Ronald Reagan by Jacob Weisberg, a Book Report
Ronald Reagan by Jacob Weisberg
A Book Report by Bobby Everett Smith
Spoiler Alert
February 28, 2018
Setting
Washington, D.C. and around the world, 1980 to 2004
Characters
Ronald Regan, Governor of California, and President of the United States, 1981 to 1989
Nancy Davis Reagan, President’s wife and first lady
Jane Wyman, Reagan’s first wife; movie actress
Ronald Reagan, Jr., Reagan’s youngest son to Nancy as mother.
Gerald Ford, President of the United States after succeeding power from Richard Nixon
John Hinckley, shot Reagan and James Brady in Washington, D.C.; sentenced to mental institution
Alexander Haig, Secretary of State under Reagan and Chief of Staff under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford
Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of USSR when it collapsed in 1991. Negotiated with Reagan to “tear down that wall” in East Germany and Berlin
Oliver North, Lcol. In U S Marine Corps, worked on Iran-Contra affair for Reagan
George H. W. Bush, Vice President under Reagan and succeeded him as President of the United States
Executive Summary
Ronald Reagan was a patriotic American who had a talent for communicating, maybe better than anyone in history, to the American people his beliefs about the role of government, the nuclear arms contest with the Communists and the leader most clearly responsible for the demise of the USSR. Reagan believed in States Rights and a balanced federal budget although as president, he never successfully achieved a budget surplus.
Reagan’s goal over the Communists was hard to understand while he was in office. He wanted victory over the Soviets and peace, resulting in years of unresolved tensions. He applied military, economic, and moral pressure on Soviet leaders trying to bend them to his will. His major theme was to make the world a safer place and even then, his facts were often wrong. He was better at negotiating with the Soviets than almost all his contemporaries.
Reagan announced to the world in 1994 that he had Alzheimer’s Disease, but many people thought that the ailment had afflicted him while he was still in office. His memory was often weak and he slept through important meetings.
Reagan’s faith in the free market went too far. Deregulation and pro-business policies unleashed entrepreneurial opportunities, but also provided opportunities for the unscrupulous to take advantage. The financial crisis of 2008 was thought to be a result of risk-taking encouraged by an unregulated economy under Reagan.
Overall, Reagan led the Western World to victory in the Cold War against Communism. Reagan left office believing that the United States was a force for good in the world. This is the best part of the Reagan legacy.
The Story
In 1987 many reporters covering the president, Ronald Reagan, thought of him as a dullard, a disengaged president with a simplistic view of the world and a superficial understanding of policy. A few months later, Reagan delivered a speech that would shape him as the second-best president of the twentieth century following Franklin D. Roosevelt. After his demand to Mikal Gorbachev delivered in Berlin, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall,” Reagan’s reputation has grown and grown.
While Roosevelt tried to solve the nation’s problems by decisive federal action, Reagan tried to solve them by reducing government.
Reagan’s Early Years
Forced from place to place during his childhood because of his father’s alcoholism, Reagan willed himself to become a self-reliant, autonomous person. Ronald Reagan was born February 6, 1911 in the Midwest in a town named Tampico, Illinois. Following his mother’s lead, he developed an optimistic imagination and tried to live his life the way he wanted it to be, not so much as the way it was.
Reagan was trained in the Disciples of Christ Church. Now call the Christian Church, his religion emphasized education and reason with a strong moral code. Reagan grew up as an avid reader and thought of himself as a firm believer in the triumph of good over evil.
In high school, Reagan took to acting and became the president of the drama club. Acting, he said, helped him cope with his feelings of insecurity. He played football during high school but mostly sat on the bench. He became a fervent supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Reagan was also proud of his parents’ rejection of racism. His father would not let him see The Birth of a Nation which dealt with the KKK and their denigration of the colored folks. Dutch, as he came to be called, graduated from Eureka College in 1932 with a degree in Economics and Sociology.
After he graduated from college, Reagan became a sports announcer in Des Moines, Iowa. He had a warm and soothing voice and a good imagination. He broadcast baseball games by reading a telegraphed message from the game to his studio. Once, the wire went down and he made up the entire game for 20 minutes while the wire was being repaired.
Reagan, The Movie Star
Reagan wanted to be in the movies and he traveled to Hollywood where he was hired by Warner Brothers who kept him busy in mostly B class movies for the next 15 years, making 41 films during that period starting in 1937.
He married Jane Wyman in 1940. Their daughter, Maureen, was born the following year. During this period, he described himself as a “liberal” and included “politics” as one of his major interests. In 1942, he was drafted and assigned to the Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Force. He acted in and narrated films used for training, public relations, and recruiting. He never went overseas during the war and he was discharged in 1945.
Political Career Starts in 1946
Reagan’s political career started in 1946 when he joined other actors and movie professionals in the opposition to Communism. At this time, he began cooperating with federal agents to identify Communists in the movie profession.
By 1952 after several years of fighting Communists, Reagan no longer referred to himself as a liberal as he joined the Democrats for Eisenhower organization.
After Reagan and Jane Wyman agreed to a divorce in 1947, he met Nancy Davis in 1949. She was a 28-year-old actress, recently signed by MGM. They were married in March 1952. Their daughter, Patti, was born seven months later followed by Ron Jr. who was born in 1958.
Reagan’s marriage to Nancy became one of the most intense relationships of his life.
Reagan’s Road Trips for GE
Reagan started working for GE in 1954 as a liberal anticommunist. He finished with GE in 1962 so far to the right that the company felt that it had to drop him. Reagan described his time with GE as a postgraduate course in political science.
Ultimately Reagan began a road tour for GE speaking to employees around the country. He would sometimes make as many as 14 speeches per day. This was to become a dry run at his political career. He learned out to interact with the audience adding to his knowledge of how to perform in front of a microphone and camera.
Some of Reagan’s speeches, delivered while he was on the road, matched the philosophy of GE, denouncing the federal government as inefficient, irrational, and meddlesome. “There is something inherent in government which makes it continue to grow,” he would say. Taxation and regulation are the villains. The expansion of federal power is wasteful and a threat to individual liberty, he would add.
Reagan Switches to Republican Party
In 1962, Reagan switched parties, from Democrat to Republican. “Liberals are inadvertently bringing socialism to America,” he said.
Reagan’s mother died in 1962, age 79, from Alzheimer’s. Reagan had more confidence in his mother than any other person except for Nancy. He never developed a close relationship with his own children, keeping them at a distance, never really accepting them as someone close to him. He provided them with good cheer and good stories but never accepted them emotionally.
Reagan’s first in-depth venture into politics came when he was hired to deliver a speech, “A Time for Choosing” which he delivered for Barry Goldwater before a live audience, one week before the election in 1964. This speech was called by one writer as the most successful political speech since those delivered in 1896 by William Jennings Bryan at the Democratic Convention. Here is an excerpt from that speech:
(Wikipedia) “The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So, we have come to a time for choosing.”
“You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man’s age-old dream – the maximum of individual freedom consistent with law and order – or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.”[
The speech raised $1 million for Goldwater’s campaign, and is considered the event that launched Reagan’s political career”
Goldwater lost the election but the “A Time for Choosing” speech put Reagan in the running for the governor’s job in the State of California. Reagan won the election for governor in 1966.
During his second term as governor of California, Reagan continued his dominant theme, “America’s place as God’s chosen nation.”
“Governments might be failing,” he continually said, “but Americans are not.”
Using his talents as a persuasive and passionate speaker, Reagan addressed the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) in 1974. “The United States should raise a banner of no pale pastels, but instead of bold colors which makes it unmistakably clear where we stand.”
This speech made Reagan a hero to the nation’s conservatives. Reagan stated that he was not a member of the Washington establishment but a citizen representing “my fellow citizens” against the institution of government. Reagan was fast becoming the front runner for president of the United States.
Reagan’s Conservative Political Philosophy
As an alternative to turning welfare and healthcare responsibilities over to the federal government, Reagan declared that the United States could save $90 Billion per year by turning these types of expenditures to the States. Gerald Ford maintained that this type of plan would drive the States into bankruptcy.
In Foreign Policy, Reagan maintained that the United States was falling behind the Soviet Union in military capabilities.
Despite Reagan’s growing popularity in America, Ford won the Republican nomination for president in 1976 but a Washington outsider, Jimmy Carter, defeated Ford in that election, making Reagan the leading contender for Republican nominee in 1980.
Reaganomics
As the 1980 election came about, Jimmy Carter was facing troubles with Iran, who had taken members of the U. S. embassy hostage. Carter was also challenged by the continuing strength of the Soviet Union, domestic inflation, and a lack of confidence of the American electorate. Carter spoke about a “crisis of confidence” that strikes at the heart and soul of our national will.
Reagan countered with “America’s best days are still ahead. I see no national malaise and see nothing wrong with the American people.”
Reagan continued his persuasive but simplistic message, “are you better off now than you were four years ago,” he asked in one of the presidential debates against Carter.
Reagan won the election to President of the United States” in a landslide. He stated his intention to reduce the size of the federal government and return power to the States. He intended, he said, to reduce the level of unemployment, inflation, and the size of the national debt. In addition, he asked Congress for an increase in military spending, a reduction in government regulations, and a tax cut.
Reagan developed the concept of “trickle down economics,” based on the studies of Arthur Laffer, who maintained that tax cuts for the rich would filter down in the economy creating enough growth of GDP to pay for the tax cut. Supply-side economics, it was called.
Reagan’s goal was to shrink the size of the federal government to where it was before the 1960’s. Even so, Reagan took off the table cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and his 1982 budget called for increases in federal spending by 11.2 per cent.
On March 30, 1982, Reagan was shot just outside a Washington hotel by John Hinkley, a college student, who was trying to impress the actress, Jodie Foster, by shooting Reagan. The gunshot wounds were worse than doctors originally thought and when Reagan recovered from the bullet wounds, he developed pneumonia and high fever, all of which was kept from the press. Reagan almost died but eventually pulled through leaving him with some residual ailments which affected his general health and memory for the rest of his life.
Reagan’s Efforts to Reduce the Size of Government
Back at the White House, Reagan’s popularity had grown to a 67% approval rating. At the end of June, Congress passed Reagan’s Tax Bill with a Senate vote of 89 to 11. The bill included a $39 Billion cut in domestic spending which pushed 400,000 people off the welfare rolls and reduced benefits to another 290,000. A million people lost food stamps.
The national deficit began to worsen. Reagan attempted to increase revenue with increased taxes to gasoline, phone service, liquor, and tobacco. By January 1983, Reagan’s approval rating had dropped to 35%. Unemployment jumped to 10.8% and in 1983, the deficit passed through $2.08 trillion for the first time,–5.9% of Gross Domestic Product. Even with these numbers, Reagan believed that he was making the federal government smaller and he was given credit for changing the nation’s attitude about the role of the federal government, lowering the expectation of what it could accomplish.
In foreign policy, Reagan wanted to see the Soviets disarm by forcing them to grow their armaments to the point where they could not afford to be armed any longer. “Then the United States can also disarm,” he told members of his cabinet.
Reagan Wins the Cold War with USSR
When Reagan woke from surgery after being shot, he developed the thought that God had saved him for preventing nuclear war. He spent the rest of his time as president pursuing that goal. He kept looking for a way to talk to the Russians with that goal as number one on the agenda. He tried to form a bond with the four Russian leaders, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Cherenkov, and Mikhail Gorbachev over a period of 28 months. “The problem is,” Reagan joked, “they keep dying on me.”
Edward Teller, founder of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, convinced Reagan that the best offense against Russia was a good defense. He proposed the development of a space-based defense, using X-ray lasers. Reagan thought it was a great idea and he presented the idea to the American public. Star Wars, it was called. Robert McFarlane, Reagan’s National Security Adviser, took the concept a step further and suggested a space-based missile defense.
The President assured the Soviet Union that the United States had no offensive assaults on the Soviets in mind and, in fact, the President wanted to abolish all nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. The Soviets were not convinced and took his Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI, as a signal that we were preparing a unilateral attack on the Communists.
The U.S. economy responded to the tax cuts and deficit spending with growth of GDP at 7.3% in 1984. Reagan declared that he was running for a second term and he won the election in 1966 by a large majority, 66% of the popular vote. Even so, some people in government thought that Reagan was heading downhill mentally and should not have run for a second term.
Democrats were no longer predominantly the working-class white people. The party was now primarily identified with African-American voters. “America is changing back to what she used to be” became the slogan for the Republican party led by Ronald Reagan.
On immigration, Reagan signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act which gave legal status to three million undocumented residents and allowed national movements across the border by farm laborers. The bill also made it a crime for employers to knowingly hire undocumented workers
Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader in 1985. Reagan’s hope for nuclear peace rose again. Reagan invited Gorbachev to the White House to try to persuade him that the U.S. meant no harm to Russia and that together the two leaders could save the world from annihilation. Gorbachev said that he wanted the same thing.
In November 1985, Gorbachev sent Reagan a letter proposing a 50% reduction in ICBM’s contingent on a complete ban on space weapons. Apparently, the Soviets had over-estimated the progress the U.S. had with the Star Wars defense. In later talks, Gorbachev agreed to give up all nuclear weapons if the U.S. would agree to eliminate the space-defense weapons. Reagan had no intention of giving up his SDI defense despite serious lobbying from members of his cabinet.
In 1985 and 1986, Reagan knew that he was trading arms for hostages in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair.
On October 13, 1986, Reagan went on TV to deny that the U.S. had traded weapons to Iran in exchange for hostages or that we were making deals with terrorists. A week later at a press conference, he took back the denial about missiles but still insisted that we had not traded arms for hostages. Reagan took the position that it was time to move on.
In the spring of 1987, Reagan was invited to Berlin to speak on Soviet/U.S. reform. In this speech, Reagan spoke to Gorbachev directly, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall,” referring to the wall that the Soviets had built to separate East from West Germany and the same in Berlin.
In May 1988, Reagan attended his final summit meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow. Reagan asked the Soviet leader to grant religious freedom as a right and repeated his request for the Soviets to tear down the Berlin and East German wall.
At the end of 1988, Gorbachev returned to the United States to deliver a speech at the United Nations. There, Gorbachev announced a 500,000 reduction in the Soviet Army and that the Soviets would no longer use force to control countries in Eastern Europe. The Cold War was over, and the USSR would soon dissolve. The wall in Germany came down and nations of Eastern Europe overthrew their dictatorial leaders, declaring their independence from the USSR. At the end of 1991, the USSR was officially dissolved.
In November 1994, Reagan disclosed to the nation that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. Ronald Reagan died on June 4, 2004 at his ranch in California. He was 93 years old.
Rating
Four stars out of five. Ronald Reagan has credit for being at least the second-best president (behind FDR) of the 20th Century but he is accused by some of being under the influence of Alzheimer’s Disease throughout some if not much of his second term of office. Even so several incredibly important events took place during his presidency like the demise of the Soviet Union. I highly recommend reading this thought-provoking book.
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