A book review from salon.com to share: How Republicans created the myth of Ronald Reagan

[devilgrrl]

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.

more: http://www.salon.com/books/excerpt/2009/02/02/ronald_reagan/

[wyldwolf]

1. that's awesome, thanks!

[wyldwolf]

4. lol! "The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project" was in respose to Clinton's success

[EFerrari]

2. K&R

[jonnyblitz]

3. thanks for posting, my local library system has two copies of

this and none are checked out, so i just put it on hold. damn I love the internets. I wasn't even aware of this book.

[UTUSN]

5. K&R #3 n/t

[devilgrrl]

6. kick

So everyone sees it.

[ThomWV]

7. I dam near cried the night Reagan was elected. Seriously.

My father was still living and lived with us. I drove him and my wife to the polls after taking off work early that afternoon. I knew he was a Reagan voter. My wife and I certainly were not.

I fell asleep on the couch after dinner but my father woke me just after 9:00PM to gloat as he told me they had already called it for Reagan. The only word in the english language that does justice to how I felt is "dumbfounded".

[mdmc]

9. I cried too

I was a huge Jimmy Carter fan..

[mdmc]

8. Raygun was the worst president in my lifetime

[dtotire]

11. He Was A Lot Better Than Bush43 n/t

[Javaman]

13. not by much. He at least could pronouce "nuclear", beyond that...nt

[mdmc]

15. I disagree

Bush is a known failure.

[BrklynLiberal]

10. Less a myth, and more a horror story..

[struggle4progress]

12. Reagan without sentimentality (Conason / Salon 2004)

He told us government was the problem -- and his corruption-plagued administration made sure of it.
By Joe Conason

... In his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years," journalist Haynes Johnson came up with an unflattering statistic: "By the end of his term, 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations."

These cases affected the nation's health, security and financial soundness. Consider the example of the EPA, where Reagan's contempt for environmental regulation led to the appointment of dishonest, incompetent people who coddled polluters instead of curbing them. Dozens of them were forced to resign in disgrace, after criminal and congressional investigations, and several went to prison. Or consider the HUD scandal, in which politically connected Republicans criminally exploited the same housing assistance programs they routinely denounced as "wasteful." Billions in EPA Superfund and HUD dollars were indeed wasted because of their corruption.

Reagan's HUD Secretary Sam Pierce took the Fifth Amendment when called to testify about the looting of his agency -- the first Cabinet official to seek that constitutional protection since the Teapot Dome scandal. But he wasn't the only Cabinet official to fall in scandal. So did Attorney General Edwin Meese, in the Wedtech contracting scandal, and so did Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in the Iran-contra affair (although he was pardoned at the 11th hour by President George H.W. Bush).

The Pentagon procurement scandals, which involved literally dozens of rather unpatriotic schemes to rip off the military, revealed the system of bid-rigging and gift-greasing that accompanied Reagan's defense buildup. Worse, the president had been warned, two years before the scandal broke, about the growing allegations of fraud within the Defense Department by a blue-ribbon commission he had appointed. When the scandal broke with a series of FBI raids in 1988, he was about to leave the White House ...

http://dir.salon.com/story/opinion/conason/2004/06/08/reagan/index.html

Nixon was a horror -- but pale in comparison to the corruption of the Reagan years

[JPZenger]

14. Gregory Peck almost ran against Reagan for Governor

In 1970, Gregory Peck almost ran against Ronald Reagan when he was running for re-election. Imagine how different the world would have been if Reagan's career had been cut short?

[Pryderi]

16. They'll do the same thing for "W" if we don't stop them.

[juno jones]

17. I'm a 45 YO

Working in a mostly younger enviroment. The 26-30 year olds are astounded when I tell them that this shit gas been going on for thirty years or more. They all became politically aware during the age of Clinton, and despite their liberal leanings had been fed the St Ronnie myth all their lives.

Fuck Ronnie. I was too young to vote in '80, but I voted against him and Bush 1, for what little good it did me. May he rot. And do not fear for history, most historians are quite aware that the contemporary chroniclers, though good for dates and details, tend to operate from the postion of the cheerleader. Numbers and facts assayed in the future will find RWR wanting.