Hayward, Steven F(redric) 1958-

views updated

HAYWARD, Steven F(redric) 1958-

PERSONAL: Born October 16, 1958, in Pasadena, CA; son of James Francis and Jean (Schulz) Hayward; married Allison Rittenhouse, May 20, 1989. Education: Lewis and Clark College, B.S., 1980; Claremont Graduate School, M.A. (government), 1983, Ph.D. (history).


ADDRESSES: Offıce—Pacific Research Institute, 755 Sansome St., Ste. 450, San Francisco, CA 94111.


CAREER: Writer and editor. Golden State Center, Claremont Institute, Claremont, CA, director, 1985-92; Inland (magazine), Claremont, executive editor, 1985-92; Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, San Francisco, CA, senior fellow and director of Center for Environmental Studies, 1992—.


AWARDS, HONORS: Weaver fellow, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1985-86; Earhart Foundation fellow, 1986-87; Olive Garvey fellow, Mont Pelerin Society, 1990, 1992; Bradley fellow, Heritage Foundation, 1997-98; senior fellow, American Enterprise Institute; adjunct fellow, Ashbrook Center, Ashland University.

WRITINGS:


Churchill on Leadership: Executive Success in theFace of Adversity, Forum (Rocklin, CA), 1997.

(With others) Environmental Indicators for Canada and the United States, Fraser Institute (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1998.

(With others) Environmental Indicators for NorthAmerica and the United Kingdom, Fraser Institute (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1999.

(Editor) Foreign Entanglements: An InstitutionalCritique of U.S. Foreign Policy, Pacific Research Institute (San Francisco, CA), 2001.

The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, Prima (Roseville, CA), 2001.

Coauthor of The Index of Leading Environmental Indicators, Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, released annually on Earth Day. Contributor to Encyclopedia of the American Right, 1993, and to periodicals and journals, including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, National Review, and Policy Review; contributing editor, Reason.

SIDELIGHTS: Steven F. Hayward is a senior research fellow and director of the Center for Environmental Studies of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, a San Francisco think tank, as well as the author of Churchill on Leadership: Executive Success in the Face of Adversity. Churchill on Leadership is a study of the character traits, habits, and practices that made up the leadership skills of the world leader. Winston Churchill served in British government for half a century in a number of capacities, twice as prime minister. As Hayward points out, Churchill was known for his self-confidence, plain speaking, and decisiveness. He took full responsibility for his actions, paid close attention to details, and could see the wider view of situations. Hayward notes that Churchill approached new positions by exploring not only the organization of the office, but also new ways to define the job. Churchill also wrote all of his own speeches.

"As a final service to his readers," wrote Terry van der Werff in Global Future Report online, "Hayward appends a succinct twenty-five-page biographical sketch of Churchill which also includes the best description I have ever seen of the difference between the British and American forms of government."

The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order is the 800-page first volume of a two-volume historical biography. It begins with Democrat Lyndon Johnson's 1964 win over Barry Goldwater and a presidency rife with unresolved problems. Johnson came to office with the death of President John F. Kennedy, and during his first full term, Johnson slowly escalated the conflict in Vietnam—a policy that led the North Vietnamese to believe that the United States was unwilling to fight and win. At the same time, Johnson was fighting a "war on poverty" at home which, as Lee Edwards noted in a review in World and I, "fuel[ed] public expectations with extravagant rhetoric" but ultimately failed to achieve its goal of eradicating poverty. Though Johnson spent tens of billions of dollars on social action programs, millions of Americans remained in poverty.

During the early 1960s the United States lost two more of its liberal leaders, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Riots by blacks and antiwar sentiment culminated in violent demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Johnson chose not to run again, and the Democratic choice, Hubert Humphrey, lost the presidential race to Richard Nixon. Edwards commented, "Is it any wonder that the Silent Majority, looking about at the chaos on all sides, gave Nixon another chance?"

The secretive Nixon alienated liberals with his foreign policy decisions, such as the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, and alienated conservatives with his domestic policies. Hayward argues that the Constitutional crisis that resulted from Watergate led to a loss of power in the executive branch that introduced "significant new distortions into our system" that continue to the present. Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned under a cloud, paving the way for Ronald Reagan to take the conservative lead, rising from the governorship of California to the presidency over the next eight years. He lost the nomination to Gerald Ford in 1976, and after the term of Democrat Jimmy Carter, he captured the Republican nomination and was elected president, much to the surprise of many.

Reagan's 1980 win was a turning point for conservatism. Edwards noted that "Hayward properly points out that [the win] was not easy. . . . Reagan was elected because (1) he shrewdly framed the economic debate in the form of a question—'Are you better or worse off than you were four years ago?'; (2) he insisted that 'war is best prevented by preparing to win'—i.e., America should follow a policy of peace through strength; and (3) he convinced the voting public through his many public appearances, especially the one televised debate with Carter—viewed by one hundred million people—that he was competent to be president."

In a National Review assessment of The Age of Reagan, Michael Knox Beran said that Hayward shows that the most significant factor contributing to his success was Reagan's understanding of the changes that had taken place in modern liberalism. "Classical liberalism—the liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville and Abraham Lincoln—was rooted in the promise of the individual citizen," wrote Beran. "It was rooted in his capacity for self-government, and his ability to realize his destiny by threading his way through the emporia of a free society. During the course of the twentieth century, however, classical liberalism gave way to a form of mandarin liberalism, to the belief that problems had grown too complicated to be mastered by private individuals; only experts in the service of the state were competent to solve them." Reagan said when he became governor in 1967, "For many years now, you and I have been shushed like children and told that there are no simple answers to complex problems which are beyond our comprehension."

Beran concluded by calling The Age of Reagan a "grand and fascinating history. . . . Hayward's portrayal of the fall of the old liberal order is not without a certain grandeur. There are no cheap or facile gibes; Hayward is sobered by the perturbations of the liberals in their last extremity, as they suffered through the agony of a collapsing supremacy." Times Literary Supplement reviewer James Bowman called it "a book that reads at times like a grand historical drama, a kind of War and Peace of the American century, complete with romance and adventure and tragic characters, a thrilling survey of what we might have thought to be familiar history but which appears here quite transformed."


BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:


periodicals


Booklist, June 1, 1997, David Rouse, review of Churchill on Leadership: Achieving Success in the Face of Adversity, p. 1650.

National Review, November 5, 2001, Michael Knox Beran, review of The Age of Reagan, p. 56.

Publishers Weekly, May 26, 1997, review of Churchill on Leadership, p. 77; October 29, 2001, review of The Age of Reagan, p. 49.

Times Literary Supplement, April 26, 2002, James Bowman, review of The Age of Reagan, p. 11.

Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2001, Fred Barnes, review of The Age of Reagan, p. A14.

World and I, February, 2002, Lee Edwards, review of The Age of Reagan, p. 20.


online


Global Future Report,http://www.globalfuture.com/ (January 18, 1999), Terry J. van der Werff, review of Churchill on Leadership.

National Review Online,http://www.nationalreview.com/ (March 6, 2002), Steven F. Hayward, "Golden Rhyme: California's history, again."

Right Turns,http://www.rightturns.com/ (April 1, 2002), John Sidline, review of The Age of Reagan.*

About this article

Hayward, Steven F(redric) 1958-

Updated About encyclopedia.com content Print Article