COMMENTARY
Reagan on Mount Rushmore?

By Robert M. Rees

Only a few days after the passing of President Reagan, a Republican member of Congress, Rep. Matt Salmon of Arizona, proposed that Ronald Reagan join George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore. Others suggested that Reagan's likeness replace Franklin D. Roosevelt's on the dime or Alexander Hamilton's on the $10 bill.

This upwelling of honorific emotion, in some ways a catharsis for an increasingly isolated and vilified America now in need of redemption following recent events in Iraq, was understandable. However, it's premature and probably even fatuous to pretend to know Reagan's place in history. It was less than a year ago, after all, that we couldn't even agree on the content of a proposed CBS-TV mini-series, "The Reagans."

During the seven days immediately after Reagan's death, code-named "Operation Serenade" by aides and family members, the reportage on the historical record seemed amiss. CNN presented a grief expert and the Fox News Network brought in Oliver North, one of the assemblers of the Reagan administration's illicit Iran-Contra plan of 1984-86. North waxed eloquently about Reagan without mentioning Iran-Contra.

In fact, the media seemed intent on glossing over Reagan. Forgotten were the "voodoo economics" that took from the poor to give to the rich. Exorcised were Reagan's claims that "welfare queens" drove Cadillacs while living at the Waldorf-Astoria, that the Russian language has no word for freedom, that trees cause more pollution than automobiles and that ketchup is a suitable vegetable for school lunches.

Also not mentioned was that the Reagans, during their eight years in the White House, consulted regularly and seriously with an astrologer, Joan Quigley of San Francisco.

Forgotten, too, was that there are those who see Reagan not as a great president but as a skillful populist who simplified the world into black and white and relied on the existence of a devil to rally the populace.

Reagan's first Satan was communism. As president of the Screen Actors Guild in Hollywood during the late 1940s, he worked against fellow actors as an informant for the FBI and then testified to Richard Nixon's House Committee on Un-American Activities.

After Reagan's encounter with communism, he served as host of the "General Electric Theater" on television. One of his duties was as designated speaker against the new evil in Reagan's life, any government regulation opposed by General Electric. Reagan literally gave the same speech hundreds of time.

Later, he took on yet another devil by targeting the Free Speech and other movements at the University of California-Berkeley in his first gubernatorial campaign in 1966.

By the time Reagan ran for president against seemingly hapless Jimmy Carter in 1980 — what with hostages in Iran, inflation at 12 percent and oil prices high — liberalism had become for the first time in American history a pejorative. Reagan, on the other hand, had become the darling of the anti-liberal right and represented the emergence of a moralistic and economic fundamentalism.

Reagan went on to create a lasting legacy. However, whether it's a legacy deserving of memorialization on Mount Rushmore is another question. In fact, when North eulogized Reagan on Fox News, even though he avoided mentioning Iran-Contra, it only brought to mind that whole sordid episode later characterized by congressional committees as one of "persuasive dishonesty" and "disdain for law."

Iran-Contra

Apparently with Reagan's knowledge, although Reagan later said he couldn't recall having been told about it, North and National Security Adviser John Poindexter instituted the illegal sale of arms to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages. Then, in spite of the Boland Amendment that prohibited such activity, the Reagan administration used the illegal proceeds to illicitly purchase arms for the Contra forces fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

The stench from Iran-Contra still haunts our system. The assistant secretary of state under Reagan, Elliott Abrams, pleaded guilty to withholding evidence from Congress but was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush and appointed by President George W. Bush to the National Security Council, where he serves today.

Also serving on Bush's National Security Council is Otto J. Reich, who was censured by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs for covert activities in support of the Contras. John Negroponte, the ambassador to Honduras during Iran-Contra who helped cover up clandestine CIA activity in Nicaragua, is now America's ambassador to Iraq. As for Poindexter, President George W. Bush found it appropriate to put him in charge of the Department of Defense's post-9/11 program to gather intelligence on American citizens.

Thinking about this might lead one to wonder: Are there other instances where the Reagan legacy has done more harm than good?

When he campaigned against Reagan for the presidential nomination in 1980, George H.W. Bush may have been right when he characterized Reagan's economics as "voodoo economics." Reagan promised to cut taxes, increase military spending and balance the budget. By the end of his two terms, however, the national debt had tripled and unemployment had averaged 7.5 percent.

Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, later acknowledged in his book of 1986, "The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed," that he and the administration had misled Congress by painting a "rosy scenario" and by using a "magic asterisk," the latter a footnote that projected never intended and never possible budget cuts.

It was all designed to sell the trickle-down economics in which Reagan believed.

At least one group did benefit from trickle-down economics. Thanks to the reduction of the top income-tax rate from 70 percent to 33 percent, the rich got richer. At the same time, however, the gap between the haves and have-nots increased. As Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., observed at the time, "A rising tide raises all yachts."

Reagan, working on the faith gained from General Electric, also began the process of deregulation. In 1982, for example, the Depository Institutions Act freed the savings-and-loan industry from federal regulations and permitted federally chartered S&P to diversify into high-risk areas. What followed were collapses, the Keating Five and other scandals that necessitated a federal bailout of the industry and that presaged Tyco, Enron and other recent debacles.

We can take no comfort in the knowledge that President George W. Bush has adopted Reaganomics.

Fundamentalism and righteousness

Ironically, it was Reagan's moral and religious fundamentalism and righteousness that seduced him into slumber when it came to helping the less fortunate of society. Part of Reaganomics was the belief that nature and God select the winners of society. To help the losers is only to get in the way. In any case, Reagan apparently believed that the poor on welfare are mostly cheats — welfare queens who drive Cadillacs — who deserve poverty.

Under the illusion that gays also are victims of a loose morality, Reagan refused even to acknowledge AIDS as a threat when it was first reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in 1981. Reagan's surgeon general, Dr. Everett Koop, later wrote that "political meddlers in the White House" complicated work against the disease.

It was Reagan's fundamentalism that led to his opposition to abortion. In 1983, on the 10th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, he delivered himself of "Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation," an essay on "human dignity under God." Later, it was this same righteousness that led to George W. Bush's opposition to the embryonic stem-cell research that Nancy Reagan says might have helped her husband and others suffering from Alzheimer's.

Reagan's son suggests that Bush has carried righteousness too far. In his eulogy for his father, Ron Reagan Jr. said: "Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians — wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage."

Anti-environmentalism

Another Reagan mantle in which President George W. Bush has cloaked himself is the belief that profit and free enterprise trump the environment. Reagan and his first secretary of the Interior, James G. Watt, set a tone of hostility to environmentalism that permeates the Bush administration.

Watt said federal preservation was a waste of oil and lumber-producing land that would be better utilized in the hands of private interests. In support of Watt's policies, Reagan once famously said about a plan to cut down a sequoia forest: "If you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all."

This legacy is being carried forward by the administration of George W. Bush.

Minorities

Reagan, unlike Richard Nixon, never held blacks, Jews and liberals in contempt. However, as in 1985 when he participated in a ceremony at a cemetery in Bitt-burg, West Germany, where Nazi SS troopers were buried, he seemed remarkably unaware of or indifferent to the meanings of oppression in a multicultural society.

Reagan chose to begin his first presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., a county known for the murders of three civil-rights workers. In the early 1980s, his administration argued that government is legally required to grant tax exemptions to racially discriminatory private schools. In 1988, he vetoed a new civil-rights act because he feared the expansion of the powers of the federal government.

He once wondered aloud whether Martin Luther King Jr. might be a communist. It was no wonder that Reagan captured less than 10 percent of the black vote.

It's also no wonder that the chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Julian Bond, said of Reagan's passing: "Everyone wants to extend sympathy to his family, but when you remember the actual record, it's a very, very different story."

Devolution and states' rights

Because Reagan believed that government is the problem and not the solution, he insisted that social programs be transferred to the states. However, as Hawai'i's former Gov. George Ariyoshi recently noted, "I agreed with the policy ... but the way it was done was to just shred the programs and send them over to the state and not provide the funding."

Reagan's policy of dumping social programs and then making believe the states would take up the slack anticipated Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America" of 1996 and the New Federalism of the Bush administration.

Victory without firing a shot

Reagan said he believed, as does George W. Bush today, that God granted America a special place in the world, that of Puritan John Winthrop's "shining city upon a hill." America's purpose is to implement and reflect God's will.

Reagan's "evil empire" speech of 1983 articulated this attitude. However, Reagan was wise enough to jettison this baggage when it came down to serious negotiations. Ironically, what many view as Reagan's greatest accomplishment — presiding over the demise of communism and the end of the Cold War — was based on a dramatic departure from Reagan's earlier doctrinaire beliefs.

The winning of the Cold War, of course, was because of the policy of containment implemented by President Truman and formulated in George Kennan's famous "Long Telegram" of 1946 from Moscow.

Reagan's great contribution was to continue this policy but to ignore the advice of the White House hawks — Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld — that there should be no negotiations with the Soviet Union.

He followed instead the advice of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who urged him to regard Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev "as a man we can deal with."

In short, the one Reagan accomplishment — victory without firing a shot — that ought to serve as a sterling legacy has been so distorted as to no longer constitute a legacy so much as an urban legend prostituted in support of pre-emptive war by the very same hawks who failed to persuade Reagan.

George W. Bush as heir

Reagan may not be headed for Mount Rushmore, but no doubt the Republican National Convention in New York City will attempt to position George W. Bush as the natural heir to the Reagan legacy. Unfortunately, that positioning will be mostly accurate. The incumbent president exhibits the same lack of thought and analysis and the same black-and-white righteousness that led Reagan so far astray. In the one area, war and peace, where the Reagan legacy ought to be honored, George W. Bush has twisted it into its exact reverse.

Robert M. Rees is moderator of 'Olelo Television's "Counterpoint" and Hawaii Public Radio's "Talk of the Islands."