Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson and Martine Anderson. Forward by George P.
Schultz
549 pages,
New York: The Free Press.
Review by
Richard Alan Leach
Deemed more
significant by the media than the ongoing fallout throughout the social order
of regressive policies is the comparatively trivial question of post-
presidential perks. On this media staple, we see two general tendencies. The
Elder Statesperson who would expiate his sins (Carter) contrasts favorably
with those who would only try to cash in on their celebrity status (Clinton,
Reagan). But let’s forget former President Clinton (which we are eager to do
anyway) and consider, two decades later, Ronald Reagan’s stature in mainstream
U.S. culture.
If the evil
that great men do lives after them, an increasingly corporatist media-culture
ensures that knowledge of the evil is often interred with their bones.
Reagan’s acolytes are currently campaigning to have his visage replace
Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill. Legislation is pending on whether or not
to erect a Reagan memorial on the National Mall in Washington. To celebrate
their 49th wedding anniversary, Nancy Reagan christened the Ronald Reagan,
a $4 billion aircraft carrier. According to the New York Times, “It has
two nuclear reactors, will carry 6,000 sailors and is expected to last fifty
years.”
This past
February, Reagan’s 90th birthday inspired a flood of tributes from
conservatives and “insiders,” such as Wall Street Journal editorialist
Peggy Noonan, who wrote an admiring op-ed. Her class loyalty does her credit:
in the good old days, she wrote speeches for Reagan, so we can presume she
knows her hero well. Although a spectacularly unoriginal thinker, he had the
Right ideas, so he is lavished with praise. Right-thinking people everywhere
see only a cause for celebration, nothing more. After all, Reagan was
president for eight years and whatever “errors” (always “well-meaning”) were
made during his Administration politeness requires that, two decades later, we
“accentuate the positive.” For spoilsports, however, all these recent tributes
seem part of a larger pattern. Why do so many agree with William F. Buckley
that his long-time friend should be memorialized on Mount Rushmore?
The official
story is easily recalled by anyone over 30: Reagan was the Marlboro Man who
moved from Hollywood to the White House, thereby exemplifying the American
Dream. His career seemed to prove the old saw that, in America, anybody could
grow up to become president, especially if Reagan could. Insiders knew that he
was little more than a “talking head” who dozed off during White House
meetings and even at the Moscow Summit with Gorbachev in 1988. After the
1980s, anyone caught sleeping at work need only remark: “Well, it worked for
Ronald Reagan, didn’t it?” A culture is constructed, not reflected, as is
often assumed, through the free marketplace of ideas, where it is considered
“unseemly” to recall not only policy blunders, but high crimes and
misdemeanors as well. The post-Hollywood role of the Great Communicator was
basically public relations, to make the American people feel good about
themselves, in a two-pronged strategy of official propganda at home and
cover-ups for crimes abroad—a project crucially assisted by the major media.
During Reagan’s presidency, it was considered “unseemly” for the establishment
media to discuss, or even acknowledge, Reagan’s personal limitations or early
signs of a deteriorating condition. Journalist Leslie Stahl was asked by
Reagan’s handlers to keep silent about the distracted, doddering president
who, during an interview, seemed to forget where he was or who he was talking
to. She complied.
Nor should
tenured rightists be exempt from criticism, as academic projects to revise
Reagan’s image continue to blight scholarly publishing. Note the transition:
during eight years and numerous scandals, Reagan was called “the Teflon
President” (nothing sticks). The pretense was that this was due to some
magical quality inherent in Reagan; the reality is that Reagan was given the
Teflon Treatment by the media. Twenty years later, we now observe Stage Two:
Teflon Tributes, to continue the project of sweeping the historical record
under the rug. For a sterling example of this phenomenon, let us wade through
a weighty tome entitled Reagan In His Own Hand. The editors collected
some 250 of his 400-word essays—yes, penned by Ronnie—which he delivered over
the radio for three years, between 1976 and 1979.
The entire
project has a defensive cast to it: the subliminal message is that Reagan
could actually write (imagine that) and with no ghostwriters or PR programmers
in sight. It is the format, not the humdrum content, which dresses to impress.
At 550 pages, this overlong, heavily annotated compendium of jottings is
intended to give the impression (if only on the bookshelf) that Reagan was a
Deep Thinker, rather than “vacant between the ears,” as his ideological soul
mate Maggie Thatcher once remarked. The forward is by another impartial
analyst of the Reagan years, former Secretary of State (under Reagan) George
Schultz, who presents the book’s intended theme lucidly: “Maybe Reagan was
smarter than everybody thought.” Reagan’s only previous book was his
ghostwritten autobiography, An American Life.
Mark Burson,
the executive director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, has
remarked inanely—indeed, outrageously— that Reagan’s writings compare
favorably with the Federalist Papers, providing “the most compelling
evidence yet that the president was indeed a man of letters worthy of
comparison to our Founding Fathers…” The last time their names were so
abused was by the incumbent Reagan, when he christened the CIA-backed Contras
as the “moral equivalent of our founding fathers,” while they rampaged through
Nicaraguan villages, murdering and pillaging with U.S. logistical support.
A progressive
reviewer is tempted to cite historical facts which Reagan’s admirers prefer to
forget, such as scandals that make Clinton’s pale in comparison. To avoid such
predictability, I will not discuss the “arms for hostages” outrage called
Iran-Contra (an impeachable offense), or the record number of convictions or
indictments (138) of his associates for criminal violations, making the Reagan
administration the most corrupt in U.S. history. Instead, let us segue from
this silly book to the laudatory review it received in the New York Times.
The review is
penned by David Brooks, an editor with the conservative Weekly Standard.
Furthering the cause of Reaganite revisionism, his florid and flattering piece
endorses the myth that “Reagan was a Reaganite.” He opens by defensively
asserting that Reagan spoke from his heart (rather than his speechwriter’s)
when he composed these radio addresses. That is, because Reagan personally
authored some of his radio scripts, we are asked to infer that, as president,
he was not merely programmed by others (an “acting president,” as Lou Cannon
dubbed him).
The comical
attempt to elevate Reagan’s intellectual prowess from lightweight to
middleweight leads Brooks to declare, “Reagan was a middlebrow (and I mean
that as a compliment). He believed in the serious explication of ideas. He’d
troll through clippings from the Public Interest or National Review,
or a policy document someone had sent him, and he’d want to bring it to his
listener’s attention…”—by merely noting his agreement, and summarizing the
slanted arguments of these “conservative” publications. Brooks also explains
that Reagan was a hedgehog, not a fox—which presumably explains why he never
read anything to the left of Reader’s Digest or National Review.
Reagan in
His Own Hand provides “evidence” of Reagan’s “revolutionary vision for
America” only for ideologues with a vested interest in promoting this
improbable fiction. The book discloses that Reagan re-wrote his lines to
achieve a more natural, conversational tone; the “old TV President” (as
satirized by Gore Vidal in his novel Duluth) was informed of what
political “line” to take and polished his lines accordingly. What do our
scholarly editors conclude? That he was a great thinker. All we really learn
is that he was a better actor than we thought.
The free
marketplace of ideas also tolerates muckraking, confident that such laborious
and thankless efforts will be buried by such heavily-subsidized “official
histories,” which will be trumpeted as important additions to the historical
record. The subservience to power, not principle, of mainstream journalism is
perhaps easier to discern today, where alternative perspectives are gaining a
foothold: as a presidential candidate, Dubya tried to shut down a Bush parody
website. By contrast, in the Reagan era, small-circulation books written for
minor publishers on the subject of Reagan’s factually challenged statements
and numerous lapsus linguae were produced by a coterie of
left-wing researchers. Reality, of course, was television. In the 1980s,
dissenting media coverage was so rare that one had to be alert for episodic
blips on the TV-radar screen.
Only media
malfeasance can explain such leniency towards Reagan’s misstatements of fact,
as if incompetence in technical matters was only to be expected from a former
actor. Yet, when defending themselves against media critics, off-duty talking
heads sputter about journalism being merely “the rough draft” of history or
resort to that hoary evasion: “We are disliked because we are the bearers of
bad news.” Yet, it is precisely the whitewash of “bad news” about bad policies
that disfigures the subsequent historical record, which draws excessively on
the compromised objectivity of newspaper archives. Reagan’s numerous verbal
gaffes became the butt of insider jokes and the inspiration for a small number
of well-researched but not well-publicized books. If one scours the mainstream
reading lists, such as New York Times book reviews, one searches in
vain for such excellent books as Tom Gervasi’s The Myth of Soviet Military
Supremacy (1986), which was never reviewed by the newspaper of record.
Instead, conservatives such as Bob Novak, George Will, or Norman Podhoretz,
will critically review politically-centrist books on Reagan, skewering them
for not being flattering enough to the president, who, after all, “won the
Cold War”—a common misconception, thanks to incessant repetition in the
mainstream.
Washington
insiders knew and understood Reagan’s symbolic role. Why else did his
successor and Reagan’s former vice-president, the elder Bush, make crucial
decisions without ever talking to Reagan? In 1990, for example, the Bush
administration decided to respond to Iraq’s (unauthorized) invasion of Kuwait
by undercutting sanctions and escalating the “Gulf Crisis” into a full-blown
war. Reagan was never consulted. Of course, while in office, Reagan’s
handlers, such as the subsequently-convicted felon Michael Deaver, were adept
at image-making and myth-mongering, and found the media easy to manipulate.
In Hollywood,
Reagan was indebted to his scriptwriters for both his wit and his wisdom; in
the White House, likewise. He often betrayed colossal ignorance of technical
knowledge that should be possessed by any commander in chief. His limitations
in this regard should have inspired the media to inquire about the gap between
image-making and reality in U.S. politics and about the actual qualifications
for high office in a polity subordinated to corporate prerogatives.
Robert “Bud”
McFarlane, Reagan’s former National Security Adviser, remarked of Reagan: “He
knows so little and accomplishes so much.” Indeed he did: and the evil will
live after him. When the first budget of the second Bush made it clear that he
intends to follow the same well- trodden path of “tax and spend,” he even
mentions Reagan by name. Yet this clue was left untouched by mass media
amnesiacs, who ignore issues concerning the historical continuity of these
regressive policies and their likely consequences, in preference to the
“politics of personality”—in an eternal present-tense.
On second
thought, I cannot resist returning to Iran-Contra. After the scandal broke,
the media agreed with Congress that all that was necessary was for the
president to “take full responsibility.” So, in 1987, Reagan finally
acknowledged that he—or his Administration—approved an arms shipment to Iran:
“First, let me say I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those
of my administration. As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without
my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities.” Thereupon, media
pundits instructed their befuddled viewers to forgive and (especially) forget:
“There. He said it. Now we can turn to other matters.” Meanwhile, obvious
questions were left unasked, in accordance with the Teflon Treatment. The
whitewash was completed by the masters of “damage control” on Capitol Hill,
who knew the right question to ask, a trivial one: “What did the president
know, and when did he know it?” Today, in the “Son of Star Wars” era, the
analogous question should be: what doesn’t George W. Bush know and when will
he be briefed on it? Z