The Real Reagan
Nossiter, Bernard D.
BOOKS The Real Reagan ON REAGAN: 1 ^ THE MAN AND HIS PRESIDENCY by Ronnie Dugger McGraw-Hill. 616 pp. $19.95. by Bernard D. Nossiter t is now evident that Ronald Reagan is not, as he is often...
...Reagan latched on to General Electric for $ 125,000 a year in 1954 dollars...
...Indeed, the handful of communists in the industry made it worthwhile to sound pink if not red...
...Jack Warner, told that Reagan was running for governor, said, "No...
...Steel and auto corporations get special help with barriers against competing imports and a significant highway program...
...In On Reagan: The Man and His Presidency, Ronnie Dugger, publisher of the splendidly irreverent The Texas Observer, has put us all in his debt by an encyclopedic recounting of where Reagan stood, dodged, twisted, and changed course...
...Reagan is pushing us toward a world in which either superpower may be tempted to begin a nuclear exchange or will feel compelled to respond to a blip on a screen that might mean an enemy missile is minutes away...
...But a Reagan call to chairman Ralph Cordiner straightened out that detail and TVA was dropped from Reagan's hit list...
...He and his fellow golfers regard welfare recipients as cheats...
...by Bernard D. Nossiter t is now evident that Ronald Reagan is not, as he is often described, an ideologue...
...Harry Truman's institutionalization of loyalty-security tests, and William Mc-Kinley's early imperialism all had little in common with the nation's professed beliefs...
...He has not been well served by editors who permitted him such phrases as "plucking from his quiver . . . conservative principles" or "clenching himself into the fist of public indignation...
...The central problem with Reagan, Dugger notes, is his threat to the uneasy nuclear peace...
...There is little doubt that the MX missile, with its promised accuracy against hardened silos, and the Pershing II, which can reach Soviet targets in ten or fewer minutes, add a new dimension to the defense posture...
...It is to Dugger's great credit that he has described all this and more in fine detail, providing a Reagan lexicon that will be a useful tool in the next election...
...But these infelicities are nothing compared to the rich Reagan rhetoric Dugger has unearthed from radio scripts, delivered in the mid-1970s, and elsewhere...
...They won the cream of his tax cut, $3.6 billion for the top 162,000 and $2.9 billion for the thirty-two million at the bottom...
...His new sponsor was famous for its aggressive anti-unionism and primitive politics...
...He vainly tried to halt the building of a Soviet pipeline and quickly repealed Jimmy Carter's ban on wheat sales to the Russians...
...The list of contradictions is almost endless...
...Moreover, as John Kenneth Galbraith has observed, Reagan has been a superb instructor in civics...
...consider scandalous any interference with their right to pollute, merge, and win tax favors, and see the Soviet Union as an evil place run by liars and cheats, a society with whom no decent man can parley...
...He does not subscribe to any systematic theory of ideas about the behavior and governance of human beings...
...The Glass-Steagall Act, a New Deal creation to prevent conflicts of interest, has also been abolished by fiat...
...the gargantuan graft (allowing for inflation, of course) of a Warren Harding or Ulysses S. Grant...
...There is nothing in Soviet history to suggest that it will not now embark on the same road, cost what it may to its nonvoting consumers...
...After all, the poor did not vote for him in 1980 nor are they likely to in 1984...
...These are first-strike weapons, designed not to deter but to win a nuclear war...
...He has chipped away at Social Security, taken Medicaid away from 660,000 children and food stamps from another million...
...Jimmy Stewart for governor...
...He does better, of course, by his newly acquired circle of rich friends...
...His latest book is "Britain: A Future That Works...
...tions, and political notions are the stuff of carpeted locker rooms in expensive country clubs...
...The goal is to destroy enough enemy missiles so that it can inflict only "acceptable damage" in return...
...He professes a belief in the efficacy of free markets and has simultaneously increased the reach of history's greatest monopson-ist, the Pentagon...
...Reagan, of course, has not always echoed his new-found locker-room pals...
...But then, as Dugger relates, Warner Brothers lost interest...
...Military contractors get $94 billion each year for weapons systems, some of which may not work...
...This is nearly three times the $35 billion Carter BOOKS r allotted in his late-hour fear of being labeled soft on defense...
...He could, and even might, destroy civilization with the nuclear first strike capability his team is now constructing...
...For GE, he delivered the series of spiels that catapulted him into public office...
...Rather than an ideologue, Reagan is just another opportunistic politician, one of a long series of mediocrities who have climbed to the top of the greasy pole...
...Richard Nixon's attempt at a coup in the style of a banana republic...
...Blacks, Hispanics, the poor, and other groups who usually do not bother going to the polls are liable to turn out in record numbers next November...
...Dugger writes little of Reagan's performance as governor, probably because it was so unremarkable...
...Reagan for best friend...
...GE had to remind Reagan that it sold $50 million of equipment to the TVA...
...Reagan tailored his pitch accordingly...
...He has alternately supported and opposed the civil rights legislation prohibiting segregation in public places...
...Reagan's current speeches, conversaBernard D. Nossiter is a New York writer and former correspondent for The Washington Post and The New York Times...
...In the fresh climate of Sacramento, Reagan vastly increased budgets for education, opened up huge tracts of public lands, and behaved like a man who seeks California votes...
...Reagan is unique only because his current set of reflexes or prejudices make him infinitely more dangerous to the peace of the world...
...In the White House, the Reagan record is only a bit less blurred, except in the critical area of social welfare and of war and peace...
...He is lucky in his hero, for seldom has so transparent an opportunist sat in the White House...
...He has cut or dropped 615,000 families from Aid to Families with Dependent Children and taken away school lunches from 3.2 million youngsters...
...He overacted once, damning the Tennessee Valley Authority as another example of socialism...
...I would quarrel, however, with Dug-ger's judgment that Reagan has uniquely violated the basic idealism of Americans...
...Troubled banks have been given a new Government safety net to protect them against their own cupidity...
...When he played secondary roles in Hollywood, the climate was quite different...
...Reagan, a man who knows how to get along, was in the forefront, president of the Screen Actors Guild, supporter of Helen Gahagan Douglas, one of the larger catches reeled in by the red-baiting Nixon...
...Now, the new financial giants take deposits, sell shares, run mutual funds, and underwrite new capital issues...
...At that time, it was fashionable to hail the New Deal, worry about peace-making v*CfOft juhasz postwar institutions, and generally sing a liberal song...
...Apart from the ten or so million who have been without jobs, catastrophe at home has been avoided and most of the old social programs, no matter how gutted, remain on the books...
...Reagan, a firm believer that wolves should guard sheep, found a man to head the Justice Department's Antitrust Division who has singlehandedly repealed much of the Sherman and Clayton Acts...
Vol. 48 • February 1984 • No. 2
