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Marcus Raskin's |
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". . . the pruneface from the West. . ." (Coleman Young, Mayor of Detroit, Washington Post, 12/19/1980) “The problem we haven’t faced up to yet is that these clowns may end up running the United States government.” (Patrick Brogan (London Times), Washington Post, 7/18/80, A8.) “All I know is that the winning lottery number on November 4 was 666, Ronald Wilson Reagan has six letters in each of his names, the number 666 connotates the anti-Christ or the devil and the planets were in an unusual configuration on the day he won . . . and . . . he was born on the sixth day of February and his age, 69, is a six and an inverted six.” (Unnamed Washington, D.C. woman on a story circulating throughout various parts of the city that Reagan was the Devil. Washington Post, 11/15/80, B1.) “What this country needs is a good do-nothing president . . . Ronald Reagan fans . . . can point with pride to their candidate’s record as Governor of California. And they will rightfully contend that he’s also done nothing for the last 6 years, except run for president and write a newspaper column.” (Arthur Hoppe (Columnist), San Francisco Chronicle, 4/8/80, p. 39.) “The concept of an aging ex-movie actor who once co-starred with a chimpanzee leading the Free World against the dark forces of Marxist-Leninism is inherently . . . hilarious.” (Arthur Hoppe (Columnist), San Francisco Chronicle, 5/12/80, p. 43.) “[Ronald Reagan is a] cruel man with a steady smile . . . we’re dealing here with a philosophy of anarchy and reactionism.” (Ralph Nader (Consumer Rights Advocate), L.A. Times, 3/30/81, p. 11.) “I think he’s wrong on every issue . . . he doesn’t work very hard; he doesn’t immerse himself in issues . . . he doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about things . . . What bothers me most is that he seems not to be educable . . .” (Rep. Anthony Beilenson (D-CA), L.A. Times, 1/22/81, IX, p. 1). Quotes compiled by Sushila Nayak. Thanks to Andy Plenge for his transcription help. Institute for Policy Studies Home Page
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RONALD
WILSON REAGAN The effect that films have had on American culture is incalculable. Twentieth century political figures use film as vehicles of propaganda that seek to create reality. From his craft the filmmaker knows that politics is more than a system for the distribution of power, hierarchy and resources. It is also a vehicle punctuated by sentiment for the manufacturing of illusion and vision about the future. Therefore the politician and the maker of films find a linkage, almost a symbiosis. Through the visual narrative film attempts to create an inexorable logic about the future and the past. So, it is not surprising that an actor such as Ronald Reagan should seize that part of politics which concerned itself with illusion in order to find a way of fusing it with political power and its acquisition. Politics and film are linked in another way. For the actor and the audience, Hollywood film is the medium to escape personal psychological pain, economic hardship or even loss of sexual power. Ronald Reagan the politician successfully fused illusion, kitsch sentiment and reality to the point where the nation at times seemed to surrender itself to the stage of politics. It seemed transfixed by a man who made up facts the way a script writer might make up lines for an actor to read in a film. There was a base purpose to what came to be known as Reagan's "factoids"; for they built on people's fears and insecurities around crime, inflation, the loss of the Vietnam war and Carter's ambivalent handling of the American embassy hostage situation. Through his rhetoric, Reagan played on how terrible conditions were in the United States and how, with his leadership, it was going to be a perennial morning in America. Reagan's first policies as president were intended, as he and the media pointed out often and gleefully, to administer pain much like the good doctor or parent who knows what's best for the patient or child. Reagan's "medicine" added to people's fears, which at first decreased his popularity. Once having survived an assassination attempt by John Hinckley, and having conducted himself with great style through that trauma, Reagan, as a man, seemed invincible. There were so many anomalies and contradictions in Reagan's presidency that it would be easy to dismiss him as an actor who merely played the role of president, reading off of cue cards prepared for him by advisors. Many have argued that he was little different than the hero of Peter Sellers' Being There; a man without knowledge or interest but with pat phrases that felt right for any situation. Whether actor or political leader, Reagan recreated a new social time where the extremes of wealth were to be flaunted, and begging on the streets was to be taken for granted. In Hollywood, Ronald Reagan was not known as leading man material. When the film mogul Jack Warner heard that Reagan was about to run for governor of California he said," No, No. Gary Cooper for Governor, Reagan for best man." If Reagan was not a leading man in Hollywood, he believed that he could be cast as such in politics if he had the proper lines and outlook. He believed, proved correct, that like Cipollo, in Thomas Mann's Mario and the Magician, he could gauge an audience, make part of them suffer and seduce the others to enjoy the show. Reagan's opponents underestimated him, dismissing him as a lightweight. This turned out to be their supreme error. California governor Pat Brown said after losing to Reagan, he had made a great mistake not comprehending Reagan's skills, for he was both tenacious and clever. Reagan learned from the movie moguls that the moviegoers wanted to enjoy the rich and the famous through celluloid so that they might escape their everyday lives. Wasn't that the key to the success of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the depression? They deftly danced away the audience's social and economic troubles. By the time Reagan became president he knew that people were prepared to pay for celebrities and the rich in foolish economic programs and tax cuts that penalized the young, children, most women and most people of color. He used a formula, both as governor and president. First he was to appear the tough guy, embracing the ideology and assumptions of the right and then slowly shift back to the ideological center by his second term, having shifted the entire political framework to the right. Until he supported Eisenhower for president in 1952, Ronald Reagan was a liberal. His first wife, Jane Wyman complained that one of the causes of divorce was that he spent too much time in union politics rather than with her. Indeed, he learned many tricks from the enemies and friends who comprised the political and cultural style of the Popular Front with the Communist party. Praise of the common man was an ode and a mantra. He understood the need to use the music, script and symbols of Americanism as the means of including "the common man" in the morality play of American life. Reagan never left that theme, although he came to use it for a different political ideology. Like the hedgehog against the fox, Reagan knew but one thing; how to communicate sincerity and use stories which had little relationship to reality but which excited and tickled the passions for an ideology of narcissism and egoism. Even greater than his public policy of meting out pain to the poor, Reagan's greatest domestic policy accomplishment was to shift the national consciousness for a time so that greed, selfishness and egoism were no longer suppressed sentiments. Rather these features were praised and identified with the creed of individualism and self confidence. Conspicuous waste and consumption were no longer embarrassments. According to liberals, they became part of the conservative economic investment strategy in which throwing subsidies and tax breaks at the rich would result in "lifting all economic boats." The idea of the environment as the endless provider if she could continue to be conquered and ravaged was back on top. Altruism was portrayed as foolish and harmful to the nation. Self-indulgence was resurrected into a positive virtue, while a little war against Grenada as distracting entertainment was successfully prosecuted. To some, Reagan's view of democracy was cramped and limited, assuming a system which intended to re-enforce the idea that there were two classes of Americans, citizens and associates, with the latter having no power and few rights. The poor, the non-white, and most women were the successful candidates for the associate class -- if they were lucky. The unlucky ones could meet an early death, as some social scientists claimed would occur. The socializing of risk and the assurance of profit for the few were seen in statistics that reflected a startling increase in the number of poor, and a trebling of the national debt. To others, Reagan's views were an antidote to statism and a celebration of individual freedom and liberty. It was the poor, women, Blacks, gays, and unions who were interest groups, not the owners of capital who, like studio owners, were thought to be disinterested men who had the common good in mind. Reagan's strategy of foreign and national security policy proved to be potent and correct, to the surprise of liberals and professional diplomats. He stoked the arms race for a few years as a means of perpetuating military Keynesianism, and frightened the Soviets. His Strategic Defense Initiative (STARWARS), ironically, followed the plot of a film Reagan had made in 1940. Reagan's hope was that the Soviets could be spent into bankruptcy. This project was one which informed American national security elites at different stages in the cold war; namely, that a piling on of arms could cause the Soviet Union to fold. And it did. (What has not changed are the assumptions of the national security state and the continued emphasis on arming because, as a Clinton CIA director put it, there are "snakes out there" in the international jungle.) The Reagan revolution, as it was called, was cleverly presented as necessary and inevitable after the Carter presidency, in which Carter had spent much time proving how smart he was. Carter, and John Anderson who ran as an independent, polled a total of 48 percent of the vote, although Reagan received 489 electoral votes to 49 for Carter and none for Anderson. Those numbers also reflected voters like for the fact that Reagan was enjoying himself and for the messages of bon homie which Reagan gave in little jokes and asides. Reagan's presidency which lasted from 1981 to 1989 may be divided into five acts. ACT ONE: (1981) The HEROIC STAGE: Reagan appears as the "Dutch Uncle," avuncular and folksy, but does not shirk from appearing to be an avenger against the welfare state. He sets out a program of budgetary changes which leaves the Northern Democrats in Congress reeling, but delights the Southern Democratic conservatives. As then House Speaker Tip O'Neill put it, "He pushed through the greatest increase in defense spending in American history, together with the greatest cutbacks in domestic programs and the largest tax cut the country has ever seen." Most Democrats bow before Reagan's leadership. Not surprisingly, the nation goes into a psychological and economic tailspin. Programs organized during the Great Society period are painted as failures. "Throwing money after problems" is the effective political slogan which is used continuously to discredit past presidents who built a modified but flawed welfare state. However, in this act Reagan identifies himself with Roosevelt, perhaps because he was a cripple without use of his legs and Reagan's greatest film success was Kings Row,in which his legs are amputated. President Reagan adds to the nation's discourse with unremitting praise for the market, deregulation and the need to teach unions a lesson. This last he does this by firing the air controllers union for striking on issues of air safety and wages. Reagan claims that runaway Federal spending and an expansion of the money supply is leading to inflation and unemployment at the same time, that is, stagflation. He is also seriously wounded in an assassination attempt, adding to his heroic, invincible image. ACT TWO, THE CONSOLIDATION STAGE: (1982-84) President Reagan appears to be invulnerable as a personality. In 1984 he beats Fritz Mondale for the presidency by a landslide vote of 59% to 41%, with Mondale carrying but 13 electoral votes. The voters are clearly enjoying the show and the fact that Reagan is continuing to enjoy himself without feeling overburdened by the task. In his second term he moves with the Congress towards modest tax increases in line with the "new" wisdom that the federal government should be smaller and not the employer of last resort, the latter being a staple of New Deal and Fair Deal thought and practice. Columnists and journalists claim that Reagan's ideas of government are the "new" ideas the nation has been waiting for. He orders a successful invasion of Grenada, ostensibly to stop the spread of Marxist chaos, but does so to take people's minds off of the 249 marines who were killed in Lebanon by a car bomber. Reagan administration officials initially said that no one would push American forces out of Lebanon, but after the tragedy American engagement with Lebanon quickly disappeared from the front pages and daily television news. And the marines left. ACT THREE, AGING WARRIOR (1985-87): Through covert actions and military assistance, Reagan leads his administration to intensify a sublimited war in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Reagan fears that American authority will be undermined in Central America unless the Sandinistas are stopped in Nicaragua and the rebel resistance in EL Salvador survives. He sanctions a series of maneuvers within his administration and through the White House National Security Council's Admiral Poindexter, Oliver North and Robert McFarlane, who order over 2000 TOW missiles to be given to the Iranians in exchange for three hostages who, are then replaced with three other hostages. He also encourages a breach of Congress's Boland amendment, which was intended to stop any more aid to the rebel forces of Nicaragua, the Contras. Leading figures of the Reagan administration are indicted and fingers point to Reagan as the chief initiator of a program to break a number of laws, including lying to Congress, use of unauthorized funds and destruction of documents. Reagan loses his nominee for the Supreme Court in a bitter fight. Robert Bork, a serious and somewhat pedantic legal scholar, loses because of his widely advertised acerbic conservatism and his part in the Saturday Night Massacre during Watergate, in which he fired the Democratic Special Prosecutor, a friend of the Kennedy family, after two attorney generals refused. However, Reagan is to choose three nominees to the Court including the first woman justice, Sandra Day O'Connor. ACT FOUR: REAGAN IS VICTORIOUS OVER COMMUNISM (1988). By the late nineteen forties, Reagan was a strong anti-Communist who fought Communists and leftists in Hollywood. He helped the FBI from time to time as an informer on Hollywood Communists and sympathizers. When he became president, he pronounced the Soviet Union as an evil empire which caused dismay among the diplomatic minded and faint hearted. However, the phrase turned out to resonate with the many people in the Soviet Union who saw the importance of profound change. One of those people was Mikhail Gorbachev, who had been looking for a way to end the Cold War and transform the Soviet Union. He concludes that the Soviet Union would collapse from within and from budgetary pressures because of the costs of the arms race unless major political surgery is performed on the tottering empire. His attitude opens the way for a wholly new relationship with the United States and inside East Europe, which for the Soviets had become a large financial burden that they thought unnecessary to their security. Through the extraordinarily adroit bureaucratic and diplomatic work of George Shultz, Reagan's second secretary of state, and with the encouragement of Reagan's wife, Nancy Reagan, an accommodation is reached with the Soviet Union as it began its descent and collapse. Reagan and Gorbachev become friendly and almost sign an agreement to get rid of all nuclear weapons, but their advisors pull them back from this seemingly radical course. ACT FIVE: AMERICAN AMNESIA: In retirement President Reagan is found to have Alzheimer's disease, which may explain why he couldn't remember various events and details of the Iran-Contra affair. The nation also has an amnesia about Reagan's policies, but his supporters say that Americans have confidence in themselves again, and no longer doubt their institutions and legitimacy. As a society, Reagan supporters say, the the nation has found the rest of itself. As a man, Ronald Reagan retained a remarkable sturdiness although physically he had a number of problems, from poor hearing and impaired eyesight to colon cancer and other malignancies. Ronald Reagan was born February 6,1911 to Nellie Wilson Reagan and Jack Reagan. His father, Jack Reagan, was an alcoholic who died in 1940. According to some accounts he was a violent man whom the young Reagan disliked. After assorted failures as a store owner, he ended by working in public works projects sponsored by the New Deal. Reagan's mother lived 72 years, dying in 1962. She mended and sold clothes in a woman's dress shop to feed her family during the depression. Reagan worked his way through Eureka college in Illinois, graduating in 1932. He was a popular student who excelled in non academic pursuits including sports and acting. Reagan became a radio announcer especially for sports games from 1932-37 and then moved on to Hollywood where his most important roles were those of playing a sick man as in Knute Rockne - All American, Kings Row and The Winning Team. Reagan's marriage to the successful actress Jane Wyman, which officially lasted eight years, from 1940-48, was presented by Hollywood as idyllic. Some have speculated that it failed because of her uninterest in pursuing Reagan's interests, his tenuous hold on reality, the death of their newborn infant, and her success as an actress as his film career failed. Two influences gave Reagan a chance at "rebirth". One was his marriage to Nancy Davis in 1952, when she was 30 and he 42. The other was the corporate influence of Music Corporation of America (MCA) and General Electric (GE). Nancy Davis Reagan was an actress and graduate of Smith College who was the adopted daughter of a Chicago brain surgeon, Loyal Davis. Nancy Reagan became a powerful behind-the-scenes political player in the Reagan White House. She was thought to be aggressive and very protective of Reagan's reputation, wanting him to be known in history as a great president who brought world peace. The corporate influence, General Electric, gave him a substantial salary over an eight year period, from 1954-62 as a host for General Electric Theater. Music Corporation of America both promoted Reagan and helped him with special gigs to pay for back taxes. When he was governor of California, the owners of MCA arranged for Reagan to sell a piece of property at much greater than market cost. Reagan's victory over Pat Brown ushered in a conservative era in American politics. He successfully campaigned against the universities which he charged with being too permissive and promoting revolution. As governor, he cut welfare rolls and balanced the state budget. His second term as governor was that of a political moderate. He first ran for president in 1976 but lost to Gerald Ford at the Republican convention. With Ford's 1976 loss to Carter, Reagan became the Republican party's principal candidate. He spent the period between 1977 and 1980 campaigning through radio, television and op-eds, as well as traveling through the nation to aid Republican candidates for local and federal offices. Nevertheless, there was an undertone in the Republican party and the nation at large that he was not "presidential material." Ford was proposed as a possible vice presidential candidate but Reagan's concern, and that of his advisors, was this would be an opening to Henry Kissinger (and others with whom Reagan felt no kinship) to run the major Departments of the government. The idea was dropped. After eight years in the White House, Edwin Meese, Reagan's counselor said that they had come to Washington to change the nation and they ended up changing the world. And there was truth to his comment. |
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