Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday Sunday provides an opportunity for people who respected and admired him to talk and write about the President and his legacy. Some recall his great achievements—his role in ending the Cold War, Reganomics, and the revival of conservatism. Others reminisce about his acting and political careers before he became president. Others remember his storytelling, his boundless sense of optimism, and his deep and enduring love of America.

As someone who arrived in Washington, D.C., the year before President Reagan and who worked in the Department of Defense during his eight years in office, I remember a president who inspired and empowered the people that worked for him, didn’t require or create a bloated national-security bureaucracy, and who you didn’t have to analyze to understand. What you saw is what you got.

A U.S. Army major just out of graduate school assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), I went to work every day in a civilian suit. Ever since the Vietnam War, men and women in the military that worked in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area did so in civilian clothes. It was the legacy of an unpopular war and an unpopular military.

One of the first things President Reagan did after taking office was to put us back in uniform. It didn’t erase the scars of the Vietnam War and the disdain so many of our fellow Americans had for us, but it was a beginning. It told us that our president was proud of us and that we should be proud of ourselves. It would take another ten years and another war for American warriors to regain the trust and respect of the American people, but it was Ronald Reagan who began the process.

As an analyst in DIA, a U.S. Army attaché in China, and as a civilian in the Office of the Secretary of Defense during Ronald Reagan’s two terms, I witnessed how the U.S. national-security establishment was supposed to work. The Iran-Contra affair, notwithstanding, it has rarely worked so well since.

Unlike the bureaucratic behemoth the national-security establishment has become in the 23 years since Reagan left office, his was lean, focused on the big issues, and effective. Its accomplishments—winning the Cold War, getting the Soviets out of Afghanistan, strategic cooperation with China without compromising the U.S. arms sales to Taiwan—are historical facts. What’s little known to all but those who served in the Reagan Administration and who have studied it, however, is how these things were accomplished within.

Ronald Reagan’s national security policy-making team was managed by seasoned loyalists and veterans who had President Reagan’s trust and confidence and were empowered to act decisively. Equally important, they had trust and confidence in him. Secretary of State George Schultz (1982-1989), Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger (1981-1987), and CIA Director William Casey (1981-1987) all served unusual six-plus-year terms in office as did many senior officials under them. When they disagreed, and they often did, they didn’t waste months attempting to forge a watered down consensus memo through endless policy committees and subcommittees. They took their disagreements directly and personally to the president who they knew would forthrightly make the right decision.

This simple but fundamental bond of trust had a trickle-down effect. Under, assistant, and deputy assistant secretaries in DoD, the CIA, and to a lesser extent in the more Foreign Service-dominated DoS, worked the same way. Their empowerment, along with their shared principles and sense of purpose, enabled them to minimize the natural bureaucratic obstacles to policy making and focus on the problems at hand.

The definition of empowerment I learned during the Reagan administration wasn’t allowing subordinates to follow their own policy preferences. It meant having the information and confidence to know what the president and the people between him and you wanted and to act knowing you were doing what they wanted you to do and that they would back you up. I never had to ask myself when a new problem or crises arose, where is President Reagan likely to come down on this issue? You knew what he believed in and what he stood for.

Reagan critics, of course, will argue that’s precisely what allowed the Iran-Contra affair to happen. Lt Col Oliver North took empowerment a bridge too far. But that’s the risk every commander-in-chief takes. Give your subordinates broad authority and they inevitably will make a mistake now and then. If you don’t choose the right subordinates, and you don’t empower them, you get the policy-by-bureaucracy we’ve all become so used to in Washington, D.C.

As a career member of the Senior Executive Service, I went on to serve under Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. They were all good presidents. They each had their accomplishments and their failures. What they all had in common, however, was that you frequently didn’t know where they would draw the line; and under them, the national-security bureaucracy became obese, less agile, and less effective. President Barack Obama and his national security establishment, even with Reagan administration veteran Bob Gates at Defense, are worse.

An enduring lesson that I learned from Ronald Reagan and his presidency is that when we elect a president, we must elect a man or women that we truly know and understand. Our belief in them can’t be based on promises and rhetoric and by filling in the blanks with our own wishful thinking.

Ronald Reagan rarely said one thing and did another. He didn’t campaign to the right then to the center to attract voting blocs then move in another direction once elected and reelected. What you saw is what you got. Perhaps that’s why so many people ridiculed him early on. They couldn’t believe he was an honest man who said what he believed and governed based on those beliefs, overwhelming shared by the majority of Americans—American Exceptionalism, limited government, and, in the national security arena, a belief that America should welcome and embrace its role as the leader of the free world.

It was a great honor and a privilege to serve under Ronald Reagan. Like so many other Vietnam War combat veterans, he restored my faith in America.