Today marks the centennial anniversary birthday of Ronald Reagan and the planned accolades are well deserved for he brought pride and spirit to a humiliated nation and changed the political direction and conversation of our politics.
As a man, Reagan was charming, intelligent, driven and a wonderful teller of stories about Hollywood and his days as a radio sportscaster. Anyone who disliked him as a person would not be a friend of mine.
I was prepared for the charm attack, accepting his omnipresent bowl of jelly beans and a tribute to my Republican father in Orange County as we sat down for an interview in the California governor’s office. I asked two softball flattering questions before the one to which I wanted answers.
“Why did you close down the state mental wards causing thousands of patients to go homeless and wandering our streets?”
Reagan stiffened from the abrupt departure from this cheeky reporter. I cannot recall his answer. I think he deferred to the explanation he offered when signing the law or executive order. Interview over as staff rushed to remind him of a meeting with powerful people, naturally.
I followed Reagan’s career from unsuccessful Republican presidential candidate to eventually winning the presidency in 1980. I was impressed with his message as well as his campaign promises. I voted for Reagan his first term because there was no way in hell I could for Jimmy Carter after 20% inflation, OPEC and a last year in humiliation as the radical Iranian Shiites held 55 embassy staff hostage for 444 days.
The hostages were freed the day Reagan was sworn into office, setting off a string of good luck and fortune his worshipers claim was his tough hawkish stance in foreign affairs. There is credence to that line of thinking based more on belief in the man and less on fact.
Reagan was lucky in his fight against the leadership of the Soviet Union he called the “Evil Empire.” His timing was perfect because a group of old Communist despots from the revolution began dieing off. Enter the new, more western-savvy Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan pounced on the opportunity.
Reagan’s words seizing the moments of history captured a nation’s heart — In East Germany, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”… the four words describing his Cold War policy, “We win, They lose” … the tearful tributes spoken on the beach in Normandy honoring our D-Day fallen heroes… and the words of compassion and resolve after the space capsule tragedy that killed our astronauts.
These traits in our president makes Reagan a political icon worthy of admiration but not exactly a candidate joining Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt on Mt. Rushmore, unless, of course, there is room to chisel and the total cost born by private donations.
As president, Reagan could be brutal. He crushed the Air Traffic Control union. He could be hawkish. He ordered a retaliatory air strike at Libya. He could be dovish. He pulled our Marines out of Lebanon after a terrorist attack killed 220 and another 21 U.S. service personnel.
But mostly, Reagan was the right president at the right time for communicating pride and a renewed spirit grown weary by a Cold War, Iran’s hostage fiasco and Vietnam. Reagan inherited years of domestic safety net programs culminated by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and, after Nixon, Ford and Carter, an apt description of what had unfolded — a Nanny Government.
In the years following his tragic death from Alzheimer’s disease, Republican presidential candidates pay homage to their icon almost to laughable proportions as we saw early in the 2008 election campaign event held at the Reagan Library.
And on Friday night, former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was the opening speaker at the anniversary celebration sponsored by a conservative group called Young America’s Foundation.
I watched the live telecast on Fox. It was a good speech but I wasn’t interested in the red meat blaming the Obama Administration for all our woes but what she had to say about Reagan.
— In that speech, Palin acknowledged that Ronald Reagan was “one of a kind” without one replacement. She added, “there’s a whole army of patriotic Davids out there, across this great country, ready to stand up and to speak out in defense of liberty. And these Davids aren’t afraid to tell Goliath ‘Don’t tread on me!’.”
That sounds more Tea Party than the tone a more-conciliatory Reagan ever enunciated.
— “Remember he said the nine most frightening words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’
— “Stick to the time-tested truths that Reagan taught,” Palin implored in her closing remarks. “Knowing that America is the shinning city on the hill; knowing that God has shed his grace on thee…”
Observed Ron Reagan, the son from Reagan’s second wife Nancy and family’s progressive wing, said in an interview repeated on the Fox News website, that he doesn’t see anything in common between his dad and the former Alaska governor.
With the memory of Gov. Reagan’s release of the mentally ill failing to dissipate over three decades ago, I have refused to join the myth-making crowd that cherry picks his actual record to foster a political God for the ages.
Says Reagan biographer Lou Cannon quoted in the FoxNews.com story:
Tea partiers rail against soaring public debt and sprawling government programs like Social Security and Medicare. But public debt roughly tripled on Reagan’s watch and he did not attempt to dismantle Social Security or Medicare during his term.
“He was no tea partier,” Cannon says.
Will Bunch, author of “Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy” and senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News, offers this assessment of the Reagan record as president in an op-ed article in the Washington Post.
— Reagan’s popularity is overrated with approval rating averaging 53%, 35% when unemployment reached 10% with 33% demanding his resignation during the peak of the Iran-Contra scandal. Polls reflect trends in specific time frames and this seems to be a shallow argument in the life achievement category.
— Reagan’s crowning glory was 1981 when he slashed tax rates for the wealthy from 70 to 50% and delivered additional tax breaks to big corporations including the oil industry. But the following year he flipped under pressure and signed the biggest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history at that time.
And more:
Ultimately, Reagan signed measures that increased federal taxes every year of his two-term presidency except the first and the last. These included a higher gasoline levy, a 1986 tax reform deal that included the largest corporate tax increase in American history, and a substantial raise in payroll taxes in 1983 as part of a deal to keep Social Security solvent. While wealthy Americans benefited from Reagan’s tax policies, blue-collar Americans paid a higher percentage of their income in taxes when Reagan left office than when he came in.
That’s part of the myth we never hear from the Reagan fan club. When I point this out to my conservative friend, she clamps her hands over her ears, shakes her head violently and pleas to stop.
While Reagan was a fearless architect of the big picture — a trait that haunted George H. W. Bush over “that visionary thing” — he delegated every detail to subordinates and turned the Oval Office into a 9-to-5 schedule. The little things came back to bite him and one in particular will send shock waves through his disciples.
Writes Bunch:
In 1987, Reagan aide Paul Bremer, later George W. Bush’s point man in Baghdad, even argued that terrorism suspects should be tried in civilian courts. “A major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are – criminals – and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law, against them,” Bremer said. In 1988, Reagan signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which stated that torture could be used under “no exceptional circumstances, whatsoever.”
And this puff the magic dragon myth buster:
Federal spending grew by an average of 2.5% a year, adjusted for inflation, while Reagan was president. The national debt exploded, increasing from about $700 billion to nearly $3 trillion. Many experts believe that Reagan’s massive deficits not only worsened the recession of the early 1990s but doomed his successor, George H.W. Bush, to a one-term presidency by forcing him to abandon his “no new taxes” pledge.
The number of federal employees grew from 2.8 million to 3 million under Reagan, in large part because of his buildup at the Pentagon… He abandoned a campaign pledge to get rid of two Cabinet agencies – Energy and Education – and added a new one, Veterans Affairs.
I honor Ronald Reagan for what he accomplished, bumps and all. To canonize the man by distorting and condoning portions of his record his disciples don’t like is a miscarriage of justice and an insult to his character, integrity and contributions to our world order.
Jerry Remmers worked 26 years in the newspaper business. His last 23 years was with the Evening Tribune in San Diego where assignments included reporter, assistant city editor, county and politics editor.