On 1 Jan 2011 02:55:00 +0100, "Knifefight Afterdance"
The Truth About Ronald Reagan: A Shallow, Shameless President
Halton Adler Mann in the Houston Chronicle, July 27, 1998
Nonrevisionist analysis is demanded before too much
hagiographic history of Ronald Reagan is engraved in
granite and the 40th president is canonized beyond
truth and endurance in airports, public buildings
and Mount Rushmore.
Now that he is 87 and mentally enfeebled, the
encomiums are coming faster from editorialist
who once excoriated him, their prose revised
to reflect an insufferably sanitized version
of his presidency. Against his relentless tide
of tribute, truth must stand firm.
The truth includes Reagan's anti-communist
zealotry that compelled him to lie in writing
every six months that he certified "progress" in
human rights in El Salvador. That was the absurd,
unilateral "condition" Congress required for
continued US support of fascist terrorism by
the death squads of that tormented country.
Reagan's monomaniacal determination to overthrow
Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua led to subsidizing of
proxy mass murder of thousands of innocents there
by Contra terrorists. Later came the Iran-Contra
scandal, the usurpations of presidential powers
by Oliver North and the selling of armaments for
American hostages in Lebanon, impeachable
offenses in a non-teflon presidency.
A similar moral famine affected Reagan when he
declared that the only alternative in the Philippines
to Ferdinand Marcos' reign of terror and murder
(he did not characterize it as such) was a communist
dictatorship. The peaceful revolution led by the
admirable Benigno Aquino's widow Corazon
whose husband was murdered in a public spectacle
by Marcos's henchmen - belied Reagan's denial of a
democratic movement. Reagan was perfectly willing t
o keep anti-communist murderers like Marcos in Power.
Although Elie Wiesel importuned him to shun a Nazi
cemetery at Bitburg at the request of Michael Deaver
and Helmut Kohl, President Reagan went and gave a
ludicrous speech. He exculpated the entire German
nation for its barbarity, persecution, genocide and
war save "one man" he held responsible. Certainly
there was a better way to honor Germany's decades
of dedication to Democracy in the wake of World War II.
The Reagan Administration supported Saddam Hussein
when Iraq invaded America's nemesis Iran, in his eight
year war. It led to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Persian
Gulf War and the present threat of chemical and biological
warfare.
Also deleted from Reagan's revisionism is his sending of
230 Marines to their easily avoidable death in what then
Senator Sam Nunn, D-Ga. called "Mission Impossible" in
Lebanon. The same security measures employed by embassies
and banks throughout the world would have prevented the bombing
of the Marine barracks in Beirut.
Reagan's me culpa after the bombing was bought by an
American electorate that could never impute anything but
the noblest motives to the "Gipper" and could forgive him
almost everything.
As George Clemenceau might conclude, history is too
serious a matter to be left to editorial writers and columnists.
Give Ronald Reagan his due, his leadership of the "revolution"
that bears his name. It culminated in Republican control of
Congress for the first time in 40 years in 1994. And give him
credit for the energy that contributed to - but was far from solely
responsible fro - the dissolution of the Soviet Union's hegemony.
Extol his B-movie actor's ability to memorize his lines and
deliver them with presidential credibility.
Like him for his affability and personal charm.
But remember and recognize that he was a shallow and
shameless president who exploited a nation's need for
shallow answers to profound and protracted problems.
History must not permit him to "go gently into that good night"
unscathed