Hey it’s Professor Dave, let’s discuss Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan was the most transformative president since Franklin Roosevelt, though not for
the better. For nearly 50 years both Republicans and Democrats accepted the changes that FDR had
brought about regarding the government’s responsibility in providing a just and fair
life for all its citizens. This social contract, born during the depths of the Great Depression,
was the acknowledged foundation of American life until Reagan, whose sunny optimism, supply
side economic theories, and union-busting began the eradication of the American Middle Class.
In his first inaugural address, Reagan famously declared, “In this present crisis,
government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” This passage would
be taken as dogma by the GOP, although Reagan was only referring to the economic stagflation
that had plagued the Carter era. Instead, the Republican Party began dismantling Roosevelt’s
New Deal coalition that had created the greatest middle class the world had ever seen. The irony is
that Reagan had not only been a fervent New Dealer but a union leader as well, as the President of
the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1954. Reagan would go on to take much of Roosevelt’s delivery
and use it to dismantle FDR’s policies. But let’s first go back to the beginning.
Ronald Wilson Reagan was born to an alcoholic Irish father,
and like many such children he learned to live in denial of reality, an attribute that came in handy
in his chosen vocation of show business. As a young radio announcer he would read baseball games
from the Teletype machine and embellish them with his own imaginary play-by-play accounts. Later,
as a contract player at Warner Brothers he would frequently play second fiddle to Errol Flynn, but
was able to demonstrate his acting ability in the melodrama King’s Row. He had actively campaigned
for Roosevelt and was an avid supporter of FDR’s New Deal. In the postwar era, the film roles began
drying up and Reagan turned to television, where he became the host for General Electric Theater.
This coincided with his divorce from his first wife, Oscar-winning actress Jane Wyman and his
second marriage to starlet Nancy Davis. Davis came from a wealthy right-wing family and her
influence would be profound on Reagan, who also had been alarmed by the Communist infiltration
exposed by Richard Nixon and the Congressional House on Un-American Activities Committee.
GE was one of the major companies of what would later be termed
“the military- industrial complex.” In addition to his hosting duties, Reagan was sent on speaking
engagements around the country, extolling the virtues of the American Way of Life,
Free-Market capitalism, and the need for vigilance against the Communist Menace.
During the 1964 Presidential Election, Reagan gave an electrifying televised speech for Barry
Goldwater, and caught the eye of conservative leaders of the California GOP. He was chosen
to run against popular governor Pat Brown in the 1966 race, and he won in a stunning upset.
Reagan’s appeal lay in his staunch disdain for the protests that were erupting over
the Vietnam War in colleges across the country. The California University system, built by Brown
into some of the finest public universities in the world, was a target of Reagan’s wrath, as were its
anti-war protestors who he felt were coddled and encouraged by liberal anti-war professors.
After only two years in office, Reagan ran for president in 1968 but the nomination went to
Nixon, and Reagan went on to win a second term as governor in 1970. He battled Gerald Ford for the
GOP presidential nomination in 1976 but lost, his decade-long political career seemingly finished.
But Ford lost the election to the unknown Georgia governor Jimmy Carter.
After four years of Carter’s awkward handling of the economy and the Iranian Hostage Crisis,
Reagan won the 1980 election in a landslide. On his inauguration day, the hostages were released,
leading to widespread speculation that like Nixon 12 years earlier, Reagan had sabotaged the
Democratic president’s negotiations with a hostile foreign power for his own political purposes.
An assassination attempt early in his term created a wave of sympathy for Reagan,
who managed to emerge in good humor, telling his surgeon as he was wheeled into the emergency room,
“I hope you’re a Republican.” He took advantage of this boost in popularity to pass a massive
tax cut that reduced taxes on the wealthy from 70% to 50% and reduced taxes on capital gains
from 39% to 20%, the idea being that a reduced rate would stimulate the economy by investments
from the wealthy. This became known as the “trickle down theory,” an economic
program ridiculed by Reagan’s own vice president, George H.W. Bush, calling it “voodoo economics”
during their competition for the Republican nomination. Reagan also fired Air Traffic
controllers when they went on strike, and in these two early incidents of his presidency,
the seeds of the great economic disparity to come were sown. Reagan’s own Budget Director
David Stockman deemed trickle-down theory a misguided policy, yet Reagan’s magnetic
personality and powers of persuasion enabled him to deflect any criticism, becoming known as “The
Teflon President,” since no matter what critics threw at him, nothing ever seemed to stick.
Reagan’s disparaging attitude towards government was coupled with an idealization of business,
a throwback to the Roaring 20s ethos of Calvin Coolidge who famously said, “the business of
America is business.” Coolidge had replaced FDR in Reagan’s pantheon and the dogma of “Reaganomics”
infected the Republican Party like an epidemic. “Facts are stubborn things,” John Adams once said,
so Reagan simply ignored them in favor of his simplistic worldview: America good, Russia bad;
government bad, tax cuts good. These simplistic views extended to his foreign policy as well,
embracing murderous right wing death squads in Nicaragua and radical Islamic Jihadists in
Afghanistan as “freedom fighters”. Reagan supplied these terrorists with arms and money that would
eventually be used against America in years to come. Reagan viewed the Soviet Union as an “evil
empire” that needed to be destroyed. His strident tone when attacking the USSR recalled the darkest
days of the Cold War and during his presidency, nuclear war again loomed as a conceivable reality.
Yet for the American public, it was Reagan’s sunny view that endeared him to the nation. For over
two decades, Americans had been traumatized by assassination, ten years of the Vietnam War, race
riots, Watergate, and the Iranian Revolution. They were tired and exhausted, and Reagan’s optimistic
“Morning in America” re-election campaign offered a false sense of hope that things would be just
fine as long as the Gipper was returned to the Oval Office. He easily demolished the
feeble campaign of Carter’s Vice President Walter Mondale, winning re-election in another landslide.
One of the most remarkable things about Reagan’s presidency was his good luck.
The Soviet Union was rocked by the successive deaths of its leaders Leonid Brezhnev in 1982,
Yuri Andropov in 1984, and Konstantin Chernenko in 1985. Determined to stop recruiting elderly men to
top positions who would immediately die in office, the Soviet Politburo appointed Mikhail Gorbachev
as their leader. Gorbachev was a visionary, he understood that the USSR’s Afghan invasion had
become its own Vietnam and it was a disaster that was bleeding an already stagnant Soviet economy.
He realized that not only could the Soviet Union no longer afford the Afghan War but the entire
Soviet system and its four-decade occupation of Eastern Europe was no longer tenable. Just as
the Chinese Communists were embracing a market economy, Gorbachev embraced glasnost, a Russian
word meaning openness. While the Chinese leaders went about reforming their economic systems
while keeping their tight political reins in place, Gorbachev wanted to reform the Russian
political and social structure before he modified the outmoded economic system. He also approached
the Western counterparts with a refreshing candor and realism, instead of trotting out old
shopworn tirades about the supremacy of Communist thought. After British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher met with him she told Reagan, “I like Mr. Gorbachev, he is a man we can do business with.”
Gorbachev and Reagan met in Iceland for a summit in October of 1986
and much to each man’s surprise, they agreed on a number of issues confronting their nations,
including reduction of intermediate-range nuclear missile systems in Western Europe.
Most astonishingly, Reagan proposed an elimination of all nuclear weapons, which Gorbachev agreed
to on the condition that the U.S. abandon its Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed “Star Wars”
for a proposed protective missile shield over North America. Reagan refused and the two men,
who had come so close to outlawing nuclear weapons, parted without reaching agreement.
The irony was that the missile defense shield was not practical and was never built,
another example of Reagan’s outlandish thinking. Despite the setback in Iceland,
Reagan and Gorbachev developed a respect for one another and Reagan accepted an invitation
to visit the Soviet Union in 1988. When asked if he still believed it was an evil empire,
Reagan responded, “No. I was talking about another time, another era.” Reagan still
demanded that the Soviets allow freedom in the occupied Eastern Bloc, and while visiting the
Berlin Wall the previous summer, he had demanded that Gorbachev prove his commitment to change.
“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for
the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate!
Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” It
was a brilliant maneuver by Reagan that put the Soviet leader on the defensive. Two years later,
the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe would end, as well as the occupation of Afghanistan.
The one major scandal of Reagan’s term was the Iran-Contra Affair, a convoluted plot
by some of the Administration underlings to circumvent Congressional sanctions against
arming the anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua by selling weapons to the Islamic Republic of Iran,
which was then locked in a costly war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
It revealed a befuddled Reagan, unaware of his subordinates’ actions. Several members
of his staff were sent to jail, serving as the most egregious stain of his presidency.
But when Reagan left office, he could pronounce his tenure a successful one, at least on his
own terms. He set out to get the economy moving again, and he did. He set out to stop Communists
in Central America, and he had. Moreover, along with his unlikely ally, Mikhail Gorbachev,
he had set the stage for the fall of the Soviet Union, and its retreat from Afghanistan.
After two decades of American crises, Reagan had seemingly achieved the impossible; he had won the
Cold War and returned the United States to its pre-eminent position as leader of the Free World.
But his unquestioned belief in Free Market Capitalism would eradicate much of the goodwill
he had engendered, and his economic legacy would be a hyper-aggressive Darwinian Market economy,
symbolized best by Gordon Gekko, the ruthless protagonist of Oliver Stone’s 1987 film
“Wall Street”. His mantra, “Greed is good,” became the anthem of future generations of Wall
Street investment bankers. Reagan had unleashed a predatory capitalism, and even as he defeated the
Communists of the Soviet Union, his actions would vindicate Marx’s harshest critiques of capitalism.
Reagan unleashed furies that have consumed the American electorate, and in his support
of the Afghan Resistance, he empowered a radical Islam that would challenge Western Civilization
in ways that the Russians never dreamt of. The New Deal was on the ropes; in a few years the
next Democratic president would announce that the “era of big government was over,” making Reagan’s
victory complete, with jobs overseas and unions in tatters. His beloved Free Market sold out
the American Dream, and in just a few decades the fallacies of Reagan’s unbridled fantasies
have been revealed as nothing more than the hollow lines his corporate overlords wrote
for this most amiable thespian to deliver to an American public desperate for comfort.
Ronald Reagan found a democratic republic and transformed it into oligarchy.
He had been ridiculed for being a mediocre actor but in truth, he was quite brilliant, for he was
able to make the entire world believe his rosy vision, despite all evidence to the contrary.
His presidency was the role of a lifetime, a performance worthy of Olivier.