An opinion from someone who thought Reagan a piece of crap

Not Even a Hedgehog
The stupidity of Ronald Reagan.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, June 7, 2004, at 10:03 AM PT



Neither a fox nor a hedgehog

Not long ago, I was invited to be the specter at the feast during "Ronald Reagan Appreciation Week" at Wabash College in Indiana. One of my opponents was Dinesh D'Souza: He wasn't the only one who maintained that Reagan had been historically vindicated by the wreckage of the Soviet Union. Some of us on the left had also been very glad indeed to see the end of the Russian empire and the Cold War. But nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.

Ronald Reagan claimed that the Russian language had no word for "freedom." (The word is "svoboda"; it's quite well attested in Russian literature.) Ronald Reagan said that intercontinental ballistic missiles (not that there are any non-ballistic missiles?-a corruption of language that isn't his fault) could be recalled once launched. Ronald Reagan said that he sought a "Star Wars" defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R. Ronald Reagan professed to be annoyed when people called it "Star Wars," even though he had ended his speech on the subject with the lame quip, "May the force be with you." Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars. Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the "End Times" foreshadowed in the Bible. In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

There was more to Ronald Reagan than that. Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war. Reagan allowed Alexander Haig to greenlight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused Tip O'Neill and the Democrats of "scuttling." Reagan sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck. Reagan then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too. Reagan then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes. He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran. (If Margaret Thatcher's intelligence services had not bugged Oliver North in London and become infuriated because all European nations were boycotting Iran at Reagan's request, we might still not know about this.)


One could go on. I only saw him once up close, which happened to be when he got a question he didn't like. Was it true that his staff in the 1980 debates had stolen President Carter's briefing book? (They had.) The famously genial grin turned into a rictus of senile fury: I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard. His reply was that maybe his staff had, and maybe they hadn't, but what about the leak of the Pentagon Papers? Thus, a secret theft of presidential documents was equated with the public disclosure of needful information. This was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time.

The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife?-the one that you remember?-because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.

However, there came a day when Mikhail Gorbachev visited Washington and when the Marriott Hotel?-host of the summit press conferences?-turned its restaurant into the "Glasnost Cafe." On the sidewalk, LaRouche supporters wearing Reagan masks paraded with umbrellas, in mimicry of Neville Chamberlain. I huddled from dawn to dusk with friends, wondering if it could be real. Many of those friends had twice my IQ, or let's say six times that of the then-chief executive. These friends had all deeply wanted either Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale to be, presumably successively, the president instead of Reagan. They would go on to put Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen bumper stickers on their vehicles. No doubt they wish that Mondale had been in the White House when the U.S.S.R. threw in the towel, just as they presumably yearn to have had Dukakis on watch when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I have been wondering ever since not just about the stupidity of American politics, but about the need of so many American intellectuals to prove themselves clever by showing that they are smarter than the latest idiot in power, or the latest Republican at any rate.

REAGAN'S SHAMEFUL LEGACY

Tue Jun 8, 8:02 PM ET

By Ted Rall

Mourn for Us, Not the Proto-Bush

NEW YORK--For a few weeks, it became routine. I heard them dragging luggage down the hall. They paused in a little lounge near the dormitory elevator to bid farewell to people they'd met during their single semester. Those I knew knocked on my door. "What are you going to do?" I asked. "Where are you going to go?" A shrug. They were eighteen years old and their bright futures had evaporated. They had worked hard in junior and senior high school, harder than most, but none of that mattered now. President Reagan, explained the form letters from the Office of Financial Aid, had slashed the federal education budget. Which is why the same grim tableau of shattered hopes and dreams was playing itself out across the country. Colleges and universities were evicting their best and brightest, straight A students, stripping them of scholarships. Some transferred to less-expensive community colleges; others dropped into the low-wage workforce. Now, nearly a quarter century later, they are still less financially secure and less educated than they should have been. Our nation is poorer for having denied them their potential.


They were by no means the hardest-hit victims of Reaganism. Reagan's quack economists trashed scholarships and turned welfare recipients into homeless people and refused to do anything about the AIDS (news - web sites) epidemic, all so they could fund extravagant tax cuts for a tiny sliver of the ultra rich. Their supply-side sales pitch, that the rich would buy so much stuff from everybody else that the economy would boom and government coffers would fill up, never panned out. The Reagan boom lasted just three years and created only low-wage jobs. When the '80s were over, we were buried in the depths of recession and a trillion bucks in debt. Poverty grew, cities decayed, crime rose. It took over a decade to dig out.


Reagan's defenders, people who don't know the facts or choose to ignore them, claim that "everybody" admired Reagan's ebullient personality even if some disagreed with his politics. That, like the Gipper's tall tales about welfare queens and "homeless by choice" urban campers, is a lie. Millions of Americans cringed at Reagan's simplistic rhetoric, were terrified that his anti-Soviet "evil empire" posturing would provoke World War III, and thought that his appeal to selfishness and greed--a bastardized blend of Adam Smith and Ayn Rand--brought out the worst in us. We rolled our eyes when Reagan quipped "There you go again"; what the hell did that mean? Given that he made flying a living hell (by firing the air traffic controllers and regulating the airlines), I'm not the only one who refuses to call Washington National Airport by its new name. His clown-like dyed hair and rouged cheeks disgusted us. We hated him during the dark days he made so hideous, and, with all due respect, we hate him still.


Not everybody buys the myth that Reagan won the Cold War by demanding that Mikhail Gorbachev "tear down this [Berlin] wall" or bankrupting the Soviet Union via the arms race--Zbigniew Brezinski's plot to "draw the Russians into the Afghan trap" by funding the mujahedeen, Chernobyl and covert U.S. schemes to destabilize the ruble had more to do with the end of the USSR. Gangsterism replaced the ossified cult of the state, millions of Russians were reduced to paupers, revived radical Islamism in Central Asia and eliminated our sole major ideological and military rival. That increased our arrogance and insularity, left us in charge of the world and to blame for everything, paving the road to 9/11. (Reagan even armed the attacks' future perpetrators.) Anyway, the Cold War isn't over. In which direction do you think those old ICBMs point today?


The lionizers are correct about one thing: Reagan was one of our most influential presidents since FDR, whose New Deal safety net he carefully disassembled. He pioneered policies now being implemented by George W. Bush: trickle down economics, corporate deregulation, radicalizing the courts, slithering around inconvenient laws and international treaties. On the domestic front, he unraveled America's century-old social contract. What the poor needed was a kick in the ass, not a handout, said a president whose wealthy patrons bought him a house and put clothes on his wife Nancy. National parks were to be exploited for timber and oil, not protected. The federal tax code, originally conceived to redistribute wealth from top to bottom, was "reformed" to eradicate social justice.


Bush also models his approach to foreign policy on that of the original Teflon President. Reagan elevated unjustifiable military action to an art. In 1983, anxious to look tough after cutting and running from Lebanon, Reagan sent marines to topple the Marxist government of Grenada. His pretext for invading this Caribbean island was the urgent plight of 500 medical students supposedly besieged by rampaging mobs. But when they arrived at the airport in the United States, the quizzical young men and women told reporters they were confused, never having felt endangered or seen any unrest.


In a bizarre 1985 effort to free a few American hostages being held in Lebanon, Reagan authorized the sale of 107 tons of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Iran, at the time one of our staunchest enemies, with the proceeds to be used to fund rightist death squads in Nicaragua--something Congress had expressly forbidden him to do. Evidence strongly suggests that Iran-Contra was at least his second dirty deal with Islamic Iran, the first being the October Surprise, which delayed the release of the Iranian embassy hostages until after the 1980 election was over. Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) eventually admitted to "trading arms for hostages," yet avoided prosecution for treason and the death penalty.


Reagan, like Bush 43, technically served in the military yet studiously avoided combat. Both men were physically robust, intellectually inadequate, poorly traveled former governors renowned for stabbing friends on the back--Reagan when he named names during McCarthyism. Both appointed former generals as secretaries of state and enemies of the environment to head the Department of the Interior. Both refused to read detailed briefings, worked short hours, behaved erratically in public appearances, ducked questions about sordid pasts, and relied on Christianist (the radical right equivalent of Islamist) depictions of foes as "evil" and America, invariably as embodied by himself and the Republicans, as "good." Based on intelligence as phony as that floated to justify the war against Iraq (news - web sites), Reagan bombed Muslim Libya.

"My father had decades of experience in public life. He was president of his union, he campaigned for presidential candidates, he served two terms as governor of California -- and that was not a ceremonial office as it is in Texas. And he had already run for president, against Ford in '76, nearly unseating the sitting president in his own party. He knew where he was coming from, he had spent years thinking and speaking about his views. He didn't have to ask Dick Cheney what he thought.

"Sure, he wasn't a technocrat like Clinton. But my father was a man -- that's the difference between him and Bush. To paraphrase Jack Palance, my father crapped bigger ones than George Bush."