This was a well-rehearsed one-liner undoubtedly written for him by one of his scriptwriters:
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What Is A President To You?
- Thread starter Revoltingest
- Start date
And professionally delivered.
I didn't intend to do that. It just sort of came out.
I'm not so sure about that. Some of the things he said were totally off the wall. For one, he said that there was no word for "freedom" in the Russian language, which was patently false. He also stated that the US had never taken any aggressive action against Russia, but he had forgotten about the US intervention in the Russian Civil War from 1918-1920.
Reagan seemed like a throwback to the McCarthy era. He wasn't as bad as McCarthy, but he had the same mindset. He believed that Russia was the "evil empire." We already had detente with the USSR before Reagan. Nixon was the driving force behind detente, and Reagan nearly destroyed it. It was really Gorbachev who demonstrated that he was gracious and magnanimous, by demonstrating that he was moving away from the hardliners by implementing Glasnost and Perestroika.
The Presidency has the power of the so-called "bully pulpit," so they can urge and encourage things, but officially, the President doesn't have that much power.
I think he was lacking in his understanding of history and the outside world. He clearly did not understand the Soviet Union when he called them the "evil empire." He also didn't seem to understand the cause-and-effect relationships in economics - or even basic mathematics with his constant deficit spending. It was Reaganomics which triggered the decline in the US economy, the consequences of which we're facing now.
I give him much credit for his movement away from the "Evil Empire" view of the USSR.
He was the one with power to end the cold war, & he unexpectedly did exactly that.
As for economics, I say he was a great boon (despite his net increase of gov regulation).
But his support for Iraq's attack on Iran had delayed terrible economic consequences.
There was no need to kill a million Iranians, making them a permanent committed enemy.
I was in business during Jimmy Carter's "malaise", & saw much good in Reagan's tax reform,
eg, lowering high marginal rates, & eliminating counter-productive tax dodges, eg, recapture
of accelerated depreciation at capital gains tax rates.
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Perhaps he softened a bit towards the end, although he was already out of office by the time the Berlin Wall came down and the Cold War "ended," although it took a couple of years before the Soviet Union actually dissolved. The abortive coup in 1991 accelerated things quite a bit.
I think America overall had been moving away from thinking of the USSR as the "evil empire." Even Nixon seemed willing to take a more reasonable approach towards both the USSR and Red China. By the time Reagan got to office, Mao was gone and China was reforming. The USSR was still a problem, but even they were loosening up somewhat. There had been a significant thaw in the post-Stalin decades. Relations between the US and USSR warmed up considerably, as both countries were quite different than what they were 20-30 years earlier.
But the way Reagan and many of his supporters spoke, they would make it seem like "The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming." The whole Nicaragua/Contra thing was like some kind of major obsession for the Reagan Administration. I remember one of my teachers in high school having a guest speaker show us a video from the American Conservative Union about how Nicaragua's communist government would cause a ripple effect, which would cause all of Central America to become communist, then Mexico, then the United States. A few years later, someone decided to make that exact scenario into a movie plot, Red Dawn.
A lot of people actually believed that this was a plausible movie plot - that this could actually happen. But then there were also those who believed that The Day After could have happened as well.
I won't quibble over whether Reagan ended or "won" the Cold War. I'm just glad we managed to survive it. The Russians never invaded us.
Reagan's dealings with Iran and the Middle East were also a bit sordid. The whole Iran-Contra arms for hostages deal was a pretty sad episode, along with allegations that the Reagan campaign conspired with the Iranians to hold the American hostages until Carter was out of office. Then there was that Beirut bombing in which hundreds of US Marines were killed; a lot of people were angry with Reagan over that.
He was obsessed over Nicaragua and the Contras, not to mention Grenada.
Carter got blamed for a lot of things that he inherited - and he inherited quite a mess. He also faced a good deal of opposition from even within his own party. Ted Kennedy was one of his biggest critics. I think what really destroyed Carter's presidency was the Iranian hostage crisis and the growing belief that the US was becoming too weak and ineffective on the world stage. That's what Reagan and many others were attacking him for. John Anderson's candidacy also ostensibly siphoned away some votes which would have gone to Carter.
I think Reagan was part of an overall wave of philosophical thought which pushed for greater deregulation and the general idea of "getting the government off the backs of private business." But it may have gone too far. Even Greenspan finally admitted as much.
It wasn't really Carter's fault that there was "malaise." I think most people agreed that America was facing some tough hurdles and challenges, but I don't think very many people wanted to face those hurdles and challenges.
Actually he seemed to me somewhat flustered by the question.
The Carter "malaise" certainly was the fault of many, & Carter is associated with it simply
because he was Prez at the time. But Reagan's tax changes were useful in recovery.
And his military adventurism later harmed the economy. A mixed record, eh?
What are your thoughts regarding Suzanne Massey's & Reagan's relationship relative
to warming US-Russian relations?
I suspected that we'd disagree about who is eloquent, & who isn't.
Yeah. If you want to complement a President, you should start with a fact.
Did you intend "compliment" for that non sequitur?
I did intend "compliment". I didn't intend a non sequitur. It was just friendly advice on how to compliment a President and make it stick.
Perhaps in the short term. I think both Carter and Anderson were looking at the long term and telling the people what they didn't want to hear, whereas Reagan told them what they did want to hear.
The country survived, but yeah, a mixed record sounds about right. He certainly wasn't the "greatest president," as some people might opine.
I was more familiar with Robert Massie's work, but it appears that she did have an influence on softening his approach towards the Soviet Union. This merely bears out what I was saying earlier, that Reagan was initially responding to the USSR out of ignorance and 50s era propaganda, but as she started to enlighten him and give him more information about what the Russians were really like, his approach changed - as well it should have.
I saw the reverse.
Carter was the short term guy, & not very good at it, eg, gasoline price fixing leading to shortages & long lines.
No recent presidents are great IMO.
Washington & Jefferson were OK though.
But my favorite was Franklin.
The fact that he could learn, & change his ways is a positive trait,
one which I seldom see in presidents. So I give him credit for it.