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TOPIC OF THE WEEK Remembering Ronald Reagan Tributes by Republicans Dinesh D’Souza, senior domestic policy analyst at White House, ’87-88 By Ela Dutt
Counted among one of the “top young public-policy makers in the country” by Investor’s Business Daily, D’Souza’s 1997 book, ‘Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader,’ is considered a definitive and insightful work on the actor-turned-politician. A graduate of Dartmouth College, D’Souza stridently Republican views have stirred more than one public policy debate around this nation, and his books have been acclaimed and scathingly criticized, among them, The New York Times best-seller, ‘Illiberal Education’ (1991), ‘The End of Racism’ (1995), ‘What’s So Great About America’ (2002). He is presently editing a book that is about to be published entitled, ‘The Best That Has Been Thought and Said: A Multicultural Reader.’ At 26, he was advising President Reagan on civil rights, constitutional issues, AIDS and probably learnt what made the man in the White House tick, but not least of all from his research and reading. To read D’Souza on Reagan, it would seem the American president supported the Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev to reform despite criticism at home, because he somehow knew the reforms would fail. “These criticisms missed the larger current of events that Reagan alone appears to have understood. In attempting to reform Communism, Gorbachev was destroying the system. Reagan encouraged him every step of the way; as Gorbachev himself joked, Reagan induced him to take the Soviet Union to the edge of the abyss and then take “one step forward,” says D’Souza in his writings.
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