Remembering Reagan

by Cliopatria

Now that the day of mourning has concluded, I suspect that the tributes to Reagan will die down. It seems to me that in many ways, both Reagan's critics and supporters overstate their case. It's tough to maintain that Reagan won the Cold War by forcing the Soviets to overspend when he claimed at the time that the US needed defense increases because it seemed as if the Soviets were about to win the Cold War. And while Reagan might have ushered in a new conservative age, in many ways he was more the symptom than the cause of the fracturing of the New Deal liberal coalition.

I found the most interesting aspect of the Reagan tribute week to be the response of Democrats, discussed in this intelligently written article by Michael Crowley in The New Republic. Crowley quotes prominent liberals--Ted Kennedy, Tom Daschle, John Lewis, Nancy Pelosi--in glowing tributes not only to Reagan as a man but to his leadership qualities and even, in some cases, to his policies as President. It's difficult to imagine that any of these figures truly believe what they're saying.

"So what would a Democratic statement that is both honest and compassionate look like," Crowley asks.

Try the one released by California Senator Dianne Feinstein:"I wish to extend my deepest sympathies to Nancy Reagan and the entire Reagan family," Feinstein said simply."There probably has been no American who has more fully lived the American dream, from actor to governor to president. He was a California legend." That Ronald Reagan's life was a great American story, and that his family deserves sympathy, is something everyone can agree on. Democrats who considered the Reagan years an affront to their most fundamental values shouldn't have strained to say anything more.

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Richard Henry Morgan - 6/16/2004

It's a simple fact that Soviet military, post-Vietnam, took a significant increase as a proportion of GNP. Now why is that? It was coupled with Soviet cries for detente, along with funding of CND, even as the Soviets produced and deployed intermediate range missiles.

The answer seems obvious. The Soviets wanted to win, through a military buildup, concessions, or at least, non-interference with its ambitions -- witness Afghanistan.

Ascribing causation is a tricky business. Certainly the economic strain of trying to respond to the US buildup of the late Carter years and the Reagan years was a factor. Similarly, Gorbachev hustled things along, putting into play forces he couldn't control.

Which brings me to Schlesinger. Here's his take (Newsweek, June 14, 2004, p.44):

"Reagan's admirers contend that his costly rearmament program caused the Soviet collapse. Maybe so; but surely the thing that did in the Russians was that time had proved communism an economic, political and moral disaster -- which is what the policy of peaceful containment had predicted 50 years before."

What is one to make of this conceptual jumble? It is conceded (a Jesuitical concession?) that Reagan's rearmament may have caused the Soviet collapse. Then, in the next breath, communism is done in by its internal failures as predicted by the architects of peaceful containment. Whence that qualifier "peaceful"? What documents support that notion? What documents support the notion that a "peaceful" containment predicted the downfall of the Soviet Union? And how exactly is it that (as is implied), a policy of peaceful containment that didn't contain (witness the expansion of communist regimes in the 50's, 60's, and 70's), managed to effect a collapse when it failed in its goals?

Reagan was the first president to adopt rollback as a policy, and if he unfairly receives a lion's share of the credit for the Soviet collapse, the effort to rewrite history to make the collapse the result of peaceful containment, is an exercise worthy of Orwell -- or Schlesinger.