THE SUNDAY CAMERA - Guest Opinion
April 19, 1998
"Ronald Reagan is the most loved man in America today" quoth House
Majority Leader Dick Armey on the occasion of the recent congressional act that
renamed Washington National Airport to Ronald Reagan Airport.
The Majority Leader's words were not only gross hyperbole, they clearly
misrepresent the vast cumulative discourse on the subject of Ronald Reagan
carried by the electronic and print media during his two administrations
(1981-1988) and since. There is little doubt that Ronald Reagan left an
indelible imprint on the country. Indeed there is hardly a sector of American
life that is not to some degree still sensible of the effects of the so-called
'Reagan Revolution.' To cite only two: 1) More than $150 billion in federal
revenue each year is devoted to paying interest on the debt attributable
primarily to one presidency. America in 1980, before Reagan took office, was the
world's largest creditor nation; when he left office eight years later America
was the world's largest debtor nation and sinking rapidly into even greater
debt. 2) Fully half of the federal judiciary by the end of the 1980s were
composed of Reagan-Bush appointees. Moreover, as Republican Senators, lead by
Helms, Hatch and Lott, effectively continue to deprive the sitting president of
his constitutional power to appoint judges to the federal bench this deplorable
condition may continue well into the next century.
Few would argue that the United States in the late 20th Century has had more than its share of ineffectual, failed and disgraced presidencies. Certainly no one can say just yet how the present administration will be viewed by historians and future Americans. Whereas, Bill Clinton's private life has been checkered by revelations of frequent episodes of acute testosterone poisoning, his generally progressive style of government appears to have benefited many Americans, and his vision of the future still inspires broad popular support. Contrast this personal profile with that of Ronald Reagan. His only reported sexual transgression was to make Nancy Davis pregnant two months before he married her. But in the office of the presidency his record is a pernicious concatenation of economic, environmental, diplomatic, military, financial and moral disasters. Consider the following well publicized docket of historical events beginning with the 1980 presidential campaign.
Respected columnist and expert on Middle Eastern affairs, Gary Sick, managed the Iran hostage crisis for President Carter in 1980 as a member of the National Security Council. Later, in the course of research for a book on the story of the 52 Americans held hostage for 444 days by a radical Iranian political faction, Sick accidentally uncovered a vastly more sinister saga of political subversion hatched by the committee to elect Ronald Reagan. Long an ardent Reagan admirer Sick at first discounted the incredible evidence that came to him from a variety of sources. Ultimately, however, he compiled sufficient and compelling evidence to compose the book 'October Surprise', named after the Republican's own nightmare that Jimmy Carter might obtain the release of the captives before the November election. The revelations brought forward by Sick strongly suggest that the Reagan campaign team made a deal with members of the powerful Khomeini opposition party in Tehran to delay the release of the hostages until after the election on the promise that the Reagan administration would supply arms to Iran in its war against Iraq. The principal protagonists in this drama were William Casey (chairman of the campaign committee and later Director of the CIA who died just as the Iran-contra scandal broke), Bani-Sadr (Iran's president at the time who confirmed that the Khomeini group conspired with the Americans to delay the hostage release), Jamshid Hashemi (an Iranian arms dealer who claimed to be present at the negotiations), and Richard Brenneke (arms merchant and a self styled CIA operative who provided detailed testimony of the meetings) and Bassam Abu Shrif (PLO advisor to Yasir Arafat, also claimed to be present at the negotiations).
No serious investigation was ever mounted by the Bush administration to determine the veracity of the alleged perfidious crimes (then Vice President Bush was strongly implicated by several eye witnesses to have been a co-conspirator). The undisputed facts are that the hostages were released 50 minutes after the Reagan inauguration in January 1981 and the flow of arms to Iran began shortly thereafter.
Political favoritism and fraud at HUD permeated both terms of the Reagan administration but were not widely publicized until late in his second term. What emerged from the Congressional hearings was that the Reagan White House ordered HUD officials to make multimillion-dollar grants to housing projects in politically sensitive areas to improve the election prospects of Republican candidates in those districts. Cashing in the bonanza Interior Secretary James Watt (the environmental nemesis of the 1980s) personally obtained a $300,000 consulting fee for making a few phone calls that resulted in a lucrative HUD contract for a Republican constituent. Straight shooting Republican Jack Kemp appointed to HUD Secretary to replace the inattentive and disgraced former Secretary Samuel Pierce was placed in the uncomfortable position of castigating the Reagan policies that precipitated the HUD debacle in the first place, "What I could not anticipate three months ago was the extent to which I had inherited a legacy of abuse and mismanagement, fraud and favoritism in HUD programs".
"No one knows the final bill, but this we know: this is the biggest financial scandal in American history" commented Mortimer Zuckerman of U.S. News and World Report at the height of the S&L crisis. The S&L industry was conceived and developed in the post WWII era to offer ordinary Americans home mortgages at affordable interest rates. However as interest rates escalated in the late 1970s the system began to destabilize. In perfect accord with his deepest conviction that the 'government was not the solution to problems but was itself the problem' Reagan promulgated his all encompassing deregulation thesis of government which invited the Congress to relax controls on the S&L system in order to help solve their dilemma. The Garn-St. Germain bill was drafted and quickly passed to meet the challenge. This bill basically gave the S&L operators carte blanche to promote and carry out virtually any exploitive scheme that promised to to turn a quick profit. Unscrupulous S&L managers and outright crooks were quick to appreciate and take full advantage of the government's naiveté and ineptness. The main fallout from this reckless policy was that the penalty for these defalcations fell not on the miscreants but rather on the shoulders of the U.S. taxpayer. A $500 billion S&L bailout bill would be added to the already burgeoning Reagan-Bush deficits. No high U.S. official was ever found culpable for the S&L disaster.
Of all Reagan's campaign promises the ones that the average American taxpayer should find most interesting in retrospect were his commitments, tantamount to a pledge of honor, to trim the size of government, reduce taxes and rollback the debt. Under Reagan's baleful influence, however, government continued to grow, the tax burden was shifted from the rich to the poor and the national debt appeared to exponentiate in size. Columnists and political pundits Richard Reeves and Robert Rankin concur in the opinion that the main thrust of Reagan's economic policy was not to reduce federal spending but to change the priorities. The principal beneficiaries turned out to be the defense contractors; the principal losers were middle and lower economic class Americans. Reeves goes further, "The big ideas of the Reagan presidency: the way to reduce the size and power of the U.S. government was to choke off its revenues. Sooner or later reduced income taxes would create huge federal deficits that would inevitably lead to reduced social spending ...Transforming American resources into increased defense spending would trigger an arms race with the Soviet Union. The United States would win the Cold War against the Evil Empire."
The deplorable facts of the U.S. economy from 1980 to the end of the Reagan-Bush era are that the gross national debt escalated from $900 billion in 1980to $4 trillion in 1992. The gross interest on the debt escalated from $75billion in 1980 to $300 billion in 1992. The cause is not difficult to determine: the tax law changes gave huge tax breaks to the richest while increasing taxes in relative terms to the nation's poorest; meanwhile defense spending coasted along at the extraordinary and accelerated pace of $200 then$300 billion per year. Add the cost of bailing out the bankrupt S&Ls, rampant defense fraud of the 1980s and a worsening economy, thus bringing in fewer tax revenues, and the overall financial picture at the end of the decade appears to be basically understandable. Davis Stockman, on leaving the job of Reagan's Director of the Office of Management and Budget sounded the alarm that the president's economic policy (a policy that he helped to create) had launched the nation on an unsustainable financial course. All that that seemed to accomplish was to earn Stockman a stinging rebuke from his former boss, R.R.
The Reagan legacy most likely to carry into the next century with the same devastating impact that his 4$ billion debt will have on future economic policy is the effect that the today's predominantly conservative federal court system will have on future 1st Amendment rights. Presidents Reagan and Bush collectively selected 67% of the nation's district and appellate judges and five of the nine Supreme Court justices, including the elevation of William Rehnquist to Chief Justice. The significance of this rightward shift in jurisprudence can hardly be overestimated in this litigious and combative society. Nearly two decades under this court system have already demonstrated that the ample gains in progressive law of the previous three decades are indeed fragile. Not only have these gains not been extended by the present court system, outright reversals have occurred in reproductive rights, in separation of church and state, in free speech, and even in the historic advances in civil rights law that antedated the Reagan era by almost a generation.
In 1983 in a nationally televised speech President Reagan sought to lift the spirits of a nation, grown weary of the endless cycle of the Cold War, by announcing the dawn of a new era in which nuclear weapons were to be rendered "impotent and obsolete." He called the program the Strategic Defense Initiative and challenged American technology to devise an effective defense against ballistic missiles. In November of that year the American Physical Society (APS) authorized an independent study by their own scientists to evaluate the President's proposal. The long awaited results of that study were revealed in May 1989 at the APS meeting in Crystal City, Virginia. However, contrary to the administration's hopes and expectations, the report turned out to be another severely critical indictment of SDI and its principal reliance upon directed energy weapons. Furthermore the report went on to censure SDI's blind disregard of parallel developments in countermeasure technology that would ultimately jeopardize both the efficacy and the survivability of SDI in any of its proposed scenarios. It is almost absurdly easy for scientists to demonstrate (as they have done repeatedly) that any of the proposed space defense strategies was hopelessly flawed by the many ways an adversary may choose to defeat it. Consider the fact that a few enemy payloads of river sand counter orbiting the SDI fleet could wipe it out at a single stroke.
Towards the end of his first term President Reagan claimed that poverty was disappearing and that American families were in better financial shape than they were four years earlier. Even at that time these claims were demonstrably untrue. The 1983 poverty rate was higher than at any time in the previous 20 years and the median family income was also lowest for the same period. By the end of his second term statistical data from the Congressional Budget Office and the Internal Revenue Service showed that average income of the richest 1% had increased from $280,000 in 1980 to $550,000 in 1989. During the same period the incomes of the nation's poorest families went down by more than 10%.
The cost of this massive redistribution of the nation's wealth upon its own social fabric was far more pervasive than mere economics and inevitably elicited ramifications in all the other social ills of which we are already too familiar. The hysteresis of poverty has its greatest impact is upon society's more helpless members, the very old and especially the very young. The Fordham Institute for Innovation in Social Policy monitored the well-being of children in America and compiled an index from zero to 100 to quantitatively gauge children's health in the problem areas of infant mortality, child abuse, poverty, suicide, drug abuse and high school dropouts. In 1972 the index nationally was 72; by 1987 it had declined to 37. Clearly the concomitant effects of Reagan cutbacks in social programs coupled with loss of working class earning power inflicted almost irreparable damage on a generation of the poor while those same policies created another, miniscule generation of mega-millionaires.
"No goal is more critical to healing the global environment than stabilizing human population.": 'Earth in the Balance' by Vice President Al Gore, 1993. In 1984 a group of about 100 environmentalists and arms control specialists conducted a five day conference on "The Fate of the Earth". Their main conclusion was that the degradation of the environment coupled with exploding global population and the nuclear arms race threatened all inhabitants of the Earth in ways and in extent unique in history. Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, a self proclaimed Republican, put it another way, "Ronald Reagan pushes the wrong way on virtually every issue I'm interested and seems to be totally disconnected from what is going on in the world."
Also in 1984 the United Nations convened a special Mexico City conference on population control. The United States virtually boycotted that conference owing to the Reagan administration's vehement opposition to all matters pertaining to sex education and birth control by artificial contraception. This benighted policy contravened the previous U.S. positions on population control that existed throughout the entire post war period when it was the world's leader in family planning, maternal health and child care. To its great discredit in the eyes of the rest of humanity the United States under the Reagan and Bush essentially abdicated that role. Under Clinton it has regained much of that lost stature among nations.
In the 1960s the nation seemed to become acutely aware that the natural environment was in serious trouble - that it was not an infinitely resilient machine as past generations apparently believed. Only a concerted effort by all segments of society in cooperation with all levels of government and industry could protect and preserve this irreplaceable resource. The Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 which committed the U.S. to protecting the environment while sustaining a healthy economy. Virtually from the moment he entered office in 1981 President Reagan began a radically different agenda on the environment designed to undo many of the legislative gains of the previous decade. His appointments of Anne Gorsuch to head the Environmental Protection Agency and James Watt as Secretary of the Department of Interior were clear indications of the administration's new pro-business bias and its virtual disregard for the entity it was supposed to protect. The principal means to conduct the new policy was implemented through 'regulatory relief' laws and federal spending cuts in the regulatory agencies. Under Gorsuch and Watt the agencies became highly politicized, intractable to Congressional oversight, unavailable to environmentalists and perceived by the public as environmentally hostile. Eventually both were forced to resign under congressional and public pressure and were replaced by slightly more congenial personalities, William Ruckelshaus and William Clark, both of whom, however, showed little inclination to depart from the narrow and ideologic policies of their predecessors.
The natural environment suffered along a broad front under the stewardship of Ronald Reagan. Some of the more harshly affected environmental elements include: the thousands of lakes watersheds and forests, many in Canada, damaged or killed outright by acid rain from air pollutants emanating from deregulated U.S. factories; the unhealthy urban atmosphere of most large American cities (Reagan rolled back fuel economy standards for motor vehicles) the forests, mostly on Northwest federal land, that lost 90% of their old growth timber in one decade; the water treatment and sewage plants that were never built due to federal spending cuts (that also adversely affected state and local budgets); the toxic waste disposal sites that were belatedly cleaned up at great cost. All of these economic losses and public health hazards could have been prevented or greatly reduced if previously existing environmental laws had been followed or improved upon instead of being cut back or ignored altogether.
The Reagan administration's penchant for conservative social issues often bordered on fanaticism but none so vehement or sharply focussed as on the subject of abortion. Despite the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that said the right to decide for or against having an abortion belonged primarily to the woman in consultation with her doctor, the religious right joined hands with its staunchest ally, Ronald Reagan, in its effort to overturn the law, or failing that to make clinical abortion de facto impossible to obtain. Under the previous conservative Republican administration of Richard Nixon the Family Planning Program, Title X, was set up to help the poor and the young to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Even though this law explicitly forbade using program funds to pay for abortions it was hailed by family planning advocates as a significant improvement in federal social policy.
In spite of its abortion prohibition provision Title X became a prime target of conservative (almost all) Republican legislators who wished to stamp out not only access to abortion services but access to birth control facilities as well. Ultimately, in one of the most absurd and outrageous pieces of federal legislation ever devised it became unlawful for doctors and clinicians even to advise their patients that abortion was a medical option, particularly where the well being of the mother was at stake. This ruling was flagrantly contrary to basic medical practice and ethics where doctors are expected to provide their patients with the best medical advise at their disposal. Any other course deprives the patient of their right to decide what medical care is in their best interest. This wrong-headed legislation passed unscathed through the Bush administration, but, gratefully, was rescinded early in the Clinton presidency.
The decade of the 1980s witnessed the most costly failure of U.S. diplomatic and military policy since the Vietnam War as the American backed Salvadoran government waged an unrelenting and savage war against its own population. It is estimated that the Salvadoran army killed 75,000 people including many rebel soldiers but mainly it killed unarmed Salvadoran citizens in remote villages who took little part in the war. The Reagan administration funnelled nearly $6 billion into this fratricidal war that pitted a well armed and U.S. trained Salvadoran military against the well organized but poorly armed FMLN guerrillas.
By all accounts the war constituted a military and policy failure in which the United States embraced an oppressive right wing government in order to carry out its anti-communist policy goals in Central America. One of the government of El Salvador's principal means of quelling the leftist rebellion was to systematically massacre its political opponents by unofficial 'death squads' that freely roamed the cities and hinterlands. Political assassinations continued throughout the duration of the conflict, peaking at about 800 killings per month in 1981. Reports of massacres by the Salvadoran army in the villages of El Mozote and Las Hojas were denounced as totally false by Reagan officials despite confirmation by American journalists who visited the scene of the killings. The long and bitter struggle finally was brought to an end only after the Bush administration abandoned the military solution in favor of peace talks between the belligerents under the auspices of the United Nations and a consortium of Latin American countries.
The crisis that erupted in Iraq in 1991 in a broad sense can be traced to British imperialism after World War I, but the current dilemma with Saddam Hussein is more directly the result of U.S. meddling in the region beginning in the 1970s as the CIA sought to help Iran in its fight with Iraq. After the fall of the Shah Iran became our enemy and the U.S. decided to take the side of Iraq in this regional dispute. In the early 1980s Reagan launched a secret Middle East policy that would shape the skein of events that eventually culminated in the Gulf War. With little public disclosure and carefully side-stepping U.S. arms export laws the Reagan and later the Bush administration sent billions in U.S. funds to Saddam, channelled through the Department of Agriculture and the Export-Import Bank despite warnings by these agencies of the illegality of this action. The infusion of American money and gratuitous intelligence services on Saddam's behalf no doubt encouraged him to proceed with his August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, buttressed with the implicit understanding through American diplomatic channels that the U.S. had no interest in defending Kuwait. As the rest of this sordid history unfolded most Americans were persuaded of Saddam Hussein's perfidy but few bothered to study or appreciate its provenance.
Swept into office in the landslide election of 1980 Ronald Reagan, activist and ideologic by nature, and thus assured by the election results evidently developed a mindset prepared to skirt any law that that interfered with his vision of America's final victory over international communism and his destined role to lead it. The U.S. Congress wary of another Vietnam debacle and weary of the inept conduct of the Nicaraguan Contras to overthrow the legally constituted government of Nicaragua enacted the 1984 Boland Amendment which forbade sending any further U.S. aid to the rebels.
Having once crossed swords with the Congress and lost the battle to legally support the Contras the President chose to go underground. Working outside the jurisdiction and knowledge of the Intelligence Committee which has primary responsibility for any official U.S. covert actions, scorning the will of Congress, and violating the explicit provisions of the Neutrality and Arms Export laws the President, a few members of the Cabinet and a close knit coterie of National Security Council staff conducted an illicit foreign policy to sustain the 'freedom fighters' in Nicaragua.
President Reagan later insisted that he was completely unaware of these activities until the scandal broke in 1986. However, the record of his own statements and those of his advisors prove the opposite. As early as 1984, the record shows, he approved the solicitation of U.S. Allies for aid to the Contras and personally met with King Faud in 1985 and obtained a pledge of $2million a month. In later testimony former NSC advisor McFarlane disclosed that White House Chief of Staff James Baker advised the President that he could be impeached for allowing these solicitations to proceed. The President later freely acknowledged that he gave his personal approval for arms shipments to Iran, "it was my idea in the first place."
With these admissions at their disposal one wonders what additional information the Senate Committee investigating the scandal needed to decide upon on the truth or falsehood of the charges. The question of whether the President knew or did not know of the diversion of proceeds from the arms sale to the Contras seems almost irrelevant. Since an attempt had clearly been made to subvert the Constitution by officials sworn to uphold it, the fact that monetary fraud was added to a chain of other abuses would appear to be beside the point. But the Congress apparently was unwilling to subject an old, weakened but still popular President to the stresses of an impeachment trial and decided instead to abdicate its responsibility to an independent counsel.
The efforts of Republican independent counsel Lawrence Walsh to obtain convictions of the Iran-contra defendants, particularly the principals, Lt Col. Oliver North and John Poindexter, a retired naval Admiral, on substantive charges were doomed from the start. The Congressional hearings had 'tainted' any subsequent proceeding; moreover, the administration covered itself by invoking 'national security privileges', i.e., "state secrets of the highest order" would be compromised. North, Poindexter, retired General Richard Secord and arms dealer Albert Hakim were accused in a 21 count indictment of illegally operating a secret unauthorized military assistance network to aid the rebels in Nicaragua with proceeds of a U.S.arms sale to Iran. The celebrated trial of Oliver North was grand theatre but accomplished little in meting out justice. It did, however, illuminate the egregious harm inflicted on the rule of law, the guiding principle of a true democracy, by a small group of reckless operators eagerly acting on the orders of the President and high ranking officials in the NSC. Perversely, instead of being demonized as the principal purveyor of subversive government North instantly became the idol of the far right.
Powerless to prosecute a defendant whose main defense depended on the accessibility of documents the government claimed were too secret to be released the court convicted North on trivial collateral charges that were basically irrelevant to the central conspiracy. Even that conviction was later overturned on appeal. Few persons were deceived by this clever evasion by the government and the defendants. Judge and jury expressed their personal belief that the wrong persons were on trial, that North was in fact telling the truth that his actions were based on orders from above. As trial judge Gerhard Gesell put it: "I do not think you were a leader at all, but a low ranking subordinate carrying out the instructions of a few cynical superiors."
I n 1986 a second deal was struck with Iran to sell it arms in exchange for hostages. This time it was for 7 Americans that had been captured in Beirut Lebanon in 1984, arguably an honorable thing to do if it were done officially and openly with the proceeds going to the U.S. Treasury. Testimony obtained by the independent counsel placed at least three of Reagan's cabinet members at secret meeting to develop a plan: (1) to free the American hostages by selling arms to Iran, and (2) to use the proceeds to buy arms for the Contra war (knowing full well that Congress had forbidden such aid).
In statements to the press former Secretary of State George Shultz and former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger disavowed President Bush's claims to have been "out of the loop" An extant Weinberger memo describes a meeting at which he argued against the arms sale and Bush argued for it. President Reagan's first reaction to the disclosure was to deny any knowledge of the deal, no doubt remembering his pledge "never to negotiate with terrorist nations." But faced with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary the President conceded the fact in a nationally televised broadcast, explaining that his secret arms deal was "an effort to reach out to moderate Iranian factions." The Iran-Conra prosecutors in June 1992 concluded that Reagan knew about the deal from the beginning, and, furthermore, was warned by some of his advisors that it was illegal. For his trouble Caspar Weinberger was indicted with five felony counts of lying and coverup, but was later pardoned by President Bush.
In the autumn of 1988 some of the first reports began to surface about a Contra-drugs connection (Leslie Cockburn's book 'Out of Control' in 1986probably was the first). According to the findings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (and others) profits from drug smuggling involving elements of the Contra army were used to finance their war against Nicaragua. The findings also showed that officials in the Reagan White House knew about the Contra connection and not only did nothing to stop it but set up a tight cover to protect the drug traffickers from exposure and investigation.
Investigative reporter Murry Waas of the L.A. Weekly scooped the story in a three-part series beginning in September 1988. The essentials of that piece revealed how tons of cocaine were imported into the U.S. using CIA proprietary and contracted aircraft and pilots. The operation was done in cooperation with some of the world's most notorious Columbian drug traffickers who supplied the cocaine, reaped the profits and contributed millions of dollars in support of the Contra war.
In December of 1988 the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, chaired by Democratic Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, issued its report 'Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy' on their investigation of the links between U.S. foreign policy and drug traffiking in Central and South America to the United States. The principal elements of that report were as follows.
Evidence showed that drug traffiking was wide spread in the Contra forces and
was implemented through a web of business relationships with Latin American
cartels which supplied "cash, weapons, planes, pilots, air supply services
and other services." Evidence also showed that drug smuggling crisscrossed
the war zone by Contra suppliers, Contra pilots and mercenaries throughout the
region. The 169 page report contained a number of strikingly pointed and
stunning paragraphs condemning the administration's duplicity and complicity in
the the Contra drug operations, only three of which are repeated here:
"There is also evidence on the record that U.S. officials involved in
assisting the Contras knew that drug smugglers were exploiting the clandestine
infra-structure established to support the war and that Contras were receiving
assistance derived from drug traffiking. Instead of reporting these individuals
to the appropriate law enforcement agencies, it appears that some officials may
have turned a blind eye to these activities."
"The payment of funds by the State Department to drug traffikers, while
they were under investigation by law enforcement or already indicted, is
compelling evidence of our government's failure to coordinate the war on
drugs."
"The logic of having drug money pay for the pressing needs of the Contras
appealed to a number of people who became involved in the covert war. Indeed,
senior U.S. policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money was a
perfect solution to the Contra's funding problems."
The Subcommittee's report concluded by stating that senior officials of the Reagan-Bush administration knew that the Contras were shipping drugs into the United States but took no action. Subsequently they adamantly denied all such allegations. The above direct quotations and summary must be considered in the context that about half of the Subcommittee were staunch Republican supporters of the president and consequently forced substantial compromises in the final report language.
The 'Great Communicator' acquired this sobriquet because of his extraordinary ability to captivate audiences by skilful intonation and body language in speeches brimming with sincerity and conviction, at least during his first term. Never mind that the words were the product of another's intellect, withall the consumate skill of an actor the effect of his speeches upon millions of Americans was electrifying. In less controlled situations, however, the intellectual depth may have been missing but his ability to throw off one-liners, "there you go again" seemed always to have a memorable effect. Un-fortunately, faced with complex issues in protracted debates where analytic thought and instant recall were needed he was more often befuddled than incisive.
According to friend and confident, former Moral Majority leader Rev. Jerry Falwell, Reagan confessed his belief in the literal truth of the Bible. His concept of eschatology was that of a fundamentalist Christian: Judgement day will come when Christ returns to proclaim the Kingdom of God, secure the salvation of the righteous and the damnation of the wicked. During the 1980 campaign Reagan intimated to TV evangelist Jim Bakker, "We may be the generation that sees Armageddon."
The second term, however, showed a distinct dimming of his former vigor, less willingness to study position papers and a reluctance to confront complex and difficult issues. Anthony Lewis of the New York Times commented on this decline, "There is every evidence that the presidency is ceasing to function. "In the disarray that attended the punishing and unrelenting disclosures of the Iran-Contra scandal in early 1987 the President seemed so disengaged and inept at his job that White House aides seriously considered the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment that provides for removal of a president for incompetence. The new Chief of Staff, Howard Baker, discounted the possibility and put an end to such speculation but the downward slide apparently continued. The possibility that the President might be affected by Alzheimer's disease while still in office was either not known or was not disclosed at the time.
The eight years of the Reagan presidency has often been referred to as the 'Reagan Revolution'. To many this meant that the permissive era of judicial activism and liberal-progressive politics were at an end and that a new conservative world order was at hand. Some called the accomplishments of this administration the most successful in modern U.S. history. Indeed, Ronald Reagan was largely effective in fulfilling his main campaign promises: strength through a more powerful defense establishment; reduced taxes (for some) to stimulate growth; a deregulated economy to free up the market place; and a more conservative legislature and court system to punish crime and eliminate the abuses of the welfare state. Indeed there was significant success in these endeavors, but at what cost.
By simultaneously slashing taxes for large corporations and the rich while building the largest military machine in history Reagan accumulated more debt in two terms than all previous administrations combined. "Getting the government off the backs" of the American people meant cutting the budgets of agencies that serve the societal needs of the middle and lower class. It also meant relaxing the regulatory laws that insure the safety of food production, airline operations, financial institutions, the workplace, waste disposal and the environment.
Defenders of Reaganomics point with unabashed pride at the unprecedented prosperity that America experienced from Reagan's second term and on into Bush's first. But part of that prosperity was paid for by the reallocation of the nation's wealth from the bottom up; the rest was borrowed from future generations of Americans.
Reagan ardently tried to establish a new set of ethical standards for Americans founded principles that could have been taken directly from the Christian right handbook: showy displays of patriotism are necessary to be a good American; opposing organized prayer in schools is not only an attack on religion it is also immoral; the legal exercise of the abortion right is equivalent to murder; sex education is basically salacious and instils immoral tendencies in the young; homosexuality is evil because it is elective, not inherent; and so on.
Under Reaganism Liberalism was made to mean something detestable, an object of contempt and ridicule among true conservatives. The central idea of liberalism is that proactivism is often necessary to lift the fortunes of the persecuted, the weak and the defenseless. That this idea could become so maligned by a collection of politicians to promote their conservative agenda and that this distorted view can become so readily accepted by their constituents demonstrates the fact that many Americans simply do not know their own history. Liberalism was not and is not the exclusive property of either political party. This generation of Americans needs to be reminded that each new major social advance in the American civilization was the product of liberal causes: the end of slavery, the right of labor to organize, immunization, the institution of child labor laws, Social Security, civil rights, environmental protection laws, Medicare to name just a few.
The one thing critics of Ronald Reagan surely cannot dispute: he put an end to Soviet Russian communism. Or did he? To accept this notion is to do a great disservice to every American president since and including the time of the Second World War. American presidents have each in his turn, by his own method and in accord with his deepest commitment to this Democracy resisted communism in almost every sector of the globe, sometimes, rightly or wrongly, even committing the nation to war against this menace. If history teaches us anything it teaches us that healthy, strong nations do not collapse overnight. Star Wars (SDI) and all the other U.S. sabre rattling during two Republican administrations were not the cause of the demise of the Soviet Union. The rapid disintegration of that vast empire was inevitably the result of many years of internal economic instability and an oppressed society; no nation so overstressed by its military machine that it could not sustain a free, viable and healthy civilian population can expect a long and peaceful life.
Howard Garcia