The Real Reagan

Ronald Reagan was a beloved man but he was not the President of the United States. He was a ceremonial monarch.

Now that he is gone, we forget the fact that Reagan preached the virtues of a balanced budget and delivered the biggest deficit in history. He preached the virtues of family values but was the nation's first divorced President with four estranged children. Fraud and dishonesty in the Reagan government produced the longest-running, independent-counsel investigation ever, and that is before the Iran-contra investigation exposed the true nature of the criminal empire that Reagan's hands-off policy had produced.

Reagan was very good at delivering prepared text, but he proved to be very uninformed when the press asked him unexpected questions and he spent his presidency evading the media. The pictures of using helicopter noise to dodge the media are as common as the unanswered questions that surround the Reagan presidency. In retrospect, it is safe to say that even Reagan could not accomodate unanswered questions because the "acting President" was not informed. Reagan delegated authority and the casual oversight of those he placed in charge, granted loose canons the opportunity to define the Reagan presidency. Indeed, Ronald Reagan did not exist in the world of unprepared text, and it is not possible to understand the Reagan presidency without examining the conduct of those he placed in charge.

In actual fact, Ronald Reagan was the revenge of Nixon apologists who thought that Nixon deserved to be popular, and he paved the way for equally incompetent people like George Bush.

Like Reagan before him, who turned authority over to people like Bill Casey and Richard Nixon, George Bush turned to Cheney, Tenet, Rumsfeld, Rice and Iran-contra criminals like Poindexter, and he re-invented the very same scandals that trash the American constitution in the name of freedom and democracy. Reagan got away with it because he was charming and uninformed and time will determine George Bush's capacity to dodge the media as effectively as Ronald Reagan did. Skeptics will invariably suggest that Richard Nixon had absolutely nothing to do with Ronald Reagan's Administration, but history has recorded the fact that during Reagan's presidency "Nixon gets into his office every morning about 7:30. By noon, he will have made and taken 40 calls, most of them to Washington. First, he calls the White House and speaks to Ed Meese, Bud McFarlane and President Reagan. Then he starts working the State Department. Everyone from George Schultz on down. He not only gives advice on foreign policy, but on politics in general. What he says is taken very seriously."

In 1960, Ronald Reagan campaigned for Richard Nixon, and in 1980, Ronald Reagan won for Richard Nixon. Those who believed that Kennedy's charisma had robbed the opportunity to advance the Nixonian agenda, turned Ronald Reagan into the heart and the soul of the Republican party. The fix worked; Ronald Reagan communicated the lofty ideals of the Republican party while criminals like Richard Nixon, Oliver North and John Poindexter routinely trashed the Constitution.

In 1992, Independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, was still probing the Iran-contra scandal, but Reagan was unable or unwilling to cooperate. When he took testimony from Reagan in July 1992, Walsh asked Reagan if his longtime friend and media adviser was a part of his administration and Ronald Reagan said, "I honestly can't swear to that. I'd hate to have him hear me say it." Reagan lost his memory 2 years before he had good reason to blame it on a medical condition. In Novmeber of 1994, Reagan eloquantly disclosed the claim that he suffered from Alzeimer's disease, but whose script was he reading?

Reagan was certainly not in a position to speak his own mind. The man without guile was infuriated over the fact that criminals like Oliver North and John Poindexter had jeopardized his legacy, and his subsequent silence was absolutely necessary, to conceal the fury of violating his own, personal principles.

It is difficult to believe that Ronald Reagan's convenient memory lapse was voluntary because his core decency was consistent, both before and after his apparent illness. On March 4, 1987, Ronald Reagan said, "A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not." If anybody was granted the right to investigate the facts and the evidence, it would expose the criminal operations of the people Reagan empowered [North, Casey, Nixon, Poindexter, etc.] and the obsession to cover up the truth prevailed. Needless to say, the American people fell in love with Reagan's heart and good intentions, it is the crafty people who surrounded him, who ultimately deserve all the blame.

If we had watched the great communicator communicate throughout an illness that did not intend to conceal anything, we would have been in a better position to understand the progression of Alzheimer's disease, but given the unprecdented hypocricy of the Reagan years, we are merely left with the fact that Reagan's heart and soul was pure, but the criminals he appointed, were absolutely evil.

In a letter to the editor of USA Today, Dorman T. Shindler casually recorded the giant flaws of the Reagan years, when he wrote:

One hopes that after the smoke has cleared, someone at USA TODAY will see fit to write a lengthy piece about Ronald Reagan's "other" legacy: dangerous deregulation; a right-wing attorney general, Ed Meese, who bulldozed civil rights, a Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, who failed to protect the environment, once explaining, "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns'; the Iran-contra scandal; and a tripled national debt.

That these horrific dealings were glossed over or swept under the rug during Reagan's time is unconscionable. That they are still being vastly ignored by the media is sad.

The real measure of Reagan's legacy is his ability to hoodwink supposedly savvy journalists into believeing the fairy tale.

Next: Nixon Ruled

Plus: Rumsfeld's world