Picking Up the Pieces: Reagan's Lessons for Bush

Picking Up the Pieces: Reagan's Lessons for Bush

Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2001

WASHINGTON – Backed by sky-high public approval ratings, President Bush wages a war on terrorism, a struggle triggered in large part by the lackadaisical, permissive attitude of the previous Clinton administration toward America’s enemies.

"Picking up the pieces” behind a failed predecessor is no small task. But polls show Americans are prepared to hunker down for the long haul and give this president all the time and latitude he needs to do the job.

There is precedent for fighting a war for years and beating back all obstacles to ultimate success.

In his new book "The Age of Reagan” (Prima Publishing), Stephen F. Hayward, a Ph.D. and a senior fellow at the Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco, shows in painstaking detail the mess that confronted our 40th president, Ronald Reagan, when he raised his hand and took the oath of office on Jan. 21, 1981. The war he had to fight, of course, was not, for the most part, a "shooting war." It was a Cold War.

There are those who think President Bush will have a hard time keeping his countrymen focused on fighting a war that was effectively declared when terrorists knocked down the twin towers of the World Trade Center and attacked the Pentagon, with thousands of innocent civilians dying right here on our own soil.

Imagine the harder public relations job confronting Reagan in fighting a war that:

had dragged on for decades;

did not involve any military combat on U.S. territory;

involved a danger that was largely pooh-poohed by a liberal establishment blinded or beguiled by Soviet propaganda and enemy adherents in our midst who succeeded in making their ideology seem "respectable”;

had been given a bad name by the Lyndon Johnson administration’s inept "no win” strategy in the Vietnam War;

an American public knew former President Jimmy Carter had bungled, but did not realize the full extent of the danger in what veteran intelligence official Robert Gates would later label "those flush times at the Kremlin.”

This first of two volumes of "The Age of Reagan,” subtitled "The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980,” takes the reader up to the time the former California governor and movie actor entered the White House. Hayward believes it is necessary to examine the Reagan era in context, i.e., by understanding the events leading up to the 1980 campaign that made Ronald Reagan’s presidency so inevitable. The second volume, yet to be published, will deal in depth with the Reagan White House years.

Goldwater, 1964

Why start with 1964? That, remember, was the year of the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. The author approvingly quotes columnist George Will as saying: "Goldwater won the election of 1964. It just took 16 years to count the votes.”

1964 was the year of Reagan’s "Time for Choosing” speech for Goldwater toward the end of the campaign. It did not elect Goldwater, but to those many who had been electrified by this debut political performance by Reagan, "his ascension seemed inevitable; to everyone else, it seemed unthinkable.”

What happened to make it reality? As mentioned above, Johnson and Carter helped. But the Republican presidencies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford didn’t hurt either.

As Hayward shows, in the 16 years following Goldwater’s humiliation at the polls, all of liberalism’s chickens came home to roost, thanks in part to Johnson and Carter. But as Nixon and Ford clearly showed, Republican efforts to play defense and appease the liberal establishment were doomed to fail as well. Oil and food shortages that showed up in 1973-74 exacerbated Nixon’s problems during the Watergate scandal, and could be traced to his earlier imposition of wage and price controls.

There were some indications that in his second term, Nixon was planning a turn to the right toward a far more conservative administration than he had pursued in his first four years, but Watergate intervened. As for Gerald Ford, his failed efforts made Reagan’s 1976 GOP primary challenge (a warm-up for the big 1980 run) inevitable. Thus, Ford, America’s only president never elected either to the first or second place on a national ticket, was ultimately defeated and remains to this day a bitter old man, railing against the GOP’s "right.”

Nixon and Ford lacked Reagan’s communication skills and, according to conventional wisdom, might not have been able to sell the public on the free-market domestic and anti-communist foreign policies the "Gipper” ultimately implemented.

Or maybe they could have if they had only tried. Hayward deflates the myth that only Reagan’s engaging smile, sense of humor and affable nature carried his policies to fruition. "The Age of Reagan” shows that Americans were ready for a return to the old values and were longing for someone who could come forward and lead.

The era immediately preceding Reagan’s election, says Hayward, included 16 of the most politically divisive years the United States has had to endure since the decade before the Civil War. Overseas, we were embroiled in a war we couldn’t win; at home, our streets had become battlefields; and in Washington, the old liberal order was collapsing under the weight of a long string of failed policies. "It seemed that an era of optimism and progress had come to a close.”

Jimmy's 'Misery Index'

With double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment figures, and double-digit interest rates, Carter’s own test of "the misery index” had been surpassed in spades.

With this set of problems facing a demoralized America, the author notes, "Reagan became the first national political figure to make a frontal assault on the esoteric premises of the administrative state. Reagan anticipated the public distrust of the federal government years before it became obvious ...” having said in 1968 that "there appears to be a panic fear afloat in the air, partly due to a feeling that government is now a separate force beyond the people’s control ...”

Reagan’s path to the presidency, Hayward argues, was helped along by the fact that the social regulation begun in the 1960s and '70s was "of a wholly different kind from the regulation of the Progressive and New Deal eras, and in many ways, ill-suited for American law and politics.”

Most of this first volume was written before the election of George W. Bush, and all of it preceded the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America. As previously noted, the current crisis differs in many ways from the Cold War that Reagan fought. But surely, with Chinagate, loose or counter-productive intelligence standards, pardoning terrorists, throwing out necessary security protections that got in the way of the Clinton political agenda, trying to "feminize” the military, cozying up to Fidel Castro and other enemies of America leave the current occupant of the White House with a huge cleanup task as he wages the expected prolonged war against terrorism.

The list of cleanup jobs that awaited Ronald Reagan was similarly impressive:

The giveaway of the Panama Canal, a move whose ultimate damage is yet to be fully realized, according to experts in the intelligence field.

Presidential agreement to the SALT 2 Treaty, which veteran security expert Eugene Rostow warned was "an expression of American acquiescence of the Soviet drive for overwhelming military superiority,” and which Sen. Henry "Scoop” Jackson, D-Wash., labeled "appeasement in its purest form.”

The armed forces were in terrible shape. When Adm. Elmo Zumwalt bluntly warned Carter that U.S. Navy forces were incapable of defending the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean oil routes, the president responded with "a stare that in a less democratic society would’ve meant he was destined for a firing squad.”

Carter’s human rights policy, says Hayward, was "a form of intervention. The [communist] Sandinistas would not have come to power [in Nicaragua] in the absence of the Carter administration’s human rights policy.”

Carter’s aversion to what he called "the inordinate fear of communism” was best exemplified by his naïve statement that the Soviets' drive to establish communism throughout the world and expansion of their system was "a legitimate purpose for them.”

Finally, a combination of poor intelligence and mixed signals from the Carter White House helped to topple our friend the Shah of Iran, ultimately resulting in an Islamic fundamentalist takeover that led to the taking of 52 American hostages. For American voters, this was the last straw.

All of this is a matter of history. It deals with fact, not just someone’s opinion.

"The Age of Reagan” is one step toward putting recent history in perspective. It is not an easy task. As Hayward notes, "The presumptive right of liberals and liberalism to rule America lurks beneath the surface of most historical writing in our time.”

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Panama Canal

A product that might interest you:
USS Ronald Reagan Cap - Get Your Piece of the Reagan Legacy!