In his December 8, 1986 journal entry, author Leo
Lerman had this to say about Ronald Reagan:
“This man was shallow, a second-rate actor, utterly dependent on
superficial Irish charm - the kind the morning milkman or letter carrier or any
man in the street has. He was destined
to be used by strong, self-seeking, unscrupulous men wanting power not for
state, but for self. The man may be
honest, but he is stupid, which in his position of highest power is criminal.”
Lerman had more to say about Reagan’s “smiling,
good-fellow self” which I will not repeat here. No, I will confine myself to
Mr. Lerman’s more moderate criticisms, i.e., the ones in the passage above.
I’ve been thinking about Reagan these days because
I’ve been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s latest book, Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden
Age of Journalism. Goodwin’s books have invariably been both enlightening and engaging to me and Bully Pulpit is no exception. One of its main messages is the powerful
effect that capable authors like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens had on public
opinion in the early 1900s. It’s hard to
think who has such influence today. I
suppose Jon Stewart’s Daily Show
comes close, but it’s kind of humiliating to realize that comedy shows today
are where we have to go to find influential critical commentary about
political and corporate shenanigans. A
hundred plus years ago, serious writers could generate a tidal wave of reform
just by reporting what Standard Oil and its flunkeys in the Senate were up to. How times have changed. Sigh.
Equally fascinating is a second theme of Bully Pulpit: the way in which Theodore
Roosevelt, working against the leadership of his own Republican Party, used
government to make life better for Americans at the expense of the big
corporations. Before Roosevelt became
president, corporate money thoroughly controlled the GOP and the GOP served those moneyed interests. Roosevelt
changed much of that by establishing regulations aimed at protecting citizens
against their depredations.
Ronald Reagan, of course, did the opposite. He initiated an era in which the government –
long the protector of the people – came to be viewed as a hostile alien entity. And by encouraging a belief in this bizarre
notion, he enabled the corporations to once again exploit and abuse ordinary
citizens in a way they had not done for decades. That’s why middle class incomes have become
stagnant while the one percent has basked in unprecedented wealth - since about 1980.
But I don’t believe that Reagan screwed middle
class Americans on purpose. I agree with
Lerman that he was simply not very smart - and certainly not smart enough to be president. He
thought he was doing the right thing because he listened to the wrong people.
Reagan had been a Democrat in his youth, and for
good reason. His hometown was
hit hard by the Depression, and his family, like many others, faced the
prospect of poverty and homelessness. Only
government intervention - Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal - saved the Reagan
family and many of its neighbors from this fate.
But later in life, once he was married to Nancy, Ronald
Reagan bought into the right-wing Republican philosophy of his wealthy
father-in-law. Even though his
well-being as a youth had depended on government intervention, he decided, once
he was wealthy, that “the government is the problem.” His very shallowness served him well here, allowing
him to ignore the bizarre contradiction of his about-face. His biographer, Lou Cannon, said that Reagan
was always uncomfortable around intellectuals.
No wonder. By the same token, I
imagine snake oil salesmen must be uncomfortable around real doctors.
One of the least appealing qualities of Reagan was
his bigotry. Granted, he was a sort of
good-natured dude, and he didn’t come across as a snarling bigot in the style
of, say, Jesse Helms. But bigot he
was. Two of his most outrageous and
disgusting gestures along these lines were his touting of “states’ rights” in
his 1980 Philadelphia, Mississippi, speech and his portrayal of an irresponsible “welfare queen” living high on honest taxpayers’ money as though she were a fair depiction of poor black families during his
campaign. Yuk.
Despite his stupidity, Reagan was not without
talent, and herein we find the sources of his political success. He was competent enough in backslapping
bonhomie, but his real skill lay in public relations. The “superficial Irish charm” of which Lerman
wrote came to the fore when he was on television and through that medium he
reached millions of Americans, many of whom were no more knowledgeable about
the world than he was. When he said “Government is not the solution to our
problem; government is the problem,” millions of people, many of whom
depended heavily on government protection or support, believed him and they
watched with approval as he dismantled many of the reforms that his
predecessors had put in place.
Of course Reagan didn’t bring about
anti-government hostility single-handedly and he isn’t solely responsible for
the rapacious way in which corporations have once again come to exploit ordinary
citizens. But more than any single
individual, he, with his shallow but clueless charm, made greed-is-good
corporate ruthlessness possible.
His anti-government policies were not born in the
thin soil of his own consciousness; they came from those “strong, self-seeking,
unscrupulous men” in the background about whom Lerman wrote. Reagan was merely their public face. He was, in fact, not so much a president as a
press secretary, a spokesman for those who stood to benefit from a
pro-corporate, small government philosophy.
And that’s why I think it’s reasonable to consider him “great” in some
sense. He was, in my opinion, the
greatest presidential press secretary of modern times.
Let me wrap up by recommending Goodwin’s Bully Pulpit. The book is a veritable inspiration. It shows how an awakened citizenry can
actually make government an active force that protects the weak
– that is, almost all of us - against the strong - those we have come to know as “the
one percent.” In short, it points the
way out of the dreadful era into which Ronald Reagan’s ingratiating
charm has led us.
