Salon.com > The Real Reagan

What the right won’t admit about Reagan

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 01:30:00 +0000

Nothing better symbolized Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday celebration than that it should fall on Super Bowl Sunday, with Air Force jets roaring unseen over a hermetically sealed stadium, almost, but not quite, drowning out a tarted-up former Mouseketeer who mangled the lyrics of the Star-Spangled Banner.

It was all there: the bombast, the grandiose self-congratulation, the willful blindness, the elevation of showbiz spectacle to patriotic rite. After which, thankfully, a pretty good NFL football game broke out. It's for pseudo-events like the Super Bowl, I believe, that a merciful God gave us high-def DVRs.

How fitting that George W. Bush, the late President Reagan's vicar on Earth, was seated in a front-row celebrity box to witness the spectacle. Reagan's genius as a politician was that he repackaged and sold to millions of Americans the comforting daydreams of the 1950s. Not the '50s as they were -- no Korean War, no Army-McCarthy hearings, no lynchings, no John Birch Society denouncing commie traitor "Ike the Kike" -- but as depicted in TV sitcoms like "Ozzie and Harriet, "Leave It to Beaver" and "The Andy Griffith Show."

When Reagan was (much) less popular than Carter

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 16:01:00 +0000

By 1992, three years after he left the White House, Ronald Reagan was anything but a beloved former president. As a painful recession gripped the country, the public came to see the Reagan years -- which featured a massive defense buildup, soaring deficits and even a stock market crash in 1987 -- as the source of their economic woes. Running for president that year, Bill Clinton promised to enact a clean break from the "failed policies of Reagan and Bush." As Reagan prepared to speak at the Republican National Convention in August, a Gallup poll found that just 46 percent of Americans had a favorable view of him. By contrast, Jimmy Carter, the man Reagan had defeated in a 44-state rout in 1980, was viewed favorably by 63 percent of the American public. The Reagan presidency stood in something approaching disrepute.

Today, though, you'd never know any of this happened. In the two decades since it bottomed out, Reagan's image has been resurrected, thanks largely to a relentless campaign from conservative activists. Will Bunch, who writes for the Philadelphia Daily News and is a senior fellow at Media Matters, chronicled Reagan's image makeover -- and the reality of his record as president -- in his 2008 book "Tear Down This Myth." We spoke with him recently about how the myth of Reagan has taken hold, and whether there's any truth to it.

Reagan’s embrace of apartheid South Africa

Sat, 05 Feb 2011 16:01:00 +0000

The regime of apartheid in South Africa, under which nonwhites were systematically oppressed and deprived of their rights, is remembered as one of the worst crimes against humanity of the 20th century.

Despite a growing international movement to topple apartheid in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan maintained a close alliance with a South African government that was showing no signs of serious reform. And the Reagan administration demonized opponents of apartheid, most notably the African National Congress, as dangerous and pro-communist. Reagan even vetoed a bill to impose sanctions on South Africa, only to be overruled by Congress.

On a trip to the United States after winning the Nobel Prize in 1984, Bishop Desmond Tutu memorably declared that Reagan's policy was "immoral, evil and totally un-Christian." Reagan's record on South Africa was also marked by at least one embarrassing gaffe, when he told a radio interviewer in 1985: "They have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country -- the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated -- that has all been eliminated." Of course, that was simply not true, and Reagan later walked the statement back.

Ronald Reagan cared more about UFOs than AIDS

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 20:30:00 +0000

Ronald Reagan claimed to have seen UFOs on at least two occasions, according to reports from sources as disparate as the Wall Street Journal, Lucille Ball and the National Enquirer. He alerted the Navy to one of his sightings, and he and Nancy believed that Egyptian hieroglyphics referenced extraterrestrial flying crafts.

In 1985, at the first summit meeting between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan surprised the Soviet premier with this odd line of questioning:

"From the fireside house, President Reagan suddenly said to me, 'What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?'

"I said, 'No doubt about it.'"

"He said, 'We too.'"

"So that's interesting," Gorbachev said to much laughter.

That hypothetical space invaders scenario -- a sort of "this island Earth" fantasy that sounds profound to either the screenwriter of a 1950s B picture or a very high college freshman -- was so compelling to Reagan that he repeated it in public speeches, on multiple occasions, while president.

The era of big spending and massive deficits

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 17:01:00 +0000

It is difficult to think of any single person more qualified to trace the roots of today's massive budget deficits, Republican tax cut fundamentalism, and overall dysfunctional government than David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's first budget director.

Stockman arrived at the White House in 1981, part of a new administration ferociously determined to cut taxes and cut spending in pursuit of the "Reagan revolution's" primal goal of smaller government. But as reported in William Greider's legendary 1981 Atlantic magazine profile, "The Education of David Stockman," nothing quite proceeded according to plan. Reagan cut taxes while boosting spending, and we've been living with the consequences ever since.

Stockman is currently working on a book about the financial crisis, and on Thursday he spoke with Salon about what happened in the 1980s, and how the economic decisions made during the Reagan era connect directly with where we are today. To provide some context for the interview, he also provided his own short written analysis of the Reagan economic record, which Salon is including here in abridged form.

We fought a war on lies, and lies won

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 13:30:00 +0000

Ronald Reagan gave America so many pretty sayings, but when it comes to social equality, he'll go down in history for his lyrical lie, "The federal government declared a war on poverty, and poverty won." (He said it many times, many ways; that exact quote is from his 1988 State of the Union address.)

Of course, Reagan was wrong. Poverty declined sharply after the war on poverty commenced. According to the Institute for Research on Poverty, in 1959 the individual poverty rate was 22 percent. It hovered there until about 1964, when it began to drop; by 1973, it was 11 percent. Then it began to climb again, to 15 percent in 1983. Thanks to the economic boom at the end of Reagan's tenure, it dropped by about a point, and then jumped back to 15 percent by the time President Clinton took office. Under Clinton, it fell to 11 percent. Under George W. Bush, it climbed back over 14 percent, and it has continued to inch upward under Barack Obama.

The scandal that almost destroyed Ronald Reagan

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 01:30:00 +0000

On Nov. 13, 1986, President Reagan declared in a national address, "We did not -- repeat -- did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages -- nor will we." His assertion ran counter to covert operations that had been ongoing for several years. Reagan was faced with an uncomfortable question, transposed from the Watergate scandal, which threatened to strike at his credibility. What did the president know and when did he know it? Having secured a landslide win against Walter Mondale in 1984, Reagan’s second term appeared to be one in which the Cold War, arms control and relations with the Soviet Union would dominate the presidential agenda. Instead, Reagan found himself in the midst of a crisis that threatened his presidency.

The “Southern Strategy,” fulfilled

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 20:11:00 +0000

Democrats thought they had solved their Southern problem in 1976, when a peanut farmer-turned-Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter swept through the old Confederacy, winning every state except Virginia en route to a narrow electoral college victory over President Gerald Ford. For the first time in 12 years, the Democrats had won a national election -- and Dixie was the reason why.

This resurgence, though, was little more than a mirage -- a brief interruption in the South's steady march away from the Democratic Party, which in many ways culminated in Carter's defeat four years later at the hands of Ronald Reagan.

The story of why Reagan was in position to run against Carter in 1980 -- and how he managed to turn Carter's prideful home region against its native son -- really begins in 1964, when regional tensions within the Democratic Party finally reached a breaking point. Since Reconstruction, when white Southerners developed a bitter hostility to Reconstruction and its northern Republican liberal architects, Dixie had been the most staunchly Democratic region in the country -- so loyal that FDR actually won over 95 percent of the vote in several Southern states. For decades, the South elected Democrats at every level of the ballot; practically speaking, there was no two-party system in the region.

The divisive underbelly of Reagan’s sunny optimism

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:31:00 +0000

Ronald Reagan was an avuncular statesman whose unswerving faith in America's destiny indelibly changed the course of American society for the better. That's one way Reagan is remembered today, 100 years after he was born, and 22 years since his presidency ended. His optimistic streak is so ingrained in the popular mind, and so intricately associated with Reaganism, that Republican presidential hopefuls routinely invoke his spirit. Even Barack Obama's recent State of the Union address was likened to Reagan's gauzy, sanguinary rhetorical style.

Reagan the optimist is everywhere. It's become a common refrain among not only Reagan's defenders but also among a wider and less politicized audience: He revived Americans' faith in their country and, deploying his "city on a hill" rhetoric, restored patriotic pride after the twin traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. This narrative isn't entirely misplaced, of course.

Reagan was armed with speeches, dramatic backdrops, wit, good looks and an unpretentious disposition, which he used to communicate to Americans that he believed in the country's fundamental decency and its capacity to promote the cause of liberty and justice worldwide. Reagan, Lou Cannon has written, was an "unabashed sentimentalist."

Introducing The Real Reagan

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:30:00 +0000

The 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth has arrived, and hagiography is in the air. More than any modern president (with the possible exception of JFK), Reagan has been the beneficiary of a dogged image enhancement campaign in the years since he left the White House, one that has cemented his status as a saint to the right, and left a new generation of Americans who don't remember much about the 1980s to assume that the decade was marked by one long love affair between a president and his people.

But the reality of Ronald Reagan's presidency, and of Reagan's three-decade career in politics, is far more complicated -- and far more interesting.