COMMENTS: Reagan's Contempt for History

...To obliterate: that is, to rub out the letters of a name, a thing, an event...

...But in March and April, 1985, Ronald Reagan asked himself a question, Whom shall I honor...

...In yearly financial earnings— the president's calculus of distinction...

...Who can believe this...

...Perhaps so...

...Two years from now, they are intended to be 25,000: sufficient to bring chaos to the farthest reaches of the countryside, and to install a regime answerable to American interests...

...State Department, he can no longer carry conviction with Nicaraguan democrats who wish to retain their independence from the U.S...

...Once again, when Kostmayer alluded to the proportion of the Contra leadership and field commanders known to 266 have come from the ranks of the Somocistas, and regretted he could not read out the classified figure, Mrs...

...268...

...Something unexpected came out of the exchange, nevertheless...

...The sense of insult does not come from their disagreement with the policies in question, for often they have no opinion about the policies...

...Think what it would mean to become a rebel in Nicaragua today...

...But in the meantime, the president had offered a remarkable apology...

...They certainly include many hungry people, for whom an American rifle, three American meals a day, and the promise of American prosperity look a great deal better than the filth and strife to which we have condemned their country...

...What he understands vividly are the ceremonial aspects of public life...

...265 For him, there were no memories to reawaken, except in connection with the strength or weakness of the "image" he would "project" on a foreign tour...

...Her answer...

...These soldiers, the president was saying, were the moral equivalent of all soldiers, and so an adequate symbol for all victims of the war...

...This means: by a reversal of the present strategy, which strengthens those in Nicaragua who favor one-party dictatorship, military control, and state surveillance in any case, but whom our policy enables to argue for all of these things as an unfortunate necessity of war...

...But he took a gamble and, as it has turned out, a deeply misguided one, when he abstained from his country's election at the prompting of our war-diplomats...

...How can this be done...

...One can hardly lament the fate of a revolution, on the ground that it failed to keep its promises, if one first opposed the revolution itself, on the ground that its promises were not worth keeping...

...Mediating between memory and fact, the rest of us are conscious of a third term: history...

...a weak man, in an unhappy time, whom one would like to have seen strong...

...By comparison, the momentous significance of occupying high office in a democracy has remained to him an abstraction...

...The president and his staff are wagering their second term and, with it, something of our country's fate, on the premise that their contempt for fact and memory will not be thrown back at them in disgust, by a people whose common history begins before 1980...

...A lot of today's fighters for freedom were yesterday's hirelings of tyranny...

...Any publicized event may call forth, therefore, the imaginary details of a provisional mythology, with instant data suited to the occasion...

...They speak of feeling insulted...

...Nor had he read any report from Nicaragua, when he decided that a majority of its people think the present government "worse than Somoza's...

...Its policy, the only policy it has ever held in earnest, is aimed at negotiating the surrender of the Nicaraguan government by any means necessary...

...He would lay a wreath in Bitburg Cemetery, where 49 SS men were buried, but he would not visit Dachau...

...You know, he is a cheerful politician...

...By following the diplomatic course proper to to a nation that believes in freedom...

...He was ambivalent in Nicaragua, when he needed to be forthright...

...so that it no longer matters what gravestone one lays a wreath beside, all the gravestones everywhere having been effaced...

...Instead of joy or grief, he only passes from pleasure to vexation...

...But again, in Ronald Reagan's mind, history is infinitely malleable, like a soft substance that can be shaped to fit the political need of the moment...

...I am not saying opposed, but there was a coolness...

...and eventually a concentrationcamp opportunity was found...

...The connection between past and present, however, held no interest to the president when he talked of continuing the wreck of Nicaragua until its government "cries uncle" (a phrase that is as low as the dirt...

...He does not like to grovel in a grisly scene like Dachau...

...She was a steady friend to the Contadora process...

...And yet, President Reagan's feelings about public service have always been equivocal...

...But to have come so far, the volunteer must believe that in Latin America the need to fight against Soviet influence outweighs all other considerations— moral and historical considerations, in the light of which the CIA may appear a far from desirable accomplice...

...What fault, then, if the demands of a new moment pull our president in a new direction...

...Kirkpatrick admitted that, though the classified figures were available to her, she had never looked to see how many of the rebels were former Somocistas...

...why, in meeting the objections of his opponents, he falls back petulantly on a questioning of motives...

...Who would you be...

...It seems right to deplore his choice of ultimate opposition and exile, since, while he worked in Nicaragua, he spoke for a democratic cause...

...It began with Michael Deaver's trip to Germany, in search of "photo opportunities" for the president's visit...

...The real heroes of the struggle, if they are allowed to survive, will be those who hold out for some such independence...

...As it is, he has attached himself to a 267 different history...

...His new patrons look back fondly on Somoza as a good friend who never did much harm to anyone they know...

...The rest of us, whether we like it or not, are the captives of certain memories...

...By agreeing to become the noncombatant spokesman for the rebels, Arturo Cruz has turned into something more than a Contra commandant, and something less than a Nicaraguan citizen...

...why, as he moves from topic to topic or from day to day, he says the most incompatible things, and then is surprised to find them compared with each other...

...and the word is exactly right...

...At the same time you are consenting to act in conspiracy with a foreign power—a power famous in your region chiefly for economic exploitation and the rigging of military coups Finally, you act at the instruction of a government led by Ronald Reagan, the apologist for dictatorship...

...Cruz wishes to be counted among them...

...Rather they see that the president and his court are trying to obliterate history...

...But it has taken us this long to learn what we should have known from the start: that the way a man remembers has something to do with the respect he accords to facts...

...Deaver used his ingenuity along the way to purchase BMW automobiles for himself, his friends and connections, with a discount reserved for diplomats...

...A VISITOR TO AMERICA said: "Reagan doesn't have the emotional range I expected...

...He was reluctant to go...

...Granted one may follow this experiment the whole length, and emerge with a picture of a Contra volunteer who finds the position of his commanders at once plausible and sympathetic...

...We don't want to reawaken old memories...

...and what it suggests is that President Reagan's short way with history is catching on...

...He was, of course, himself a rigid enthusiast for Somoza in 1978, and every statement he or his advisers now make is predicated on a denial of the memory of that fact...

...policy) performed the deed of your lifetime (an achievement so cherished that nobody claims not to have been part of it), by throwing out Somoza...

...For you are not only taking up arms against a government that (though committing many wrongs, some of them inseparable from U.S...

...as well as from the U.S.S.R...

...On inspection, this too could be seen as a number, a piece of disguised arithmetic...

...With this analogy it became clear (though reporters understandably found it hard to put into words) that something new to our nation's politics had taken place...

...Three years ago (it is already hard to remember), the Contras were 500 men, who existed solely to interdict the flow of arms to El Salvador...

...Late in March, the president's German itinerary was announced...

...A general protest followed, but it was kept urgent by two groups particularly—war veterans and Jews: people with memories...

...In the past several weeks, senators and representatives in the Congress, together with many citizens, have begun to use a special word about these equivalencies...

...Expert at the manipulation of opinion, they have taken courage from the election results, and given up all pretense...

...compliant in America, when he needed to be firm...

...Kirkpatrick dared to join him in criticizing the restrictions on public knowledge: nobody, she said, had worked harder than she herself to have just such materials declassified...

...A little before, in a speech on Nicaragua, the improvisation had been a name: the Contra rebels were "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers...

...Before pursuing this train of thought further, however, democrats ought to try an experiment...

...Till now, American democracy had found one of its vindications in the idea that service to the republic could form the highest aspiration of a citizen...

...It is sometimes said, by halfhearted defenders of the present strategy, that the Contras include many good people...

...Our contest in the next few years will be against those who believe that American democracy rests on a gradual perfecting of masterful performances that enthrall and obliterate...

...This was well observed, and it explains a puzzle about his conduct...

...As a collaborator with the U.S...

...They seem merely the accidental hostages of our unhappy memories—unlooked-for deposits, from the episodic recitals he is called on to perform...

...By most foreign observers, these elections were judged to stand up favorably beside the American-supervised elections in El Salvador, and some cogent reasons for supporting the judgment were advanced by Abraham Brumberg in the last Dissent...

...In an April 18 New York Times article by Bernard Weinraub, an official told of another reason for the choice: "The president was not hot to go to the camp...

...In the Bitburg apology, the improvisation was a number: the average age of the soldiers buried there, he decided, was eighteen...

...Behind such a judgment lies an unusual conception of public virtue...

...By people in his position the president seemed to mean: officials who have the honor of serving the American people...

...The people to whom this honor was given, it followed, would be people above any suspicion of chicanery...

...The soldiers in Bitburg, he said—among them, men of the Second Panzer Division, which carried out the Oradour massacre—were victims of the Nazis, just as surely as the Jews who perished in the Holocaust...

...The president's aides soon announced that his schedule was under reconsideration...

...In recent congressional hearings on Nicaragua, Jeane Kirkpatrick was asked by Congressman Kostmayer why she had pressed for military action instead of assisting the Contadora negotiations...

...Doubtless also, there are some idealists among them...

...This piece of duplicity is at the very heart of the Reagan administration's reasoning about Nicaragua...

...This swindle made the news, and President Reagan said of it genially: "People in his position have always done things like that...

...And again, who can believe this...

...He was free to talk in this style because he is a man to whom the past is a dead letter...

...Here was a president at the height of his power and in the maturity of life, speaking of the formative event of his generation, in a language that showed he had never learned the first thing about the history of which he was a part...

...It is for this reason that most people feel reluctant to describe his false sayings as lies...

...Why, for example, he is untouchable by the suffering that his policies impose...

...But his henchmen are made of different stuff...

...By what motives, ambitions, resentments would you have been guided into that path...

...It would make him less cheerful...

...How a step down...

...Indeed, a capacity for lying would be an unnecessary addition to his equipment...

...The current instrument of policy is the FDN ultimatum, which demands, as a condition for opening discussions, the nullification of the Nicaraguan elections...

...This concession was too embarrassing to have been a deliberate falsehood...

...And his answers showed that Bitburg and Managua were closer to each other than anyone had supposed...

...As for the Contras, whom we have created as an active force, the best we can do for their future is to create no more of them...

...He is fond of boasting that his Administration recruits men so successful that "it is a step down for them to serve in government...

...WHAT MANY AMERICANS INSTINCTIVELY FEEL about Nicaragua is that the government includes both more repressive and less repressive elements, and what we want to do somehow is to encourage the latter...

...it had no more reliable well-wisher than herself...

...Thus the Nicaraguan ambassador spoke with accuracy and restraint when he nicknamed the ultimatum: Drop-dead-orwe'llkill-you...

...It is easy enough to confront these founding fathers—paternal adepts of rape and murder, loyalists to the old brutality of privilege—with a single staring fact about themselves...

...and, in turn, the renaming of the German soldiers as "victims" was itself a moral judgment...

...They now disregard the truth quite openly...

...In the name of the memories we are being asked to forget, let us remind them again and again that the truth was otherwise...

...Now they are 15,000, who burn crops, blow up bridges and tear up roads, commit acts of violence and casual plunder that stagger the imagination of an American...

...It is a lesson our pure ideologues cannot master, that nothing is ever the moral equivalent of anything else...