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The John Wayne comparison comes easily when discussing
Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th President of the United
States, who was an actor himself — although
one who realized nowhere near the same level of success
on the Silver Screen as “The Duke.” But
Reagan, who was known as “Dutch,” eventually
got his casting call on the much larger World Stage
— and when it came time to act there, he shed
all inclinations towards B-movie mediocrity and came
up with the grandest performance of his life.
Or so revisionist historians would have us believe.
And many would. But they would be wrong.
Ronald Reagan was a duplicitous, god-fearing brute
who spoke with a forked-tongue and used the rhetoric
of apocalyptic imagery to instill a climate of fear
and docility in America, while he and his rich henchmen
exponentially increased the ranks of the nation’s
“working poor.”
A quote by Reagan in 1966 — at the beginning
of his eight-year stint as the governor of California
— says a lot. The Free Speech Movement had flared
up again at the University of California at Berkeley.
Reagan, after deep consultations with the state Board
of Regents, chided that the student protestors should
“obey the prescribed rules or get out.”
That was Reagan to a Tee: he had no use for self-examination,
or anyone who did; his identity was action.
He won the Cold War, say the revisionists, and they
grant him full credit for having brought down the
symbolic Berlin Wall, despite that each of the seven
presidents who preceded him, beginning with Truman,
executed a similar, if not identical, program of Communist
Containment; and their efforts had, by the time Reagan
moved into the White House, worn down the Soviet Union
so completely that Dutch need only utter a few boisterous
threats eastward to send the “Evil Empire”
down to the mat for good….
Indeed, 35 years of economic tampering, psychological
warfare and propaganda…not to mention a five-decades-long
marathon to see who could gather a larger stockpile
of nuclear weapons that neither country would ever
use — a nefarious and well-orchestrated policy
of shameless waste that eventually bankrupted the
Soviet Union and, at the same time, damn near bankrupted
America.
I hail from western Pennsylvania, and come from a
long line of steel folks. I still recall how desperate
things became for my people shortly after Reagan came
into office, and subcontracted nearly the entire steel
industry to Japan. It became a sort of nervous contest
to predict which of the various mills in the area
would be next in line for the chopping block…and,
as a result, who among my family or my family’s
friends would find their secure way of life —
their American Dream, as it were — melted down
like so much bituminous waste. Back then, someone
was always next in line to get the axe.
Ronald Reagan never visited western Pennsylvania
while he was president, though he did once place a
phone call to the area — in the spring of 1981,
this was, soon after he assumed the presidency and
even sooner after a Jodie Foster-obsessed Okie named
John Hinckley Jr. fired six shots from a cheap .22
pistol at him and his entourage as they left the Hilton
Hotel in Washington, D.C. A lot of people in western
Pennsylvania would have loved to see him at various
points throughout the Eighties…but Reagan never
could make it. Which makes perfect sense when you
consider that no criminal worth his salt is ever dumb
enough to return to the scene of the crime.
And Reagan was a criminal — make no mistake
of that. Revisionist history has served him well,
just as it did Richard Nixon, who actually enjoyed
a return to eminence long before he himself met the
Grim Reaper in 1994. The Republicans are terribly
fond of revisionism, which permits them to commit
heinous atrocities while they are in office on the
hunch that no one in America will remember what they
did a decade later…and still fewer will even
care. Tricky Dick benefited from this — and
so did Ronald Reagan.
But with Reagan, the revisionists have gone over
the top…and they’re not finished yet.
Oh, there were some shaky moments, to be sure. In
1987, when the Iran-Contra Affair was uncovered, there
was staunch determination among all sectors of the
GOP to keep the crimes that Reagan and his cronies
committed as secret as possible. Indeed. They circled
the wagons tight and fast on that one. Richard Nixon
had already blown the opportunity to be raised before
History as the paradigm of meritorious Republican
leadership designed to offset the wistful myth of
John F. Kennedy. Under no circumstances would revisionists
allow Reagan to meet the same harsh fate.
Iran-Contra. It sounds boring and arcane now —
like some bad soap opera, slated for cancellation,
flickering across a broken television screen. Not
even History has given it a fair shake. There are,
however, obvious reasons for that. Foremost among
them is that revisionists have seen to it that Iran-Contra
has never gotten any airtime on History’s Big
Screen….And, for this same reason, it appears
certain it never will — especially given the
somber rhapsody surrounding Reagan’s funeral,
and the shameless tributes that are certain to continue
long after the memory of that maudlin spectacle fades.
But, goddamnit, I’m writing this for a reason;
and since I haven’t succumb to the historical
lobotomy that revisionism perpetrates upon the American
Memory, I feel impelled to lay out at least some of
the facts regarding that treacherous farce.
The Iran-Contra Affair was a brazen and deliberate
transgression by the Reagan administration of the
Boland Amendment, which Congress passed in December
1982. It was conducted under the illegal auspices
of the rogue National Security Council (NSC) and Rear
Adm. John Poindexter — from 1983 until October
5, 1986, when U.S. covert operator Eugene Hasenfus
was forced to go before world television cameras and
relate the details of the mission he and his colleagues
had been undertaking when the cargo plane they were
in was shot down over Nicaragua by a Sandinistan surface-to-air
missile.
Under duress, Hasenfus told of an undercover U.S.
government-sponsored program to resupply the anti-Sandinistan
“Contras” in Nicaragua with paramilitary
aid. More importantly, he explained that those in
the top echelon of power in the Reagan administration
had sanctioned the program.
A month later, a Lebanese magazine published an account
of a secret trip to Iran that State Department official
Robert McFarlane and a corny dupe lieutenant colonel
named Oliver North had taken six months earlier. The
account, which detailed an extensive covert arms-for-hostages
policy between the NSC and Iran, swiftly reached the
Western media, where it spread with the speed of a
napalm-fueled brushfire.
A few weeks later, Reagan and his attorney general,
Edwin Meese, announced that the NSC had indeed sold
arms to Iran, ostensibly as a way to secure “stability”
in the embattled Middle East — and then diverted
the proceeds from those sales to bolster the Contras
in Nicaragua — in direct violation of Congress.
In scope, if not effect, the program had implications
far more hideous than Watergate. Despite that, none
of the major players in the Reagan administration
were ever forced to testify, and Oliver North was
transformed into a national hero for the obscene jingoism
he displayed in not sinking the entire ship.
Which is precisely the lesson the Reaganites learned
from Watergate: Rather than risk having Ollie North
pull a John Dean, they wisely reeled him in, plying
him with promises in the hereafter, as long as he
took one on the chin for the team now. North acquiesced,
and became a martyred celebrity. At last report, he
had his own radio talkshow—just like G. Gordon
Liddy.
Iran-Contra was the cornerstone of the “Reagan
Doctrine,” a ruthless, worldwide plan to rollback
leftist governments unfavorable to U.S. capitalist
infiltration. Neo-conservatives viewed Nicaragua as
a crucial test to U.S. hegemony in the wake of Vietnam.
Reagan cited forgetfulness when defending his role
in the five years of illegal activities that led up
to the congressional hearings into the Iran-Contra
Affair in the summer of ’87. But he was guilty.
And so was Vice President George H.W. Bush…even
though he couldn’t use the same flimsy excuse
of selective memory loss as Reagan. He planned to
run for president himself, after all — and on
Reagan’s coattails, no less. And he succeeded…well,
sort of. He managed to win one term and keep the ball
rolling a little while longer for the GOP.
And look where we are now.
Bush’s son, George W., who was appointed president
in late 2000, fancies himself the Second Coming of
Reagan, if not of Jesus Christ Himself.
And who can we thank for it? Well…it was Reagan,
after all, who implemented and executed the absurdly
dangerous policy of playing Iran against Iraq —
and vice versa — while the two nations were
already fighting a war against each other. But then,
how could he tell who would win? Best to hedge all
bets when the going gets unpredictable.
Hedging came naturally to Reagan; it was his dirty,
humble trademark. He had been a Democrat until 1960,
when he finally saw the light, as it were. Even so,
being a Democrat never stopped him from participating
in the Hollywood witch-hunts of the 1950s. In common
terms, he would be called a liar…or at the very
least dishonest. Some might even use the term “waffler.”
But to the issue again — Iran, Iraq, and Reagan’s
insidious double-dealings with them both: From ’83
until late ’86, when the NSC and CIA were re-circulating
arms from Israel to Iran, the United States was also
selling military hardware — including chemical
weapons — to Saddam Hussein. Which helped Iraq
out quite well in its war with Iran, as one might
imagine.
And all this amid Reagan’s vociferous assertion
that “America will never make concessions to
terrorists.” His solution? He removed Iraq from
the list of “states sponsoring terrorism,”
in February of 1982, against the stringent objections
of Congress. Congress, it seems, knew the score. But
then, it was dealing with the very same man who would
come to say, “A tree is a tree. How many do
you have to look at?”
“He stood tall,” exclaimed Speaker of
the House Dennis Hastert, the Thursday after Reagan’s
death. Hastert, like other leading Republicans, has
shown no hesitation in using Dutch’s death as
a shameless reaffirmation of the GOP’s current
treacherous agenda.
Clearly, our Supreme Court-appointed president displays
the same standing-tall-as-a-tree John Wayne machismo
that Dutch did. Still, as the poet Gary Snyder once
observed: “Comparisons are odious.” And
he was right. Drawing parallels between Reagan and
Dubya only reinforces the horrid truth that the political
climate in America has — in the span of just
three short years — reverted all the way back
to 1981 or so, when a spry, 70-year-old President
Reagan declared his own War on Terrorism, and the
economy was one delicate flush away from being lost
forever.
On that note, this seems like a fine opportunity
to bring up the topic of the “Reagan Revolution,”
and I must now go on the record — after decades
of embracing the belief that the people in the Reagan
administration were nothing but a passel of tired,
reactionary hacks — and admit that there did
in fact occur a revolution under Reagan.
But it was a revolution confined to the GOP —
a tactical re-imaging, as it were, of the entire party
after the indelible disgrace Nixon had branded it
with a half decade before. It was, unarguably, a willful
uprising of wealthy white zealots against the American
middle class, and anything that smacked of the Truth.
The Reagan Revolution lay in the fact that those who
would undermine both institutions (the middle class
and the Truth) had learned enough from the mistakes
of the past to allow them to suppress any and all
incriminating evidence about their crimes from the
American people in the present — a skill that
Nixon and his henchmen had proven too inept, or perhaps
too cavalier, to perfect.
Already there is talk of placing Reagan’s image
on the ten-dollar bill…or perhaps the dime,
if the Republicans can manage it without raising the
intense ire of Democrats who would consider supplanting
FDR’s likeness with that of Reagan sacrilegious
— which is doubtful. It is an election year,
after all — expect the Bush people to milk Reagan’s
death for all the mileage they can get out of it…just
like they did with Sept. 11.
But Reagan’s timing, in this regard, could
have been worse. At least he didn’t die in,
say, October — when what is shaping up as the
most important and potentially divisive election since
1968 will be in hyper-swing.
It’s hard to deny that Ronald Reagan has a
legacy, but that legacy is much simpler than most
people know…or will ever admit. For if it is
true, as one great writer has contended, that Richard
Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream, then
Reagan broke its back. Now, more than fifteen years
after Reagan left office, the American Dream is clearly
down for the count.
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