Reagan was inaugurated on January 20, 1981, less than a month shy of his 70th birthday. A little over two months later, John Hinckley Jr. attempted to assassinate Reagan, apparently in an effort to impress actress Jodie Foster. Reagan was shot, but surgery was successful and he was released 11 days later. In the summer of 1981, an air traffic controllers union went on strike. He fired 11,345 of them and used supervisors and military controllers to handle air traffic until new controllers could be hired and trained. It was open season on unions.
As I write this, I find that I am getting to a part of history that I’m tempted to re-litigate. There are at least three threads I want to follow for each issue – what actually happened, what Reagan claimed he was trying to do, and the story that current Reagan enthusiasts put forward. Rather than go through all of that, I am just going to touch the surface. Reagan advocated tax cuts and increased military spending. The budget deficit increased significantly despite an economy that started improving in 1982 after the recession ended. There’s a lot of argument about whether Reagan was an anti-tax hero. Most of the cuts in 1981 were restored later on. He raised taxes 11 times over the course of his Presidency.
Reagan was a Cold Warrior, and a lot of the increased deficit under his watch came from the military build up he wanted. In 1984, the theory with respect to the USSR was:
Their society is economically weak, and it lacks the wealth, education, and technology to enter the information age. They have thrown everything into military production, and their society is starting to show terrible stress as a result. They can’t sustain military production the way we can. Eventually it will break them, and then there will be just one superpower in a safe world—if, only if, we can keep spending.
One of the most famous of these initiatives was “Star Wars” — the Strategic Defense Initiative “that would have used ground- and space-based systems to protect the United States from attack by strategic nuclear ballistic missiles.” When Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader, Regan shifted from aggression to diplomacy. He held four summit conferences with Gorbechev, pursuing significant arms reduction. Reagan and Gorbachev seemed to develop warm feelings for one another and the relationship between the two countries thawed considerably. In 1989, 10 months after Reagan left office, the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War ended, and in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.
By the time of the 1984 election, Reagan was immensely popular. He declared it “morning again in America,” and beat Walter Mondale in a landslide (18.21%) comparable to LBJ in 1964 (22.58%) and Nixon in 1972 (23.15%). On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded killing the seven astronauts aboard. Reagan gave a memorable speech, saying,
“The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave … We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of Earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”
Reagan announced a “War on Drugs” in 1982. Nancy Reagan urged us to “Just Say No.” The Fourth Amendment took a beating, government spending increased, and our jails filled up. It’s not clear how effective those measures were in actually deterring drug use. His administration’s response to the AIDS epidemic was slow. After a year when the epidemic killed 1,000 people, the CDC had spent $1 million which compared unfavorably to its response to Legionnaire’s disease which killed fewer than 50 and merited spending of over $9 million.
In 1986, Reagan granted amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants as part of a bill that was designed to strengthen penalties on employing illegal aliens. In 1986, the administration became embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal. Funds from covert sales of arms to Iran were used to illegally fund Contra rebels fighting the government of Nicaragua. Reagan denied knowledge of the deal and was never directly proven to have known about the deal. Reagan would, after his Presidency, be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and it is unclear whether the effects of the disease may have set in sometime during his Presidency.
He was able to push the Supreme Court to the right. He appointed Sandra Day O’Connor as the first woman on the Supreme Court. When Warren Burger stepped down, Reagan promoted Justice Rehnquist to Chief Justice and nominated Antonin Scalia to fill the vacancy. Finally, after unsuccessfully nominating Robert Bork, Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy to fill the vacancy.
In August 1994, at the age of 83, Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. As the years went on, the disease slowly destroyed his mental capacity. In 2001, Nancy explained that very few visitors were allowed to see her husband because she felt that “Ronnie would want people to remember him as he was.” On June 5, 2004, Ronald Reagan passed away at the age of 93 years old.
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