angle4eva
06-05-2004, 08:13 PM
Former President Reagan dies at 93
Ronald
Reagan, the Hollywood actor who became one of the most popular presidents of the 20th
century and transformed the political landscape of an era with his vision of conservative
government, died at 1 p.m. today at his home in the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles. He was
93.
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His wife, Nancy, his greatest fan and fierce protector, was
at his side at the time of his death. For 10 years, he suffered from Alzheimer's disease. In
1994, he bade a poignant farewell to "my fellow Americans." In a handwritten letter, made
public by his office, he said he was setting out on "the journey that will lead me into the sunset
of my life."
In a statement relayed by chief of staff Joanne Drake, who represents the
family, Nancy Reagan said: "My family and I would like the world to know that President
Ronald Reagan has passed away after 10 years of Alzheimer's disease at 93 years of age.
We appreciate everyone's prayers."
Drake said Reagan's death was caused by
pneumonia.
Alzheimer's robbed him of his ability to remember much of his own
remarkable history: that he had served eight years as governor of California and eight more as
president of the United States, and that he had led America rightward toward the
middle.
Only one Democrat has succeeded him: Bill Clinton, a "new Democrat," who
did as much or more to achieve such conservative goals as balancing the federal budget and
changing welfare than anything Reagan himself accomplished.
Reagan inspired a
missionary corps of conservatives who hold countless elected offices and government jobs to
this day. Others have been elected since he left the White House. Indeed, biographer Lou
Cannon likens the Reagan revolution to a time bomb, citing political analyst Michael Barone's
tally showing that more Reagan Republicans won congressional seats in 1994 than they did
when he was president. Even in his final years, Reagan was a role model. President George
W. Bush, who has tugged the country farther right, has called Reagan "a hero in the American
story."
As the nation's 40th president, Reagan left lasting contributions to the world,
his nation and the people he served. Graced with a gift for storytelling, a ready wit and a
visceral understanding of the aspirations of his countrymen, Reagan had the rare distinction of
leaving office more popular than when he arrived.
Part of his gift was his ability to make
Americans, shaken by the Vietnam War and the scandal of Watergate, feel good about
themselves. His optimism was real and unyielding. Once, after surgery for colon cancer, he told
reporters: "I didn't have cancer. I had something inside of me that had cancer in it, and it was
removed."
It helped that he was an actor. "There have been times in this office," he
once told interviewer David Brinkley, "when I've wondered how you could do the job if you
hadn't been an actor."
People called him the Gipper, because he played Notre Dame
football star George Gipp in the 1940 movie "Knute Rockne-All American." On his deathbed,
Gipp urges Coach Rockne to implore the Fighting Irish to "win one for the Gipper." As
president, Reagan urged his fellow Americans to do the same, time and again: to write
Congress for tax relief, to vote Republican — so they, too, could win one for the
Gipper.
People also called him the Great Communicator because he understood the
presidency was a pulpit, and he used it to preach. Mostly his sermons were about a simple kind
of conservatism: cut taxes so investments of the wealthy would trickle down to the poor; build
America's military might so world communism would topple and fall. "Mr. Gorbachev," he
shouted, at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin during a visit in June of 1987, "tear down this
wall!"
Ten years later, after the Berlin Wall had tumbled and the Soviet empire had
collapsed, Reagan was strolling in Armand Hammer Park near his home. The Toledo Blade
reported that a Ukrainian from Ohio and his 12-year-old grandson asked if Reagan would sit on
a park bench with the boy for a picture. He obliged. The grandfather later told the New York
Times that they had thanked him for opposing communism.
Yes, Reagan replied, that
had been his job.
His Legacy
Reagan left a tangled legacy.
He presided
over a historic agreement to ban intermediate range nuclear missiles with the Soviet Union,
which he had reviled as an "evil empire." But he also presided over a debacle in Lebanon with
uncounted victims, including 241 U.S. troops, mostly Marines; and he presided over the
Iran-Contra affair, a scandal that severely damaged his administration.
Reagan's
tenure produced lower inflation, interest rates and unemployment. But his term also saw a
busted budget and record deficits, which made America a net importer and tripled the national
debt. It "mortgaged much of our future vitality," said conservative columnist George F. Will.
Nearly 15 years passed before the nation was able to post a surplus.
The president
himself was a man of striking contradictions, said Jane Mayer, a New Yorker magazine staff
writer, and Doyle McManus, the Times Washington bureau chief, in their book, "Landslide:
The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988." He was a gifted leader, they wrote, but he could
be detached and indecisive. He was an overwhelmingly popular politician, they said, but he
could be shy and intensely private and kept a personal distance from almost everyone except
his wife, Nancy.
"On balance, Reagan was a strong man, but an extraordinarily weak
manager," biographer Cannon said in his book "President Reagan: The Role of a
Lifetime."
Reagan restored public confidence in the presidency, Cannon wrote,
"without mastering the difficult art of wielding presidential power." Reagan often said:
"Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem."
In fact,
Cannon said, "Reagan thought so little of government that he did not think enough about it."
As a result, he treated the presidency with a hands-off style of management that tested the
abilities of those charged to run the executive branch, sometimes with unhappy
results.
But he also could be a very personal president. A recent collection, "Reagan: A
Life in Letters," revealed that he hand-wrote an astonishing assortment of notes to friends,
adversaries, world leaders and plain folks, from Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to a
seventh-grader who requested federal help because his mother had declared his bedroom a
disaster area. Reagan's letters asked whether governments truly reflected the needs of their
people, told of his imaginings about a ballistic missile defense system and suggested, with a
fatherly chuckle, that the youngster volunteer to clean up his room himself.
Many
Americans, however, saw in him things they also wanted to believe about themselves, said
cultural historian Garry Wills, in his book "Reagan's America: Innocents at Home." They were
convinced, Wills wrote, that both he and they were hopeful and independent, strong and
God-fearing, as well as destined to be extraordinary. They shaped their faith in him and in
themselves to accommodate any uncomfortable realities, Wills said, and they ignored his
inconsistencies.
This helped to shield Reagan from political disapproval. Confounding
opponents, he seemed at times to be immune to controversy. "The Teflon-coated presidency,"
complained former Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), when criticisms would not take hold but
slipped off instead like grease on a nonstick frying pan.
Reagan was protected, too, by
his style. He did not turn political foes into personal enemies. House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip"
O'Neill, an earthy populist from Boston who championed liberal causes with a fervor to match
Reagan's devotion to conservative crusades, often went from Capitol Hill down to the White
House at the end of the day for a quiet chat between two Irish pols.
"There's just
something about the guy that people like," O'Neill once explained to the Washington Post.
"They're rooting for him, and of course they're rooting for him because we haven't had any
presidential successes for years — Kennedy killed, Johnson with Vietnam, Nixon with
Watergate, Ford, Carter and all the rest." O'Neill remembered how Reagan would say to him,
"Tip, you and I are political enemies only until 6 o'clock. It's 4 o'clock now. Can we pretend
that it's 6 o'clock?"
Finally, Reagan was sustained by his sense of humor, which he
often exercised in times of adversity. When a would-be assassin gunned him down outside a
Washington hotel during the third month of his presidency, he quipped to a doctor laboring to
save his life: "I hope you're a Republican."
As in "win one for the Gipper," when
Reagan did not have a good line of his own, he borrowed one from a movie in which he had
appeared, or which he especially liked. To Reagan, the presidency was often the stage for a
well-rehearsed script. He tapped the talents of a stable of writers, including the eloquent Peggy
Noonan.
On the 40th anniversary of D-day, she provided his tribute on the palisades of
Normandy to American veterans who had flown to France for the occasion. "These are the
boys of Pointe du Hoc," he intoned, his delivery a marvel of dramatic narrative and pauses at
the punch lines. "These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped
free a continent. These are the heroes who helped win a war."
Veterans cried, said the
Washington Post, which reported that the speech moved "even reporters and Democrats to
tears."
His writers knew history. Left to himself, Reagan sometimes garbled it. This
mattered little, however, because he had perfect pitch for its music. "Reagan would embody
great chunks of the American experience, become deeply involved with them emotionally,
while having only the haziest notion of what really occurred," Wills said. "He had a skill for
striking 'historical' attitudes combined with a striking lack of historical attention."
What
he was doing was acting, but it served him well, even in times of trouble. Alexander M. Haig
caused a stir, for example, by resigning abruptly as secretary of State after battling the White
House staff and embarrassing the administration with an emotional pronouncement following
the assassination attempt that "I am in control here."
As Reagan prepared to answer
questions from reporters about Haig's departure, he regaled his aides with jokes. Chief of Staff
James A. Baker cautioned against levity at serious moments.
"Don't worry, Jim,"
Reagan replied. "I'll play it somber."
And he did.
His Early Years
Ronald
Wilson Reagan was born Feb. 6, 1911, in Tampico, Ill., the second son of John Edward
Reagan and Nelle Wilson Reagan.
His father, an Irish-Catholic Democrat, was a shoe
salesman and charming storyteller, but he had a restless spirit and a drinking problem. In the
early years of Reagan's childhood, his father had difficulty holding a job.
The Reagans
moved from one small town to another in rural Illinois. For a brief period, they resided on the
South Side of Chicago. By the age of 8, he had lived in seven homes. In 1920, when Reagan
was 9, the family settled down at last in the small community of Dixon, about 100 miles due
west of Chicago.
Dixon was where Reagan went to high school, played football and fell
in love with a preacher's daughter. It was where he took up his famous duties as a lifeguard in
Lowell Park, northeast of town on the Rock River. He was credited with saving 77
lives.
He was "Dutch" Reagan then, a nickname given to him when he was a baby by
his father, who thought he looked like "a fat little Dutchman." Reagan preferred "Dutch" to
Ronald, which he considered sissy.
His mother was a pious woman who had a big
influence on her sons, Neil and Ronald. Cheerful and energetic, she taught that people were
innately good and could achieve great things with perseverance. She gave Ronald his first
taste of acting: playing parts in moralistic church skits, some of which she wrote.
By
contrast, in an early autobiography, "Where's the Rest of Me? The Ronald Reagan Story,"
he described coming home to find his father "flat on his back on the front porch and no one
there to lend a hand but me. He was drunk, dead to the world. I wanted to let myself in the
house and go to bed and pretend he wasn't there." Instead, the scrawny 11-year-old tugged
his father inside and put him to bed.
Reagan said that he felt no resentment and
credited his mother. "She told Neil and myself over and over that alcoholism was a sickness —
that we should love and help our father and never condemn him for something that was
beyond his control." But it scarred him: As a youngster, he tried to avoid the trouble that
alcoholism caused at home; as an adult, Cannon said, sometimes he could not bring himself to
confront the trouble that infighting caused on his White House staff.
After high school,
Reagan enrolled in Eureka College, a small Christian school 21 miles east of Peoria. Early on,
he found his public voice. The college president, under fire for puritan restrictions against
smoking, dancing and staying out after 9:30 p.m., compounded his problems by threatening to
eliminate courses and fire teachers to save money.
Reagan, the freshman
representative, was asked to speak on behalf of students who were in revolt. "He did not call
for a return to law and order or ask the students to protest to the trustees through established
channels," wrote Bill Boyarsky, a retired Times city editor, political writer and columnist, in his
book, "Ronald Reagan: His Life & Rise to the Presidency." Nor did he criticize the faculty for
supporting the students, as he did during student unrest when he was the governor of
California.
Instead, Boyarsky said, "he offered a resolution calling for a student strike."
Reagan's emotional appeal prevailed: All but a few students refused to attend classes.
Ultimately, the president of Eureka College resigned.
In his autobiography, Reagan said
he discovered while he was making his strike speech "that an audience has a feel to it, and, in
the parlance of the theater, the audience and I were together. . . . It was heady
wine."
When he graduated from Eureka in 1932, the nation was deep in the
Depression. "We didn't live on the wrong side of the railroad tracks," Reagan said later about
those meager years, "but we lived so close to them we could hear the whistle real
loud."
Even in the depths of the nation's economic crisis, Reagan was determined to
succeed. He wanted to be a broadcaster. He was attracted to radio partly by the new
president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Memorizing portions of FDR's first inaugural address,
Reagan later echoed Roosevelt's cadence. As for FDR's New Deal politics, "I was a
near-hopeless hemophilic liberal," Reagan wrote later. "I bled for 'causes.' "
He
landed a part-time announcer's job at WOC in Davenport, Iowa. Within a year, WOC had
merged with its big-sister station, WHO in Des Moines, and Reagan was hired as a sports
announcer and recreated Chicago Cubs games.
Reagan often told a story during his
presidency of how he would get abbreviated information about a game in progress by
telegraph and relay it to listeners as if he were describing the action. Except once, when the
ticker died.
"When the [telegraph] slip came through, it said, 'The wire's gone dead.'
Well, I had the ball on the way to the plate," Reagan recalled to a group of baseball players at
a Hall of Fame lunch at the White House in 1981. "So I had Billy [Jurges] foul one off. . . . And
I had him foul one back at third base and described the fight between the two kids who were
trying to get to the ball. Then I had him foul one that just missed being a home run." Finally,
with Reagan sweating and listeners wondering about this odd succession of foul balls, the
ticker started to click again.
"And the slip came through the window, and I could hardly
talk for laughing," Reagan recalled. "It said, 'Jurges popped out on the first pitch.'
"
Radio loved Reagan's voice, but he longed to be an actor. WHO sent him to
Catalina Island in 1937 to cover the Cubs during spring training. While he was in California, he
wrangled a screen test and signed a contract for $200 a week with Warner Brothers
studio.
The Hollywood Years
Reagan acted in 52 movies cast as a good guy
and in one made-for-TV film, "The Killers," cast as a villain. He later said he regretted making
the picture. It was considered too violent for television and was released in theaters just as his
political career began.
In 1940, he married actress Jane Wyman, and they appeared
together in a sequel to their first pairing in "Brother Rat." It was called "Brother Rat and a
Baby." Within a year, their first child was born, a daughter they named Maureen Elizabeth.
Later they adopted a son, Michael Edward. Their daughter died in August 2001 of melanoma
at age 60.
Reagan's big movie break came with "Knute Rockne-All American," the
film that immortalized the Gipper. But his most challenging part came in "Kings Row," a 1942
picture in which he played a small-town playboy whose legs are needlessly amputated by a
vicious surgeon. Both he and critics called it his best performance.
He later became a
board member of the Screen Actors Guild. Stars who commanded big money — Robert
Montgomery, Cary Grant, James Cagney — welcomed him as an equal.
Reagan's film
career was sidetracked by World War II, and it never recovered. Disqualified from combat
because he was nearsighted, he was sent to the 1st Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps
in suburban Culver City, which made over 400 training films. He was discharged Dec. 9, 1945,
as a captain.
His involvement with the Screen Actors Guild increased, and with it a
growing interest in public life, which Wyman complained took all his time. In 1948, their
marriage — to Reagan's painful surprise — headed for divorce. It was for him a personal trauma.
"The plain truth was," he said, "that such a thing was so far from even being imagined by me
that I had no resources to call upon."
The trauma coincided with his first stirrings of
conservatism. He remained a Democrat, urging Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for president as a
Democrat and campaigning for Helen Gahagan Douglas in her futile U.S. Senate race against
Richard M. Nixon. It would not be until the early 1960s that he switched parties. "I didn't
leave the Democratic Party," he said. "The party left me."
By 1947, Reagan had
become president of the Screen Actors Guild. He was swept up in ideological turmoil that
tormented Hollywood. The House Un-American Activities Committee began investigating
claims of Communist influence within the studios. Writers and actors were blacklisted. Some
never worked again.
Reagan was convinced that Communists intended to seize
control of the movie industry so it could be used as "a worldwide propaganda base." The
remedy, he wrote in "Where's the Rest of Me?" was "that each American generation must be
re-educated to the precariousness of liberty."
Reagan and other actors appeared
before the committee to testify to their opposition to Communism. Although some witnesses had
named names, the actors did not, said Larry Ceplairv and Steven Englundv in their book, "The
Inquisition in Hollywood," but they "lent (their) names" to the luster of its hearings.
In
1952, he married Nancy Davis, a young actress whose mother, Edith Luckett, had been on
stage and whose stepfather, Dr. Loyal Davis, was a prominent neurosurgeon. She gave up
acting to devote herself to her husband. They had two children, Patricia Ann and Ronald
Prescott.
For Reagan, there was comfort in having a family again.
Enter General
Electric, stage right. For eight years, beginning in 1954, Reagan served GE as the host of a
televised series of dramas. He also was its goodwill ambassador to employees and to civic and
business groups around the country. While his motive was to make money, over time the
experience of speaking to business people helped crystallize his views and prepared him for
active politics.
His talks, initially only lighthearted reminiscences of Hollywood's Golden
Age, began to grow more serious. In speeches with titles such as "Encroaching Government
Controls" and "Our Eroding Freedoms," he broadened his scope to include a wide range of
national issues. At first, he confined his deepest political beliefs to private communications — a
1960 letter to Vice President Nixon, for instance, in which he said of John F. Kennedy: "Under
the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx."
By 1962, his speeches had become
more political — and more controversial. Under pressure, General Electric ended the
arrangement. He had become so popular, he said, that at least three years of bookings had to
be canceled.
"It would be nice to accept this as a tribute to my oratory," Reagan later
wrote. "But I think the real reason had to do with a change that was taking place all over
America. People wanted to talk about and hear about encroaching government control. And
hopefully they wanted suggestions as to what they themselves could do to turn the
tide."
The Political Years
Reagan's political fortunes rose from the ashes of
Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater's spectacular defeat in 1964. Reagan
offered a friendly antidote to Goldwater's strident rhetoric. Reagan's tone suggested patriotic
concern and continuity with the past. Unlike Goldwater, he could sell conservatism with a
smile.
In a fund-raising address televised to the nation, Reagan honed "the speech,"
as it was known during his GE days, into a clarion call. Americans saw the smoothest, most
articulate, most attractive champion of the Republican cause in a generation. Biographer
Boyarsky said Reagan's speech, "A Time for Choosing," stirred conservatives just as William
Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech had electrified farmers and factory workers in
1896.
Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson, but Reagan won national
acclaim.
The next spring, Holmes P. Tuttle, a wealthy Los Angeles car dealer who had
promoted the fund-raising speech, invited other millionaires to support Reagan in a race for
governor of California. The millionaires, later known as Reagan's kitchen cabinet, hired the
California campaign management team of Stuart Spencer and Bill Roberts. They, in turn, hired
professors to brief Reagan on state issues and broaden his command of literary
allusions.
His years on television for GE, then as host of "Death Valley Days," had
made Reagan a familiar face. But it brought criticism, as well. Democrats derided him as a
puppet who mouthed words scripted by others. In "An American Life," a later autobiography,
he recalled that incumbent Gov. Edmund G. "Pat" Brown aired an ad in which he told
schoolchildren, "I'm running against an actor," and then added, "and you know who killed
Lincoln, don't you?"
Reagan, for his part, gave versions of "the speech" at every
opportunity. He argued that government was too big, taxes were too high and regulation was
strangling business. Often he ended with, "Ya basta!" It was Spanish for, "Enough,
already!"
Californians said yes, overwhelmingly.
Reagan defeated Brown by
nearly 1 million votes and swept Republicans into every major executive office except attorney
general.
During his eight years in Sacramento, Reagan's performance foreshadowed
his stewardship in Washington. Against Democratic majorities among lawmakers for most of the
time in both places, he portrayed himself as a "citizen politician" determined to "squeeze, cut
and trim" and get government off "the backs of its people."
The champion of striking
students at Eureka College vowed to restore order at protest-torn campuses throughout
California and was pleased to see the firing of nationally respected University of California
President Clark Kerr. Reagan also supported the first-ever UC student tuition.
He
appointed a former member of the John Birch Society to head his Office of Economic
Opportunity and to campaign against legal assistance for the rural poor. In a compromise,
Boyarsky wrote, he gave up a permanent ceiling on welfare appropriations, but he succeeded
in reducing welfare rolls.
Squeezing, cutting and trimming government were harder. In
his first year, he proposed slashing the state budget by an unprecedented 10% — but ended up
signing a spending program 10% larger than his predecessor's. He kept proclaiming "squeeze,
cut and trim," but his budgets, hammered by inflation, ballooned from his first of $4.6 billion to
his last of $10.2 billion. He signed what at the time was the biggest state tax increase in the
nation's history: $844 million in the first year, $1.01 billion in the second. It marked the first of a
roller coaster series of tax increases and rebates.
One of his most remarkable flip-flops
involved his opposition to payroll withholding of state income taxes. "My feet are in concrete,"
he said, over and over. But in 1970, when the state faced a serious cash flow crisis, Reagan
finally gave in. "That sound you hear," he told reporters, "is the concrete breaking around my
feet." That same year he found himself in a personal controversy. He had paid no state income
tax himself because of "business reverses."
As he campaigned, he had been
dismissive of some environmental concerns. "You know, a tree is a tree," he said. "How many
more do you need to look at?" But as governor, he signed some of the nation's strictest air
and water quality laws, increased state parkland and started requiring environmental impact
reports on state construction projects.
He signed a historic abortion reform bill authored
by a Democrat that vastly liberalized the procedure in California. Advocates promoted it as a
model for other states. Later, as a national political figure, Reagan would hold the support of
the most militant anti-abortionists, while doing relatively little to advance their
cause.
"Reagan was not as good as the Republicans like to think, or as bad as the
Democrats would have you believe," declared Democratic Assembly Speaker Jesse M. Unruh,
who had opposed him unsuccessfully when he ran for a second term.
Reagan's
march on Washington began almost as soon as he reached the state Capitol. He ran for
president in 1968, but fell to Nixon. By 1975, when Reagan completed his second term as
governor, Nixon had resigned in disgrace. Reagan began an all-out, two-year drive to wrest
the 1976 nomination from incumbent Gerald R. Ford, who became president on the resignation
of Nixon. He fell short by a handful of delegates to the Republican National
Convention.
But Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, and Reagan became the front-runner to
challenge Carter in 1980. This time Reagan was not to be denied. He flirted with asking former
President Ford to be his running mate, but negotiations faltered — so he turned to George Bush,
who in the primaries had called his fiscal policy "voodoo economics." By 1983, Reagan
vowed, he would cut taxes, boost defense spending and balance the budget.
Under
Carter, Americans had been battered by double-digit inflation, stagnant growth and a fuel
shortage that caused long lines at gasoline stations. They had been humiliated by the
imprisonment of 52 Americans who were being held hostage in Iran and by Carter's
unsuccessful efforts to free them, including an aborted military rescue that cost the lives of
eight American servicemen.
Reagan preached optimism. If he were elected, America
would stand tall again, he said, and competence would return to Washington.
"Are you
better off now than you were four years ago?" he asked voters.
Absolutely not, they
responded, and gave him a resounding victory: 51% of the vote to Carter's 41%. Independent
John Anderson won nearly 7%.
Reagan won the electoral vote 489 to 44.
The
White House Years
When Reagan took office at the age of 69, he was better
positioned that any Republican since Eisenhower to lay a firm hand on government. He froze
hiring and new regulations. He swept even low-level Democrats out of their jobs and replaced
them with Republicans. He won a 25% cut in personal income taxes and big tax breaks for
businesses. He called for deep cuts in social programs, and he increased Pentagon spending
by more than 9% per year between fiscal 1981 and 1984.
To presidents with programs,
their first 100 days in office are important. Reagan did not have that long. On his 70thday, he
was shot by John W. Hinckley Jr., a 25-year-old drifter who had hidden in a crowd of reporters
outside the Washington Hilton, where Reagan had just spoken to labor leaders. A .22-caliber
bullet entered his chest under his left shoulder. It careened off a rib and lodged in his left lung —
within an inch of his heart. The bullet was removed during a two-hour operation, but not before
he had lost nearly half his blood and had edged close to death.
Reagan had been in
far graver danger than he let on. He had walked into the hospital and did not collapse until he
was out of sight. "Honey, I forgot to duck," he told Nancy, borrowing a line from boxer Jack
Dempsey.
Hinckley, who had a history of psychiatric problems, was trying to impress
actress Jodie Foster, whom he idolized. He had fired six shots, wounding four people. Press
Secretary James Brady was hit in the head and has been in a wheelchair since. Hinckley was
committed to a mental institution.
Twelve days after the shooting, Reagan was back at
the White House. His strength and gallant demeanor touched the public. Characteristically,
however, he did not change his long-standing opposition to gun control. Brady, on the other
hand, became a national leader in the fight to curb handguns.
Despite the interruption,
Reagan lost little momentum. In the middle of his first summer as president, more than 11,000
federal air traffic controllers, members of one of the few unions to support him, walked off their
jobs — and he fired them. It was a blow to organized labor, already in decline. But it showed that
Reagan meant what he said — especially about guarding the economy against inflation. Before
the end of his first summer as president, Congress had enacted his historic tax cut and his
budget legislation largely intact.
To justify increasing defense spending while slashing
taxes, Reagan had embraced supply-side economics — a theory that enjoyed little standing
among many economists. Supply-siders held that higher spending and lower taxes would not
increase the deficit. Instead, the theory held, tax cuts would unleash such a wave of economic
growth that government income would actually rise.
It did not happen. As defense
spending rose and the tax cuts kicked in, the predicted surge in economic growth did not
materialize. The deficit soared toward record levels. Eventually, the national debt nearly tripled.
Before Reagan's first year was up, the nation's economy plunged into the worst downturn in
years. By March of 1982, Reagan, who had acknowledged "a slight and, I hope, a short
recession," was reduced to denying that the nation was in a depression. Unemployment
reached a 41-year record of 10.8% that November, and the global effects of the slowdown did
severe damage to Third World debtor nations and the world's banking
system.
Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, was among the disillusioned. He
granted a series of devastating interviews to William Greider, who published them in the
Atlantic Monthly, quoting Stockman as saying, "None of us really understands what's going
on with all these numbers."
"Stay the course!" Reagan urged the nation, insisting that
supply side simply needed more time. But even Republicans feared that without additional
revenue, the deficit would reach uncontrollable proportions. Republican senators forced him to
accept a three-year, $100-billion tax increase.
Reagan sought to pass it off as closing
loopholes.
The economic turmoil cost the Republicans 25 seats in the House of
Representatives. But Democrats were hesitant to press their own solutions for the recession,
and when Reagan's tax increase began boosting economic indicators in the fall of 1983, the
president could claim full credit.
All the while, superpower relations degenerated to an
unnerving low. Arms control negotiations stalled. Some Americans, including a number of
religious leaders, urged a freeze on nuclear weapons. To blunt the movement, Reagan
assailed the Soviet Union as an "evil empire." He called communism "another sad, bizarre
chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written." He announced a plan
to develop a space-based defense system, called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), to
destroy Soviet missiles before they could reach the United States.
Moscow
bristled.
American critics said SDI would never work. They named the system Star
Wars, after the George Lucas space fantasy film. But Reagan would not give it up, and it
became a persistent stumbling block to an arms control agreement.
In September of
1983, a Soviet fighter shot down an unarmed South Korean airliner that had strayed into Soviet
air space over a Russian peninsula. The attack killed 269 people, including a U.S.
congressman. Although an isolated incident, it deepened fear of a superpower
conflict.
In the Middle East, the administration tried hard to bring peace. Reagan sent
Marines into Lebanon as part of a multinational force to end warfare between Christians and
Muslims. But the administration was divided. Reagan's advisors showed signs of the infighting
that would come to cost him dearly during his second term. Defense Secretary Caspar W.
Weinberger opposed the mission in Lebanon. But Reagan, encouraged by Secretary of State
George P. Shultz, stepped up U.S involvement.
Pro-Iranian terrorists crashed a
bomb-laden van into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 persons, including 17 Americans.
Reagan held the Marines in place despite the increasing risk.
Terrorists struck again. A
truck filled with explosives broke through inadequate defenses around a Marine barracks in
Beirut. It blew the building to pieces and killed 241 U.S. servicemen.
It was "the
saddest day of my presidency," Reagan wrote in "An American Life," and "perhaps the
saddest day of my life."
On the day after the bombing, he ordered Marines and Army
Rangers to invade the Caribbean island of Grenada to oust a cadre of Cuban troops,
effectively overthrowing a new Marxist government and bringing home 800 American medical
students. Many allies and a number of Democratic leaders called the invasion meddling in
Grenada's affairs and suspected that it was intended to distract Americans from the horror in
Beirut.
The facts showed otherwise, Cannon said. Although Reagan did not issue his
formal order for the invasion until the day after Beirut, planning for a military evacuation of the
students from Grenada had been underway for four days, and Reagan and his advisors had
reached a consensus to invade the island one day before.
In the end, the Granada
operation got bad marks: The 5,000-member invasion force, facing little opposition, sustained
19 fatalities. But Americans reveled in the show of military muscle.
During all of this,
Reagan refused to bring the Marines home from Lebanon. He left them at risk for three more
months until he quietly ordered all 1,500 to retreat to the safety of U.S. Navy ships
offshore.
By now the economy was back up. The president and the Federal Reserve
had curbed inflation — "the most enduring," Cannon judged, "of Reagan's economic
legacies."
The president, who might have been doomed by recession and plagued by
misadventures abroad, basked in respect. As the 1984 election approached, he held a big
lead in the polls.
His television commercials declared: "It's morning again in
America."
The Second Term
Reagan campaigned on patriotism, prosperity and
military strength. His opponent, Walter F. Mondale, who was Carter's vice president, failed to
seize on a compelling issue. He saddled himself with a pledge to raise taxes. He said Reagan
would raise taxes, too, but would not be candid enough to admit it.
A poor performance
during one debate gave Reagan his only uneasy moment. It prompted speculation that the
president, well past 73, might be too old for the job. When the matter came up in the next
debate, he remarked with a disarming smile, "I want you to know that . . . I will not make age
an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's
youth and inexperience."
Even Mondale, 56, laughed.
Reagan won by the
largest electoral raw vote landslide in history. He received 59% of the popular vote, carried 49
states and got 525 electoral votes — to Mondale's 13.
Even before his second
inauguration, planning was underway for Reagan to visit Germany for the 1985 economic
summit on the 40th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis. Chancellor Helmut Kohl asked him
to honor dead German soldiers as an act of reconciliation. Touched by Kohl's emotion and
eager to reciprocate his support as an ally, Reagan agreed -and kept his word, despite
relentless objections from Elie Wiesel and other Jewish leaders, as well as groups of American
veterans, prominent Republicans and his own wife.
The ceremony would be at a
cemetery in Bitburg. Protests exploded into outcries when snow melted on the graves and
revealed that 49 SS troops were among the 2,000 German soldiers buried there. Wiesel
begged Reagan to abandon the Bitburg visit, citing SS participation in the Holocaust. "One
million Jewish children perished," he pleaded. "If I spent my entire life reciting their names, I
would die before finishing the task. Mr. President, I have seen children-I have seen them being
thrown in the flames alive. Words, they die on my lips . . . . May I, Mr. President, if it's possible
at all, implore you to do something else . . . to find another way, another site. That place, Mr.
President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS."
Reagan added a
stop to honor the Jews who had died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but it hardly
helped. When the president finally visited the German graves, he lost a measure of his stature
in the Jewish community.
He did not understand history, and he would fail this way
again. "Within two months of Bitburg," Cannon said, "Reagan would authorize the first stages
of a backdoor deal with Iran that would demonstrate in even greater measure . . . [his]
inadequate historical understanding, political naivete and awesome presidential
stubbornness."
Emboldened by his landslide reelection, the Reagan administration
reached beyond what was legal and provided arms to the Iranians in return for American
hostages in Lebanon — and used proceeds to finance a war by guerrillas, called Contras, trying
to overthrow the Marxist government of Nicaragua.
The deal developed into a scandal
called Iran-Contra, and it cost the president mightily.
Nicaragua's governing coalition,
the Sandinistas, supported guerrillas of its own, who were trying to overthrow pro-American
leaders in El Salvador. The Sandinistas, Reagan told the Washington Post, were "terrorists" in
a "revolution being exported to the Americas."
As early as 1981, Reagan had
approved a request by William J. Casey, his CIA director and a longtime cold warrior, for $19
million to help the Contras overthrow the Sandinista government in the name of democracy and
anti-communism. It was secret money, and it went to 500 insurrectionists — including national
guard members in the former regime of despised Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza.
Reagan called them "freedom fighters" and "the moral equal of our Founding
Fathers."
Rightists won control of the Salvadoran assembly, and they elected as
president Roberto d'Aubuisson, suspected of being tied to the unsolved murder of Oscar
Arnulfo Romero, a Catholic archbishop and outspoken foe of the far right. Now Reagan found
himself supplying covert aid to members of a deposed despot's national guard, who were
trying to overthrow the lawful government of Nicaragua, in defense of a right-wing leader in El
Salvador who was associated with death squads.
Reagan did not flinch. In 1982, the
Washington Post disclosed his covert aid. He won several fights in Congress to send the
Contras official assistance, but he lost others, and by May of 1984 the Contras were broke.
Robert C. McFarlane, the president's national security advisor, said Reagan told him to keep
the Contras together "body and soul."
McFarlane passed the instruction along to a
Marine lieutenant colonel, Oliver North, who was a member of the National Security Council
staff.
Congress passed an amendment, called Boland II, barring the use of funds to
support, either directly or indirectly, any military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua. Less
than a month before his reelection, Reagan signed the legislation. But he thought that helping
the Contras was the "right thing to do," according to Cannon. "He had no interest whatever in
the legal restrictions that Congress believed it had imposed on him."
At the same time,
his second term brought an acute deterioration in his White House team, with disastrous
consequences. He allowed James Baker, his pragmatic chief of staff, to trade jobs with Donald
Regan, his secretary of the Treasury. For four years, said Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus,
Baker had helped guard Reagan "from his own worst instincts." Regan, on the other hand, let
Reagan be Reagan. The loss of Baker at the White House, along with his political savvy, was
widely blamed for many of the subsequent troubles that befell the president.
Regan and
McFarlane distrusted each other; Cannon said they barely spoke. McFarlane also was at odds
with Secretary of State Shultz and Secretary of Defense Weinberger, especially on Iran.
McFarlane wanted to woo Iran away from Soviet influence, even if it meant encouraging the
sale of Western arms to Iran for its ongoing war against Iraq. Shultz and Weinberger opposed it
adamantly. American policy opposed selling arms to Iran and other sponsors of
terrorism.
To Reagan, this was yet another wrangle over government policy. He was
not really interested in government, Cannon said. "[He] was so obviously wearied by extensive
analysis, particularly of foreign policy, that aides plunged into arcane material at their peril. If
Reagan became sufficiently bored, he simply nodded off."
He had even less appetite
for personal conflicts among his staff. "Reagan had learned in childhood from his father's
alcoholic eruptions," Cannon said, "to withdraw at any sign of disharmony."
In March of
1984, William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, had been kidnapped by terrorists linked
to Iran, and CIA Director Casey told Reagan he wanted Buckley back. Moreover, Casey saw
merit in McFarlane's Cold War view of Iran as a barrier against the Soviet
Union.
Terrorists took more hostages, seven Americans in all.
This seized
Reagan's attention like no policy debate ever could. It evoked what Mayer and McManus
call the "hard-liner's soft touch." The danger, they said, "was that, left to his own good
intentions, the president would confuse the human interest with the national interest . . . .
There was no clearer example of this danger than in his approach to the hostages."
In
August of 1985, McFarlane later testified, Reagan secretly approved the first of eight
shipments of missiles and missile parts to Iran. Four of the shipments were made through Israel,
which provided the arms and received replacements from the United States. The other
shipments were made directly.
Reagan signed three "findings," or authorizations, for
the secret sales. One spoke of freeing the hostages. Attached to another was a memo.
Cannon said Reagan did not bother to read it, so Admiral John Poindexter, who had
succeeded McFarlane as national security advisor, initialed it on Reagan's behalf. It approved
using a private agent as a go-between.
Lt. Col. Oliver North already had arranged for
such an agent. He called it the Enterprise. It was a network of secret operatives, shadow
corporations and Swiss bank accounts. He could use them to do something that might be
illegal under Boland II but would further a cause dear to the president. He could divert profits
from the Iranian arms sales to the Contras. It would keep them together "body and
soul."
Secretly, Cannon said, North and the Enterprise demanded far more money from
the Iranians than they paid the Defense Department for the missiles; just two of the shipments
had yielded $6.3 million in profits. North kept none of the money for himself, but fellow
operatives in the Enterprise pocketed some. North gave much of the rest to the
Contras.
On Nov. 3, 1986, a Lebanese magazine, Al-Shiraa, told about a McFarlane
visit to Iran and said he had sent weapons on Reagan's behalf. Three days later the Los
Angeles Times and the Washington Post broke the first full story of the Iran arms sales.
Diversion of profits to the Contras remained a secret, but Congress exploded in anger, and
trading arms for hostages sputtered to a close.
By Cannon's count, Reagan had sold
more than 2,000 missiles and in excess of 200 spare parts to Iran. Operatives in the Enterprise
had pocketed $4.4 million. Another $3.8 million had gone to the Contras, in defiance of the law
established by Boland II. CIA agent William Buckley had died in captivity. Three American
hostages had been released, but terrorists had taken three others in their stead.
The
president's first reaction was a "no comment," his second, a denial. Then his denial became
confusing: He said that Weinberger and Shultz had supported an initiative toward Iran, which
he had already denied existed. He refused to concede that he had traded arms for hostages.
"Our government has a firm policy not to capitulate to terrorist demands," he declared to the
American people in a televised speech. "That no-concessions policy remains in force, in spite
of the wildly speculative and false stories about arms for hostages and alleged ransom
payments.
"We did not-repeat, did not-trade weapons or anything else for
hostages."
This became his version of the truth, Cannon said, and the one that
Reagan believed forever. A Los Angeles Times poll found, however, that only 14% of those
who watched him on television believed him.
Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III opened an
inquiry. So did congressional committees and a bipartisan review board headed by former Sen.
John G. Tower, a Republican from Texas. An independent counsel, former federal judge
Lawrence Walsh, a Republican, began a criminal investigation.
Meese's investigation
discovered the diversion of funds to the Contras. Now the attorney general and other top aides
worried that the president might be impeached. McFarlane tried to kill himself. Reagan forced
Poindexter to resign. He fired North, then called him "a national hero." The Tower Board said
that Regan, as chief of staff, bore "primary responsibility for the chaos that had descended
upon the White House." Reagan forced Regan to resign.
Walsh indicted 14 persons,
mostly lesser players. They included Poindexter, who was convicted on five felony counts of
conspiracy, obstruction of Congress and lying to Congress. His conviction was overturned.
Walsh charged Weinberger with perjury. But before Weinberger could be tried, he was
pardoned by Reagan's vice president, George Bush, after he was elected
president.
Ten others were convicted. Walsh found that Reagan had "participated or
acquiesced in covering up the scandal."
Had he authorized sending money from Iran
to the Contras? Walsh could not find out.
Reagan consistently denied it.
The
answer was a mystery and might be forever.
Other Achievements
Reagan
succeeded, however, in keeping his pledge to conservatives to change the Supreme Court. In
1981, he appointed the first woman, Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderately conservative judge
from Arizona. In 1986, he promoted conservative Justice William H. Rehnquist to be chief
justice and appointed another conservative, Antonin Scalia.
He nominated Robert H.
Bork, the conservative who fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox for Nixon during Watergate.
But the nomination was defeated after a battle that injected enduring bitterness into
confirmation hearings. Reagan had to settle for Anthony M. Kennedy. While hardly a liberal,
Kennedy later would vote against overturning Roe vs. Wade, which upholds the right to
abortion.
Nor was Iran-Contra the only trouble abroad. In late 1985, four Palestinians
hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro with 400 passengers aboard. The hijackers
surrendered in Egypt, but not before killing Leon Klinghoffer, 69, a New Yorker confined to a
wheelchair. He was singled out because he was Jewish.
When an Egyptian plane tried
to fly the hijackers home, U.S. Navy fighters forced it to land in Sicily, where they were
arrested. The interception gave the administration a boost.
In April 1986, American
planes struck Libya in retaliation for a terrorist attack on a West Berlin night club that claimed
the life of a U.S. serviceman. Libyan officials said leader Moammar Kadafi was not harmed, but
three dozen civilians were killed, including his adopted daughter, and that nearly 100 people,
including two of his sons, were injured.
The raid was sharply criticized internationally,
but it, too, gained Reagan popularity at home.
His overwhelming triumph, however, was
an improvement in superpower relations that presaged the end of the Cold War. Nothing
displayed Reagan's capacity for political accommodation more clearly than his dealings with
Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
During his second term, Reagan carried the
burden of his anti-Soviet rhetoric and the stakes he had raised with SDI, his space-based
defense program, into four summit meetings with Gorbachev. Doggedly Reagan pursued both
a reduction in atomic weapons and better treatment for dissidents and Soviet
Jews.
Reagan had three good reasons to reach out to Gorbachev, Cannon said. He
had little to show for his first four years in foreign policy. He had built up the military and could
bargain from strength. He was freer to deal with the Soviets than any other president because
he, of all people, could not be accused of being soft on communism.
Reagan believed
in Armageddon. It made him a visionary. "My dream . . . became a world free of nuclear
weapons . . . ," he said in "An American Life." Because "I knew it would be a long and difficult
task to rid the world of nuclear weapons, I had this second dream: the creation of a defense
against nuclear missiles, so we could change from a policy of assured destruction to one of
assured survival."
But during negotiations, Cannon said, his two dreams clashed. The
Soviets refused to retire any of their strategic, long-range missiles unless Reagan gave up SDI,
his proposed system of defensive missiles to knock down enemy weapons. SDI frightened the
Soviets. If it ever worked, they said, it would provide a screen behind which the United States
could launch an atomic attack of its own.
Moreover, they said, SDI violated an
antiballistic missile treaty in effect since 1972. The treaty permitted laboratory research of
antimissile components, but it banned testing and deployment.
On this, too, the Reagan
administration was divided. Defense Secretary Weinberger and Assistant Defense Secretary
Richard Perle wanted a broader interpretation of the treaty to permit testing. Secretary of State
Shultz and Paul Nitze, his leading arms negotiator, said anything but the traditional
interpretation would anger the Soviets and cause problems with allies and members of
Congress.
As usual, Cannon said, Reagan tried to avoid the disagreement. He said he
would interpret the ABM treaty broadly to permit testing, but as a matter of policy he would
abide by the traditional interpretation and stop short of conducting any tests.
"A
deliberate deceit," the Soviets responded.
So it was that prospects seemed dim when
Reagan and Gorbachev sat down on Nov. 19, 1985, in Geneva for their first summit. Reagan
was the first U.S. president since Eisenhower to go more than four years without meeting his
Soviet counterpart. During those four years, there were three Soviet leaders. They "kept dying
on me," he quipped.
From the start, Reagan was relaxed and cordial. As Gorbachev,
bundled against the cold, approached the mansion on Lake Geneva where they would hold
their initial session, Reagan took off his overcoat and strode out onto the top step to greet him.
In "An American Life," he wrote: "As we shook hands for the first time, I had to admit — as
Margaret Thatcher and (Canadian) Prime Minister Brian Mulroney predicted I would — that there
was something likable about Gorbachev."
Reagan developed a personal sense of
Gorbachev as someone he could deal with. But by afternoon the two of them were arguing
about SDI. Reagan said the United States would never launch an initial strike with nuclear
weapons and would prove it by sharing SDI technology with the Soviets.
Gorbachev
did not believe him. For his part, the Soviet leader said that his nation had no aggressive
intentions.
How could Americans believe that, Reagan asked, if Gorbachev did not
believe him?
Reagan suggested some fresh air. He and Gorbachev strolled out to a
pool house and talked in front of a blazing fire. They achieved no momentous breakthrough,
but as they walked back, Reagan invited Gorbachev to meet again, this time in Washington.
Gorbachev accepted and proposed a subsequent meeting in Moscow.
It set the stage
for negotiation, not denunciation. The two leaders shared "a kind of chemistry," Reagan told
Cannon. "Yes, we argued, and we'd go nose to nose. But when the argument was over, it
was like it is with us. He wasn't stalking out of there and [saying] 'down with the lousy
Americans' or anything. We fought it out, and maybe knew we were going to fight it out again,
but when the meeting was over, we were normal."
In "An American Life," Reagan said
he was reminded of his after-hours relationship with Tip O'Neill. The Soviet leader "could tell
jokes about himself and even about his country, and I grew to like him more."
They
ended the summit with a promise: to seek a 50% cut in nuclear weapons.
It looked
impossible. Gorbachev remained adamant: no SDI, or no cuts. Reagan was committed to both:
SDI and cuts. Worse, Cannon said, Reagan's advisors were more sharply divided than ever.
Weinberger and Perle distrusted arms control and wanted SDI, at least partly to block an
agreement. But Shultz and Nitze wanted an agreement so badly they were willing to give
ground on SDI.
Gorbachev suggested meeting in Iceland or Britain before the
Washington summit to see if he and Reagan could break the deadlock. Reagan chose
Iceland. They met on Oct. 11, 1986, in Reykjavik. The two leaders argued about the missile
cuts and about SDI, and their advisors negotiated through the night. By morning, they had
neared agreement on the cuts — but they were far apart on SDI.
In "An American Life,"
Reagan said that Gorbachev would not budge on any SDI development outside the
laboratory.
Reagan stood. "The meeting is over." He turned to Shultz. "Let's go,
George. We're leaving."
Shultz was crushed, but Reagan was unfazed. "I went to
Reykjavik determined that everything was negotiable except two things," he told the American
people afterward. "Our freedom and our future."
Over the coming year, Shultz,
Gorbachev and his advisors negotiated persistently to eliminate at least a lower level of
weaponry: the U.S. and Soviet arsenals of intermediate and short-range missiles. In September
of 1987, Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze announced an agreement
in principle on an Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, and Gorbachev came to
Washington that December.
Crowds along the streets applauded him. Like an
American politician, Gorbachev stopped his car, got out and shook hands. On Dec. 8, Reagan
and the Soviet leader sat at a White House table once used by Abraham Lincoln and put their
names to a ban on all nuclear missiles with ranges of 300 miles to 3,400 miles.
The
destruction of these missiles -some 1,700 by the Soviet Union and some 800 by the United
States — was well underway by the time Reagan left office.
As for the long-range
missiles, it was obvious before the remaining Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Moscow that SDI
would be an insurmountable obstacle to any reduction. But Reagan went to the Soviet Union
anyway.
He received a welcome from the Russians to match Gorbachev's in America.
As Reagan walked through the Arbat, where artisans sold their wares, crowds pressed forward
to greet him. KGB agents charged the people, causing a panic. But their friendly intentions
carried the day.
Reagan spoke to students at Moscow State University, offering them
his vision of the American dream. He met with 96 dissidents and pressed Gorbachev on human
rights.
Gorbachev already had allowed hundreds to emigrate who were on lists Reagan
had given him, and he would free thousands more.
Reagan met three more times with
Gorbachev. Once was in New York when the Soviet leader spoke to the United Nations; the
second time was in San Francisco, after Reagan had left office; and the third time was in
Moscow, when Reagan was nearly two years into retirement.
By now, Reagan was
calling Gorbachev "my friend." Reagan never abandoned what he said was his favorite
Russian proverb, "Doveryai no proveryai" (Trust but verify). But the warmth of their friendship
started the thaw that ended the Cold War.
Saying Goodbye
When he departed
the White House and came back to California, Ronald Reagan had good reason to be
satisfied. He had failed to balance the federal budget; the national debt had nearly tripled to
$2.684.4 trillion. But his recession, which Cannon called "the worst since the Depression," had
been followed by what would become the longest peacetime recovery in
history.
Reagan had achieved an unprecedented breakthrough in arms control, and his
diplomacy had been crucial to peace. He was, Gorbachev declared, a "great political
leader."
His credibility with Congress and the American people, dismayingly low during
Iran-Contra, had recovered. His achievements as well as his unyielding belief that nothing was
impossible and his unparalleled ability to persuade Americans to believe in him and in
themselves had earned Ronald Reagan a job performance rating in the Gallup Poll of 63%
when he left Washington. It had been 51% when he arrived.
On Jan. 11, 1989, when
he bade farewell from the Oval Office, there were two things he was proudest of. "One is the
economic recovery . . . The other is the recovery of our morale. America is respected again in
the world, and looked to for leadership."
The United States, he said, was a shining city
upon a hill. "And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure and
happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that. After 200 years, two centuries, she still
stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steadily no matter what the
storm . . .
"As I walk off into the city streets, a final word to the men and women across
American, who for eight years did the work that brought America back: My friends, we did it.
We weren't just marking time, we made a difference. We made the city stronger, we made the
city freer, and we left her in good hands.
"All in all, not bad. Not bad at all. And so,
goodbye. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America."
R.I.P. :-(
Ronald
Reagan, the Hollywood actor who became one of the most popular presidents of the 20th
century and transformed the political landscape of an era with his vision of conservative
government, died at 1 p.m. today at his home in the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles. He was
93.
[img:18cfcf9a87]http://www.newsday.com/media/photo/2004-06/12918691.jpg[/img:18c
fcf9a87]
His wife, Nancy, his greatest fan and fierce protector, was
at his side at the time of his death. For 10 years, he suffered from Alzheimer's disease. In
1994, he bade a poignant farewell to "my fellow Americans." In a handwritten letter, made
public by his office, he said he was setting out on "the journey that will lead me into the sunset
of my life."
In a statement relayed by chief of staff Joanne Drake, who represents the
family, Nancy Reagan said: "My family and I would like the world to know that President
Ronald Reagan has passed away after 10 years of Alzheimer's disease at 93 years of age.
We appreciate everyone's prayers."
Drake said Reagan's death was caused by
pneumonia.
Alzheimer's robbed him of his ability to remember much of his own
remarkable history: that he had served eight years as governor of California and eight more as
president of the United States, and that he had led America rightward toward the
middle.
Only one Democrat has succeeded him: Bill Clinton, a "new Democrat," who
did as much or more to achieve such conservative goals as balancing the federal budget and
changing welfare than anything Reagan himself accomplished.
Reagan inspired a
missionary corps of conservatives who hold countless elected offices and government jobs to
this day. Others have been elected since he left the White House. Indeed, biographer Lou
Cannon likens the Reagan revolution to a time bomb, citing political analyst Michael Barone's
tally showing that more Reagan Republicans won congressional seats in 1994 than they did
when he was president. Even in his final years, Reagan was a role model. President George
W. Bush, who has tugged the country farther right, has called Reagan "a hero in the American
story."
As the nation's 40th president, Reagan left lasting contributions to the world,
his nation and the people he served. Graced with a gift for storytelling, a ready wit and a
visceral understanding of the aspirations of his countrymen, Reagan had the rare distinction of
leaving office more popular than when he arrived.
Part of his gift was his ability to make
Americans, shaken by the Vietnam War and the scandal of Watergate, feel good about
themselves. His optimism was real and unyielding. Once, after surgery for colon cancer, he told
reporters: "I didn't have cancer. I had something inside of me that had cancer in it, and it was
removed."
It helped that he was an actor. "There have been times in this office," he
once told interviewer David Brinkley, "when I've wondered how you could do the job if you
hadn't been an actor."
People called him the Gipper, because he played Notre Dame
football star George Gipp in the 1940 movie "Knute Rockne-All American." On his deathbed,
Gipp urges Coach Rockne to implore the Fighting Irish to "win one for the Gipper." As
president, Reagan urged his fellow Americans to do the same, time and again: to write
Congress for tax relief, to vote Republican — so they, too, could win one for the
Gipper.
People also called him the Great Communicator because he understood the
presidency was a pulpit, and he used it to preach. Mostly his sermons were about a simple kind
of conservatism: cut taxes so investments of the wealthy would trickle down to the poor; build
America's military might so world communism would topple and fall. "Mr. Gorbachev," he
shouted, at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin during a visit in June of 1987, "tear down this
wall!"
Ten years later, after the Berlin Wall had tumbled and the Soviet empire had
collapsed, Reagan was strolling in Armand Hammer Park near his home. The Toledo Blade
reported that a Ukrainian from Ohio and his 12-year-old grandson asked if Reagan would sit on
a park bench with the boy for a picture. He obliged. The grandfather later told the New York
Times that they had thanked him for opposing communism.
Yes, Reagan replied, that
had been his job.
His Legacy
Reagan left a tangled legacy.
He presided
over a historic agreement to ban intermediate range nuclear missiles with the Soviet Union,
which he had reviled as an "evil empire." But he also presided over a debacle in Lebanon with
uncounted victims, including 241 U.S. troops, mostly Marines; and he presided over the
Iran-Contra affair, a scandal that severely damaged his administration.
Reagan's
tenure produced lower inflation, interest rates and unemployment. But his term also saw a
busted budget and record deficits, which made America a net importer and tripled the national
debt. It "mortgaged much of our future vitality," said conservative columnist George F. Will.
Nearly 15 years passed before the nation was able to post a surplus.
The president
himself was a man of striking contradictions, said Jane Mayer, a New Yorker magazine staff
writer, and Doyle McManus, the Times Washington bureau chief, in their book, "Landslide:
The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988." He was a gifted leader, they wrote, but he could
be detached and indecisive. He was an overwhelmingly popular politician, they said, but he
could be shy and intensely private and kept a personal distance from almost everyone except
his wife, Nancy.
"On balance, Reagan was a strong man, but an extraordinarily weak
manager," biographer Cannon said in his book "President Reagan: The Role of a
Lifetime."
Reagan restored public confidence in the presidency, Cannon wrote,
"without mastering the difficult art of wielding presidential power." Reagan often said:
"Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem."
In fact,
Cannon said, "Reagan thought so little of government that he did not think enough about it."
As a result, he treated the presidency with a hands-off style of management that tested the
abilities of those charged to run the executive branch, sometimes with unhappy
results.
But he also could be a very personal president. A recent collection, "Reagan: A
Life in Letters," revealed that he hand-wrote an astonishing assortment of notes to friends,
adversaries, world leaders and plain folks, from Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to a
seventh-grader who requested federal help because his mother had declared his bedroom a
disaster area. Reagan's letters asked whether governments truly reflected the needs of their
people, told of his imaginings about a ballistic missile defense system and suggested, with a
fatherly chuckle, that the youngster volunteer to clean up his room himself.
Many
Americans, however, saw in him things they also wanted to believe about themselves, said
cultural historian Garry Wills, in his book "Reagan's America: Innocents at Home." They were
convinced, Wills wrote, that both he and they were hopeful and independent, strong and
God-fearing, as well as destined to be extraordinary. They shaped their faith in him and in
themselves to accommodate any uncomfortable realities, Wills said, and they ignored his
inconsistencies.
This helped to shield Reagan from political disapproval. Confounding
opponents, he seemed at times to be immune to controversy. "The Teflon-coated presidency,"
complained former Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), when criticisms would not take hold but
slipped off instead like grease on a nonstick frying pan.
Reagan was protected, too, by
his style. He did not turn political foes into personal enemies. House Speaker Thomas P. "Tip"
O'Neill, an earthy populist from Boston who championed liberal causes with a fervor to match
Reagan's devotion to conservative crusades, often went from Capitol Hill down to the White
House at the end of the day for a quiet chat between two Irish pols.
"There's just
something about the guy that people like," O'Neill once explained to the Washington Post.
"They're rooting for him, and of course they're rooting for him because we haven't had any
presidential successes for years — Kennedy killed, Johnson with Vietnam, Nixon with
Watergate, Ford, Carter and all the rest." O'Neill remembered how Reagan would say to him,
"Tip, you and I are political enemies only until 6 o'clock. It's 4 o'clock now. Can we pretend
that it's 6 o'clock?"
Finally, Reagan was sustained by his sense of humor, which he
often exercised in times of adversity. When a would-be assassin gunned him down outside a
Washington hotel during the third month of his presidency, he quipped to a doctor laboring to
save his life: "I hope you're a Republican."
As in "win one for the Gipper," when
Reagan did not have a good line of his own, he borrowed one from a movie in which he had
appeared, or which he especially liked. To Reagan, the presidency was often the stage for a
well-rehearsed script. He tapped the talents of a stable of writers, including the eloquent Peggy
Noonan.
On the 40th anniversary of D-day, she provided his tribute on the palisades of
Normandy to American veterans who had flown to France for the occasion. "These are the
boys of Pointe du Hoc," he intoned, his delivery a marvel of dramatic narrative and pauses at
the punch lines. "These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped
free a continent. These are the heroes who helped win a war."
Veterans cried, said the
Washington Post, which reported that the speech moved "even reporters and Democrats to
tears."
His writers knew history. Left to himself, Reagan sometimes garbled it. This
mattered little, however, because he had perfect pitch for its music. "Reagan would embody
great chunks of the American experience, become deeply involved with them emotionally,
while having only the haziest notion of what really occurred," Wills said. "He had a skill for
striking 'historical' attitudes combined with a striking lack of historical attention."
What
he was doing was acting, but it served him well, even in times of trouble. Alexander M. Haig
caused a stir, for example, by resigning abruptly as secretary of State after battling the White
House staff and embarrassing the administration with an emotional pronouncement following
the assassination attempt that "I am in control here."
As Reagan prepared to answer
questions from reporters about Haig's departure, he regaled his aides with jokes. Chief of Staff
James A. Baker cautioned against levity at serious moments.
"Don't worry, Jim,"
Reagan replied. "I'll play it somber."
And he did.
His Early Years
Ronald
Wilson Reagan was born Feb. 6, 1911, in Tampico, Ill., the second son of John Edward
Reagan and Nelle Wilson Reagan.
His father, an Irish-Catholic Democrat, was a shoe
salesman and charming storyteller, but he had a restless spirit and a drinking problem. In the
early years of Reagan's childhood, his father had difficulty holding a job.
The Reagans
moved from one small town to another in rural Illinois. For a brief period, they resided on the
South Side of Chicago. By the age of 8, he had lived in seven homes. In 1920, when Reagan
was 9, the family settled down at last in the small community of Dixon, about 100 miles due
west of Chicago.
Dixon was where Reagan went to high school, played football and fell
in love with a preacher's daughter. It was where he took up his famous duties as a lifeguard in
Lowell Park, northeast of town on the Rock River. He was credited with saving 77
lives.
He was "Dutch" Reagan then, a nickname given to him when he was a baby by
his father, who thought he looked like "a fat little Dutchman." Reagan preferred "Dutch" to
Ronald, which he considered sissy.
His mother was a pious woman who had a big
influence on her sons, Neil and Ronald. Cheerful and energetic, she taught that people were
innately good and could achieve great things with perseverance. She gave Ronald his first
taste of acting: playing parts in moralistic church skits, some of which she wrote.
By
contrast, in an early autobiography, "Where's the Rest of Me? The Ronald Reagan Story,"
he described coming home to find his father "flat on his back on the front porch and no one
there to lend a hand but me. He was drunk, dead to the world. I wanted to let myself in the
house and go to bed and pretend he wasn't there." Instead, the scrawny 11-year-old tugged
his father inside and put him to bed.
Reagan said that he felt no resentment and
credited his mother. "She told Neil and myself over and over that alcoholism was a sickness —
that we should love and help our father and never condemn him for something that was
beyond his control." But it scarred him: As a youngster, he tried to avoid the trouble that
alcoholism caused at home; as an adult, Cannon said, sometimes he could not bring himself to
confront the trouble that infighting caused on his White House staff.
After high school,
Reagan enrolled in Eureka College, a small Christian school 21 miles east of Peoria. Early on,
he found his public voice. The college president, under fire for puritan restrictions against
smoking, dancing and staying out after 9:30 p.m., compounded his problems by threatening to
eliminate courses and fire teachers to save money.
Reagan, the freshman
representative, was asked to speak on behalf of students who were in revolt. "He did not call
for a return to law and order or ask the students to protest to the trustees through established
channels," wrote Bill Boyarsky, a retired Times city editor, political writer and columnist, in his
book, "Ronald Reagan: His Life & Rise to the Presidency." Nor did he criticize the faculty for
supporting the students, as he did during student unrest when he was the governor of
California.
Instead, Boyarsky said, "he offered a resolution calling for a student strike."
Reagan's emotional appeal prevailed: All but a few students refused to attend classes.
Ultimately, the president of Eureka College resigned.
In his autobiography, Reagan said
he discovered while he was making his strike speech "that an audience has a feel to it, and, in
the parlance of the theater, the audience and I were together. . . . It was heady
wine."
When he graduated from Eureka in 1932, the nation was deep in the
Depression. "We didn't live on the wrong side of the railroad tracks," Reagan said later about
those meager years, "but we lived so close to them we could hear the whistle real
loud."
Even in the depths of the nation's economic crisis, Reagan was determined to
succeed. He wanted to be a broadcaster. He was attracted to radio partly by the new
president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Memorizing portions of FDR's first inaugural address,
Reagan later echoed Roosevelt's cadence. As for FDR's New Deal politics, "I was a
near-hopeless hemophilic liberal," Reagan wrote later. "I bled for 'causes.' "
He
landed a part-time announcer's job at WOC in Davenport, Iowa. Within a year, WOC had
merged with its big-sister station, WHO in Des Moines, and Reagan was hired as a sports
announcer and recreated Chicago Cubs games.
Reagan often told a story during his
presidency of how he would get abbreviated information about a game in progress by
telegraph and relay it to listeners as if he were describing the action. Except once, when the
ticker died.
"When the [telegraph] slip came through, it said, 'The wire's gone dead.'
Well, I had the ball on the way to the plate," Reagan recalled to a group of baseball players at
a Hall of Fame lunch at the White House in 1981. "So I had Billy [Jurges] foul one off. . . . And
I had him foul one back at third base and described the fight between the two kids who were
trying to get to the ball. Then I had him foul one that just missed being a home run." Finally,
with Reagan sweating and listeners wondering about this odd succession of foul balls, the
ticker started to click again.
"And the slip came through the window, and I could hardly
talk for laughing," Reagan recalled. "It said, 'Jurges popped out on the first pitch.'
"
Radio loved Reagan's voice, but he longed to be an actor. WHO sent him to
Catalina Island in 1937 to cover the Cubs during spring training. While he was in California, he
wrangled a screen test and signed a contract for $200 a week with Warner Brothers
studio.
The Hollywood Years
Reagan acted in 52 movies cast as a good guy
and in one made-for-TV film, "The Killers," cast as a villain. He later said he regretted making
the picture. It was considered too violent for television and was released in theaters just as his
political career began.
In 1940, he married actress Jane Wyman, and they appeared
together in a sequel to their first pairing in "Brother Rat." It was called "Brother Rat and a
Baby." Within a year, their first child was born, a daughter they named Maureen Elizabeth.
Later they adopted a son, Michael Edward. Their daughter died in August 2001 of melanoma
at age 60.
Reagan's big movie break came with "Knute Rockne-All American," the
film that immortalized the Gipper. But his most challenging part came in "Kings Row," a 1942
picture in which he played a small-town playboy whose legs are needlessly amputated by a
vicious surgeon. Both he and critics called it his best performance.
He later became a
board member of the Screen Actors Guild. Stars who commanded big money — Robert
Montgomery, Cary Grant, James Cagney — welcomed him as an equal.
Reagan's film
career was sidetracked by World War II, and it never recovered. Disqualified from combat
because he was nearsighted, he was sent to the 1st Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps
in suburban Culver City, which made over 400 training films. He was discharged Dec. 9, 1945,
as a captain.
His involvement with the Screen Actors Guild increased, and with it a
growing interest in public life, which Wyman complained took all his time. In 1948, their
marriage — to Reagan's painful surprise — headed for divorce. It was for him a personal trauma.
"The plain truth was," he said, "that such a thing was so far from even being imagined by me
that I had no resources to call upon."
The trauma coincided with his first stirrings of
conservatism. He remained a Democrat, urging Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for president as a
Democrat and campaigning for Helen Gahagan Douglas in her futile U.S. Senate race against
Richard M. Nixon. It would not be until the early 1960s that he switched parties. "I didn't
leave the Democratic Party," he said. "The party left me."
By 1947, Reagan had
become president of the Screen Actors Guild. He was swept up in ideological turmoil that
tormented Hollywood. The House Un-American Activities Committee began investigating
claims of Communist influence within the studios. Writers and actors were blacklisted. Some
never worked again.
Reagan was convinced that Communists intended to seize
control of the movie industry so it could be used as "a worldwide propaganda base." The
remedy, he wrote in "Where's the Rest of Me?" was "that each American generation must be
re-educated to the precariousness of liberty."
Reagan and other actors appeared
before the committee to testify to their opposition to Communism. Although some witnesses had
named names, the actors did not, said Larry Ceplairv and Steven Englundv in their book, "The
Inquisition in Hollywood," but they "lent (their) names" to the luster of its hearings.
In
1952, he married Nancy Davis, a young actress whose mother, Edith Luckett, had been on
stage and whose stepfather, Dr. Loyal Davis, was a prominent neurosurgeon. She gave up
acting to devote herself to her husband. They had two children, Patricia Ann and Ronald
Prescott.
For Reagan, there was comfort in having a family again.
Enter General
Electric, stage right. For eight years, beginning in 1954, Reagan served GE as the host of a
televised series of dramas. He also was its goodwill ambassador to employees and to civic and
business groups around the country. While his motive was to make money, over time the
experience of speaking to business people helped crystallize his views and prepared him for
active politics.
His talks, initially only lighthearted reminiscences of Hollywood's Golden
Age, began to grow more serious. In speeches with titles such as "Encroaching Government
Controls" and "Our Eroding Freedoms," he broadened his scope to include a wide range of
national issues. At first, he confined his deepest political beliefs to private communications — a
1960 letter to Vice President Nixon, for instance, in which he said of John F. Kennedy: "Under
the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx."
By 1962, his speeches had become
more political — and more controversial. Under pressure, General Electric ended the
arrangement. He had become so popular, he said, that at least three years of bookings had to
be canceled.
"It would be nice to accept this as a tribute to my oratory," Reagan later
wrote. "But I think the real reason had to do with a change that was taking place all over
America. People wanted to talk about and hear about encroaching government control. And
hopefully they wanted suggestions as to what they themselves could do to turn the
tide."
The Political Years
Reagan's political fortunes rose from the ashes of
Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater's spectacular defeat in 1964. Reagan
offered a friendly antidote to Goldwater's strident rhetoric. Reagan's tone suggested patriotic
concern and continuity with the past. Unlike Goldwater, he could sell conservatism with a
smile.
In a fund-raising address televised to the nation, Reagan honed "the speech,"
as it was known during his GE days, into a clarion call. Americans saw the smoothest, most
articulate, most attractive champion of the Republican cause in a generation. Biographer
Boyarsky said Reagan's speech, "A Time for Choosing," stirred conservatives just as William
Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech had electrified farmers and factory workers in
1896.
Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson, but Reagan won national
acclaim.
The next spring, Holmes P. Tuttle, a wealthy Los Angeles car dealer who had
promoted the fund-raising speech, invited other millionaires to support Reagan in a race for
governor of California. The millionaires, later known as Reagan's kitchen cabinet, hired the
California campaign management team of Stuart Spencer and Bill Roberts. They, in turn, hired
professors to brief Reagan on state issues and broaden his command of literary
allusions.
His years on television for GE, then as host of "Death Valley Days," had
made Reagan a familiar face. But it brought criticism, as well. Democrats derided him as a
puppet who mouthed words scripted by others. In "An American Life," a later autobiography,
he recalled that incumbent Gov. Edmund G. "Pat" Brown aired an ad in which he told
schoolchildren, "I'm running against an actor," and then added, "and you know who killed
Lincoln, don't you?"
Reagan, for his part, gave versions of "the speech" at every
opportunity. He argued that government was too big, taxes were too high and regulation was
strangling business. Often he ended with, "Ya basta!" It was Spanish for, "Enough,
already!"
Californians said yes, overwhelmingly.
Reagan defeated Brown by
nearly 1 million votes and swept Republicans into every major executive office except attorney
general.
During his eight years in Sacramento, Reagan's performance foreshadowed
his stewardship in Washington. Against Democratic majorities among lawmakers for most of the
time in both places, he portrayed himself as a "citizen politician" determined to "squeeze, cut
and trim" and get government off "the backs of its people."
The champion of striking
students at Eureka College vowed to restore order at protest-torn campuses throughout
California and was pleased to see the firing of nationally respected University of California
President Clark Kerr. Reagan also supported the first-ever UC student tuition.
He
appointed a former member of the John Birch Society to head his Office of Economic
Opportunity and to campaign against legal assistance for the rural poor. In a compromise,
Boyarsky wrote, he gave up a permanent ceiling on welfare appropriations, but he succeeded
in reducing welfare rolls.
Squeezing, cutting and trimming government were harder. In
his first year, he proposed slashing the state budget by an unprecedented 10% — but ended up
signing a spending program 10% larger than his predecessor's. He kept proclaiming "squeeze,
cut and trim," but his budgets, hammered by inflation, ballooned from his first of $4.6 billion to
his last of $10.2 billion. He signed what at the time was the biggest state tax increase in the
nation's history: $844 million in the first year, $1.01 billion in the second. It marked the first of a
roller coaster series of tax increases and rebates.
One of his most remarkable flip-flops
involved his opposition to payroll withholding of state income taxes. "My feet are in concrete,"
he said, over and over. But in 1970, when the state faced a serious cash flow crisis, Reagan
finally gave in. "That sound you hear," he told reporters, "is the concrete breaking around my
feet." That same year he found himself in a personal controversy. He had paid no state income
tax himself because of "business reverses."
As he campaigned, he had been
dismissive of some environmental concerns. "You know, a tree is a tree," he said. "How many
more do you need to look at?" But as governor, he signed some of the nation's strictest air
and water quality laws, increased state parkland and started requiring environmental impact
reports on state construction projects.
He signed a historic abortion reform bill authored
by a Democrat that vastly liberalized the procedure in California. Advocates promoted it as a
model for other states. Later, as a national political figure, Reagan would hold the support of
the most militant anti-abortionists, while doing relatively little to advance their
cause.
"Reagan was not as good as the Republicans like to think, or as bad as the
Democrats would have you believe," declared Democratic Assembly Speaker Jesse M. Unruh,
who had opposed him unsuccessfully when he ran for a second term.
Reagan's
march on Washington began almost as soon as he reached the state Capitol. He ran for
president in 1968, but fell to Nixon. By 1975, when Reagan completed his second term as
governor, Nixon had resigned in disgrace. Reagan began an all-out, two-year drive to wrest
the 1976 nomination from incumbent Gerald R. Ford, who became president on the resignation
of Nixon. He fell short by a handful of delegates to the Republican National
Convention.
But Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, and Reagan became the front-runner to
challenge Carter in 1980. This time Reagan was not to be denied. He flirted with asking former
President Ford to be his running mate, but negotiations faltered — so he turned to George Bush,
who in the primaries had called his fiscal policy "voodoo economics." By 1983, Reagan
vowed, he would cut taxes, boost defense spending and balance the budget.
Under
Carter, Americans had been battered by double-digit inflation, stagnant growth and a fuel
shortage that caused long lines at gasoline stations. They had been humiliated by the
imprisonment of 52 Americans who were being held hostage in Iran and by Carter's
unsuccessful efforts to free them, including an aborted military rescue that cost the lives of
eight American servicemen.
Reagan preached optimism. If he were elected, America
would stand tall again, he said, and competence would return to Washington.
"Are you
better off now than you were four years ago?" he asked voters.
Absolutely not, they
responded, and gave him a resounding victory: 51% of the vote to Carter's 41%. Independent
John Anderson won nearly 7%.
Reagan won the electoral vote 489 to 44.
The
White House Years
When Reagan took office at the age of 69, he was better
positioned that any Republican since Eisenhower to lay a firm hand on government. He froze
hiring and new regulations. He swept even low-level Democrats out of their jobs and replaced
them with Republicans. He won a 25% cut in personal income taxes and big tax breaks for
businesses. He called for deep cuts in social programs, and he increased Pentagon spending
by more than 9% per year between fiscal 1981 and 1984.
To presidents with programs,
their first 100 days in office are important. Reagan did not have that long. On his 70thday, he
was shot by John W. Hinckley Jr., a 25-year-old drifter who had hidden in a crowd of reporters
outside the Washington Hilton, where Reagan had just spoken to labor leaders. A .22-caliber
bullet entered his chest under his left shoulder. It careened off a rib and lodged in his left lung —
within an inch of his heart. The bullet was removed during a two-hour operation, but not before
he had lost nearly half his blood and had edged close to death.
Reagan had been in
far graver danger than he let on. He had walked into the hospital and did not collapse until he
was out of sight. "Honey, I forgot to duck," he told Nancy, borrowing a line from boxer Jack
Dempsey.
Hinckley, who had a history of psychiatric problems, was trying to impress
actress Jodie Foster, whom he idolized. He had fired six shots, wounding four people. Press
Secretary James Brady was hit in the head and has been in a wheelchair since. Hinckley was
committed to a mental institution.
Twelve days after the shooting, Reagan was back at
the White House. His strength and gallant demeanor touched the public. Characteristically,
however, he did not change his long-standing opposition to gun control. Brady, on the other
hand, became a national leader in the fight to curb handguns.
Despite the interruption,
Reagan lost little momentum. In the middle of his first summer as president, more than 11,000
federal air traffic controllers, members of one of the few unions to support him, walked off their
jobs — and he fired them. It was a blow to organized labor, already in decline. But it showed that
Reagan meant what he said — especially about guarding the economy against inflation. Before
the end of his first summer as president, Congress had enacted his historic tax cut and his
budget legislation largely intact.
To justify increasing defense spending while slashing
taxes, Reagan had embraced supply-side economics — a theory that enjoyed little standing
among many economists. Supply-siders held that higher spending and lower taxes would not
increase the deficit. Instead, the theory held, tax cuts would unleash such a wave of economic
growth that government income would actually rise.
It did not happen. As defense
spending rose and the tax cuts kicked in, the predicted surge in economic growth did not
materialize. The deficit soared toward record levels. Eventually, the national debt nearly tripled.
Before Reagan's first year was up, the nation's economy plunged into the worst downturn in
years. By March of 1982, Reagan, who had acknowledged "a slight and, I hope, a short
recession," was reduced to denying that the nation was in a depression. Unemployment
reached a 41-year record of 10.8% that November, and the global effects of the slowdown did
severe damage to Third World debtor nations and the world's banking
system.
Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, was among the disillusioned. He
granted a series of devastating interviews to William Greider, who published them in the
Atlantic Monthly, quoting Stockman as saying, "None of us really understands what's going
on with all these numbers."
"Stay the course!" Reagan urged the nation, insisting that
supply side simply needed more time. But even Republicans feared that without additional
revenue, the deficit would reach uncontrollable proportions. Republican senators forced him to
accept a three-year, $100-billion tax increase.
Reagan sought to pass it off as closing
loopholes.
The economic turmoil cost the Republicans 25 seats in the House of
Representatives. But Democrats were hesitant to press their own solutions for the recession,
and when Reagan's tax increase began boosting economic indicators in the fall of 1983, the
president could claim full credit.
All the while, superpower relations degenerated to an
unnerving low. Arms control negotiations stalled. Some Americans, including a number of
religious leaders, urged a freeze on nuclear weapons. To blunt the movement, Reagan
assailed the Soviet Union as an "evil empire." He called communism "another sad, bizarre
chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written." He announced a plan
to develop a space-based defense system, called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), to
destroy Soviet missiles before they could reach the United States.
Moscow
bristled.
American critics said SDI would never work. They named the system Star
Wars, after the George Lucas space fantasy film. But Reagan would not give it up, and it
became a persistent stumbling block to an arms control agreement.
In September of
1983, a Soviet fighter shot down an unarmed South Korean airliner that had strayed into Soviet
air space over a Russian peninsula. The attack killed 269 people, including a U.S.
congressman. Although an isolated incident, it deepened fear of a superpower
conflict.
In the Middle East, the administration tried hard to bring peace. Reagan sent
Marines into Lebanon as part of a multinational force to end warfare between Christians and
Muslims. But the administration was divided. Reagan's advisors showed signs of the infighting
that would come to cost him dearly during his second term. Defense Secretary Caspar W.
Weinberger opposed the mission in Lebanon. But Reagan, encouraged by Secretary of State
George P. Shultz, stepped up U.S involvement.
Pro-Iranian terrorists crashed a
bomb-laden van into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 persons, including 17 Americans.
Reagan held the Marines in place despite the increasing risk.
Terrorists struck again. A
truck filled with explosives broke through inadequate defenses around a Marine barracks in
Beirut. It blew the building to pieces and killed 241 U.S. servicemen.
It was "the
saddest day of my presidency," Reagan wrote in "An American Life," and "perhaps the
saddest day of my life."
On the day after the bombing, he ordered Marines and Army
Rangers to invade the Caribbean island of Grenada to oust a cadre of Cuban troops,
effectively overthrowing a new Marxist government and bringing home 800 American medical
students. Many allies and a number of Democratic leaders called the invasion meddling in
Grenada's affairs and suspected that it was intended to distract Americans from the horror in
Beirut.
The facts showed otherwise, Cannon said. Although Reagan did not issue his
formal order for the invasion until the day after Beirut, planning for a military evacuation of the
students from Grenada had been underway for four days, and Reagan and his advisors had
reached a consensus to invade the island one day before.
In the end, the Granada
operation got bad marks: The 5,000-member invasion force, facing little opposition, sustained
19 fatalities. But Americans reveled in the show of military muscle.
During all of this,
Reagan refused to bring the Marines home from Lebanon. He left them at risk for three more
months until he quietly ordered all 1,500 to retreat to the safety of U.S. Navy ships
offshore.
By now the economy was back up. The president and the Federal Reserve
had curbed inflation — "the most enduring," Cannon judged, "of Reagan's economic
legacies."
The president, who might have been doomed by recession and plagued by
misadventures abroad, basked in respect. As the 1984 election approached, he held a big
lead in the polls.
His television commercials declared: "It's morning again in
America."
The Second Term
Reagan campaigned on patriotism, prosperity and
military strength. His opponent, Walter F. Mondale, who was Carter's vice president, failed to
seize on a compelling issue. He saddled himself with a pledge to raise taxes. He said Reagan
would raise taxes, too, but would not be candid enough to admit it.
A poor performance
during one debate gave Reagan his only uneasy moment. It prompted speculation that the
president, well past 73, might be too old for the job. When the matter came up in the next
debate, he remarked with a disarming smile, "I want you to know that . . . I will not make age
an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's
youth and inexperience."
Even Mondale, 56, laughed.
Reagan won by the
largest electoral raw vote landslide in history. He received 59% of the popular vote, carried 49
states and got 525 electoral votes — to Mondale's 13.
Even before his second
inauguration, planning was underway for Reagan to visit Germany for the 1985 economic
summit on the 40th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis. Chancellor Helmut Kohl asked him
to honor dead German soldiers as an act of reconciliation. Touched by Kohl's emotion and
eager to reciprocate his support as an ally, Reagan agreed -and kept his word, despite
relentless objections from Elie Wiesel and other Jewish leaders, as well as groups of American
veterans, prominent Republicans and his own wife.
The ceremony would be at a
cemetery in Bitburg. Protests exploded into outcries when snow melted on the graves and
revealed that 49 SS troops were among the 2,000 German soldiers buried there. Wiesel
begged Reagan to abandon the Bitburg visit, citing SS participation in the Holocaust. "One
million Jewish children perished," he pleaded. "If I spent my entire life reciting their names, I
would die before finishing the task. Mr. President, I have seen children-I have seen them being
thrown in the flames alive. Words, they die on my lips . . . . May I, Mr. President, if it's possible
at all, implore you to do something else . . . to find another way, another site. That place, Mr.
President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS."
Reagan added a
stop to honor the Jews who had died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but it hardly
helped. When the president finally visited the German graves, he lost a measure of his stature
in the Jewish community.
He did not understand history, and he would fail this way
again. "Within two months of Bitburg," Cannon said, "Reagan would authorize the first stages
of a backdoor deal with Iran that would demonstrate in even greater measure . . . [his]
inadequate historical understanding, political naivete and awesome presidential
stubbornness."
Emboldened by his landslide reelection, the Reagan administration
reached beyond what was legal and provided arms to the Iranians in return for American
hostages in Lebanon — and used proceeds to finance a war by guerrillas, called Contras, trying
to overthrow the Marxist government of Nicaragua.
The deal developed into a scandal
called Iran-Contra, and it cost the president mightily.
Nicaragua's governing coalition,
the Sandinistas, supported guerrillas of its own, who were trying to overthrow pro-American
leaders in El Salvador. The Sandinistas, Reagan told the Washington Post, were "terrorists" in
a "revolution being exported to the Americas."
As early as 1981, Reagan had
approved a request by William J. Casey, his CIA director and a longtime cold warrior, for $19
million to help the Contras overthrow the Sandinista government in the name of democracy and
anti-communism. It was secret money, and it went to 500 insurrectionists — including national
guard members in the former regime of despised Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza.
Reagan called them "freedom fighters" and "the moral equal of our Founding
Fathers."
Rightists won control of the Salvadoran assembly, and they elected as
president Roberto d'Aubuisson, suspected of being tied to the unsolved murder of Oscar
Arnulfo Romero, a Catholic archbishop and outspoken foe of the far right. Now Reagan found
himself supplying covert aid to members of a deposed despot's national guard, who were
trying to overthrow the lawful government of Nicaragua, in defense of a right-wing leader in El
Salvador who was associated with death squads.
Reagan did not flinch. In 1982, the
Washington Post disclosed his covert aid. He won several fights in Congress to send the
Contras official assistance, but he lost others, and by May of 1984 the Contras were broke.
Robert C. McFarlane, the president's national security advisor, said Reagan told him to keep
the Contras together "body and soul."
McFarlane passed the instruction along to a
Marine lieutenant colonel, Oliver North, who was a member of the National Security Council
staff.
Congress passed an amendment, called Boland II, barring the use of funds to
support, either directly or indirectly, any military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua. Less
than a month before his reelection, Reagan signed the legislation. But he thought that helping
the Contras was the "right thing to do," according to Cannon. "He had no interest whatever in
the legal restrictions that Congress believed it had imposed on him."
At the same time,
his second term brought an acute deterioration in his White House team, with disastrous
consequences. He allowed James Baker, his pragmatic chief of staff, to trade jobs with Donald
Regan, his secretary of the Treasury. For four years, said Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus,
Baker had helped guard Reagan "from his own worst instincts." Regan, on the other hand, let
Reagan be Reagan. The loss of Baker at the White House, along with his political savvy, was
widely blamed for many of the subsequent troubles that befell the president.
Regan and
McFarlane distrusted each other; Cannon said they barely spoke. McFarlane also was at odds
with Secretary of State Shultz and Secretary of Defense Weinberger, especially on Iran.
McFarlane wanted to woo Iran away from Soviet influence, even if it meant encouraging the
sale of Western arms to Iran for its ongoing war against Iraq. Shultz and Weinberger opposed it
adamantly. American policy opposed selling arms to Iran and other sponsors of
terrorism.
To Reagan, this was yet another wrangle over government policy. He was
not really interested in government, Cannon said. "[He] was so obviously wearied by extensive
analysis, particularly of foreign policy, that aides plunged into arcane material at their peril. If
Reagan became sufficiently bored, he simply nodded off."
He had even less appetite
for personal conflicts among his staff. "Reagan had learned in childhood from his father's
alcoholic eruptions," Cannon said, "to withdraw at any sign of disharmony."
In March of
1984, William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, had been kidnapped by terrorists linked
to Iran, and CIA Director Casey told Reagan he wanted Buckley back. Moreover, Casey saw
merit in McFarlane's Cold War view of Iran as a barrier against the Soviet
Union.
Terrorists took more hostages, seven Americans in all.
This seized
Reagan's attention like no policy debate ever could. It evoked what Mayer and McManus
call the "hard-liner's soft touch." The danger, they said, "was that, left to his own good
intentions, the president would confuse the human interest with the national interest . . . .
There was no clearer example of this danger than in his approach to the hostages."
In
August of 1985, McFarlane later testified, Reagan secretly approved the first of eight
shipments of missiles and missile parts to Iran. Four of the shipments were made through Israel,
which provided the arms and received replacements from the United States. The other
shipments were made directly.
Reagan signed three "findings," or authorizations, for
the secret sales. One spoke of freeing the hostages. Attached to another was a memo.
Cannon said Reagan did not bother to read it, so Admiral John Poindexter, who had
succeeded McFarlane as national security advisor, initialed it on Reagan's behalf. It approved
using a private agent as a go-between.
Lt. Col. Oliver North already had arranged for
such an agent. He called it the Enterprise. It was a network of secret operatives, shadow
corporations and Swiss bank accounts. He could use them to do something that might be
illegal under Boland II but would further a cause dear to the president. He could divert profits
from the Iranian arms sales to the Contras. It would keep them together "body and
soul."
Secretly, Cannon said, North and the Enterprise demanded far more money from
the Iranians than they paid the Defense Department for the missiles; just two of the shipments
had yielded $6.3 million in profits. North kept none of the money for himself, but fellow
operatives in the Enterprise pocketed some. North gave much of the rest to the
Contras.
On Nov. 3, 1986, a Lebanese magazine, Al-Shiraa, told about a McFarlane
visit to Iran and said he had sent weapons on Reagan's behalf. Three days later the Los
Angeles Times and the Washington Post broke the first full story of the Iran arms sales.
Diversion of profits to the Contras remained a secret, but Congress exploded in anger, and
trading arms for hostages sputtered to a close.
By Cannon's count, Reagan had sold
more than 2,000 missiles and in excess of 200 spare parts to Iran. Operatives in the Enterprise
had pocketed $4.4 million. Another $3.8 million had gone to the Contras, in defiance of the law
established by Boland II. CIA agent William Buckley had died in captivity. Three American
hostages had been released, but terrorists had taken three others in their stead.
The
president's first reaction was a "no comment," his second, a denial. Then his denial became
confusing: He said that Weinberger and Shultz had supported an initiative toward Iran, which
he had already denied existed. He refused to concede that he had traded arms for hostages.
"Our government has a firm policy not to capitulate to terrorist demands," he declared to the
American people in a televised speech. "That no-concessions policy remains in force, in spite
of the wildly speculative and false stories about arms for hostages and alleged ransom
payments.
"We did not-repeat, did not-trade weapons or anything else for
hostages."
This became his version of the truth, Cannon said, and the one that
Reagan believed forever. A Los Angeles Times poll found, however, that only 14% of those
who watched him on television believed him.
Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III opened an
inquiry. So did congressional committees and a bipartisan review board headed by former Sen.
John G. Tower, a Republican from Texas. An independent counsel, former federal judge
Lawrence Walsh, a Republican, began a criminal investigation.
Meese's investigation
discovered the diversion of funds to the Contras. Now the attorney general and other top aides
worried that the president might be impeached. McFarlane tried to kill himself. Reagan forced
Poindexter to resign. He fired North, then called him "a national hero." The Tower Board said
that Regan, as chief of staff, bore "primary responsibility for the chaos that had descended
upon the White House." Reagan forced Regan to resign.
Walsh indicted 14 persons,
mostly lesser players. They included Poindexter, who was convicted on five felony counts of
conspiracy, obstruction of Congress and lying to Congress. His conviction was overturned.
Walsh charged Weinberger with perjury. But before Weinberger could be tried, he was
pardoned by Reagan's vice president, George Bush, after he was elected
president.
Ten others were convicted. Walsh found that Reagan had "participated or
acquiesced in covering up the scandal."
Had he authorized sending money from Iran
to the Contras? Walsh could not find out.
Reagan consistently denied it.
The
answer was a mystery and might be forever.
Other Achievements
Reagan
succeeded, however, in keeping his pledge to conservatives to change the Supreme Court. In
1981, he appointed the first woman, Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderately conservative judge
from Arizona. In 1986, he promoted conservative Justice William H. Rehnquist to be chief
justice and appointed another conservative, Antonin Scalia.
He nominated Robert H.
Bork, the conservative who fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox for Nixon during Watergate.
But the nomination was defeated after a battle that injected enduring bitterness into
confirmation hearings. Reagan had to settle for Anthony M. Kennedy. While hardly a liberal,
Kennedy later would vote against overturning Roe vs. Wade, which upholds the right to
abortion.
Nor was Iran-Contra the only trouble abroad. In late 1985, four Palestinians
hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro with 400 passengers aboard. The hijackers
surrendered in Egypt, but not before killing Leon Klinghoffer, 69, a New Yorker confined to a
wheelchair. He was singled out because he was Jewish.
When an Egyptian plane tried
to fly the hijackers home, U.S. Navy fighters forced it to land in Sicily, where they were
arrested. The interception gave the administration a boost.
In April 1986, American
planes struck Libya in retaliation for a terrorist attack on a West Berlin night club that claimed
the life of a U.S. serviceman. Libyan officials said leader Moammar Kadafi was not harmed, but
three dozen civilians were killed, including his adopted daughter, and that nearly 100 people,
including two of his sons, were injured.
The raid was sharply criticized internationally,
but it, too, gained Reagan popularity at home.
His overwhelming triumph, however, was
an improvement in superpower relations that presaged the end of the Cold War. Nothing
displayed Reagan's capacity for political accommodation more clearly than his dealings with
Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
During his second term, Reagan carried the
burden of his anti-Soviet rhetoric and the stakes he had raised with SDI, his space-based
defense program, into four summit meetings with Gorbachev. Doggedly Reagan pursued both
a reduction in atomic weapons and better treatment for dissidents and Soviet
Jews.
Reagan had three good reasons to reach out to Gorbachev, Cannon said. He
had little to show for his first four years in foreign policy. He had built up the military and could
bargain from strength. He was freer to deal with the Soviets than any other president because
he, of all people, could not be accused of being soft on communism.
Reagan believed
in Armageddon. It made him a visionary. "My dream . . . became a world free of nuclear
weapons . . . ," he said in "An American Life." Because "I knew it would be a long and difficult
task to rid the world of nuclear weapons, I had this second dream: the creation of a defense
against nuclear missiles, so we could change from a policy of assured destruction to one of
assured survival."
But during negotiations, Cannon said, his two dreams clashed. The
Soviets refused to retire any of their strategic, long-range missiles unless Reagan gave up SDI,
his proposed system of defensive missiles to knock down enemy weapons. SDI frightened the
Soviets. If it ever worked, they said, it would provide a screen behind which the United States
could launch an atomic attack of its own.
Moreover, they said, SDI violated an
antiballistic missile treaty in effect since 1972. The treaty permitted laboratory research of
antimissile components, but it banned testing and deployment.
On this, too, the Reagan
administration was divided. Defense Secretary Weinberger and Assistant Defense Secretary
Richard Perle wanted a broader interpretation of the treaty to permit testing. Secretary of State
Shultz and Paul Nitze, his leading arms negotiator, said anything but the traditional
interpretation would anger the Soviets and cause problems with allies and members of
Congress.
As usual, Cannon said, Reagan tried to avoid the disagreement. He said he
would interpret the ABM treaty broadly to permit testing, but as a matter of policy he would
abide by the traditional interpretation and stop short of conducting any tests.
"A
deliberate deceit," the Soviets responded.
So it was that prospects seemed dim when
Reagan and Gorbachev sat down on Nov. 19, 1985, in Geneva for their first summit. Reagan
was the first U.S. president since Eisenhower to go more than four years without meeting his
Soviet counterpart. During those four years, there were three Soviet leaders. They "kept dying
on me," he quipped.
From the start, Reagan was relaxed and cordial. As Gorbachev,
bundled against the cold, approached the mansion on Lake Geneva where they would hold
their initial session, Reagan took off his overcoat and strode out onto the top step to greet him.
In "An American Life," he wrote: "As we shook hands for the first time, I had to admit — as
Margaret Thatcher and (Canadian) Prime Minister Brian Mulroney predicted I would — that there
was something likable about Gorbachev."
Reagan developed a personal sense of
Gorbachev as someone he could deal with. But by afternoon the two of them were arguing
about SDI. Reagan said the United States would never launch an initial strike with nuclear
weapons and would prove it by sharing SDI technology with the Soviets.
Gorbachev
did not believe him. For his part, the Soviet leader said that his nation had no aggressive
intentions.
How could Americans believe that, Reagan asked, if Gorbachev did not
believe him?
Reagan suggested some fresh air. He and Gorbachev strolled out to a
pool house and talked in front of a blazing fire. They achieved no momentous breakthrough,
but as they walked back, Reagan invited Gorbachev to meet again, this time in Washington.
Gorbachev accepted and proposed a subsequent meeting in Moscow.
It set the stage
for negotiation, not denunciation. The two leaders shared "a kind of chemistry," Reagan told
Cannon. "Yes, we argued, and we'd go nose to nose. But when the argument was over, it
was like it is with us. He wasn't stalking out of there and [saying] 'down with the lousy
Americans' or anything. We fought it out, and maybe knew we were going to fight it out again,
but when the meeting was over, we were normal."
In "An American Life," Reagan said
he was reminded of his after-hours relationship with Tip O'Neill. The Soviet leader "could tell
jokes about himself and even about his country, and I grew to like him more."
They
ended the summit with a promise: to seek a 50% cut in nuclear weapons.
It looked
impossible. Gorbachev remained adamant: no SDI, or no cuts. Reagan was committed to both:
SDI and cuts. Worse, Cannon said, Reagan's advisors were more sharply divided than ever.
Weinberger and Perle distrusted arms control and wanted SDI, at least partly to block an
agreement. But Shultz and Nitze wanted an agreement so badly they were willing to give
ground on SDI.
Gorbachev suggested meeting in Iceland or Britain before the
Washington summit to see if he and Reagan could break the deadlock. Reagan chose
Iceland. They met on Oct. 11, 1986, in Reykjavik. The two leaders argued about the missile
cuts and about SDI, and their advisors negotiated through the night. By morning, they had
neared agreement on the cuts — but they were far apart on SDI.
In "An American Life,"
Reagan said that Gorbachev would not budge on any SDI development outside the
laboratory.
Reagan stood. "The meeting is over." He turned to Shultz. "Let's go,
George. We're leaving."
Shultz was crushed, but Reagan was unfazed. "I went to
Reykjavik determined that everything was negotiable except two things," he told the American
people afterward. "Our freedom and our future."
Over the coming year, Shultz,
Gorbachev and his advisors negotiated persistently to eliminate at least a lower level of
weaponry: the U.S. and Soviet arsenals of intermediate and short-range missiles. In September
of 1987, Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze announced an agreement
in principle on an Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, and Gorbachev came to
Washington that December.
Crowds along the streets applauded him. Like an
American politician, Gorbachev stopped his car, got out and shook hands. On Dec. 8, Reagan
and the Soviet leader sat at a White House table once used by Abraham Lincoln and put their
names to a ban on all nuclear missiles with ranges of 300 miles to 3,400 miles.
The
destruction of these missiles -some 1,700 by the Soviet Union and some 800 by the United
States — was well underway by the time Reagan left office.
As for the long-range
missiles, it was obvious before the remaining Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Moscow that SDI
would be an insurmountable obstacle to any reduction. But Reagan went to the Soviet Union
anyway.
He received a welcome from the Russians to match Gorbachev's in America.
As Reagan walked through the Arbat, where artisans sold their wares, crowds pressed forward
to greet him. KGB agents charged the people, causing a panic. But their friendly intentions
carried the day.
Reagan spoke to students at Moscow State University, offering them
his vision of the American dream. He met with 96 dissidents and pressed Gorbachev on human
rights.
Gorbachev already had allowed hundreds to emigrate who were on lists Reagan
had given him, and he would free thousands more.
Reagan met three more times with
Gorbachev. Once was in New York when the Soviet leader spoke to the United Nations; the
second time was in San Francisco, after Reagan had left office; and the third time was in
Moscow, when Reagan was nearly two years into retirement.
By now, Reagan was
calling Gorbachev "my friend." Reagan never abandoned what he said was his favorite
Russian proverb, "Doveryai no proveryai" (Trust but verify). But the warmth of their friendship
started the thaw that ended the Cold War.
Saying Goodbye
When he departed
the White House and came back to California, Ronald Reagan had good reason to be
satisfied. He had failed to balance the federal budget; the national debt had nearly tripled to
$2.684.4 trillion. But his recession, which Cannon called "the worst since the Depression," had
been followed by what would become the longest peacetime recovery in
history.
Reagan had achieved an unprecedented breakthrough in arms control, and his
diplomacy had been crucial to peace. He was, Gorbachev declared, a "great political
leader."
His credibility with Congress and the American people, dismayingly low during
Iran-Contra, had recovered. His achievements as well as his unyielding belief that nothing was
impossible and his unparalleled ability to persuade Americans to believe in him and in
themselves had earned Ronald Reagan a job performance rating in the Gallup Poll of 63%
when he left Washington. It had been 51% when he arrived.
On Jan. 11, 1989, when
he bade farewell from the Oval Office, there were two things he was proudest of. "One is the
economic recovery . . . The other is the recovery of our morale. America is respected again in
the world, and looked to for leadership."
The United States, he said, was a shining city
upon a hill. "And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure and
happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that. After 200 years, two centuries, she still
stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steadily no matter what the
storm . . .
"As I walk off into the city streets, a final word to the men and women across
American, who for eight years did the work that brought America back: My friends, we did it.
We weren't just marking time, we made a difference. We made the city stronger, we made the
city freer, and we left her in good hands.
"All in all, not bad. Not bad at all. And so,
goodbye. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America."
R.I.P. :-(