[Deathwatch] Ronald Wilson Reagan, former US president, 93

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Ronald Reagan, 1911-2004
An indefatigable optimist who set America on a conservative course

Ronald Wilson Reagan, the most successful conservative American
politician of modern times, died Saturday at his California home at age
93.

Derided by his adversaries as glib, doctrinaire and uninformed ? a mere
actor, they scoffed ? Reagan demonstrated throughout his political
career the power that comes from being underestimated.

He won power by defeating overconfident Democratic incumbents ? Gov.
Pat Brown in California in 1966 and President Jimmy Carter in the 1980
presidential election.

?It was said of Dwight Eisenhower (and could have been said of Ronald
Reagan) that his smile was his philosophy,? wrote columnist George
Will. And many Americans found Reagan?s smiling optimism appealing.

Federal spending little changed
But Reagan never was able to bring about the conservative revolution
that his disciples had hoped for.

When he became president in 1981, federal spending accounted for 22
percent of the Gross Domestic Product; when he left office eight years
later, federal spending was 21 percent of the GDP.

?Ultimately, the fact that Ronald Reagan left office as the most
popular president in modern history means that he settled for less
change than either he or his supporters wanted or could have gotten,?
Wall Street Journal editorialist John Fund wrote in 1989.

Another conservative, Ralph Reed, former executive director of the
Christian Coalition, viewed the Reagan presidency with chagrin: ?His
eight years in office did little to transform a political culture that
had become insensitive to religious values and uncaring about innocent
human life.?

Reed said conservatives ?woke up the morning after Reagan?s two terms
to discover that many maladies still afflicted our nation and many
pathologies had grown worse.?

Out of the wilderness
Reed did give Reagan credit for helping to lead conservatives ?out of
the wilderness,? calling him ?the midwife of a new political movement.?


Reagan was limited in what he could accomplish by a
Democratic-controlled Congress. But the ideas that he championed ?
lower taxes, giving more power to state and local governments and an
end to welfare entitlements for single mothers ? did reach fruition in
the Clinton presidency after the Republicans took control of Congress
in 1995.

One could argue that one of the high points of Reaganism came long
after he left the presidency, on Aug. 22, 1996, when President Bill
Clinton signed the welfare reform bill into law.

Son of a shoe salesman
Ronald Reagan was born on Feb. 6, 1911, in Tampico Ill., the son of an
itinerant shoe salesman named Jack Reagan and his wife, Nelle.

Jack Reagan was a Democrat, an alcoholic and something of a
ne?er-do-well. Ronald Reagan recounted in his autobiography in 1965
that as a boy he came home one day to find his father ?drunk, dead to
the world,? flat on his back on the front porch.

AP file
Actor Ronald Reagan loads his gun in the 1953 Western ?Law and Order,?
in which he played a retired U.S. marshal who can?t hang up his
holster.

Jack Reagan ended up working for the presidential campaign of Franklin
D. Roosevelt and later got a job with the Works Progress
Administration, one of FDR?s job-creation efforts.

Roosevelt became a hero to young Reagan, his fireside chats making an
imprint on Reagan?s own radio style.

After graduating from Eureka College, a small Illinois liberal arts
college, in 1932, Reagan landed a job broadcasting University of Iowa
football games over WOC, a radio station in Davenport, Iowa.

Later, Reagan broadcast Chicago Cubs games over WHO in Des Moines. In
1937, when he covered the Cubs spring training in California, Reagan
was discovered by a Warner Bros. agent and began his film career.

Often cast as the foil to leading men like Errol Flynn, Reagan was best
known for the 1940 film ?Knute Rockne, All American,? in which he
played Notre Dame football star George Gipp.

In another drama, ?Kings Row,? Reagan played Drake McHugh, who awakes
from anesthesia to find his legs amputated by a sadistic surgeon and
says, ?Where?s the rest of me??

?No single line in my career has been so effective in explaining to me
what an actor?s life must be,? Reagan wrote in his autobiography. He
prepared meticulously for the scene, consulting disabled people and
psychiatrists.

?At night I would wake up staring at the ceiling and automatically
mutter the line before I went back to sleep,? he recalled.

Democrat turned Republican
After making Army Air Force training films during World War II, Reagan
shifted from actor to corporate spokesman ? and from Democrat to
Republican ? by hosting the TV series ?General Electric Theater? in the
1950s. He toured the country for GE, giving boosterish free-enterprise
speeches with such titles as ?Our Eroding Freedoms.?

In 1964, Reagan?s nationally televised speech on behalf of Republican
presidential candidate Barry Goldwater made him the darling of
Republican activists. The speech was a Reaganesque recasting of FDR
rhetoric:

?You and I have a rendezvous with destiny,? Reagan said. ?We can
preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or
we can sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of
darkness.?

Two years later, Reagan defeated California Gov. Pat Brown by nearly a
million votes.

The California Legislature sent Reagan a measure in 1967 that legalized
abortion in cases of rape and incest and when a doctor found that a
pregnancy would endanger the life or health of the woman. Reagan
agonized over the measure, fearing that doctors would exploit a mental
heath loophole to approve many abortions. But in the end he signed it.

Despite Reagan?s aversion to taxes, the corporate tax rate doubled
during his tenure as California governor, and the top personal income
rate jumped by nearly 60 percent.

Challenged Ford in 1976
In 1976, Reagan nearly succeeding in wresting the Republican nomination
from President Gerald Ford.

Four years later, with Jimmy Carter hobbled by the Iranian hostage
crisis and soaring inflation, Reagan won the presidency, carrying 44
states.

The Iranians who had seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran later said they
released the  hostages only because they feared that Reagan might deal
with them ?like a cowboy.?

But Reagan?s presidency, which began with the exhilarating news of the
hostages? release, almost ended within a few months.

On March 30, 1981, as he left a Washington hotel after giving a speech,
he was shot by a deranged would-be assassin, John Hinckley Jr.

Reagan?s penchant for quips didn?t fail him. As he emerged from
surgery, he looked up at his wife, Nancy, and repeated the line that
boxer Jack Dempsey had used in 1926 when he lost the heavyweight title
to Gene Tunney: ?Honey, I forgot to duck.?

Reagan survived the assassination attempt, but he faced a series of
crises during the next three years.

Weathered 1982 recession
By the end of 1982, the nation was sunk in the deepest recession since
the 1930s, with nearly 12 million people out of work.

To stimulate the economy, Reagan had championed Jack Kemp?s
across-the-board income tax cuts in 1981, but he blunted their effect
when he acceded to a $100 billion tax increase only a year later.

Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., convinced Reagan that Congress would make $3 in
spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases. Reagan signed the tax
increase ? but Congress never made the spending cuts.

Meanwhile, Reagan stood back as Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker,
a Carter appointee, was squeezing inflation out of the economy by
restricting the money supply.

Volcker later commended him, saying ?People in the White House and
Treasury put pressure on Reagan, but they could never get Reagan to
criticize me.? The president, Volcker said, ?had this visceral feeling
that fighting inflation was a good thing.?

The economy had recovered by the time the 1984 election arrived, and ad
man Hal Riney?s soothing ?Morning in America? TV ad campaign helped
Reagan crush Democrat Walter Mondale in a landslide re-election
victory.

In foreign policy, Reagan?s rhetoric was initially combative: In 1983
he called Soviet communism ?the focus of evil in the modern world.?

But Reagan eventually held four summits with Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev. At Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev were on
the brink of a deal to abolish all nuclear weapons, but Reagan scuttled
it when Gorbachev insisted that the United States abandon its research
and development of a missile defense system.

The following year, the two men signed the most far-reaching
disarmament accord since 1945, eliminating their arsenals of
medium-range missiles and scrapping 2,600 warheads.

Bitburg, S&L mishaps
During his eight years in the White House, Reagan made some costly
miscalculations:

    * In 1982, he signed into law the Garn-St. Germain Act, which
deregulated the savings and loan industry and ended up costing
taxpayers tens of billions of dollars as S&L owners plunged into
speculative investments. Economist Paul Krugman called it the ?biggest
single economic policy disaster of the 1980s.?
    * Reagan drew criticism from Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and others
in 1985 when he attended a wreath-laying ceremony at the Bitburg
cemetery in West Germany, gravesite of 2,000 German soldiers, including
49 Nazi members of Hitler?s SS.
    * According to a panel of investigators headed by Sen. John Tower,
R-Texas, Reagan allowed Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North and others to
operate an extra-constitutional shadow government that diverted Iranian
arms sales profits to Nicaraguan rebels.

In the last two years of his presidency Reagan was hobbled both by the
Iran-Contra fiasco and by the Republicans? loss of the Senate in the
1986 elections, before Iran-Contra was revealed.

This in turn led to the Senate?s rejection of the nomination of Judge
Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, which was Reagan?s most
stinging ideological defeat ? and the one with perhaps the most lasting
consequences.

But to many conservatives Reagan was ? and remains ? a heroic
inspiration, as much for what he said as for what he accomplished.