Saturday, Jun 05, 2004

For Ronald Reagan, 40th president of the United States, who died on Satruday at the age of 93, America was always, like Jerusalem, "that shining city on a hill."

It was a vision born in the worst of times - the great depression of the 1920s and 1930s that so ravaged his midwestern birthplace - and realised a half century later, in 1980, when he became, at 69, the oldest man ever elected president.

His two terms in the White House defined America in the 1980s, as Margaret Thatcher's did Britain, and, indeed, as had Franklin Delano Roosevelt back in the depression, albeit with policies so opposite to all Mr Reagan's known convictions.

The legacy of the conservative "feel good" years over which he presided remains controversial. The conservative revolution that he promised remains largely unfulfilled and the Republican Party he commanded so effortlessly for so long a patchwork quilt of competition. His successor, George Bush, was unable to carry on his work in the way that Lyndon Johnson, domestically, codified the very incomplete efforts of John Kennedy. Democratic president, Bill Clinton, was elected in 1992 in good measure by campaigning against the perceived excesses and neglect of the Reagan years.

But there is no dispute that, at home and abroad, Ronald Reagan restored confidence in the office of the presidency, so battered in the previous 20 years by assassination, an unpopular war, resignations, disgrace and under-achievement. Even President Clinton, in so many respects his antithesis as a politician, made no bones about his admiration for the ways in which Reagan used what Theodore Roosevelt called the "bully pulpit" of the presidency to carry his country along.

His perennial optimism, geniality and skills as a communicator obscured in the public eye his own personal shortcomings (inattention to detail often bordering on outright ignorance) and the scandals and errors in judgment by those who worked for him, most obviously the notorious Iran-Contra affair. Not for nothing was he known as the "Teflon" president, to whom no dirt could stick.

As Garry Wills, his best and by no means uncritical biographer, once wrote of Reagan's remarkable bond with his countrymen: "he is just as simple and just as mysterious as our collective dreams and memories."

Equally, overseas, under the overall rubric of the motto "peace through strength" and with references beyond number to the need for the US to "stand tall" in the world, his constancy against what he so memorably called the "evil empire" undoubtedly contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus the end of the Cold War. If the final denouement happened after he had departed from the scene, it was in full retreat by 1988, with the beginning of the end of the expansionism of the Soviet Union and its surrogates in Angola, Afghanistan, Cambodia and central America already apparent. In the Middle East, too, Moscow was proving more cooperative.

In office, he could point to the 1987 agreement scrapping the deployment of intermediate nuclear weapons as probably the most significant arms control agreement of the post-war period. If there was irony in this reflexively anti-communist president, a man who had invested additional trillions of dollars in building up his military and on the SDI system of star wars defences, cutting a deal with Mikhail Gorbachev, it was more than offset by the sense that Reagan had grasped the dynamics of change under way in Moscow.

He was not averse to displaying American muscle, in the invasion of Grenada in 1983 to unseat a pro-Cuban regime and in bombing Libya in 1986 because of its involvement in terrorism. One intervention turned out disastrously, with the death of 240 Marines in Beirut in 1984, but it was conventional wisdom at the time, if less now, that his aggressiveness overseas had laid to rest the ghost of the Vietnam War.

Central America remained a particular thorn in the president's flesh, as he was never able to convince Congress and the public that the Nicaraguan Contras were anti-communist "freedom fighters" worth supporting to the hilt. This led to Colonel Oliver North's clandestine freelance operation, selling arms to Iran and using the proceeds to finance the Contras, undertaken against the advice of the secretaries of state and defence and ultimately, as the full story was told, much tarnishing Reagan's last years in office. So, too, though more in retrospect, have the revelations about the US "tilt" towards Iraq in its discreet assistance to Saddam Hussein's military capabilities.

His supply side economic policies, based on the free market and free trade, sounded comparably distinctive and determined and indeed the US enjoyed good economic growth for most of his eight years as president. The great tax-cutting legislation of his first term transformed the business climate and greatly enriched America's middle and upper income classes, if not the poorer ones. It helped that the 1980s were years in which consuming nations, not producers, dominated, bringing about a substantial decline in the inflationary pressures that had bedevilled the 1970s.

But, having successfully campaigned on the promise that his "new federalism" would "get government off the backs of the people" and free up market forces, Reagan never took much of an axe to the federal bureaucracy and its rules and regulations. Indeed the weight of government was far heavier when he left office than when he entered it, with both the national debt and the federal deficit tripling in size. His staunch public opposition to protectionism did not always translate into action in the face of a steadily increasing US trade deficit. His government singularly failed to step in as the savings and loan debacle began to unfold in all its magnitude.

Nor was Reagan conspicuously successful in implementing the social agenda of which he so frequently spoke and which was so dear to the heart of his conservative supporters. His attempts to transform the political composition of the judiciary met only mixed results, as his Supreme Court appointments deviated from their presumed right wing convictions. The basic right of women to obtain abortions, so much the target of religious fundamentalists, was under constant attack but remained intact.

Congress, too, proved surprisingly resilient, especially after the Republicans lost control of the Senate in 1984. The second Reagan term saw a reassertion of the powers of the legislature, most obviously in consecutive budget acts, in resisting presidential attempts to cut back on the welfare state, on Nicaragua and over the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. By 1987 he was losing more battles than he was winning on Capitol Hill.

If Reagan himself was often disengaged from policy-making, he was well-served by the more important members of his administration, if less by some of its ideologues and plotters. James Baker was an effective White House chief of staff in the first term and treasury secretary in the second, managing the decline of the dollar with skill. George Shultz proved a steadying hand as secretary of state after the initial alarms and excursions under General Alexander Haig. Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve did his bit on inflation and deftly deflected some of the wilder flights of supply side economic policy thinking.

In fact, Reagan had come to the White House promising to be more the chairman of the board than the micro-manager of the nation's affairs, which was one of Jimmy Carter's besetting sins. In this, the president was acting in a known American tradition, previously exemplified with success by Dwight Eisenhower. His own two terms as governor of California, from 1966-74, had been marked by the same approach.

Yet in many other respects the Reagan path to the White House was improbable, even by the standards of the fictional rags-to-riches hero Horatio Alger. Born on February 6, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois, he was the son of a hard-drinking travelling shoe salesman, Jack Reagan, who eventually settled in nearby Dixon, which Ronald Reagan came to call home.

His was an unexceptional childhood, not affluent but not as destitute as many around him who were severely affected by the depression. He always said his great early influence was FDR's fireside radio chats in which the president sought to give a dispirited nation reason for hope.

Indeed when he first launched his own national political career in 1964 by coming out for Barry Goldwater, the ultra-conservative Republican presidential candidate, he did so by paraphrasing Roosevelt's presidential acceptance speech of 1933 with the words: "You and I have a rendez-vous with destiny."

His own first destiny was Hollywood. He had by his mid-20s become a successful sports broadcaster in the Midwest. A friend suggested he go West for a screen test, which turned out well and which led to more than 50 films, none memorable, many awful, but the source of financial security and of his presentational speaking skills.

It was also the source of his interest in politics. Still a Democrat, in the 1940s he became head of the Screen Actors' Guild (he remains the only president who once headed a trades union). This put him in the eye of the early McCarthyite hurricane when the film industry was accused of being infiltrated by communists and when the infamous Hollywood "blacklist" was drawn up depriving many talented people of their livelihoods.

Although already opposed to communism, Reagan received credit for preserving his union from the worst inroads of the witch-hunters. But it cost him his first marriage, to the actress Jane Wyman who gave him a son and a daughter.The couple divorced in 1948 after she complained that he spent too much time on Guild affairs. In fact, his own film career had already taken a distinct downward turn.

It was the 1950s that really saw the shaping of his political views. He married another actress, Nancy Davis, daughter of a very conservative Midwestern surgeon and herself politically on the right.The couple had a son and a daughter.It was while he had a young family that Reagan took to the road for a lucrative period, working for General Electric, hosting a regular weekly TV drama series and, more importantly, travelling for the company, preaching the merits of capitalism.

In the 1960 presidential campaign he worked, as a Democrat, for Richard Nixon against John Kennedy. In 1962 he finally switched parties while again supporting Nixon in his unsuccessful bid for the governorship of California. In 1964, at the Republican convention in San Francisco, his speech for Goldwater was rapturously received. In 1965, with Hollywood money and influence behind him, he decided to do what Nixon had failed to accomplish - unseat the venerable Edmund G "Pat" Brown as governor. He managed it the following year, riding a state backlash against the permissiveness of young California society, exemplified, to some, by the excesses of the "free speech" movement on the Berkeley campus of the University of California.

His record as governor was intriguing, in that he tended to speak in tough conservative terms but carried a softer, more pragmatic stick. He did partly purge the universities but often appointed moderate professionals to important positions in education. He did enact a tax rebate, but also approved substantial tax increases. He did seek to prune government and reform welfare, but the number of state employees rose substantially during his tenure. He worked as much with as against the state legislature, controlled by such powerful Democrats as his arch rival, Jesse Unruh.

Inevitably, just as these golden years of growth in California made it a national leader, so Reagan began to attract a national political following. In 1968 he gingerly tested the political waters, but mostly to prove that he had taken over Goldwater's conservative mantle. In 1972, with Nixon's re-election not in doubt, he showed himself a faithful, but not overly enthusiastic Republican, and bided his time.

In 1974, unable to succeed himself in California, he set his sights firmly on the presidency and two years later came within an ace of denying the Republican nomination to President Gerald Ford. Although their contest was often depicted in moderate versus extremist terms, the two differed more in degree than substance. But it rankled with Ford that after the convention Reagan did so little to help against the Democratic candidate, Jimmy Carter, who in the end won only narrowly.

But the 1976 election confirmed the ascendancy from the grass roots up of the right wing of the Republican Party under Reagan's leadership. George Bush, decrying "voodoo economics", challenged him briefly in the early primaries of 1980, but in Detroit in July Reagan was enshrined as the Republican nominee backed by a platform as conservative as that of Goldwater's 16 years before. Having toyed with the idea of choosing Ford as a running mate, he eventually picked another perceived moderate, George Bush, to give the ticket a semblance of balance.

In the event, and contrary to predictions and polls published almost up to the eve of the election, Ronald Reagan handed Jimmy Carter the worst defeat suffered by an incumbent president since FDR beat Herbert Hoover in 1932. An undoubted turning point was the head-to-head televised debate with two weeks to go. Carter, who had forced Ford into critical errors in a similar confrontation four years before, sought to make much of Reagan's extremism and simplicity with some well-marshalled detailed arguments. But he was completely undone by his opponent's confidence and good humour, perfectly illustrated in one memorable riposte which began "there you go again...."

The reassurance that Reagan conveyed was exactly what a country yearning for strong, straighforward leadership was looking for. He scored points enough with his "misery index" (the sum of inflation and unemployment), but national discontent with Carter was most painfully evident in his handling of the prolonged hostage crisis in Iran, which flared up as an issue in the closing days of the campaign. In a last cruel twist, the hostages were released on inauguration day the following January just minutes after Carter left office.

If that got Reagan off on the right initial foot, another incident two months later, so nearly a tragedy, rendered the new president all but invulnerable to standard political criticism and attack. He was shot, and severely wounded, by John W Hinckley outside a Washington hotel. It may or may not be true that he actually said to his wife, "Honey, I forgot to duck," but the words rang true and added to his reputation for humour and coolness that became part of the popular esteem in which he was held. Abundant sympathy was also more than evident in later bouts with colon cancer. His 1984 re-election, against former vice president Walter Mondale, was a cakewalk.

Having conquered Washington, he rode off to relative obscurity in the Western sunset. He was criticised for accepting vast speaking fees from the Japanese and rewarded with an honorary British knighthood on the recommendation of his great admirer, Margaret Thatcher.

But even before the onset of Alzheimers disease, disclosed by Reagan in 1994, he seemed to shun the limelight. Unlike Jimmy Carter, immersing himself in countless good works around the world, or Richard Nixon, endlessly seeking rehabilitation, or indeed Lady Thatcher herself, harrying her successor from pillar to post, Ronald Reagan simply walked away from the highest office in the land. Occasionally, as on his 80th birthday or at the 1992 Republican convention, he basked in the glory of his conservative admirers and spoke again of "that shining city on a hill". But mostly he and his faithful Nancy rode their horses and chopped their wood on the ranch, just as they did in the movies after the good guys had laid the bad guys to rest.

Jurek Martin

Jurek Martin

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