1980. The Cold War is on, accompanied by nightmares of nuclear Armageddon. Inflation is running at 12.5 percent. U.S. hostages are approaching their second year of captivity in Iran.
Flash forward to 2004: The Cold War is over. A deregulated economy has grown by leaps and bounds since the days of Jimmy Carter. Inflation has been whipped. All trends Reagan put into motion.
Yet some things haven’t changed; specifically, the dismissive attitude toward the 40th president put forward by America’s most influential paper, the New York Times.
On Saturday the Times came through with fitting coverage of the pageantry of Reagan’s funeral, relaying the gracious tributes of Margaret Thatcher, President Bush, and Reagan’s former Washington colleagues. But when it comes to the paper’s take on the Reagan presidency itself, nothing has changed in the quarter century since he took office.
After Reagan’s big win over Carter in 1980, Times veteran James “Scotty” Reston, former Washington bureau chief and executive editor, dubiously claimed the election “left Mr. Reagan with no clear policy mandate.” Yet Reston found “some consolations” back then, among them: “We will have a one-term President, without fear that Reagan, at his age, will try for a second term.”
Be afraid: Not only did Reagan push through conservative policies, but he had the audacity to run for and win a second term in 1984. Reston showed his and the Times’s displeasure in a sour, condescending piece the Sunday before Reagan’s historic thrashing of Walter Mondale, titled “Reagan Beats The Press.” It’s a startling admission that Reagan won despite the best efforts of the liberal press: “Some editorial writers and columnists and most Washington reporters were on to his evasive tactics, easy cheerfulness and unsteady grasp of the facts. They did not hesitate to point out his deficits, personal and fiscal, condemn his windy theorizing, and mock his zigzag contortions, but Mr. Reagan had the photographers and television cameramen for allies and proved that one picture on the nightly news can be worth a million votes.”
Twenty years later, Marilyn Berger’s June 6, 2004, front-page obituary for Reagan starts out with references to Reagan’s unquenchable optimism. But one soon realizes the Times considers “optimism” to be the whole story of Reagan’s presidency, as if Reagan’s popularity was based merely on presenting an amiable façade to the American people. It’s an attitude that enables the Times, then and now, to dismiss the substance of Reagan’s success.
Berger hints Reagan got lucky regarding the greatest achievement of his administration: “It was Mr. Reagan’s good fortune that during his time in office the Soviet Union was undergoing profound change, eventually to collapse, setting off a spirited debate over Mr. Reagan’s role in ending the cold war.” Later, she offers the line embraced by sore-loser liberals that Reagan’s aggressiveness actually prolonged the Cold War: “Some analysts believe that buildup, along with military exercises and reconnaissance that were seen from the Soviet perspective as provocative, may have strengthened Soviet hawks and actually delayed efforts by Mr. Gorbachev to bring reform to the Soviet Union.”
Berger doesn’t neglect the ultimate liberal anti-Reagan argument–those awful budget deficits–lamenting, “Mr. Reagan repeatedly refused to consider tax increases.” (Of course, Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, won liberal praise by raising taxes in 1990–and the deficit increased to a record $290 billion in 1992.)
She even brings up the “October Surprise” conspiracy theory–the idea that the Reagan campaign negotiated to delay the release of the hostages until after the election: “The timing of the release led to questions about whether Mr. Reagan or his staff had struck a private deal with the Iranians.”
The Times closed its week-long look at Reagan with R. W. Apple’s story on Friday, the day of Reagan’s funeral. Apple, longtime Times political essayist (and, incidentally, one of Reston’s successors as Times Washington bureau chief), is more interested in food journalism these days. But he puts down his fork long enough to stick a knife into Reagan’s policies.
Apple despairs of Reagan’s “severe and continuing cutbacks in government services to the poor and vulnerable” and brings his dubious geopolitical expertise (he once compared the Afghanistan war to a Vietnam-style “quagmire”) to the fore: “But he came to power as the cold war was nearing a denouement, and he did all he could to hasten the process by beefing up the American military and then, in Berlin, boldly challenging Soviet leaders to ‘tear down this wall.’…It was the result of 45 years of aggressive allied containment, but the commander in chief, as always, got much of the credit.”
Again, the Times refuses to give Reagan full credit for winning the Cold War. And was it really common knowledge at the time that “the cold war was nearing a denouement”? Reagan believed it, but hardly anyone else did.
Apple continues: “Much of the country, including most of those who are physically, economically or otherwise disadvantaged, deeply resented and still resent his insistence that government is the problem, not the solution. Severe and continuing cutbacks in government services to the poor and vulnerable resulted, and the gulf dividing rich from poor widened.” Of course, as the increasing federal budget deficits showed, those cutbacks, “severe” or not, never came about but in the minds of Reagan’s liberal foes.
Then Apple huffs: “Many missed Mr. Carter’s burning commitment to civil rights and liberties at home and human rights abroad. African-Americans and trade union members felt particularly aggrieved, as did many Jews, who resented Mr. Reagan’s participation in a ceremony in 1985 at a German cemetery where Nazi SS troopers were buried.”
At least one trade union (Polish Solidarity, in the forefront of the fight against Soviet Communist tyranny) would disagree with Apple’s assessment of Reagan’s supposed indifference to human rights abroad. The fact that Afghanistan and Nicaragua went Communist during the Carter years doesn’t say much favorable about Carter’s own human-rights record. Apple also provides no data on how many people “missed” punitive inflation or the Iranian hostage crisis.
Yes, times have changed, but the Times hasn’t: still unwilling to admit Reagan was both “optimistic” and right, while they were pessimistic and wrong.
–Clay Waters is director of “Times Watch,” a project of the Media Research Center.