Don Hodel
Reagan Secretary of Energy

Shortly after President Reagan's inauguration in 1981, Secretary of the Interior, James G. Watt, came back from a Cabinet meeting with a big smile on his face and said to me (his Under Secretary), "If you want to know where Ronald Reagan stands on any issue, just read any speech he's given over the last 16 years!" He was, of course, indicating that, as President, unlike so many who win that office, Ronald Reagan continued to espouse the same issues and causes he had fought for over the years.

I was in the Cabinet as Secretary of Energy when David Stockman, Director of Office of Management and Budget, and Donald Regan, Secretary of the Treasury, made a very clear and powerful presentation on the necessity of a tax increase to cut the deficits. By the time they were finished I was convinced. It seemed to me that the President had no choice but to follow their advice. The President, however, cut right through all the rhetoric and said, "I understand what you're saying, but, y'know, if we raise taxes, Congress won't cut the deficit, they will just spend it." Bingo! He never sight of reality even when all those wise heads around him had lost theirs. Subsequent events have shown that he was exactly right.

On another occasion, on the same subject of the need for a tax increase, at a Cabinet breakfast (which the President did not attend) several Cabinet members said we had to support a tax increase and urged Chief of Staff, Jim Baker, to set up a meeting so they could urge the President to retreat from his opposition to a tax increase. I recall Baker saying something like, "Well, if you want a meeting, I'll set it up, but I sure don't want to be there!" indicating the intensity of the negative reaction he knew would come from the President. It was clear to all that the President was simply not going to budge on that issue. (Or any other issue which he cared about.)

It was this same constancy and clarity that allowed me, as Secretary of Energy, to speak to the Nuclear Power Assembly and list a series of things we would do to try to promote nuclear energy. I closed, however, by saying that the one thing we would not do was provide financial subsidies. When I finished, a reporter accosted me before I had left the stage and asked rather accusatorily, "Did you clear this speech with the White House?!" Having worked in prior administrations where clearance of major speeches was a requirement, for just a fraction of a second I thought, "Oops! Am I in trouble for not clearing this speech?" Then, I recognized reality and said to the reporter, "I didn't have to. I know where President Reagan stands on nuclear power." The only thing I would have had to try to clear would have been a proposal to provide financial subsidies to the nuclear power industry, and I never would have gotten that clearance.

Lyn Nofziger once commented to me that the great thing about Ronald Reagan was that he knew that 35% of the people would never support him no matter what he did, and he simply did not worry about them. Too many politicians spend their time in office trying to prove to their critics that the critics were wrong about them rather than doing the things that prove that their supporters were right.

Finally, as will soon be seen from the publication in February, 2004, God and Ronald Reagan, by Paul Kengor, President Reagan was a man with a deep and abiding faith in Jesus Christ. His Christian world view infused his thinking in the same what that it did for so many of the Founders of our nation and gave him the goal of bringing freedom to all peoples. I knew of his commitment, but I do not think I appreciated how much it affected and empowered him, particularly in his approach to the Soviet Union.

It is my hope that in due course history will recognize that he was a great President and a great man whose vision for America and the world resulted in the end to the cold war and the enormous reduction in the risk of a global holocaust.

It was a terrific pleasure to work for a man who knew what he believed and why he believed it and who was not about to be moved by sophisticated (but incomplete, misguided or inaccurate) arguments or the urgings of the left-wing liberal press.