Keep Reagan's Record in Balance.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Keep Reagan's Record in Balance.
67
Thu, 06-10-2004 - 9:57am

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29859-2004Jun9.html


The good that Ronald Reagan did is not being buried with his bones tomorrow, as Shakespeare's Mark Antony predicted of Caesar. Reagan's good is being disinterred and magnified. It is being raised to new and unrealistic heights that will live on, and hang heavily over his successors, in public expectations.


This is not to begrudge the 40th president the thunderous applause that has come from politicians, journalists, historians and citizens to mark Reagan's final bow. Ill should rarely be spoken of the dead. But it is puzzling how these assessments of Reagan's accomplishments have improved so dramatically and uniformly in the 16 years since he left office.


Perhaps this is how contemporary history is made or, in the electronic era, mismade and distorted. Reagan's growing reputation as the great victor in the Cold War who made Mikhail Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall depends on looking at Reagan and his times through the light cast by subsequent events.


The craving by Americans for uncluttered heroism -- for what is seen in retrospect as the order and clarity of the Cold War -- also powers this yearning for a near-mythical transformation of Reagan's death into a moment to sweep aside the dread and anguish of the wars in Iraq and against al Qaeda.


Yes, winners always write the history. But it is dangerously easy today to make the leap from that news footage of Reagan speaking at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to concluding that he came to office with a master plan to make victory in the Cold War inevitable. As one television executive said to me not long ago, "Today history is what we say it is."


To one who covered many of the key international events of that day, Reagan seemed in fact to come late to a realistic view of the Soviet Union and the world, and -- like most presidents -- to have improvised furiously and not always successfully in foreign affairs.


It is also easy in today's elegiac mood to forget how unpopular Reagan was abroad for most of his presidency, even among his peers. France's Francois Mitterrand once sputtered in rage at me when I asked about his ideological conflicts with Reagan over Soviet policies. Kremlin officials expressed private delight at Reagan's election because they would be able to "roll him."


That is no skin off Reagan's record. He was more right about the evil and the fate of Soviet imperialism than Mitterrand, Gorbachev and most other leaders of the day. He was far from the amiable dunce portrayed by his knee-jerk critics.


But the opposition that Reagan stirred should not be airbrushed out of the final photograph of his times. Nor can we ignore the fact that the analysis and policies that brought some breakthroughs with Moscow originated more with George Shultz at the State Department than at Reagan's White House.


The Wall collapsed a year after Reagan's successor had been chosen and had started to alter policies toward Moscow. That collapse was due more to the struggle in the 1980s of the citizens of Poland, Hungary, East Germany and other satellite nations than to new actions by Washington. Nor should we minimize the contribution that a half-century of common dedication by U.S. and West European citizens and their military forces made to the final collapse of the Soviet empire.


There were important costs that came with Reagan's undeniable successes. His confrontational style used in getting much-needed Pershing 2 missiles deployed in Europe helped prematurely end the career of West Germany's highly competent chancellor, Helmut Schmidt.


U.S. support extended to guerrillas to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan has blown back in the form of al Qaeda and extreme instability in Central Asia. U.S. help to Saddam Hussein in Iraq also boomeranged. Iran-contra was not as great an aberration at the Reagan White House as it is often painted today.


The commentariat has made many of the right points about Reagan's uplifting personality and all the good and the fascinating that will live after him. Even if he was not a great president, he lived a great life from which we can all learn.


But if we airbrush and prettify history for the small screen and the front page, and ultimately for the books to come, we will not learn the most important lessons about mistakes that can be avoided. Let Reagan be Reagan, warts and all, for all time now.


The Man, the Myths
Don't believe everything you hear about Ronald Reagan.


http://slate.msn.com/id/2102060/


Gorby had the lead role, not Gipper.


>"In the collapse of communism he deserves credit not as an instigator, but an abettor. Best Supporting Actor."<


Quote from.........


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040610/COMARTIN10/TPComment/TopStories


Op-ed: REAGAN'S SHAMEFUL LEGACY


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=127&ncid=742&e=7&u=/ucru/20040608/cm_ucru/reagansshamefullegacy

cl-Libraone~

 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 05-18-2004
Fri, 06-11-2004 - 2:06pm
This is the type of garbage that angers me:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/040611/480/zeb10206111551&e=6&ncid=705

Notice the "Reagan in Hell" protestors on the route of his procession. Imagine being in your parent's procession and seeing a sign wishing your father/mother in hell. How heart wrenching. How disgusting. My anger for these type of people is without equal.

Jim

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Fri, 06-11-2004 - 2:54pm

Isn't


iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Fri, 06-11-2004 - 2:58pm


iVillage Member
Registered: 10-01-2003
Fri, 06-11-2004 - 3:06pm

One wonders just how venemous and "jovial" the posts would be from the right if it were Clinton who had passed away this week and the last week was spent talking about what a great President he was.

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-18-2004
Fri, 06-11-2004 - 3:14pm
"I would bet you everything I have that there would be dozens of Monica posts and even more posts about policies and issues people had with him"

You are no doubt correct. A lack of taste isn't reserved by the left. There are many on the right who show the same lack of good taste. While I think Clinton was a poor president upon his death I will show him the respect he deserves as a former president. No Monicas, no political attacks, etc from me. While I'm sure the feeling I have today will not be equaled when Clinton passes I will honor his passing with a lighted flag at half staff, and a tongue void of attacks and criticism. There is nothing to be gained by putting down a man during his funeral except to make oneself looking petty and trite.

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-18-2004
Fri, 06-11-2004 - 3:43pm
Presidential Ranking:

http://ragz-international.com/pres.pdf

Ranks Reagan 8th overall, and generally favors Democrats over Republicans

http://www.americanpresidents.org/survey/historians/39.asp

Ranks Reagan 11th, giving his Economic skills a laughable ranking of 21 and Admin skills a 32. Viewers ranked Reagan 6th with his Economic skills a 7 and admin skill an 11. Seems more like reality to me.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/hail/rankings.html

Ranks Reagan 8th

http://www.siena.edu/sri/results/95%20Presidency%20Survey.htm

Ranks Reagan 20th. Somehow this website puts Washington at 4th below the Rosevelt's and Lincoln. Even this obivous left preferring ranks buts Reagan in the top half.

http://www.zogby.com/features/features.dbm?ID=129

Ranks Reagan 5th.

http://www.campvishus.org/PresHistRankPard.htm

Reagan at 20


The lowest I could find, unless I ask the DNC, was a ranking of 20. Never below the top half. You may put him the bottom third but better researched peoople than you and I have him much higher.

Jim


iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Fri, 06-11-2004 - 3:44pm

Our soldiers deserve our respect; you will not find a greater support of our military than I. However, Reagan did far more to protect our freedoms as Americans than any single soldier could do. The great thing about Reagan was he did it without firing a shot.


You're right...he wasn't forced to fire a shot.


iVillage Member
Registered: 05-18-2004
Fri, 06-11-2004 - 4:10pm
"he did more to protect our freedoms. In what way? How?"

Consider the cold war. How many millions could have potentially died should the war begin. Reagan recognized that we could mutually destroy each other. The Soviet Union couldn't match us $ for $ in research due to their restrictive economy. The pressure he placed on them was a large reason for their collapse.

I love our soldiers but the man leading them gets the primary responsibility for its outcome. Was it the union soldier or Lincoln who won the civil war? Sure the soldier was vital but (and this will sound cold and I don't want it to, please take it in context) in the end the soldier is an instrument to carry out the desires of the leader.

"I disagreed with him and that's my right."

I disagree with Clinton on just about everything but I still respect him. It doesn't appear you afford Reagan the same latitudes you gave Clinton.

"what business is his married life of yours?"

Who mentioned his personal life. He was a poor president for many more reasons than his perjury and infidelity.

"do you realize that I question and refuse 'the blinders' because I also love this country? "

Nothing wrong with refusing the blinders. No one asked anyone to endorse Reagan's policies. He DOES deserve our respect. He doesn't get respect from the left because they can't see passed their veneer of political hatred.

"conservatives don't have the corner on the market for 'love of country'."

No one said we did. I'm sure liberals love our country, it just they don't understand their policies enough to know how bad they are for everyone.

"I would much rather be truthful than lie and be fake."

It isn't an issue of lieing and being fake. If you can't say anything positive remain silent. I don't question your right to say whatever you want, I question your timing.

The truth is always the truth but it doesn't always need to be said. "You are fat" might be true but it isn't appropriate.


"Why not respond to the poster?"

My post was meant as a general reply to all the posters prior to mine. It may seem directed at you personally, its not. No one else has responded, and you appeared to defend the other posts. You certainly didn't show the poor taste that others did so my disgust is directed elsewhere.

"What you seem to miss initially was that the 'pot shots' were aimed at the GOP and their deification of him."

I disagree. Did you read the articles posted by others? Many of these articles were personal attacks wishing him to hell in one. Very personal.

I would love to talk about his legacy, his triumphs and mistakes but not during his funeral and not with someone who wishes him to Hell.

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-18-2004
Fri, 06-11-2004 - 4:12pm
Let's balance this topic, since afterall that is the goal of this topic.

http://wbal.com/stories/templates/show_durian.asp?articleid=19681

The Legacy Of Ronald Reagan

It was in a movie called "Santa Fe Trail" that I first saw Ronald Reagan. He was playing the role of young George Custer, first at West Point, then in Kansas in pursuit of John Brown. He and Errol Flynn, who played Jeb Stuart, were rivals for the hand of the lovely Olivia DeHavilland in an entertaining but fanciful account of the events that led to the Civil War. Flynn got the girl, but I always thought Olivia had made the wrong choice.

Ronald Reagan's life was very much like that film. It was always about courage, and honor, and doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do. There was no ambiguity to the man. A bedrock solid Roosevelt liberal back in the 30s and 40s he became a Goldwater conservative in the 60s when he decided there was too much socialism and collectivism in the mantra of the Democrats. To Ronald Reagan nothing was more important than the freedom and majesty of the individual.

Critics and opponents often made the mistake of underestimating him. In 1966,when he ran for governor of California, he was regarded as a lightweight by incumbent Pat Brown. That illusion vanished when he beat Brown by a million votes. Four years ater he buried Jesse Unruh, speaker of the California Assembly, under a landslide of pic proportions. And his victories over Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Walter Mondale in 1984 were the stuff of which legends are made.

Ronald Reagan not only changed the United States. He changed Planet Earth. As he willed the nation to throw off the collective guilt of Vietnam and Watergate he demanded that the nations of the world understand the difference between good and evil and choose sides accordingly. And his farewell message in 1994 was and will forever remain a masterful expression of the nobility of the human spirit.

As an ebony charger pranced through the streets of the nation's capital, boots reversed in the stirrups, and the muffled drums beat in sorrowful cadence each strike of hoof of asphalt, mallet on drumhead, echoed to the heartbeat of a nation in mourning.

Even now, in my imagination I I hear the band play the "Last Post" and Chorus, and the pipes play the "Flowers of the Forest."

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-18-2004
Fri, 06-11-2004 - 4:21pm
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/

Thanks From a Grateful Country

For a man who changed the world, Ronald Reagan sure was modest.

BY PEGGY NOONAN

Monday, June 7, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

He was dying for years and the day came and somehow it came as a blow. Not a loss but a blow. How could this be? Maybe we were all of us more loyal to him, and to the meaning of his life, than we quite meant to be.

And maybe it's more.

This was a life with size. It had heft, and meaning. And I am thinking of what Stephen Vincent Benet, a writer whom he quoted, wrote on the death of his friend Scott Fitzgerald. "You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you'd better."

Ronald Reagan was not unappreciated at the end, far from it. But he was at the beginning.

His story was classically, movingly rags-to-riches; he was a nobody who became a somebody in the American way, utterly on his own and with the help of millions.

He was just under 10 when the Roaring Twenties began, 16 when Lindbergh flew the ocean; he remembered as a little boy giving a coin to a doughboy leaning out a window of a troop train going east to the ships that would take them to the Marne and the Argonne Forest.

Ronald, nicknamed Dutch, read fiction. He liked stories of young men battling for the good and true. A story he wrote in college had a hero arriving home from the war and first thing calling his girl. Someone else answered. Who is calling? "Tell her it's the president," he said. He wrote that when he was 20 years old.

Many years later, in middle age, he was visited by a dream in which he was looking for a house. He was taken to a mansion with white walls and high sparkling windows. It was majestic. "This is a house that is available at a price I can afford," he would think to himself. And then he'd come awake. From the day he entered the White House for the first time as president he never had the dream again.

His family didn't have much--no money, no local standing--and they were often embarrassed. Jack Reagan was alcoholic and itinerant, a shoe salesman who drank when things were looking up. They moved a lot. His mother was an Evangelical Christian who was often out of the house helping others or taking in work at home. (Like Margaret Thatcher's mother, and Pope John Paul's too, Nell Reagan worked as a seamstress at home, sewing clothes for money.)

Dutch and his brother Moon were often on their own. From his father he learned storytelling and political views that were liberal for the time and place. In old age he remembered with pride that his father would smack him if he ever said anything as a child that showed racial or religious bigotry. His mother gave him religious faith, which helped him to trust life and allowed him to be an optimist, which was his nature.

He wanted to be an artist, a cartoonist, a writer. Then he wanted to be a sportscaster on radio, and talked his way in. Then he wanted to be an actor. He went to Hollywood, became a star, did work that he loved and married Jane Wyman, a more gifted actor than he. They were mismatched, but she proved in her way to be as old-school as he. In the decades after their divorce and long after he rose to power, she never spoke publicly of him, not to get in the news when her career was waning and not for money. She could have hurt him and never did.

He volunteered for action in World War II, was turned away by doctors who told him with eyesight like his he'd probably shoot his own officer and miss. But they let him join behind the lines and he served at "Fort Roach" in Los Angeles, where he made training and information films. After the war, Ronald Reagan went on the local speaking circuit, talking of the needs of veterans and lauding the leadership of FDR and Truman. Once a woman wrote to him and noted that while he had movingly denounced Nazism, there was another terrible "ism," communism, and he ought to mention that, too. In his next speech, to industry people and others, he said that if communism ever proved itself the threat to decency that Nazism was, he'd denounce it, too. Normally he got applause in this part of the speech. Now he was met by silence.

In that silence he built his future, becoming a man who'd change the world.

The long education began. He studied communism, read Marx, read the Founders and the conservative philosophers from Burke to Burnham. He began to tug right. The Democratic Party and his industry continued to turn left. There was a parting.

A word on his intellectual reflexes. Ronald Reagan was not a cynic--he did not assume the worst about people. But he was a skeptic; he knew who we are. He did not think that people with great degrees or great success were necessarily smart, for instance. He had no interest in credentialism. He once told me an economist was a fellow with a Phi Beta Kappa key on one end of his chain and no watch on the other. That's why they never know what time it is. He didn't say this with asperity, but with mirth.

He did not dislike intellectuals--his heroes often were intellectuals, from the Founders straight through Milton Friedman and Hayek and Solzhenitsyn. But he did not favor the intellectuals of his own day, because he thought they were in general thick-headed. He thought that many of the 20th century's intellectuals were high-IQ dimwits. He had an instinctive agreement with Orwell's putdown that a particular idea was so stupid that only an intellectual would believe it.

He thought that intellectuals, like the great liberal academics of the latter half of the 20th century, tended to tie themselves in great webs of complexity, webs they'd often spun themselves--great complicated things that they'd get stuck in, and finally get out of, only to go on and construct a new web for mankind to get caught in. The busy little spiders from Marx through Bloomsbury--some of whom, such as the Webbs, were truly the stupidest brilliant people who ever lived--through Harvard and Yale and the American left circa 1900-90.

As president of the Screen Actors Guild he led the resistance to a growing communist presence in the unions and, with allies such as William Holden, out-argued the boutique leftism of the Hollywood salons. But when a small army of congressional gasbags came to town, Ronald Reagan told the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hollywood could police itself, thank you. By the time it was over, even his harshest foes admitted he'd been fair. In the '90s, an actress who'd been blacklisted, her career ruined, was invited by historians of Hollywood to criticize him. She said yes, she remembered him well. He was boring at parties. He was always talking about how great the New Deal was.

He wanted to be a great actor, but it never happened. He was a good actor. He married Nancy Davis, a young actress who'd gone to Smith. On their first date, she told me once, she was impressed. "He didn't talk, the way actors do, about their next part. He talked about the Civil War." They had children, made a life; she was his rock.

In 1962 he became a Republican; in 1966, with considerable initial reluctance, he ran for governor of California. The establishment of the day labeled him a right-wing movie star out of touch with California values; he beat the incumbent, Pat Brown, in a landslide. He completed two successful terms in which he started with a huge budget deficit, left behind a modest surplus, cut taxes and got an ulcer. About the latter he was amazed. Even Jack Warner hadn't been able to give him an ulcer! But one day it went away. Prayer groups that did not know of his condition had been praying for him. He came to think their prayers healed him.

In his first serious bid for the presidency, in 1976, he challenged his own party's beleaguered incumbent, the hapless Gerald Ford. Ronald Reagan fought valiantly, state by state, almost unseated Mr. Ford, and returned from the convention having given one of the best speeches of his life. He told his weeping volunteers not to become cynical but to take the experience as inspiration. He promised he wouldn't go home and sit in a rocking chair. He quoted an old warrior: "I will lie me down and bleed awhile / And then I will rise and fight again." Four years later, he won the presidency from Jimmy Carter after a mean-spirited onslaught in which he was painted as racist, a man who knew nothing, a militarist. He won another landslide.

Once again he had nobody with him but the people.

In his presidency he did this: He out-argued communism and refused to accept its claim of moral superiority; he rallied the West, rallied America and continued to make big gambles, including a defense-spending increase in a recession. He promised he'd place Pershings in Europe if the Soviets would not agree to arms reductions, and told Soviet leaders that they'd never be able to beat us in defense, that we'd spend them into the ground. They were suddenly reasonable.

Ronald Reagan told the truth to a world made weary by lies. He believed truth was the only platform on which a better future could be built. He shocked the world when he called the Soviet Union "evil," because it was, and an "empire," because it was that, too. He never stopped bringing his message to the people of the world, to Europe and China and in the end the Soviet Union. And when it was over, the Berlin Wall had been turned into a million concrete souvenirs, and Soviet communism had fallen. But of course it didn't fall. It was pushed. By Mr. Know Nothing Cowboy Gunslinger Dimwit. All presidents should be so stupid.

He pushed down income taxes too, from a high of 70% when he entered the White House to a new low of 28% when he left, igniting the long boom that, for all its ups and downs, is with us still. He believed, as JFK did, that a rising tide lifts all boats. He did much more, returning respect to our armed forces, changing 50-year-old assumptions about the place of government and the place of the citizen in the new America.

What an era his was. What a life he lived. He changed history for the better and was modest about it. He didn't bray about his accomplishments but saw them as the work of the American people. He did not see himself as entitled, never demanded respect, preferred talking to hotel doormen rather than State Department functionaries because he thought the doormen brighter and more interesting. When I pressed him once, a few years out of the presidency, to say what he thought the meaning of his presidency was, he answered, reluctantly, that it might be fairly said that he "advanced the boundaries of freedom in a world more at peace with itself." And so he did. And what could be bigger than that?

To be young and working in his White House at that time in human history, was--well, we felt privileged to be there, with him. He made us feel not that we were born in a time of trouble but that we'd been born, luckily, at a time when we could end some trouble. We believed him. I'd think: This is a wonderful time to be alive. And when he died I thought: If I'd walked into the Oval Office 20 years ago to tell him that, he'd look up from whatever he was writing, smile, look away for a second and think, It's pretty much always a wonderful time.

And then he'd go back to his work.

And now he has left us. We will talk the next 10 days about who he was and what he did. It's not hard to imagine him now in a place where his powers have been returned to him and he's himself again--sweet-hearted, tough, funny, optimistic and very brave. You imagine him snapping one of those little salutes as he turns to say goodbye. Today I imagine saluting right back. Do you? We should do it the day he's buried, or when he lies in state in the Capitol Rotunda. We should say, "Good on you, Dutch." Thanks from a grateful country.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag" (Wall Street Journal Books/Simon & Schuster), a collection of post-Sept. 11 columns, which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore.



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