Who are these strange and interesting people, and what makes them tick? On top of that lay an equally interesting question: What do we strange Americans look like to the British eye?

As I watched my friends in the British press trying to figure out Reagan, I could see they were both helped and hindered by the analogy with Margaret Thatcher. She had become Britain’s prime minister a few months before, swept into the top office partly through public frustration with relentless union militancy. Cut from a Churchillian cloth of indefatigable determination, mastery of detail, and withering scorn for her enemies, she brusquely set out to swing the ship of state to the right.

Ronald Reagan also put the helm hard to starboard. His early dismissal of striking air traffic controllers signaled a Thatcheresque willingness to take unyielding stands. But he hailed from a Middle-American tradition of small-town optimism, unbarbed wit, and can-do individualism that never questioned the relationship between hard work and personal success. Unlike Thatcher, he was genial even to his worst antagonists, committed to a nine-to-five workday and a good night’s sleep, and happy to leave details to be sorted out by his staff. If she was an admiral in full regalia, blasting away with equal relish at striking miners in Wales and Argentinean generals in the Falkland Islands, he was the impeccably tailored chairman of the board, stopping by to count the silver and dispense avuncular guidance.

But before too many months had passed, a curious change overtook my colleagues in the London media. Their scythe-sharp irony began to abate. It’s not that they embraced him or even began to like him. It’s that they figured him out.

And that took them by surprise. Schooled by centuries of byzantine European politics, where nothing is ever what it seems, they were prepared for a presidency shrouded in mystery, complexity, and nuance. They were masters at peering into the murk and ferreting truth out of vagueness. Yet here came a politician who, well before his first year had ended, had laid to rest the question, Who is Ronald Reagan? He was a man visibly motivated by a few key principles, which were simple and easily understood. It wasn’t that he had no depth. It was that the depth was transparent, so you could see right to the bottom. What you saw was what you got: a kind of Midwestern faith that values, adhered to over time, create progress.

That doesn’t mean the public universally liked him. Like Margaret Thatcher, he oversaw a time of immense transformation. Much of it was good, but by no means all. Perhaps what got him through was that, as Johns Hopkins University professor Kenneth Lynn observed in the New York Times over the weekend, he had “a lack of guilt in his personal life and in America in general.” Or perhaps it was simply that he knew what made him tick — and knew it was not baffling and elaborate, but as plain and unadorned as the heartland sky.

And through it all, he flummoxed the journalistic profession. We thought our task was to unravel the tangled skeins of personal intrigue. He knew his task was to help people see that life wasn’t all that mysterious. We were marinated in skepticism. He was refreshed by a few key values, honestly held and patiently repeated.

Time would prove him successful. And time would send the press back to its old familiarities: Eight years into the Clinton presidency, the question, Who is Bill Clinton? still had huge resonance. Reagan’s distinctness lay in the transparency of his values. Love him or loathe him, you knew who he was.

©2004 Institute for Global Ethics