'Reagan Diaries' Reveal Man Beyond the Image

That brain dead moron caused the problems we have today.Just in time,auto industry,textiles,airlines,and the worthless dollar.He traded drugs for weapons,(contras),started plunge protection team,amnesty for the illegals,and was a paid for,by the japanese,treasonist bast--d.

A sober review of Reagan's presidency doesn't yield the seamlessly conservative record being peddled today. Federal government expanded on his watch. The conservative desire to outlaw abortion was never seriously pursued. Reagan broke with the hardliners in his administration and compromised with the Soviets on arms control. His assault on entitlements never materialized; instead he saved Social Security in 1983. And he repeatedly ignored the fundamental conservative dogma that taxes should never be raised.

All of this has been airbrushed from the new literature of Reagan. But as any balanced account must make clear, Reagan acceded to political compromises as all presidents do once in office--and on many occasions did so willingly. In fact, however often unintentionally, many of his actions as president wound up facilitating liberal objectives. What this clamor of adulation is seeking to deny is that beyond his conservative legacy, Ronald Reagan has bequeathed a liberal one.

Roosevelt Republican

Reagan arrived in Washington with a full head of steam, vowing, as he put it in the major economic speech of his 1980 campaign, "to move boldly, decisively, and quickly to control the runaway growth of federal spending." To conservatives, and many others, he seemed destined to fulfill campaign pledges to abolish entire government agencies, rein in the excesses of the welfare state, and end Americans' overreliance on government. Sensing the historical moment, Reagan echoed John F. Kennedy in famously declaring, "If not us, who? If not now, when?"

At the outset of his first term, Reagan's revolution appeared to have unstoppable momentum. His administration passed an historic tax cut based on dramatic cuts in marginal tax rates and began a massive defense buildup. To help compensate for the tax cut, his first budget called for slashing $41.4 billion from 83 federal programs, only the first round in a planned series of cuts. And Reagan himself made known his desire to eliminate the departments of Energy and Education, and to scale back what his first budget director David Stockman called the "closet socialism" of Social Security and Medicaid.

But after his initial victories on tax cuts and defense, the revolution effectively stalled. Deficits started to balloon, the recession soon deepened, his party lost ground in the 1982 midterms, and thereafter Reagan never seriously tried to enact the radical domestic agenda he'd campaigned on. Rather than abolish the departments of Energy and Education, as he had promised to do if elected president, Reagan added a new cabinet-level department--one of the largest federal agencies--the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Though his budgets requested some cuts in some areas of discretionary spending, Reagan rapidly retreated and never seriously pushed them. As Lou Cannon, the Washington Post reporter who covered Reagan's political career for 25 years, put it in his masterful biography, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, "For all the fervor they created, the first-term Reagan budgets were mild manifestos devoid of revolutionary purpose. They did not seek to 'rebuild the foundation of our society' (the task Reagan set for himself and Congress in a nationally televised speech of February 5, 1981) or even to accomplish the 'sharp reduction in the spending growth trend' called for in [his] Economic Recovery Plan." By Reagan's second term, the idea of seriously diminishing the budget was, to quote Stockman, "an institutionalized fantasy." Though in speeches Reagan continued to repeat his bold pledge to "get government out of the way of the people," government stayed pretty much where it was.

This hasn't stopped recent contemporary conservative biographers from claiming otherwise. "He said he would cut the budget, and he did," declares Peggy Noonan in When Character Was King. In fact, the budget grew significantly under Reagan. All he managed to do was moderately slow its rate of growth. What's more, the number of workers on the federal payroll rose by 61,000 under Reagan. (By comparison, under Clinton, the number fell by 373,000.)

Reagan also vastly expanded one of the largest federal domestic programs, Social Security. Before becoming president, he had often openly mused, much to the alarm of his politically sensitive staff, about restructuring Social Security to allow individuals to opt out of the system--an antecedent of today's privatization plans. At the start of his administration, with Social Security teetering on the brink of insolvency, Reagan attempted to push through immediate draconian cuts to the program. But the Senate unanimously rebuked his plan, and the GOP lost 26 House seats in the 1982 midterm elections, largely as a result of this overreach.

The following year, Reagan made one of the greatest ideological about-faces in the history of the presidency, agreeing to a $165 billion bailout of Social Security. In almost every way, the bailout flew in the face of conservative ideology. It dramatically increased payroll taxes on employees and employers, brought a whole new class of recipients--new federal workers--into the system, and, for the first time, taxed Social Security benefits, and did so in the most liberal way: only those of upper-income recipients. (As an added affront to conservatives, the tax wasn't indexed to inflation, meaning that more and more people have gradually had to pay it over time.)

By expanding rather than scaling back entitlements, Reagan--and Newt Gingrich after him--demonstrated that conservatives could not and would not launch a frontal assault on Social Security, effectively conceding that these cherished New Deal programs were central features of the American polity.

"Mondale Would Have Been Proud"

It's conservative lore that Reagan the icon cut taxes, while George H.W. Bush the renegade raised them. As Stockman recalls, "No one was authorized to talk about tax increases on Ronald Reagan's watch, no matter what kind of tax, no matter how justified it was." Yet raising taxes is exactly what Reagan did. He did not always instigate those hikes or agree to them willingly--but he signed off on them. One year after his massive tax cut, Reagan agreed to a tax increase to reduce the deficit that restored fully one-third of the previous year's reduction. (In a bizarre bit of self-deception, Reagan, who never came to terms with this episode of ideological apostasy, persuaded himself that the three-year, $100 billion tax hike--the largest since World War II--was actually "tax reform" that closed loopholes in his earlier cut and therefore didn't count as raising taxes.)

Faced with looming deficits, Reagan raised taxes again in 1983 with a gasoline tax and once more in 1984, this time by $50 billion over three years, mainly through closing tax loopholes for business. Despite the fact that such increases were anathema to conservatives--and probably cost Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, reelection--Reagan raised taxes a grand total of four times just between 1982-84.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0301.green.html

He was the last of a GREAT generation of Presidents. He was honorable, focused, proud, intelligent and yes, made us proud to be Americans. I agree...I, too, long for that time. I was also in HS during this time. Ahhhhhhh......

You are so right on!!! I sooo loved Ronald Reagan!!! What a great president and patriot!!! where have men and women like him gone????

He kinda lost me with the illegal bombing that killed around 100 Women and Children. Oh yeah, that whole Iran/Contra thing still leaves a bad taste too. Let's illegally sell the Iranians 4000 advanced anti-tank missles so we can illegally fund an attempt to overthrow yet another government... Was he rewarding the Iranians for taking our hostages? "Trickle down economics", the hit parade rolled on and on. All in all, he should have spent the last years of his life rotting in jail.

That new Philadelphia, MS. Mayor replaced the longtime KKK White Supremacist Mayor that you support.

One of the Eisenhower Commission's primary targets was the Ku Klux Klan, linked at that point to hundreds of acts of racial terror perpetrated by some of its approximately 17,000 dues-paying members.

In 1964, the FBI had identified seventeen independent "Klans"--the largest of which, by far, was the United Klans of America.

Billy Flowers, an Exalted Cyclops of the Johnston County chapter of the UKA, stands in front of his billboard on the outskirts of Smithfield, North Carolina, photographed by Pete Young, courtesy of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library.

On June 21, 2005, exactly forty-one years after the murder of Civil Rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman in Neshoba County, Mississippi, former Ku Klux Klan member Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of their murders.

Racism was and is wrong as this weeks events prove all too well, "Mrs.(Janet13.com/Joe The) Plumber".

Thank you for your comments Sheila. To all of our "Yankee" friends who love to poke their fingers in our chests - I will remind them that the state with the LARGEST KKK membership was Indiana. Remember the race riots during 1974 in South Boston, Mass, over the busing of black students into predominantly white schools? Many cities and towns in the North had laws on the books (i.e., Shaker Heights, OH) that prohibited blacks from the town after sundown. I spent two years in grad school at Syracuse University and frequently heard whites use the "N"-word when referring to African-Americans. Outside the city, I saw cars on blocks, unmowed yards and squalor. So much for the "enlightened" North.

Reagan did exactly what he was suppose to do as President,which is to protect and defend freedom and democracy at home and abroad and it was the democrats of course who supported the Sandistas.A good friend of mine is from Honduras and he loves Ronald Reagan for what he did in helping defeat the Sandinistas.

Sheila, I also was in high school during President Reagan's kick off to the presidency, and would like to assure you your adoration of Reagan is deserved. My mom worked for Paramount Pictures and met President Reagan when he was just an actor and also again when he has won his first term. My mom, who was a democrat was so taken by Reagan's sincere love of country and her people, and his good characted, that she became a Republican soon after. He was a good man, and doesn't deserve the hatred turned his way at all. Cherie ps...I adore him as well

An article was written six months was written six months before before Reagan's election dexcribing how he drove California into bankrupty. But you voters were dumb to read it. He was the third biggest spender of all. Like all Republicans he was tax and spend

Pundit, I have to thank you for trying to enlighten,(remind?), people of what happened during the Reagan presidency. Unfortunately we live in a world where people choose to judge others based on image and media spin tactics.

During the recent elections when it seemed that everyone was using Reagan as the president to emulate, I couldn't help but comment to everyone I knew that I could not believe that so many people had forgotten not only what Reagan's policies and actions created in America, (as you have so succinctly explained), but how Reagan was more of a figurehead than an independent thinker.

Does anyone remember how the same media that glorifies him now used to make fun of how it seemed that Reagan was just following Nancy's advice? Does anyone remember the jokes about Reagan being just a talking head? I know I do and I'm sure there are others as well but the average American is a Sheila. They're the kind of people that politicians love because they fall right in line with whatever the best spin artist can concoct.

I see you have perfected your copy and paste skills... well done!

Reagan inherited an economy destroyed by the fool, Jimmy Carter. The country was in a deep malaise, the military was weak and demoralized.
Reagan turned it around and got people believing in this nation again.

You made a semi coherent comment about Carter and the F-117 and B-2 bomber, and your involvement. What was the name of the computer program that allowed stealth flight? Why was the B-2 three times more expensive than the B-1? What are you talking about when you so deftly refer to "Carter's pre-developed F-117A & B-2 Stealth bomber program"? Carter didn't do a damn thing, except divulge sensitive information about the B-2 development to make himself look like he wasn't weak on defense.