Monday

Ronald Reagan 1911-2004

Ronald Wilson Reagan died as he lived: In a lie. As late as Saturday, the day of his death, his health was worsening but his office denied that his condition had changed. A sad end to a pitiful figure who was manipulated while he was supposed to lead.

Much of this column is repeated from earlier comments on Reagan and the cognitive dissonance necessary to consider him a good president. There is little new to say about a man who hasn't been all here since 1983.

Reagan started his career by pretending to be watching baseball games. He "announced" the game while reading merely reading the results from the wire. Child of an alcoholic father, Reagan developed an early gift for storytelling and acting. He was a first-rate radio announcer of Chicago Cubs games, getting only the bare outlines of the game from a ticker and relying on his imagination and storytelling gifts to flesh out the game. Once in 1934, during the ninth inning of a Cubs - St. Louis Cardinals game, the wire went dead. Reagan smoothly improvised a fictional play-by-play until the wire was restored.. Even as a young man, he wasn't all there. But he was good at faking it, and that's what matters to the GOP.

As his acting career stuck on the second level, his personal life reflected his lack of character. Reagan is our only divorced president (on the grounds of "mental cruelty"), forced to marry a pregnant Nancy in a shotgun wedding, was greatly influenced by astrology in events, senility by 1983, surrounded by corruption and incompetence and found guilty of "failing to meet presidential obligations" (bottom of link), and investigated for being a Communist in 1947. (This last link has been consigned to the vandemark archives, which are not always available.)

HUAC and the McCarthy-era witchhunts were remarkable for their failures. They didn't actually catch any major spies, and let the big ones get away. By relying on Reagan and co. instead of the intelligence community (ie the Bushes...), the witchhunts caught a bunch of people (mostly Jews) who had been to a communist party meeting or two in the 30s, or provided low-level information to the Soviet Union when we were allies fighting Hitler (the major knock on Alger Hiss, it seems). One of the great unasked questions of the 20th Century: If the Soviet Union was such a dictatorship, a top-heavy evil empire, why didn't it collapse after the death of Stalin? Franco's Spain quickly returned to sanity, Tito's Yugoslavia splintered almost immediately after his death, even Communist China has changed considerably after Mao's death. Why not Russia? The answer is not simple, but much of it has to do with the choices available at the time. Because the right-wingers were making life hell for innocent people, the US in the middle 50s was not a good alternative to the Soviet Union of the 50s. We had our own gulag. Why would anyone who loves freedom go after Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly? The Communist Party and the Republican Party offered the same thing for anyone who didn't toe the party line: prison, loss of family, exile and/or death. We thought we had Freedom of Speech, but because of people like Reagan we didn't.

It's been long enough that history is starting to make judgment, and we can say that Reagan was not a good president. He campaigned for 16 years, since his Goldwater acceptance speech and won in 1980 on a balanced budget platform, yet the first thing he did was massively increase the deficit, and for wholly political reasons said his Budget Director. This is the biggest flip-flop in US political history, and it drove conservatives crazy. The corruption in his SAG term of office was reflected in massive corruption in his presidential terms (some attribution here and here and... Indeed, it's worse than reported, going so far as to terrorize church officials for their politics and having the CIA illegally infiltrate church sanctuaries. He didn't defeat "communism". The Soviet Union was less than a quarter the number of people that remain under communist regimes. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was a major victory for the people in Russia and the repressed states, but Reagan's sabre-rattling kept it alive several years after it was obviously dead. Star Wars not the reason: There was no increase in the Soviet Union's military spending in response to Reagan's build-up. He screwed up at Reykjavik, proposing a deal to completely eliminate US and Soviet nukes, then backing off when it looked like Gorby would accept. Credit should go to Carter for setting exactly the right policy with a selected arms build-up, in Afghanistan, and with Solidarity. As we've seen since, the Soviet Union wasn't much of an empire and most of the people in it aren't particularly evil. Perhaps if he hadn't fired the air traffic controllers, there would have been more experienced people who would raise the alarm faster on 9/11.

The right wing likes to say they're "resolute" with "absolute morals", but all this means is that they plow ahead even if their policies are disaster. They steadfastly refuse to admit that they were wrong, sort of like Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Reagan and co. trained and funded what became the Taliban and Al Queda because they were convinced "the enemy of our enemy is our friend". They were wrong. Deadly wrong. One of Reagan's legacies is the cowardly way he fled Lebanon after the terror bombing of our troops by Hezbollah, described as Reagan's worst moment. That weakness led to another of Reagan's legacies, 9/11.

The Reagan administration was one miserable failure after another. Stupid, corrupt and greedy. The inmates took over the asylum.

Still, one can't be the most powerful person in the world for eight years and not get something right, accidentally. He had two notable successes: Dr. C. Everett Koop and getting rid of the SS20s in Europe.

Dr. Coop was a controversial figure when nominated for Surgeon General in 1981. One of the evangelicals in Reagan's cabinet, he was an outspoken anti-abortionist. But he was a doctor first, and spoke on many public health issues. He attacked tobacco vigorously, calling for "A smoke free society by the year 2000". Reagan was slow off the mark on AIDS (as was most of the world). The conservatives desperately wanted another shot fired in their trumped-up "culture war", but Koop wanted to save lives more than preach. His 1986 report was "explicit, nonjudgmental, controversial and popular." Dr. Koop refused to let anything get in the way of saving lives, and told the truth too often for the Republicans. Poppy Bush refused to nominate him for Secretary of HHS, and he left public life to give lectures and educate the public.

The Cold War -- the war of nerves between the Soviet Union and the US -- ended with the Cuban Missile Crisis. We came all-too close to blowing up the world, but demonstrated that neither the US nor the USSR was quite that self-destructive. From then on, it was an arms race. The Soviet Union upped the stakes by shipping nuclear-tipped SS20 missiles into Eastern Europe. These missiles could take out London, Paris, etc... and not Washington, Dallas or LA. The stakes were now raised for a part of the world that thought it was under the US nuclear umbrella. NARO and Carter tried for an arms deal, but none was forthcoming. Reagan insisted that England, France and other countries host Pershing II cruise missiles as a counter. This met with tremendous resistance from people who didn't want to be targets in a nuclear exchange. Well, we here in the US didn't want to be the sole target, and the countries under our protection have to take some of the heat too. By spreading the danger of the Cold War arms race to our allies, they suddenly had to take the threat more seriously. On the flip side, the Communist counties in Eastern Europe were in much the same position. It's one thing to have Soviet troops use your rail lines in a potential attack. It's quite another to have your cities be targets for nukes. Carter laid the groundwork for splintering Eastern Europe from the Soviets by supporting Solidarity, and Reagan helped make sure they knew that they would be involved in a shooting war. I don't give Reagan credit for dissolving the Soviet Union, but I do give him credit for making the USSR's European allies (and our own) a bit more nervous about the kind of protection they could hope to have.

Reagan himself was more complex than his critics admit, but simpler than his rabid supporters try to slip by. The Reagan Administration is marked by a lack of Reagan. Deaver, Ailes, Watt, etc etc etc were running the country, and we haven't recovered from their corruption, extremism and stupidity. Abrupt betrayal of ideals when Reagan got into power left many conservatives clinging to the Republican party even though they espoused none of Reagan's new policies. Despite screwing things up in the first place, Reagan remains a Hero of the Revolution and is revered by conservatives for toppling the Soviet Union. All former presidents get a certain amount of honor after their death, no matter how bad they were, and Reagan is no exception. But please, none of this Mount Reagan garbage. He should be on the $3 bill.

I wonder if Nancy's astrologer predicted Ron's death...

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