REAGAN
The Legacy's Other Side
With the solemn farewell to Ronald Reagan now complete, the right-wing spin machine has ramped up efforts to whitewash the Reagan record. Despite glowing media coverage last week of the Reagan presidency which downplayed contentious issues, radio host Rush Limbaugh continues to browbeat the media for its supposedly negative coverage of the Reagan record. But as journalist William Greider notes, the Reagan presidency is one "the major media, draped in mourning, is solemnly fictionalizing." The phenomenon is similar to the media's coverage of Reagan in the 1980s, where the actor-turned-president "spun [the media] around brilliantly, used the White House reporters and cameras as hapless props in his melodrama, ignored the tough questions and stuck unyieldingly to his scripted version of reality." But while conservatives like Vice President Dick Cheney claim "what lingers from [Reagan presidency] is almost all good," beneath the hyperbole remains a legacy rife with controversy.
AIDS – NOT A LAUGHING MATTER: Although Reagan was lauded for being a "man of tremendous compassion" who saved lives by winning the Cold War, conservatives "failed to mention how many lives were lost on another front - the AIDS front, as Reagan's administration ignored the disease during his early years in the White House, when it was viewed as predominantly a gay disease, even 'a gay plague.'" Even as thousands of Americans died from AIDS during the 1980s, the Reagan administration apparently found humor in the disease. As USA Today reports, when Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes was asked about the disease, he joked "What's AIDS?" as "the briefing room dissolved in laughter" (see some press briefing transcripts).
RACE – INSENSITIVITY TO DISREGARD: Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts points out that even from the beginning of Reagan's time on the national stage, he appeared insensitive to issues of race. In 1980, Reagan kicked off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a place made famous when three young civil-rights workers were murdered in 1964 for registering African Americans to vote. Reagan chose to hold his speech "at a fair that for generations had served as a forum for segregationists" and declared, "I believe in state's rights" – a statement designed to offer "thinly veiled support for [segregationists'] cause." And during his term, it was more of the same. As the Richmond Times Dispatch notes, "He threatened to veto an extension of the Civil Rights Act" and "he sought to scuttle affirmative action." He also "vetoed sanctions against apartheid South Africa." The Baltimore Sun reports "black Americans remember Reagan for dismantling social programs and his use of racially tinged code words such as 'welfare queen.'" Political analyst David Bositis put it more bluntly, saying, "My sense of Ronald Reagan is that blacks didn't really exist for Ronald Reagan."
TERRORISM – FUELING THE RISE OF BIN LADEN AND SADDAM: Lost amid the praise for Reagan's national security record is an accurate review of how Reagan administration policy helped build up both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. As the Denver Post notes, "the Central Intelligence Agency's clandestine war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, launched by Reagan and his advisers, has had tragically unintended consequences, feeding the rise of Islamic extremism, Osama bin Laden and the birth of al-Qaida." (See the LA Times and Fred Kaplan's article in Slate for more on this topic.) Similarly, "it was Reagan's administration that cultivated Saddam Hussein," sending its envoy Donald Rumsfeld to schmooze the Iraqi dictator. The current President Bush chastised Saddam for supposedly still possessing chemical and biological weapons and for using those weapons on his own people in 1988. What he has not said is that the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations sold Iraq "poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague" and maintained ties to Saddam even after his massacre at Halabjah.
IRAN-CONTRA – ILLEGAL SCHEME CIRCUMVENTING CONGRESS: Knight-Ridder notes that "Reagan was widely criticized as president for his role in one of the most riveting scandals in recent U.S. history - the Iran-contra affair." Just 11 months into his presidency, Reagan "signed a three-paragraph secret document authorizing the CIA to conduct covert operations against the Marxist-leaning Sandinista government in Nicaragua." The scheme eventually "led to U.S. weapons sales to Iran, with the profits illegally funneled to CIA-backed anti-Sandinista guerrillas known as contras - so notorious for their human-rights abuses that Congress cut off their U.S. financing." The independent investigation found that Reagan "fostered a climate that encouraged subordinates to break the law." And yet, despite the scandal, the current Bush administration has appointed various Iran-Contra figures such as John Negroponte and Elliott Abrams to key positions in the government. Even so, Ivo Daalder and Mac Destler say our current president could learn a lot from Reagan's handling of the scandal.
ECONOMY – RED INK, INCOME REDISTRIBUTION TO THE RICH: With Reagan cutting taxes while proposing record spending increases, he oversaw a tripling of the national debt, from "$909 billion just before he entered the White House to $2.6 trillion when he left in 1989." And his tax cuts geared to the wealthy and spending increases primarily for defense meant the average American was left out of the "Reagan Revolution." As history professor Bob Buzzanco writes in the Houston Chronicle, under Reagan, "only the top 20 percent of Americans saw an increase in family income," with the middle-class actually experiencing a decline in real income. While median pay in 1973 was a little over $10 an hour in 1973, it fell to about $8.85 by 1987, in inflation-adjusted dollars. And with Reagan's cuts to social services, personal debt climbed to more than $3 trillion. For the poor, it was even worse. Reagan slashed the budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development by three quarters, resulting in a rise in homelessness from a level "so little it wasn't even written about widely in the late 1970s to more than 2 million when Reagan left office."
americanprogress.org |
