A book review from salon.com to share: How Republicans created the myth of Ronald Reagan

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Mon Feb-02-09 01:05 PM
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A book review from salon.com to share: How Republicans created the myth of Ronald Reagan

With the Gipper's reputation flagging after Clinton, neoconservatives launched a stealthy campaign to remake him as a "great" president.

Editor's note: This excerpt from "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future" is reprinted by permission of Free Press.

By Will Bunch

Feb. 2, 2009 | The myth of Ronald Reagan was already looming in the spring of 1997 — when a highly popular President Bill Clinton was launching his second-term, pre-Monica Lewinsky, and the Republican brand seemed at low ebb. But what neoconservative activist Grover Norquist and his allies proposed that spring was virtually unheard of — an active, mapped-out, audacious campaign to spread a distorted vision of Reagan's legacy across America.

In a sense, some of the credit for triggering this may belong to those supposedly liberal editors at the New York Times, and their decision at the end of 1996 to publish that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. survey of the presidents. The below-average rating by the historians for Reagan, coming right on the heels of Clintons’ easy reelection victory, was a wake-up call for these people who came to Washington in the 1980s as the shock troops of a revolution and now saw everything slipping away. The first Reagan salvos came from the Heritage Foundation, the same conservative think tank that also had feted the 10th anniversary of the Reagan tax cut in 1991. After its initial article slamming the Times, the foundation’s magazine, Policy Review, came back in July 1997 with a second piece for its 20th anniversary issue: “Reagan Betrayed: Are Conservatives Fumbling His Legacy?”

The coming contours of the Reagan myth were neatly laid out in a series of short essays from the leaders of the conservative movement: that the Gipper deserved all or at least most of the credit for winning the Cold War, that the economic boom that Americans were enjoying in 1997 was the result of the Reagan tax cut (and not the march toward balanced budgets, lower interest rates and targeted investment), and that the biggest problem with the GOP was, as the title suggested, not Reagan’s legacy but a new generation of weak-kneed leaders who were getting it all wrong. The tone was established by none other than Reagan’s own son, Michael, now himself a talk-radio host, who wrote: “Although my father is the one afflicted with Alzheimer's disease, I sometimes think the Republicans are suffering a much greater memory loss. They have forgotten Ronald Reagan's accomplishments — and that is why we have lost so many of them.”

Michael Reagan, like most of the others, mentioned Reagan’s frequent calls for less government — presumably his accomplishment there was simply in calling for it, since he never came close to achieving it. Gary Bauer, another former Reagan aide who later ran for president as an antiabortion “family values” candidate, took a similar tack on the speaking-out issue, noting that Reagan “spoke of the sanctity of human life with passion” — again regardless of his lack of concrete results on that front. One of the writers argued: “On the international scene, Reagan knew that only America could lead the forces of freedom” — it was former assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, who’d pleaded guilty in a deal to withholding information about Iran-Contra from Congress and was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush. Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating even went the distance and compared Reagan to the 16th president with his argument that “Reagan's achievement can be compared to Lincoln's, because he faced immense challenges in an era characterized by deep and fundamental philosophical divisions among the people he set out to lead.” Of course, Keating’s analogy implied that stagflation and a left-wing government in Nicaragua were on an equivalent plane with slavery and a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans on our own soil — dramatizing the rhetorical extent to which conservatives were now willing to go in order to salvage their movement.

more: http://www.salon.com/books/excerpt/2009/02/02/ronald_reagan/