How Republicans created the myth of Ronald Reagan
With the Gipper's reputation flagging after Clinton, neoconservatives launched a stealthy campaign to remake him as a "great" president.
Editor's note: This excerpt from "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future" is reprinted by permission of Free Press.
By Will Bunch
Feb. 2, 2009
| The myth of Ronald Reagan was already looming in the spring of 1997 — when a highly popular President Bill Clinton was launching his second-term, pre-Monica Lewinsky, and the Republican brand seemed at low ebb. But what neoconservative activist Grover Norquist and his allies proposed that spring was virtually unheard of — an active, mapped-out, audacious campaign to spread a distorted vision of Reagan's legacy across America.
In a sense, some of the credit for triggering this may belong to those supposedly liberal editors at the New York Times, and their decision at the end of 1996 to publish that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. survey of the presidents. The below-average rating by the historians for Reagan, coming right on the heels of Clintons’ easy reelection victory, was a wake-up call for these people who came to Washington in the 1980s as the shock troops of a revolution and now saw everything slipping away. The first Reagan salvos came from the Heritage Foundation, the same conservative think tank that also had feted the 10th anniversary of the Reagan tax cut in 1991. After its initial article slamming the Times, the foundation’s magazine, Policy Review, came back in July 1997 with a second piece for its 20th anniversary issue: “Reagan Betrayed: Are Conservatives Fumbling His Legacy?”
The coming contours of the Reagan myth were neatly laid out in a series of short essays from the leaders of the conservative movement: that the Gipper deserved all or at least most of the credit for winning the Cold War, that the economic boom that Americans were enjoying in 1997 was the result of the Reagan tax cut (and not the march toward balanced budgets, lower interest rates and targeted investment), and that the biggest problem with the GOP was, as the title suggested, not Reagan’s legacy but a new generation of weak-kneed leaders who were getting it all wrong. The tone was established by none other than Reagan’s own son, Michael, now himself a talk-radio host, who wrote: “Although my father is the one afflicted with
Alzheimer's disease, I sometimes think the Republicans are suffering a much greater memory
loss. They have forgotten Ronald Reagan's accomplishments — and that is why we have lost so
many of them.”
Michael Reagan, like most of the others, mentioned Reagan’s frequent calls for less government — presumably his accomplishment there was simply in calling for it, since he never came close to achieving it. Gary Bauer, another former Reagan aide who later ran for president as an antiabortion “family values” candidate, took a similar tack on the speaking-out issue, noting that Reagan “spoke of the sanctity of human life with passion” — again regardless of his lack of concrete results on that front. One of the writers argued: “On the international scene, Reagan knew that only America could lead the forces of freedom” — it was former assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, who’d pleaded guilty in a deal to withholding information about Iran-Contra from Congress and was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush. Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating even went the distance and compared Reagan to the 16th president with his argument that “Reagan's achievement can be compared to Lincoln's, because he faced immense challenges in an era characterized by deep and fundamental philosophical divisions among the people he set out to lead.” Of course, Keating’s analogy implied that stagflation and a left-wing government in Nicaragua were on an equivalent plane with slavery and a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans on our own soil — dramatizing the rhetorical extent to which conservatives were now willing to go in order to salvage their movement.
One of the more down-to-earth tributes was written by Norquist, who said: “Every conservative knows that we will win radical tax reform and reduction as soon as we elect a president who will sign the bill. The flow of history is with us. Our victories can be delayed, but not denied. This is the change wrought by Ronald Reagan.” Norquist all but revealed one of his missions in the coming two years — finding a presidential candidate who would assume the Reagan mantle in a way that neither Bush 41 nor Dole ever could — but not the other. His second big push was practically a guerrilla marketing campaign to make sure that the less-engaged Middle America would get the message that Reagan belonged in the pantheon of all-time greats right next to Lincoln, Washington and FDR. Norquist had learned the lessons of Normandy and of the Brandenburg Gate, which was that powerful symbols can mean a lot more than words (especially in a little-read policy journal), that a motorist under the big Sunbelt sky of Ronald Reagan Boulevard will absorb the message of the Gipper’s greatness without ever pondering if ketchup should be a vegetable in federally funded school lunches or if “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” in Central America were drug-dealing thugs, the kind of stubborn things that popped up in those newspaper articles ranking the presidents.
The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project was hatched in the spring of 1997 — and perhaps like any successful guerrilla operation, there was an element of surprise. There was no formal announcement, nothing to tip off any alarmists on the left. Rather than incorporate the Reagan project as a separate entity, which carried the potential of greater scrutiny of its operations and its finances, it was simply a unit of the group that Norquist had been overseeing for more than a decade, the Americans for Tax Reform. The Reagan Legacy Project would not even get its first mention in print until October 23, 1997 — by then its first bold proposal had two key backers in Georgia Rep. Bob Barr and that state’s Republican Sen. Paul Coverdell. They had endorsed legislation that would rename the Capitol region’s busy domestic airport, Washington National, as Reagan National. The renaming would not only mean that millions of air travelers would pass through the facility named for the 40th president, but a disproportionate number would be from the nation’s liberal elites, especially in Big Media, who used the airport’s popular shuttle service. Simply put, Reagan National Airport would be a weekly thumb in the eye of the Yankee elites who were still belittling the aging Gipper’s presidency.
The announcement didn’t even get coverage in the hometown Washington Post until exactly one month later, when Norquist’s behind-the-scenes lobbying push had already bagged the endorsement of the influential Republican Governors Association — including George Allen, the governor of the state where the airport is located (in Arlington, Va.) on federal land — as well as House Speaker Gingrich. With Reagan out of public view with Alzheimer’s for three years now, advocate Barr cast the measure as a feel-good proposal that surpassed partisanship. “People appreciate how Ronald Reagan gave voice to Americans' basic good feelings, including a lot of Democrats, ” he said. Democrats, in fact, did what you would expect them to do … they hemmed and hawed. The mayor of Washington, D.C., at the time — with thus the largest presence on the regional panel that ran Washington National — was Democrat Marion Barry, a bitter foe of Reagan’s politics, who could only fret that there were a “host of other” people who should be considered, too; in a later article, Geraldine Ferraro, who was Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984, said that Reagan’s real legacy was the mountain of debt, but then she offered a verbal shrug: “The man was president of the United States; he served two terms.” It almost brought to mind Reagan’s cruel remark about Michael Dukakis a decade earlier, that “I’m not going to pick on an invalid.”
Next page: "Who was this man to have so many things named after him?"
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