In honor of president Reagan’s funeral, here’s a useful corrective to the notion that his legacy was always celebrated. Today, almost everyone concedes his historical significance. But that wasn’t what was said at the time. Here’s a smattering of commentary from the 1980s.
“A few years from now, I believe, Reaganism will seem a weird and improbable memory, a strange interlude of national hallucination, rather as the McCarthyism of the early 1950s and the youth rebellion of the late 1960s appear to us today.” – Arthur “Always Wrong” Schlesinger, Washington Post, May 1, 1988.
“I wonder how many people, reading about the [Evil Empire’] speech or seeing bits on television, really noticed its outrageous character… Primitive: that is the only word for it. … What is the world to think when the greatest of powers is led by a man who applies to the most difficult human problem a simplistic theology – one in fact rejected by most theologians?… What must the leaders of Western Europe think of such a speech? They look to the head of the alliance for rhetoric that can persuade them and their constituents. What they get from Ronald Reagan is a mirror image of crude Soviet rhetoric. And it is more than rhetoric: everyone must sense that. The real Ronald Reagan was speaking in Orlando. The exaggeration and the simplicities are there not only in the rhetoric but in the process by which he makes decisions.” – Anthony Lewis, New York Times, March 10, 1983
“Something like the speech to the evangelicals is not presidential, it’s not something a president should say. If the Russians are infinitely evil and we are infinitely good, then the logical first step is a nuclear first strike. Words like that frighten the American public and antagonize the Soviets. What good is that?” – Rick Hertzberg, New Yorker macher, quoted in the Washington Post, March 29, 1983.
“President Reagan has substituted a mindless militarism for a foreign policy, rattling arms from El Salvador to Saudi Arabia, frightening our friends from Japan to West Germany. He proposes a 50 percent increase in ‘defense expenditures.’ Much of it will be dissipated in the self-defeating spiral of an open-ended nuclear-arms race that poses a greater threat to our own internal and external security than all the Communist propaganda that ever emanated from Moscow. Already, the cost of Reagan policies is devastating to our country in economic strength, in diplomatic influence, in national security, in moral stature.” — John B. Oakes, former senior editor, New York Times, November 1, 1981.
“All evidence indicates that the Reagan administration has abandoned both containment and détente for a very different objective: destroying the Soviet Union as a world power and possibly even its Communist system. [This is a] potentially fatal form of Sovietphobia… a pathological rather than a healthy response to the Soviet Union.” – Princeton Professor Stephen Cohen, 1983.
“‘We’ve really got to start talking,’ says George Ball, undersecretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. ‘The fact is we’ve let these fellows get away with murder, and the situation now is much too serious for that.’ To ideological men like Ronald Reagan, new information is only useful if it confirms old prejudices. Though he is shrewd enough to bend and budge under pressure (hence, for example, his abandonment of old positions on Taiwan), in his heart Reagan knows he has always been right about the nature of the world, of communism, of America’s proper role.” – Robert Kaiser, Washington Post, October 30, 1983.
“Are we rushing headlong into the next step of those 40 years of progressions by which we do something then they do something, by which we pretend that we’re going to build this and it will somehow strengthen our deterrent then they do it, and low and behold, the next thing we know is, the President of the United States is addressing the nation saying, ‘My fellow Americans, I hate to tell you this, but the Soviet Union is deploying more of these, and we have to respond, and I’m asking the Congress for more money in order to respond.’ Star Wars is guaranteed to do that, and it’s guaranteed to threaten the heavens — the one line we haven’t yet crossed with weaponry: the heavens.” – Senator John Kerry, on SDI, the program that brought the evil empire to its knees, August 5, 1986.
“In his distaste for bilateral efforts to manage the superpower rivalry and his instinctive predilection for unilateral ones, Reagan is counting on American technological and economic predominance to prevail in the end. The most striking, and questionable, theme in his star wars speech was his apparent belief that the U.S. could mobilize its scientific community and its economic resources in quest of an impenetrable antiballistic-missile shield over the entire nation without triggering perilously destabilizing countermeasures, both offensive and defensive, on the part of the U.S.S.R. Reagan’s views notwithstanding, there is little reason to hope that the many handicaps of the Soviet economy will be decisively advantageous to the U.S. in the long run, allowing the U.S. to ‘beat’ the U.S.S.R. in an arms race.” — Strobe Talbott, Time, April 18, 1983.
“Ronald Reagan came to Europe to persuade people that he is not the shallow, nuclear cowboy of certain unkind assessments. Said White House spokesman David Gergen, on the eve of departure, ‘Some in Europe do not know or understand him.’ But now that the president has been among them for over a week, Europeans may think they got him right the first time. In Rome, he made a stab at identifying himself as a ‘pilgrim for peace.’ But by the time he got to London he had reverted to type as a cold warrior. And yesterday in Bonn, he reiterated his commitment to ‘peace through strength’ – which is fancy talk for continuing the nuclear arms race.” – Mary McGrory, Washington Post, June 10, 1982.
Rest in peace, Mr President. And know that after all these years, you were right – and all these people were clearly, emphatically, embarrassingly, wrong.
The Dish 