Reagan Library Focuses on Think Tank

The private foundation that built the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library has finished paying for the bricks and mortar and is focusing on developing a public policy think tank to carry the torch of Reagan-style conservatism.

The final $2-million payment on the $57-million hilltop complex was delivered this month, said John J. Midgley, executive director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. The money for the 153,000-square-foot museum and research library came largely from Reagan’s wealthy friends, big business and Japanese interests.

“This is a real milestone,” Midgley said of the foundation’s ability to pay off the nation’s most expensive presidential library. “Everybody’s real pleased.”

Now, the foundation is concentrating on extending the Reagan legacy through the Ronald Reagan Center for Public Affairs, a fledgling operation in the basement of the library.

While the library looks to the past, detailing Reagan’s White House years, Midgley said, the focus of the center is the future.

In recent months, the public affairs center has started laying the groundwork for an ambitious series of conferences that Reagan associates hope will bring together political figures, business leaders and scholars from around the world to conceive solutions to domestic and international problems.

The Reagan foundation’s board of trustees recruited former Secretary of State George P. Shultz as a member last February to help attract scholars and world leaders to events.

Conferences will cover a range of topics, from arms control and the U.S. economy to establishing democratic institutions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The plan also calls for the seminars to be more than academic exercises.

“These will not be like university seminars where you kind of sit around and exchange views and then go to lunch,” said Midgley, who also serves as the center’s director. “They have to be top class and they have to have high impact.”

The first program, “Free Enterprise and Limited Government,” is scheduled for April 23-25. Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp has signed on as the conference’s chairman.

The program will focus on the U.S. economy and what role government can and should play in better equipping the country to compete in the global marketplace.

“I think it may be a very spirited conference,” said Martin Anderson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a domestic policy adviser under Reagan. Anderson said Kemp has invited him to attend and he expects the Clinton Administration’s new tax policies to be one of the topics discussed.

A second conference, “Arms Control and Global Security,” is tentatively scheduled for mid-July in conjunction with the Mikhail Gorbachev Foundation.

Midgley said he was in Moscow this month arranging an agenda, which will examine the progress of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

The historic pact signed in January by President George Bush and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin calls for the most sweeping cuts in history in both countries’ nuclear arsenals. It is expected to be approved by Congress and the Russian parliament this year.

Midgley said he hoped that the program will include appearances by Reagan and Gorbachev. But Gorbachev may address the conference via a satellite link.

Other conferences are also under consideration, with subjects ranging from problems confronting California to the U.S. presidency and the press.

Frederick J. Ryan, Reagan’s chief of staff and a member of the foundation, said it is unclear what role Reagan will play in the conferences. “He plans on being involved in all of them,” he said. “But whether or not he will actually attend each of the conferences has not been determined.”

Ryan dismissed any notion that because of Reagan’s age--now 82--he might play only a minor role in the center’s activities. “His age hasn’t slowed him down with any of the other activities of the library,” Ryan said.

Ironically, the Reagan public affairs center seems to mirror the efforts of the Jimmy Carter Center of Emory University in Atlanta.

In the 11 years since its inception, the Carter center has sponsored conferences on Middle East peace prospects, U.S. health care policy, arms control, Latin American debt and human rights.

“The goal of the institution extends far beyond the role of a think tank,” said Carrie Harmon, spokeswoman for the Carter center. “What makes us different from other institutions is that we actually go out in the field and practice what we’ve learned.”

With the center’s sponsorship, Carter has worked with leaders of Third World countries to increase food production and try to eradicate diseases. Carter has monitored new democratic elections in Zambia, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

With a 120-person staff and a $25-million annual operating budget, the Carter center has sponsored conferences drawing speakers such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, former President Gerald Ford, former Argentine President Raul Alfonsin and Gorbachev.

For its part, the Reagan center has about $1.5 million in its coffers and $8 million in uncollected pledges, said Walter F. Beran, treasurer for the Reagan foundation.

“Frankly, we have more ideas right now than we have resources,” said Midgley, who has a staff of three. The center has yet to establish an annual operating budget.

The foundation held a fund-raiser for the center Feb. 6 to celebrate Reagan’s 82nd birthday. Tickets for the black-tie gala went for $500 apiece and more than 500 people attended, including former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

In addition to the fund-raiser, Midgley said the foundation recently received a single contribution of more than $200,000 that will be used to help underwrite the economic conference in April.