Guardian: A Rose-Tinted President

[kskiska]

Visitors to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, in the grounds of which the 40th president of the United States will be laid to rest later this month, frequently depart somewhat baffled. The Reagan museum and library are magnificently set out on a matchlessly beautiful hilltop setting north of Los Angeles. The optimistic feel of the visitor experience, with its prominent displays about Mr Reagan's movies and Mrs Reagan's gowns, is undeniably attractive. But there is also something missing. The nitty-gritty documentary political records of the president's toughest moments, the sort of sweaty detail that makes a visit to John Kennedy's or Richard Nixon's presidential libraries so compellingly interesting, is largely absent here. The visitor to Simi Valley emerges feeling extremely benevolent towards Mr Reagan, but without quite knowing what he really did. It is as though he presided over his years in office rather than leaving a conventional political imprint upon them.

This is, in many respects, also the case with Mr Reagan's remarkable life, which came to a close on Saturday, nearly 10 years after his poignant and dignified announcement of his Alzheimer's diagnosis. Mr Reagan is chiefly remembered now for three things - his tax cutting economic policies, his role in bringing about the end of the cold war and his ability to make America feel so good about itself after the turmoil of Vietnam, civil rights and Watergate.

These are formidable legacies. As his veteran secretary of state George Shultz rightly put it yesterday, Mr Reagan was one of the few presidents who shook things up. Yet Mr Reagan also had the magic ability to appear to be achieving things when he was not. In economics, he made no serious attempt to balance the financial books. His budget forecasts, in David Stockman's words, were "absolutely doctored", Enron before Enron. An enemy of big government, Mr Reagan tripled the deficit and left the largest government debt in America's history. Everyone can now agree that Mr Reagan had something to do with the collapse of communism, but as Garry Wills has written, "even his admirers are not clear on the exact chain of causality". Some believe that Mr Reagan spent the Soviet Union into submission, others that with Star Wars he scared it into surrender. At the time he left the White House, though, these were not widely shared views. The CIA, along with many conservatives, had barely recovered from Mr Reagan's apparent willingness at Reykjavik to destroy the US nuclear arsenal if Mikhail Gorbachev would do the same (an event which Mr Reagan always regarded as the most important of his presidency). When he left office in 1989, many believed he had delivered communism a hand-up rather than a knock-down.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1232950,00.html