Reagan’s gone, but the lies live on — if we let them
Sent June 11, 2004

It’s time to speak ill of the dead. Ronald Reagan is gone, but the Big Lies live on. The nation and the media may have a knee-jerk desire to say nice things about the recently departed, but preserving historical accuracy allows incivility. In this case, history begs for it, so I come not to praise Caesar but to bury him.

Whether it’s ingrained good manners, guilt at the prospect of upsetting the grieving widow, or just chickening out of speaking truth when the deceased’s supporters are plentiful and loud, there’s been a wave of willful self-delusion and myopia about Reagan that’s affected most of the news media and the political world since his death. There are times when frankness is necessary, however, and this is one.

That the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many other newspapers so softballed their obituaries and editorials raises eyebrows, but that's not as shocking as the fact that some of those obits, editorials, and columns repeat the Big Lies that this same press rightfully challenged when they were first spun. It’s as if the news media have developed collective amnesia about Reagan — at the exact moment that Republican spinmeisters are doing their damndest to make sure we swallow those Big Lies, so that history will be biased accordingly and so that we are more favorably disposed to the sad case in the White House who is currently up for reelection. We’ve even forgotten that political hacks and flak-catchers earned the sobriquet ‘spinmeisters’ during the Reagan Administration, because that’s when they perfected the practice of ‘spinning’ bad news into an art. It means they got good at lying, which seems to be a required trait in the Beltway.

Reagan wasn’t the first politician on earth to use the Big Lie and won’t be the last, but his administration did use it particularly well. There are two requirements to using the Big Lie effectively: repetition (i.e., overwhelm the truth by making sure the lie is repeated far more often than the truth is) and seeming sincerity. Reagan’s ability to persuade clearly was aided by his actor’s training, but as David Broder noted in the Washington Post, it helped Reagan greatly that he actually believed some of the lies he told. Like the ones about Iran-Contra, for example. “The reason that Reagan was persuasive, I came to understand, was that he had first persuaded himself of the truth of his utterances,” Broder writes. “Much later, when someone hung the title ‘The Great Communicator’ on Reagan, I thought to myself, It should be ‘The Great Persuader.’” The ability to persuade, of course, doesn’t mean that what you’re saying is actually true. In Reagan’s case, it often wasn’t. Anybody remember his administration’s notion of ketchup as a vegetable, or the idea that trees cause pollution?

The effusive tributes to Reagan are surprising to those of us who know just how controversial Reagan and his decisions were and still remain. What is more disturbing is that those who covered Reagan still unthinkingly let the propoganda about Reagan stand instead of debunking it. Even David Broder, who knows better, somehow can’t stop himself from repeating yet another Big Lie about Reagan, in this case the myth that Reagan was somehow responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall.

That’s a lie that needs to be exposed and discounted right now. No, David, it didn’t happen because Reagan so believed that it should, nor because he demanded that Mr. Gorbachev “tear down that wall” – that was just gratuitous grandstanding by Reagan that made for good but highly misleading video. And just because Margaret Thatcher echoed the lie doesn't make it true (she had her own delusions to support and had been friends with Ronnie, so it was in her self-interest to back the Reagan myth). The Berlin Wall really came down because the Germans, and most particularly the East Germans, decided to take it down – and Gorbachev didn’t stop them. Gorbachev's demurring to interfere with the Germans was the key, not Reagan's bluster.

And here we come to perhaps one of the most persistent and egregious of the Big Lies told about Ronald Reagan: that he is somehow also responsible for or contributed to the end of the Cold War. Bull - the one and only person who is responsible for the end of the Cold War, the one person without which it never would have happened, is Mikhail Gorbachev. Without Gorbachev, it wouldn’t have mattered what the sitting American president might have wanted. Nothing would have happened without the consent of the Soviet president, however, so it did matter who that person was. It also mattered that the internal damage to the Soviet Union was overwhelming and had already been largely accomplished long before Reagan became the U.S. president. To insist otherwise is to stubbornly ignore 70 years of Soviet history and economic evidence that has finally come to light, something Reagan’s supporters are quite willing to do.

It’s also nonsense to insist that Reagan’s costly defense build-up made any real difference to anything besides our own economy. It wasn’t just the arms race that cost the Soviet Union, nor was it the main factor damaging the Soviet economy. Communism was. We forget that Gorbachev is first and foremost an economist: for most of his career, he had a front-row view of exactly how the Soviet economy had been deteriorating for 70 years, how badly it had been mismanaged because Lenin and Stalin thought they could rewrite economic reality on a whim, and how badly the Soviet Union’s production capacity had been demolished over the decades. Remember that Russia had never been industrialized, and when the Communists brought industrialization, they completely screwed it up because they had no experience at it and collectivized it with party prejudices on top of everything else. Of course it didn't work. Beyond that, Gorbachev saw how severely the populace had been frightened and demoralized by the murders of 20 million that Stalin killed for political reasons and by the imprisonment and deaths of many others under subsequent premiers — and to what degree that and collectivization had killed Soviet productivity. Russia never knew how to create an industrial infrastructure that worked, and Communist policies merely made the situation much worse.

Gorbachev also understood the finer points of the rest of the Soviet budget. He knew, for example, how much subsidizing the Iron Curtain countries and Soviet satellites like Cuba cost the Russian nation, not to mention insurgencies in places like Afghanistan. As for the space race, national pride and a touch of old-style Russian paranoia would have kept those Soviet expenditures high even without the Cold War: Soviet Russia had a certain standing as a superpower that it wanted to maintain on the international stage, and that meant it couldn’t defer to the U.S. in the space race any more than it could routinely defer to the U.S. in the United Nations, not even if the space race bankrupted the Soviets (and together with the arms race and everything else wrong in the budget, it did).

Moreover, the Cold War wouldn’t have ended if Gorbachev hadn’t first prepared the way through several years of glasnost and perestroika, during which time reforms could be begun while the fallacies and failures of Communism could begin to be freely discussed and documented in public with the release of government memos and secret files. Without glasnost allowing freer flow of information, Gorbachev likely would have been deposed by either his own Politburo or the Soviet Army; even with glasnost, he had to walk a very fine line. And given that Gorbachev did want to end the Cold War, it didn’t matter who the U.S. president was — because any U.S. president who wasn’t completely out of his mind would have agreed.

So it wasn’t Reagan’s arms spending or our posturing that pushed Gorbachev into action; it was the fact that the economist understood precisely what Communism was costing his country and recognized that the Soviet Union could no longer afford Communism if it wanted to survive. Reagan’s contribution was marginal; what credit he deserves is for the fact that he cooperated, while Gorbachev took all the risks and did all the heavy lifting. Even if you wanted to insist that Reagan’s defense build-up prompted a similar response in Moscow and that was the final blow to Communism, should the last straw that broke the camel’s back get most of the credit for doing so, or should the entire haystack that preceded it get the honors? Come on, now — do the math.

While the Republican spin machine goes into overdrive and funerary tributes continue to spew pablum, we have to ask ourselves: why do we allow ourselves to swallow this pap when the facts tell us something quite different? Whatever respect we give to the office of the presidency doesn’t obligate us to automatically sanctify dead presidents; we must judge those individuals solely on their merits, yet we’re reluctant to do so. Part of the answer where Reagan is concerned is his having developed Alzheimer’s disease; it seems in bad taste to kick a guy when he’s down, as if his diagnosis could retroactively excuse all the misstatements and bad decisions made years earlier. Well, of course it can’t, and the moment one expresses the notion of such retroactive forgiveness out loud, one realizes how ridiculous it is.

Another reason we’re more than willing to overlook Reagan’s many political sins is that some of us liked the folksy, just-an-average-guy image of the late president (I didn’t buy it, but I’m clearly in the minority; I tend to believe facts, not images). We like that he was a cheerleader for the U.S. The problem is that U.S. presidents are asked to fill two roles, that of the largely ceremonial chief of state (i.e., chief cheerleader) and that of chief executive (the person who actually has to run the nation). Cheerful Reagan made a great chief of state, but as a CEO, he was bloody awful — and that’s a whole other discussion.

But Reagan wasn’t just an optimist, he was a Pollyanna — a pejorative term for someone who insists that salvation is at hand when, in fact, disaster that he or she refuses to see has long since arrived. A positive attitude or brave face in the wake of tragedy is one thing. Willful blindness 100 percent of the time is quite another, and Reagan made a happy habit of ignoring inconvenient truths. An anecdote retold by Broder illustrates just how casual an attitude Reagan had about truth. Charlie McDowell, Washington correspondent for the Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch, once bemoaned the fact that he’d inadvertently created a tall tale about seeing Reagan in a local Virginia drugstore during the filming of the movie Brother Rat, only to discover later that all Reagan’s scenes had been shot in Hollywood. When McDowell admitted this to Reagan, the former president told him not to worry about it: “You believed it because you wanted to believe it. There’s nothing wrong with that. I do it all the time.” And Reagan did it long before the Alzheimer’s kicked in, which probably happened a lot sooner than many people thought.

Now, ignoring inconvenient reality might work at times for a minor problem, but it doesn’t work in economics, as Mr. Gorbachev well knows. Ronald Reagan never conceded this. But we Americans love our cheerleaders (note Dr. Phil) and are willing to forgive them almost anything, including being removed from reality, as long as they genially keep us smiling and tell us what we want to hear (this is where Dr. Phil differs from Dr. Ronnie: the former uses his folksiness to make hard truths more palatable, whereas the latter used his to get elected, fib to Democrats and promote Republican mythology — at the nation's expense).

We elected Cheerleader Reagan in part because we couldn’t forgive Jimmy Carter for saying the nation was “in a malaise” when, in fact, it was — and Reagan painted us a much nicer, if false, picture. People might forgive you for lying to them (especially if it's a pleasant lie they want to hear), but they'll never forgive you for an unpleasant truth. We’d rather hear about how great we are. We ought to care more about how we’re going to get out of whatever hole we’ve dug ourselves into at the moment, but we’re only ready to hear that when things are really painful. Which means, by the way, that we ought to listen carefully this year to what political candidates, Kerry and Bush especially, have to say, given the painful economy that has hurt so many. We should remember, too, that Bush the incumbent is trying to get reelected by trading on Reagan’s well-spun image and repeating some Big Lies of his own.

Reagan’s lies should be buried with him — and if Shrub keeps lying to us, we should bury him, too.