Reagan was the Original Forrest Gump Who Struck Lucky

[Q]

Published on Sunday, June 6, 2004 by the Sunday Herald (Scotland)

Reagan was the Original Forrest Gump Who Struck Lucky

by Trevor Royle

It was fitting perhaps that Ronald Reagan died on the eve of the D-Day celebrations. Unlike other Hollywood actors such as Jimmy Stewart who gave up tinseltown to fly for the US army air force, Reagan remained an actor, not a doer. Later in life, before Alzheimer's disease cruelly felled him - he called the affliction "riding into the sunset", another Hollywood cliché - he would tell Israeli politicians that he remembered seeing the liberated concentration camps at the end of the second world war. It sounded good, but too bad that he was not wearing a uniform at the time but was working for a documentary unit.

In that sense there was always more than a touch of vaudeville about Reagan. He was a bad actor who knew his limitations. Not for him Gary Cooper's heroic sheriff role in High Noon (a White House favorite for successive presidents). And not for him the youthful John Wayne in John Ford's Stagecoach, two movies which helped to define 20th century America. He was always on the outside looking in, the minor bit-player who was always small-town America.

Perhaps because he saw himself as a patriot, a Forrest Gump before his time, he allied himself with the McCarthy faction and joined those Hollywood bigots who lined themselves up against anything that smacked of communism and the perils of the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war in the early 1950s. It was unworthy of him and unworthy of the country at the time, but it marked him and had he not entered politics he could have ended up a bad actor who chose bad politics.

He was a man of contradictions who was easy to mock. Famously, he addressed Princess Diana as Prince David and there were times when he believed that the Middle East was close to Minnesota in the mid-west. But this much-maligned president was not just the buffoon which his enemies painted him. True, he dirtied himself with the Iran-Contra scandal and his foreign policies owed more to the machinations of the Pentagon than to any personal knowledge. But in that sense he was probably no worse than the present incumbent.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0606-01.htm

[FreakinDJ]

1. You forgot about this

Ronald Reagan and Savings and Loans

Reagan's contribution to the US Savings and Loans fraud was to deregulate the Savings and Loans industry without removing the federal deposit insurance. This opened the way for crooks to use savings and loans to perpetrate their frauds. By offering high interest rates on federally insured deposits, these frauduant S&Ls could attract deposits. These high rates were sustained in a pyramid scheme. When the scheme finally collapsed, most investors were covered by the federal deposit insurance.

Of course, pyramid schemes were only part of the S&L scandal. With no regulation, more creative forms of fraud were perpetrated. And S&L officers lied to many investors, telling them that their deposits were federally insured even if they weren't. When the S&L went bankrupt, these investors lost every penny.


For a more sanitized, happy view of the Reagan presidency, take a peak at the Reagan library web page.

http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~smann/Humor/MMF/reagan.html