The Whitewashing of Ronald Reagan

By Tom Maertens
(A version of this originally appeared in the Mankato, MN Free Press.)

A Gallup poll taken in 1992 found that Ronald Reagan was the most unpopular living president apart from Nixon, and ranked even below Jimmy Carter; just 46 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Reagan while Carter was viewed favorably by 63 percent of Americans.

This was before the Hollywood-style re-write of Reagan’s presidency that created the fictional character portrayed during Reagan’s 100th birthday celebration. The campaign was led by Grover Norquist and his “Ronald Reagan Legacy Project,” along with corporate-funded propaganda mills like Heritage and American Enterprise Institute that underwrote hundreds of flattering books to create a mythic hero and perpetual tax-cutter. They singled out Reagan’s 1981 tax cut that lowered top marginal rates from 70% to 28% as the basis for the campaign, leaving out the inconvenient reality that he subsequently raised taxes eleven times, according to former Republican Senator Alan Simpson who “was there.”

The plutocrats idolize Reagan because he cut taxes on the wealthy -- on income, capital gains, interest, and dividends -- and increased taxes on working people, including raising the self-employment (SECA) tax rate by 60%. He made major cuts in Medicaid, food stamps, aid to families with dependent children (AFDC), and school lunch programs. Mark Hertsgaard (On Bended Knee: the Press and the Reagan Presidency) called it arguably the “single greatest government-led transfer of wealth in history, and in the direction of the top two percent;” the number of families living below the poverty line increased by one-third under Reagan. The result is an enduring, entitled class of individuals who believe that work should be taxed, but wealth should not, and probably, like Reagan that ‘The homeless are homeless because they want to be homeless.’ They control the Republican Party.

Their revisionist history makes Reagan into a small-government fiscal conservative, but he actually grew the government by 53% (Mises Institute), increasing military expenditures by 27% and creating another new department, Veterans’ Affairs. He never submitted a balanced budget and ended up tripling the national debt to $3 trillion. His S&L bailout cost 2.4 times more to fix (relative to GDP) than Bush’s financial crisis. The Washington Post reported in Reagan's last year that "In less than a decade, the world's largest creditor nation has become its leading debtor….”

Did Reagan end the Cold War? Immediately after the Berlin Wall fell, a USA Today survey found that only 14% of respondents believed that. Historians mostly credit forty years of “Containment” by eight U.S. presidents. As Tony Judt’s Postwar concluded: “…Washington did not ‘bring down’ Communism – Communism imploded of its own accord.” I served in the USSR during perestroika and glasnost and later, in Russia after the breakup, and can attest to that; Gorbachev tried to reform a repressive, dysfunctional system and lost control of the process.

What is virtually unknown in this country is that Reagan’s bellicose rhetoric and saber-rattling led the U.S. to the brink of a hot war with the USSR in 1983 (Google “Abel Archer”).

Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act, which he said he would have voted against, and publically supported the South African apartheid regime, a policy that Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu declared to be "immoral, evil and totally un-Christian." This sympathy for racists was not an anomaly: Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign was announced in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a city with no connection whatever to the governor of California but infamous for the murder of three civil rights workers. His speech there lauding states’ rights was dog-whistle politics to die-hard anti-integrationists, a continuation of Nixon’s racist Southern Strategy. His 1980 campaign against a Cadillac-driving welfare queen from Chicago’s South Side (i.e., Black woman) was more of the same.

Never mentioned in the current hagiography is that he amnestied 3 million illegal aliens; that among his most important advisers was an astrologer (Joan Quigley) whom Nancy consulted daily about major decisions; and that he regularly fabricated stories, including about personally “liberating” Nazi concentration camps (he never left California).

Other inconvenient facts about Reagan have disappeared into the memory hole: he provided aid to Saddam Hussein after his unprovoked attacked on Iran and despite Saddam’s known use of chemical weapons; he funneled money and arms to the Islamist mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan who later morphed into al Qaeda; his sending Marines ashore in Lebanon led to the deaths of 241 Marines; and, he invaded tiny Grenada on the flimsiest of pretenses.

Reagan illegally traded weapons to Iran for American hostages (which led to more Americans being kidnapped) and repeatedly lied about it. On March 4, 1987 he finally admitted he had lied. He diverted the profits of this criminal trade to illegally fund the murderous, drug-running Contras in Nicaragua ("The moral equal of our Founding Fathers") and lied about that, too. Eleven of his co-conspirators were nonetheless convicted, making a total of 138 Reagan administration officials indicted for various offenses, according to Richard Reeves, making it the most corrupt administration ever.

The public gave Reagan a pass, however, probably because they thought he was too dense to understand what an impeachable offense was; even his official biographer Edmund Morris calls him an "apparent airhead" who depended heavily on his staff. Margaret Thatcher echoed the claim: "Poor dear, there's nothing between his ears." Richard Pipes, the conservative historian and a senior NSC official under Reagan wrote: “RR is totally lost, out of his depth, and uncomfortable. All of this--both the substance and human conflict--is above and beyond him.”

No corporate-funded whitewash of Reagan’s presidency can change those historical facts.

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