b***@consort.new
2009-06-05 08:46:09 UTC
Was Ronald Reagan an Even Worse President Than George W. Bush?
By Bob Parry, Consort News. Posted June 5, 2009.
The starting point for many of the catastrophes confronting the United
States today can be traced to Reagan's presidency.
There's been talk that George W. Bush was so inept that he should
trademark the phrase "Worst President Ever," though some historians
would bestow that title on pre-Civil War President James Buchanan.
Still, a case could be made for putting Ronald Reagan in the
competition.
Granted, the very idea of rating Reagan as one of the worst presidents
ever will infuriate his many right-wing acolytes and offend Washington
insiders who have made a cottage industry out of buying some
protection from Republicans by lauding the 40th President.
But there's a growing realization that the starting point for many of
the catastrophes confronting the United States today can be traced to
Reagan's presidency. There's also a grudging reassessment that the
"failed" presidents of the 1970s Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and
Jimmy Carter may deserve more credit for trying to grapple with the
problems that now beset the country.
Nixon, Ford and Carter won scant praise for addressing the systemic
challenges of America's oil dependence, environmental degradation, the
arms race, and nuclear proliferation all issues that Reagan
essentially ignored and that now threaten America's future.
Nixon helped create the Environmental Protection Agency; he imposed
energy-conservation measures; he opened the diplomatic door to
communist China. Nixon's administration also detected the growing
weakness in the Soviet Union and advocated a policy of détente (a plan
for bringing the Cold War to an end or at least curbing its most
dangerous excesses).
After Nixon's resignation in the Watergate scandal, Ford continued
many of Nixon's policies, particularly trying to wind down the Cold
War with Moscow. However, confronting a rebellion from Reagan's
Republican Right in 1976, Ford abandoned "détente."
Ford also let hard-line Cold Warriors (and a first wave of young
intellectuals who became known as neoconservatives) pressure the CIA's
analytical division, and he brought in a new generation of
hard-liners, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
After defeating Ford in 1976, Carter injected more respect for human
rights into U.S. foreign policy, a move some scholars believe put an
important nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union, leaving it
hard-pressed to justify the repressive internal practices of the East
Bloc. Carter also emphasized the need to contain the spread of nuclear
weapons, especially in unstable countries like Pakistan.
Domestically, Carter pushed a comprehensive energy policy and warned
Americans that their growing dependence on foreign oil represented a
national security threat, what he famously called "the moral
equivalent of war."
However, powerful vested interests both domestic and foreign
managed to exploit the shortcomings of these three presidents to
sabotage any sustained progress. By 1980, Reagan had become a pied
piper luring the American people away from the tough choices that
Nixon, Ford and Carter had defined.
Cruelty with a Smile
With his superficially sunny disposition and a ruthless political
strategy of exploiting white-male resentments Reagan convinced
millions of Americans that the threats they faced were:
African-American welfare queens, Central American leftists, a rapidly
expanding Evil Empire based in Moscow, and the do-good federal
government.
In his First Inaugural Address in 1981, Reagan declared that
"government is not the solution to our problem; government is the
problem."
When it came to cutting back on America's energy use, Reagan's message
could be boiled down to the old reggae lyric, "Don't worry, be happy."
Rather than pressing Detroit to build smaller, fuel-efficient cars,
Reagan made clear that the auto industry could manufacture
gas-guzzlers without much nagging from Washington.
The same with the environment. Reagan intentionally staffed the
Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department with
officials who were hostile toward regulation aimed at protecting the
environment. George W. Bush didn't invent Republican hostility toward
scientific warnings of environmental calamities; he was just picking
up where Reagan left off.
Reagan pushed for deregulation of industries, including banking; he
slashed income taxes for the wealthiest Americans in an experiment
known as "supply side" economics, which held falsely that cutting
rates for the rich would increase revenues and eliminate the federal
deficit.
Over the years, "supply side" would evolve into a secular religion for
many on the Right, but Reagan's budget director David Stockman once
blurted out the truth, that it would lead to red ink "as far as the
eye could see."
While conceding that some of Reagan's economic plans did not work out
as intended, his defenders including many mainstream journalists
still argue that Reagan should be hailed as a great President because
he "won the Cold War," a short-hand phrase that they like to attach to
his historical biography.
However, a strong case can be made that the Cold War was won well
before Reagan arrived in the White House. Indeed, in the 1970s, it was
a common perception in the U.S. intelligence community that the Cold
War between the United States and the Soviet Union was winding down,
in large part because the Soviet economic model had failed in the
technological race with the West.
That was the view of many Kremlinologists in the CIA's analytical
division. Also, I was told by a senior CIA's operations official that
some of the CIA's best spies inside the Soviet hierarchy supported the
view that the Soviet Union was headed toward collapse, not surging
toward world supremacy, as Reagan and his foreign policy team insisted
in the early 1980s.
The CIA analysis was the basis for the détente that was launched by
Nixon and Ford, essentially seeking a negotiated solution to the most
dangerous remaining aspects of the Cold War.
The Afghan Debacle
In that view, Soviet military operations, including sending troops
into Afghanistan in 1979, were mostly defensive in nature. In
Afghanistan, the Soviets hoped to prop up a pro-communist government
that was seeking to modernize the country but was beset by opposition
from Islamic fundamentalists who were getting covert support from the
U.S. government.
Though the Afghan covert operation originated with Cold Warriors in
the Carter administration, especially national security adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the war was dramatically ramped up under Reagan,
who traded U.S. acquiescence toward Pakistan's nuclear bomb for its
help in shipping sophisticated weapons to the Afghan jihadists
(including a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden).
While Reagan's acolytes cite the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan as
decisive in "winning the Cold War," the counter-argument is that
Moscow was already in disarray and while failure in Afghanistan may
have sped the Soviet Union's final collapse it also created twin
dangers for the future of the world: the rise of al-Qaeda terrorism
and the nuclear bomb in the hands of Pakistan's unstable Islamic
Republic.
Trade-offs elsewhere in the world also damaged long-term U.S.
interests. In Latin America, for instance, Reagan's brutal strategy of
arming right-wing militaries to crush peasant, student and labor
uprisings left the region with a legacy of anti-Americanism that is
now resurfacing in the emergence of populist leftist governments.
In Nicaragua, for instance, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega (whom
Reagan once denounced as a "dictator in designer glasses") is now back
in power. In El Salvador, the leftist FMLN won the latest elections.
Indeed, across the region, hostility to Washington is now the rule,
creating openings for China, Iran, Cuba and other American rivals.
In the early 1980s, Reagan also credentialed a young generation of
neocon intellectuals, who pioneered a concept called "perception
management," the shaping of how Americans saw, understood and were
frightened by threats from abroad.
Many honest reporters saw their careers damaged when they resisted the
lies and distortions of the Reagan administration. Likewise, U.S.
intelligence analysts were purged when they refused to bend to the
propaganda demands from above.
To marginalize dissent, Reagan and his subordinates stoked anger
toward anyone who challenged the era's feel-good optimism. Skeptics
were not just honorable critics, they were un-American defeatists or
in Jeane Kirkpatrick's memorable attack line they would "blame
America first."
Under Reagan, a right-wing infrastructure also took shape, linking
media outlets (magazines, newspapers, books, etc.) with well-financed
think tanks that churned out endless op-eds and research papers. Plus,
there were attack groups that went after mainstream journalists who
dared disclose information that poked holes in Reagan's propaganda
themes.
In effect, Reagan's team created a faux reality for the American
public. Civil wars in Central America between impoverished peasants
and wealthy oligarchs became East-West showdowns. U.S.-backed
insurgents in Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan were transformed from
corrupt, brutal (often drug-tainted) thugs into noble
"freedom-fighters."
With the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan also revived Richard Nixon's
theory of an imperial presidency that could ignore the nation's laws
and evade accountability through criminal cover-ups. That behavior
also would rear its head again in the war crimes of George W. Bush.
[For details on Reagan's abuses, see Robert Parry's Lost History and
Secrecy & Privilege.]
Wall Street Greed
The American Dream also dimmed during Reagan's tenure.
While he played the role of the nation's kindly grandfather, his
operatives divided the American people, using "wedge issues" to deepen
grievances especially of white men who were encouraged to see
themselves as victims of "reverse discrimination" and "political
correctness."
Yet even as working-class white men were rallying to the Republican
banner (as so-called "Reagan Democrats"), their economic interests
were being savaged. Unions were broken and marginalized; "free trade"
policies shipped manufacturing jobs abroad; old neighborhoods were
decaying; drug use among the young was soaring.
Meanwhile, unprecedented greed was unleashed on Wall Street, fraying
old-fashioned bonds between company owners and employees.
Before Reagan, corporate CEOs earned less than 50 times the salary of
an average worker. By the end of the Reagan-Bush-I administrations in
1993, the average CEO salary was more than 100 times that of a typical
worker. (At the end of the Bush-II administration, that CEO-salary
figure was more than 250 times that of an average worker.)
Many other trends set during the Reagan era continued to corrode the
U.S. political process in the years after Reagan left office. After
9/11, for instance, the neocons reemerged as a dominant force,
reprising their "perception management" tactics, depicting the "war on
terror" like the last days of the Cold War as a terrifying
conflict between good and evil.
The hyping of the Islamic threat mirrored the neocons' exaggerated
depiction of the Soviet menace in the 1980s and again the propaganda
strategy worked. Many Americans let their emotions run wild, from the
hunger for revenge after 9/11 to the war fever over invading Iraq.
Arguably, the descent into this dark fantasyland that Ronald Reagan
began in the early 1980s reached its nadir in the flag-waving early
days of the Iraq War. Only gradually did reality begin to reassert
itself as the death toll mounted in Iraq and the Katrina disaster
reminded Americans why they needed an effective government.
Still, the disasters set in motion by Ronald Reagan continued to
roll in. Bush's Reagan-esque tax cuts for the rich blew another huge
hole in the federal budget and the Reagan-esque anti-regulatory fervor
led to a massive financial meltdown that threw the nation into
economic chaos.
Love Reagan; Hate Bush
Ironically, George W. Bush has come in for savage criticism, but the
Republican leader who inspired Bush's presidency Ronald Reagan
remained an honored figure, his name attached to scores of national
landmarks including Washington's National Airport.
Even leading Democrats genuflect to Reagan. Early in Campaign 2008,
when Barack Obama was positioning himself as a bipartisan political
figure who could appeal to Republicans, he bowed to the Reagan
mystique, hailing the GOP icon as a leader who "changed the trajectory
of America."
Though Obama's chief point was that Reagan in 1980 "put us on a
fundamentally different path" a point which may be historically
undeniable Obama went further, justifying Reagan's course correction
because of "all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s, and government
had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability."
While Obama later clarified his point to say he didn't mean to endorse
Reagan's conservative policies, Obama seemed to suggest that Reagan's
1980 election administered a needed dose of accountability to the
United States when Reagan actually did the opposite. Reagan's
presidency represented a dangerous escape from accountability and
reality.
Still, Obama and congressional Democrats continue to pander to the
Reagan myth. On Tuesday, as the nation approached the fifth
anniversary of Reagan's death, Obama welcomed Nancy Reagan to the
White House and signed a law creating a panel to plan and carry out
events to honor Reagan's 100th birthday in 2011.
Obama hailed the right-wing icon. "President Reagan helped as much as
any President to restore a sense of optimism in our country, a spirit
that transcended politics -- that transcended even the most heated
arguments of the day," Obama said. [For more on Obama's earlier
pandering about Reagan, see Consortiumnews.com's "Obama's Dubious
Praise for Reagan."]
It's a sure thing that the Reagan Centennial Committee won't do much
more than add to the hagiography surrounding the 40th President.
Despite the grievous harm that Reagan's presidency inflicted on the
American Republic and the American people, it may take many more years
before a historian has the guts to put this deformed era into a
truthful perspective and rate Reagan where he belongs -- near the
bottom of the presidential list.
By Bob Parry, Consort News. Posted June 5, 2009.
The starting point for many of the catastrophes confronting the United
States today can be traced to Reagan's presidency.
There's been talk that George W. Bush was so inept that he should
trademark the phrase "Worst President Ever," though some historians
would bestow that title on pre-Civil War President James Buchanan.
Still, a case could be made for putting Ronald Reagan in the
competition.
Granted, the very idea of rating Reagan as one of the worst presidents
ever will infuriate his many right-wing acolytes and offend Washington
insiders who have made a cottage industry out of buying some
protection from Republicans by lauding the 40th President.
But there's a growing realization that the starting point for many of
the catastrophes confronting the United States today can be traced to
Reagan's presidency. There's also a grudging reassessment that the
"failed" presidents of the 1970s Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and
Jimmy Carter may deserve more credit for trying to grapple with the
problems that now beset the country.
Nixon, Ford and Carter won scant praise for addressing the systemic
challenges of America's oil dependence, environmental degradation, the
arms race, and nuclear proliferation all issues that Reagan
essentially ignored and that now threaten America's future.
Nixon helped create the Environmental Protection Agency; he imposed
energy-conservation measures; he opened the diplomatic door to
communist China. Nixon's administration also detected the growing
weakness in the Soviet Union and advocated a policy of détente (a plan
for bringing the Cold War to an end or at least curbing its most
dangerous excesses).
After Nixon's resignation in the Watergate scandal, Ford continued
many of Nixon's policies, particularly trying to wind down the Cold
War with Moscow. However, confronting a rebellion from Reagan's
Republican Right in 1976, Ford abandoned "détente."
Ford also let hard-line Cold Warriors (and a first wave of young
intellectuals who became known as neoconservatives) pressure the CIA's
analytical division, and he brought in a new generation of
hard-liners, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
After defeating Ford in 1976, Carter injected more respect for human
rights into U.S. foreign policy, a move some scholars believe put an
important nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union, leaving it
hard-pressed to justify the repressive internal practices of the East
Bloc. Carter also emphasized the need to contain the spread of nuclear
weapons, especially in unstable countries like Pakistan.
Domestically, Carter pushed a comprehensive energy policy and warned
Americans that their growing dependence on foreign oil represented a
national security threat, what he famously called "the moral
equivalent of war."
However, powerful vested interests both domestic and foreign
managed to exploit the shortcomings of these three presidents to
sabotage any sustained progress. By 1980, Reagan had become a pied
piper luring the American people away from the tough choices that
Nixon, Ford and Carter had defined.
Cruelty with a Smile
With his superficially sunny disposition and a ruthless political
strategy of exploiting white-male resentments Reagan convinced
millions of Americans that the threats they faced were:
African-American welfare queens, Central American leftists, a rapidly
expanding Evil Empire based in Moscow, and the do-good federal
government.
In his First Inaugural Address in 1981, Reagan declared that
"government is not the solution to our problem; government is the
problem."
When it came to cutting back on America's energy use, Reagan's message
could be boiled down to the old reggae lyric, "Don't worry, be happy."
Rather than pressing Detroit to build smaller, fuel-efficient cars,
Reagan made clear that the auto industry could manufacture
gas-guzzlers without much nagging from Washington.
The same with the environment. Reagan intentionally staffed the
Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department with
officials who were hostile toward regulation aimed at protecting the
environment. George W. Bush didn't invent Republican hostility toward
scientific warnings of environmental calamities; he was just picking
up where Reagan left off.
Reagan pushed for deregulation of industries, including banking; he
slashed income taxes for the wealthiest Americans in an experiment
known as "supply side" economics, which held falsely that cutting
rates for the rich would increase revenues and eliminate the federal
deficit.
Over the years, "supply side" would evolve into a secular religion for
many on the Right, but Reagan's budget director David Stockman once
blurted out the truth, that it would lead to red ink "as far as the
eye could see."
While conceding that some of Reagan's economic plans did not work out
as intended, his defenders including many mainstream journalists
still argue that Reagan should be hailed as a great President because
he "won the Cold War," a short-hand phrase that they like to attach to
his historical biography.
However, a strong case can be made that the Cold War was won well
before Reagan arrived in the White House. Indeed, in the 1970s, it was
a common perception in the U.S. intelligence community that the Cold
War between the United States and the Soviet Union was winding down,
in large part because the Soviet economic model had failed in the
technological race with the West.
That was the view of many Kremlinologists in the CIA's analytical
division. Also, I was told by a senior CIA's operations official that
some of the CIA's best spies inside the Soviet hierarchy supported the
view that the Soviet Union was headed toward collapse, not surging
toward world supremacy, as Reagan and his foreign policy team insisted
in the early 1980s.
The CIA analysis was the basis for the détente that was launched by
Nixon and Ford, essentially seeking a negotiated solution to the most
dangerous remaining aspects of the Cold War.
The Afghan Debacle
In that view, Soviet military operations, including sending troops
into Afghanistan in 1979, were mostly defensive in nature. In
Afghanistan, the Soviets hoped to prop up a pro-communist government
that was seeking to modernize the country but was beset by opposition
from Islamic fundamentalists who were getting covert support from the
U.S. government.
Though the Afghan covert operation originated with Cold Warriors in
the Carter administration, especially national security adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski, the war was dramatically ramped up under Reagan,
who traded U.S. acquiescence toward Pakistan's nuclear bomb for its
help in shipping sophisticated weapons to the Afghan jihadists
(including a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden).
While Reagan's acolytes cite the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan as
decisive in "winning the Cold War," the counter-argument is that
Moscow was already in disarray and while failure in Afghanistan may
have sped the Soviet Union's final collapse it also created twin
dangers for the future of the world: the rise of al-Qaeda terrorism
and the nuclear bomb in the hands of Pakistan's unstable Islamic
Republic.
Trade-offs elsewhere in the world also damaged long-term U.S.
interests. In Latin America, for instance, Reagan's brutal strategy of
arming right-wing militaries to crush peasant, student and labor
uprisings left the region with a legacy of anti-Americanism that is
now resurfacing in the emergence of populist leftist governments.
In Nicaragua, for instance, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega (whom
Reagan once denounced as a "dictator in designer glasses") is now back
in power. In El Salvador, the leftist FMLN won the latest elections.
Indeed, across the region, hostility to Washington is now the rule,
creating openings for China, Iran, Cuba and other American rivals.
In the early 1980s, Reagan also credentialed a young generation of
neocon intellectuals, who pioneered a concept called "perception
management," the shaping of how Americans saw, understood and were
frightened by threats from abroad.
Many honest reporters saw their careers damaged when they resisted the
lies and distortions of the Reagan administration. Likewise, U.S.
intelligence analysts were purged when they refused to bend to the
propaganda demands from above.
To marginalize dissent, Reagan and his subordinates stoked anger
toward anyone who challenged the era's feel-good optimism. Skeptics
were not just honorable critics, they were un-American defeatists or
in Jeane Kirkpatrick's memorable attack line they would "blame
America first."
Under Reagan, a right-wing infrastructure also took shape, linking
media outlets (magazines, newspapers, books, etc.) with well-financed
think tanks that churned out endless op-eds and research papers. Plus,
there were attack groups that went after mainstream journalists who
dared disclose information that poked holes in Reagan's propaganda
themes.
In effect, Reagan's team created a faux reality for the American
public. Civil wars in Central America between impoverished peasants
and wealthy oligarchs became East-West showdowns. U.S.-backed
insurgents in Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan were transformed from
corrupt, brutal (often drug-tainted) thugs into noble
"freedom-fighters."
With the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan also revived Richard Nixon's
theory of an imperial presidency that could ignore the nation's laws
and evade accountability through criminal cover-ups. That behavior
also would rear its head again in the war crimes of George W. Bush.
[For details on Reagan's abuses, see Robert Parry's Lost History and
Secrecy & Privilege.]
Wall Street Greed
The American Dream also dimmed during Reagan's tenure.
While he played the role of the nation's kindly grandfather, his
operatives divided the American people, using "wedge issues" to deepen
grievances especially of white men who were encouraged to see
themselves as victims of "reverse discrimination" and "political
correctness."
Yet even as working-class white men were rallying to the Republican
banner (as so-called "Reagan Democrats"), their economic interests
were being savaged. Unions were broken and marginalized; "free trade"
policies shipped manufacturing jobs abroad; old neighborhoods were
decaying; drug use among the young was soaring.
Meanwhile, unprecedented greed was unleashed on Wall Street, fraying
old-fashioned bonds between company owners and employees.
Before Reagan, corporate CEOs earned less than 50 times the salary of
an average worker. By the end of the Reagan-Bush-I administrations in
1993, the average CEO salary was more than 100 times that of a typical
worker. (At the end of the Bush-II administration, that CEO-salary
figure was more than 250 times that of an average worker.)
Many other trends set during the Reagan era continued to corrode the
U.S. political process in the years after Reagan left office. After
9/11, for instance, the neocons reemerged as a dominant force,
reprising their "perception management" tactics, depicting the "war on
terror" like the last days of the Cold War as a terrifying
conflict between good and evil.
The hyping of the Islamic threat mirrored the neocons' exaggerated
depiction of the Soviet menace in the 1980s and again the propaganda
strategy worked. Many Americans let their emotions run wild, from the
hunger for revenge after 9/11 to the war fever over invading Iraq.
Arguably, the descent into this dark fantasyland that Ronald Reagan
began in the early 1980s reached its nadir in the flag-waving early
days of the Iraq War. Only gradually did reality begin to reassert
itself as the death toll mounted in Iraq and the Katrina disaster
reminded Americans why they needed an effective government.
Still, the disasters set in motion by Ronald Reagan continued to
roll in. Bush's Reagan-esque tax cuts for the rich blew another huge
hole in the federal budget and the Reagan-esque anti-regulatory fervor
led to a massive financial meltdown that threw the nation into
economic chaos.
Love Reagan; Hate Bush
Ironically, George W. Bush has come in for savage criticism, but the
Republican leader who inspired Bush's presidency Ronald Reagan
remained an honored figure, his name attached to scores of national
landmarks including Washington's National Airport.
Even leading Democrats genuflect to Reagan. Early in Campaign 2008,
when Barack Obama was positioning himself as a bipartisan political
figure who could appeal to Republicans, he bowed to the Reagan
mystique, hailing the GOP icon as a leader who "changed the trajectory
of America."
Though Obama's chief point was that Reagan in 1980 "put us on a
fundamentally different path" a point which may be historically
undeniable Obama went further, justifying Reagan's course correction
because of "all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s, and government
had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability."
While Obama later clarified his point to say he didn't mean to endorse
Reagan's conservative policies, Obama seemed to suggest that Reagan's
1980 election administered a needed dose of accountability to the
United States when Reagan actually did the opposite. Reagan's
presidency represented a dangerous escape from accountability and
reality.
Still, Obama and congressional Democrats continue to pander to the
Reagan myth. On Tuesday, as the nation approached the fifth
anniversary of Reagan's death, Obama welcomed Nancy Reagan to the
White House and signed a law creating a panel to plan and carry out
events to honor Reagan's 100th birthday in 2011.
Obama hailed the right-wing icon. "President Reagan helped as much as
any President to restore a sense of optimism in our country, a spirit
that transcended politics -- that transcended even the most heated
arguments of the day," Obama said. [For more on Obama's earlier
pandering about Reagan, see Consortiumnews.com's "Obama's Dubious
Praise for Reagan."]
It's a sure thing that the Reagan Centennial Committee won't do much
more than add to the hagiography surrounding the 40th President.
Despite the grievous harm that Reagan's presidency inflicted on the
American Republic and the American people, it may take many more years
before a historian has the guts to put this deformed era into a
truthful perspective and rate Reagan where he belongs -- near the
bottom of the presidential list.