The official commissioning of the Navy’s newest nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, is Saturday at the Norfolk Naval Station.
Reagan, still revered by millions of Americans years after his exit from the White House and even as he, the “great communicator,” is no longer able to communicate with his countrymen, will be honored as the ship is the centerpiece of a 90-minute ceremony.
The Ronald Reagan, the ninth Nimitz-class carrier, will be home to more than 5,550 sailors. It will support approximately 80 aircraft. Other ships in the Nimitz series include carriers honoring Presidents Washington, Lincoln, Eisenhower and Theodore Roosevelt.
Michael Reagan, eldest son of the former president, credited the volunteer Santa Barbara Navy League with doing the real work for the occasion. “Without them, there would be no ship,” Reagan, a NewsMax pundit, said as he rushed between his radio talk show and preparations to leave for Norfolk, Va.
“We believe in supporting our sailors. They protect our freedoms, and that’s why we’re here because they support our very way of life,” Navy League President Connie O’Shaughnessy-Los told NewsMax. “They make a contribution by not making the money they could in the private sector.”
The occasion prompts fond memories from those who knew the man, the greatest chief executive of the 20th century.
Robert B. Carleson served as special assistant to the former president in his first term, the heady early years when the Reagan Revolution jelled as national policy. Those were the days before “the Bushies” gravitated closer to the Oval Office in the second term, even as the Gipper forged ahead with his agenda to win the Cold War regardless of who surrounded him.
In an interview with NewsMax, Carleson, who had earlier served as California’s director of social services when Reagan was governor, recalled the great communicator’s fierce loyalty toward his appointees when they were under fire.
At one time, Carleson underwent hours of hostile grilling by a state legislative committee regarding the governor’s welfare reform program. That measure was the forerunner of the welfare bill ultimately enacted on the national level by the “Contract With America” GOP Congress in 1996. Bill Clinton signed it only because he was warned that failure to do so would cost him his re-election.
The questioning became so heated and so filled with cheap shots that Gov. Reagan, viewing it on TV, wanted to get up out of his chair and walk into the committee room, put his arm around Carleson and say, “Let’s go, Bob.”
This was no small matter. It is and was something unheard of in protocol. Only the strenuous pleadings of his closest aides convinced the governor that it would do more harm than good for Carleson and for the welfare agenda. It would be as if President Bush in this era were to do that for his judicial nominees on the firing line of Democrat “When did you stop beating your wife?” inquisitions before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Edwin Meese - President Reagan’s close friend, adviser and attorney general - has said the secret to the former president’s success did not lie in his oratorical skills or background as an actor. Rather, says Meese, “the key to Reagan’s success was that he communicated timeless truths about freedom, limited government, hard work, and opportunity -and that these truths guided him while he was in office.”
The USS Reagan, of course, is funded by the Navy. The volunteer Santa Barbara Navy League raises private contributions for “ship enhancement.” This makes it “a home away from home” for the sailors prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, according to O’Shaughnessy-Los, the first female president of the West Coast group. This is what makes the USS Reagan something beyond “a bare-bones warship.”
“Peace Through Strength,” a rallying cry of the Reagan presidency, is the motto of the new ship.
Vice President Dick Cheney is the main speaker at Saturday’s ceremony in Norfolk. Former first lady Nancy Reagan, the ship sponsor, is scheduled to be there, as are Reagan Cabinet members and loyalists (including those mentioned above), and top congressional icons.
The USS Reagan symbolizes the words of America’s 40th president, who declared that a successful military “is one that, because of its strength and ability and dedication, will not be called upon to fight, for no one will dare provoke it.”
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