In the wake of his second administration,
there are a number of events that occur which suggest
the impact that the Reagan administration
or perhaps history generally, had had on international affairs,
in the world. Just to
go through a few of these: remember that
Reagan and Gorbachev had met in Washington, they had
reached agreements that would lead to the INF Treaty,
to actual nuclear reduction, and it's just fascinating that
protesters in the United States, often environmental protesters but
more largely peace protesters through the early 1980s
had been calling for a nuclear freeze, for no more
nuclear missiles and Ronald Reagan comes through
and has success, actually reaching agreements with the Soviets to reduce,
not just freeze,
but reduce the total number of missiles each side will possess.
But it's not really just the INF Treaty, it's not really just the summits, it is
the largest systemic issues that are occurring
in the Soviet Union and its satellite states.
I mentioned solidarity in Gdansk,
Poland, in an earlier segment. Well in June
of 1989, Poland
finally got those free elections that had been talked about since the end of
World War II.
It was an amazing moment,
after years of struggle and of protest.
And then in October,
Hungary, who had had an uprising in the 1950s, Hungary
will adopt a democratic constitution
and will begin opening its borders with the West. And that leads to a fascinating
push - demographic push - by East Germans who now can go into Hungary and through
Hungary and
exit to the West. You remember
the Berlin Wall that was put in place
to stop this exodus, this brain drain,
had prevented the crossing between East and West Berlin
and it separated Germans, Berliners.
And now, in 1989, for the first time,
they can make their way through Hungary and out and they did.
I remember distinctly the images of
these people really trying to -
getting tangled in barbed wire, for that matter. Whereas just days before they
could have been shot for trying to cross that border,
under this new, more open system, man,
they're just taking everything they've got and going. With the Berlin Wall
no longer really functional, on November 9, East German
authorities will open the wall. I can remember
very distinctly those images of
East Germans/East Berliners and West Berliners who,
again could not cross,
chipping away at the wall, standing on top of the wall.
It was just - I really wish I could get across to you,
it was an amazing moment.
An amazing moment, and you knew it was an historic moment. You knew that in terms of
the Cold War something fundamental
had changed by the end of 1989.
What it changed in part was that the Soviet Union,
rather than crushing these events
and these forces was simply pulling back its troops.
In time, of course,
Germany itself would be reunified.
But the president who oversaw these events
was not Ronald Reagan, it was
George HW Bush. And he enters
a world as president, again that's very much
changed. There are a number of
issues, though, that he'll confront early in his presidency,
that are very problematic.
On the foreign affairs front, for all the amazing things will happen in
1989, just two years earlier
the Reagan administration, including George HW Bush as vice president,
had really been caught up in a scandal, known as the Iran-Contra scandal.
This Iran-Contra scandal
involved a plot led by
a national security aid, by the name of Oliver North,
to accomplish a number of sort of illegal
activities.
1. How do you get aid, since Congress has barred aid
to the Contras in Nicaragua, how do you get
aid to them? Where do you get the money? Well you can't put in a budget, you can just
pull it out of nowhere. Where are you going to get your money?
And it's illegal for the government to use funds to
to support the Contras but there's also another problem.
I mentioned the Middle East.
There were throughout this period, the 1980s, there were hostages
being held
in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East.
And again remember the hostage crisis at the end of the Carter administration.
Ronald Reagan was very much concerned about getting those hostages out.
Well it turns out that to raise money for the Contras,
Oliver North had been part of this larger scheme
to sell
to sell missile technology to
Iran. And Iran and
its leaders had some control over the hostage-takers
in Lebanon. The idea was
that, although it was denied
later, the idea basically was that you exchange missiles for hostages,
and then you take the money you make of the missiles once you free the hostages
and it goes to support the Contras and basically
whether it's legal or whether it's a policy matter,
when it comes to light it looks bad.
By 1987, Congress was holding hearings
on the Iran-Contra scandal, and the question being asked was
whether the scandal went all the way to the top, whether Ronald Reagan
at actually approved, or authorized,
the plans
or had in any way sought to cover them up.
In the end it's largely Oliver North and a few other officials who will
really take the blame. Ronald Reagan goes on television
and basically does a tremendous job
of pushing away the scandal
from himself personally.
But there are also signs of recession,
a little bit of slowdown, and another sort of scandal involving
savings and loan associations, much like banks, in which
some very important figures have been playing fast and loose with
people's money,
which it turns out really isn't insured.
And there are some substantial political figures,
especially the Republican Party, but more broadly that are involved in this
scandal over the savings and loans
and the failures of regulation in the banking industry.
So, for all that's accomplished the Reagan administration actually ends
on, I don't want to say a sour note, but sort of a sour note.
And it falls, then, to George
HW Bush to oversee
the events that sort of conclude much of the Cold War,
but also to deal with the problems left at the end of the Reagan
administration.
So,
in thinking about the problems that George Bush faces
he now has to deal with the S&L failures, of which there were
approximately 600,
but some of the results of these long-term Reagan tax cuts,
an ever-increasing deficit,
trade deficit but also a
spending deficit where the United States cannot pay its bills,
is not paying its bills - we're basically borrowing money -
and
problems with unemployment and the growing jobless rate.
There were old problems too. One of the events that I specifically remember was
the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles,
where an African-American was stopped, a motorist was stopped and beaten
on the side of the interstate by a group of Los Angeles policemen.
And it so happened that we were early enough then in this new media and
technology that there were people there
to actually take pictures. Meanwhile,
there was a growing push in terms of feminism that continued to build as more and
more women went into the workforce.
In 1970 there been 29 million
women in the workforce. By 2000,
somewhere around 66 million women in the workforce.
And larger changes in the economy. For instance, a shift from
manufacturing that's under way toward service industries and more
white-collar work, management work.
Another issue
that emerged really late in the Reagan presidency -
well midway in the Reagan presidency, his
two administrations - was the issue of AIDS,
and that goes back again of course to the issue of gay rights,
at least as conservatives in this country saw it.
But it was a disease that began affecting
homosexuals first,
but it was known quite early on that it wasn't
going to be merely a "disease of homosexuals." That was part of the
arguments that were being made in the 1980s,
and there was a good bit of fear -
how one contracted the disease, who could contract the disease,
and there were some individuals who showed
a decided amount of sort of bravery
I think in trying to move public opinion towards
much more of a sense if sort of compassion for those who were ill.
That's a problem that the Reagan administration
really fails to confront, fails to recognize.
There's that underlying notion - this is somewhat opinion here - but an underlying
notion that
AIDS and HIV, the infection that leads to AIDS
is a problem of, for instance, the gay community
when in fact it's becoming increasingly clear over the course of the 1980s
that
anyone could potentially catch
AIDS in a number of different ways and so
it's a huge issue in the 1980s and one that
George HW Bush will have to deal with as well.
Immigration
begins to become an increasingly important issue.
Remember that in 1965
the United States government
had basically reworked or refashion its immigration policies
and the result was a lifting of the bans that had existed
in terms of where people could originate,
a lifting of the bans that had existed since the 1920s.
That's going to remake
American demographics in some major ways including an increasingly large
Hispanic population
in the United States but also
Asian population and that's
one of those factors that's been huge
already in the 21st century. The one thing I want to mention about this
before
moving on to the next statement just very quickly is the passage
under George HW Bush for all his sort of talk of "points of light."
He talked about a sort of service to humanity that was very personal and
individualized, but not government
sponsored as part of his larger conservative image.
One of the, I think, key achievements have that administration is the passage
of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
It's one more facet of this larger expansion of
rights but the idea was that
Americans with actual disability should not be denied their basic
rights as citizens because those disabilities
and that access was
something that was incumbent upon society to provide,
to ensure that access was
given, was maintained for all American citizens.
And that was, I think, an important important piece of legislation
under George HW Bush. I'm going to stop right here,
and I'm going to pick up with the final bit of this lecture
in the last segment.