◆ Campaigning against the Carter “malaise”

◆ Assassination attempt and the failure to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment

◆ From Reaganomics to the Iran-Contra scandal

Of the three branches of government, only the executive—not the legislative, not the judicial—has led genuine political realignment of American government.

Such realignment has been relatively rare. In the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson set a course for progressive reform, which the presidencies of Harding and Coolidge reversed in a return to laissez-faire government. Propelled by the dire emergency of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt led a sweeping realignment toward a welfare state, which succeeding presidents up through Jimmy Carter either rolled back, perpetuated, or advanced—but never substantially changed. From the 1930s to 1980, the United States remained under the glow or the shadow (depending on one’s political point of view) of the New Deal.

Then came Ronald Reagan, the first executive since FDR to use the presidency to radically realign American government and politics.

A Hunger for Greatness

Ronald Wilson Reagan was a highly unlikely revolutionary—so unlikely, in fact, that Democratic liberals may be forgiven, if not entirely excused, for having almost universally underestimated him.

Born above a grocery store in the central Illinois town of Tampico in 1911, Reagan worked his way through college and successively became the two things he most wanted to be, a sportscaster and a screen actor. His B-picture talent was less than spectacular, but with 53 films and, later, many TV appearances to his credit, he was a universally familiar face and never out of work.

What They Said

How can you take this man seriously? Perhaps even he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.... He is the biggest liar of all the American Presidents ... the worst terrorist in the history of mankind … a madman, an imbecile and a bum.… His ideas are from the era of Buffalo Bill, not the nuclear age. —President Fidel Castro, 1985

A Democrat during his on-screen years, Reagan’s yen for politics earned him the presidency of the Screen Actors’ Guild (SAG). He left both the acting profession—though he would always remain an actor at heart—and the Democratic Party to enter Republican politics with a strong stop-communism and end-big-government message. In 1966, Reagan handily defeated incumbent Democrat Pat Brown for the governor’s office in California and served two terms, during which he made a national reputation as a ruthless tax cutter and an implacable foe of the welfare state, having vigorously endeavored to make good on his campaign pledge of sending “the welfare bums back to work.”

Reagan left the California state house in 1975 and campaigned against Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. Although he lost—narrowly, picking up 1,070 delegates to Ford’s 1,187—his strong anti-Soviet, anti-big government, anti-tax, and anti-welfare positions made an impact, and when Ford lost to Carter in the general election, most Republicans were more than ready to abandon Ford’s moderation and embrace Reagan’s conservatism.

Executive Event

Reagan left the profession of acting, but never stopped being an actor. No one ever questioned his patriotism or doubted his belief in the vision he had for the nation; however, many observers also had the distinct impression that, for Reagan, the presidency was yet another role. Jim Wright, Democratic House majority leader in 1980, believed that “Reagan was an entertainer, a super salesman, an enjoyable companion …. His grasp of issues, and of history, was superficial.” Wright recalled in a 1996 memoir the day president-elect Reagan visited him and House speaker Tip O’Neill in O’Neill’s Capitol office. “Tip sat behind a large desk which, he explained to the president[-elect], had once belonged to Grover Cleveland. ‘I played him once in a movie,’ Reagan said. ‘No, Mr. President,’ Tip gently corrected, ‘you played Grover Cleveland Alexander, the baseball player.’”

Caught a Malaise? Here’s the Cure

On July 15, 1979, President Carter addressed the nation concerning what he called an “erosion of our confidence in the future [that] is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” Although he never used the word in the address, media commentators pointed out that Carter had diagnosed a national “malaise” and they immediately dubbed his talk the “Malaise Speech.”

It was against this sense of malaise and what many believed was Carter’s feckless response to it—end the energy crisis by obeying the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit and turning down your thermostat—that Ronald Reagan directed his campaign. The answer, he told voters, was not to whine about a “malaise” or to impose limits on energy consumption, but to take bold steps to return Americans to their birthright of greatness by cutting taxes and vastly reducing the size of government (“getting government off our backs,” Reagan called it). These goals would be achieved by eliminating much government regulation of the “private sector”—business of all kinds—and by radically rolling back the welfare state. The one area of government that Reagan proposed to enlarge was the military, which needed to be bigger and stronger in order to defeat, once and for all, the Soviet Cold War threat.

The “Great Communicator”

Reagan’s oratorical gifts made for a dramatic contrast with Carter. Not only were his speeches well written—and, contrary to what many of his critics believed, Reagan often took a strong personal hand in writing them—they were delivered with all the dramatic polish a journeyman actor could give them. Even more important, unlike Carter, Reagan based his candidacy and his subsequent presidency on powerful themes: how strong government weakens those governed and the proposition that the Soviet Union still constituted the greatest international threat the United States faced.

It was the anti-big government message that rang most resoundingly. Reagan delivered its most concentrated distillation in his first inaugural address: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt before him, Ronald Reagan created a rhetorical presidency. It was not simply that he gave a good speech. It was that he delivered superb lines very effectively. Wilson’s “The world must be made safe for democracy,” FDR’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” and Reagan’s “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” were all cut from the same rhetorical cloth. For his ability to put his policy beliefs into the capsule form of an inspiring formula, Ronald Reagan was justly dubbed “the Great Communicator.”

Grace Under Pressure

On March 31, 1981, at the end of his second full month in office, President Reagan left the Washington Hilton Hotel after delivering a speech. Six shots were fired from the crowd near the door. Secret Service agent Timothy J. McCarthy and Washington police officer James Delahanty were wounded, as was White House press secretary James S. Brady, who suffered a severe head wound from which he would never fully recover.

What They Said

I hope you’re all Republicans. —President Ronald Reagan, to his surgeons, just before the operation to remove a bullet lodged in his lung, March 31, 1981

Apparently unhurt, the president was bundled into his limousine. Although it soon became apparent that he, too, had been wounded, he insisted on walking unaided into the emergency room of George Washington University Hospital, where it was discovered that a bullet had entered his lung—a .22-caliber “devastator,” intended to explode on impact. Fortunately, this one failed to detonate and was removed in a 2-hour emergency operation.

Ronald Reagan was the oldest man ever elected president, and the public now saw their 70-year-old president not only survive a severe bullet wound, but joke about it—“Honey, I forgot to duck,” he told wife Nancy as he was being wheeled into surgery—and then recover with apparently remarkable speed. The incident drew even more popular admiration for Reagan and support for his legislative agenda. The man who preached the conservative Republican message of self-reliance seemed hardly fazed by a bullet in his chest.

The President as Legislative Leader

Much like Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ronald Reagan ran in 1980 as an outsider, whose fresh perspective positioned him to criticize politics-as-usual Washington. Once he entered the Oval Office, however, Reagan discarded his predecessor’s playbook. Where Carter had spurned Congress—at least initially—Reagan endeavored to establish a close working relationship with key members. In this, his presidency recalled Lyndon Johnson’s; however, whereas Johnson habitually summoned members to the White House, Reagan reached out to them, either by telephone or with a trip to Capitol Hill.

Ronald Reagan had strong popular appeal; however, he recognized the disparity between his stunning electoral vote victory—489 to 49—and the fact that he was barely a majority president, having captured 51 percent of the popular vote (Carter lagged at 41 percent, and Independent John Anderson captured 7 percent). Accordingly, he was careful not to repeat Carter’s error of bypassing Congress in a direct appeal to the people. In his view, Carter had squandered the Democratic congressional majority that existed during his presidency. Although in 1980 the Democrats still controlled the House, the Republicans won a Senate majority, and the president was determined to make the most of it.

Tally

Reagan polled 43,899,248 popular votes (51 percent) in 1980 to Democrat Carter’s 35,481,435 (41 percent) and Independent John Anderson’s 5,719,437 (7 percent). Reagan swept the Electoral College, 489 to 49, Anderson receiving no electoral votes. In 1984, Reagan’s popular majority was much greater. He polled 54,281,858 votes (59 percent) to Democrat Walter Mondale’s 37,457,215 (41 percent). In another Electoral College sweep, Reagan received 525 votes to Mondale’s 13. It was the largest electoral total in American history.

Yet Ronald Reagan did not bow to Congress. He positioned himself unmistakably as the nation’s legislative leader. Whereas Carter, like LBJ, had been on hands-on executive, whom critics accused of transforming the Oval Office into the Office of Micromanagement, Reagan was infamously averse to details. He therefore put together an Executive Office of the President (EOP) that tightly packaged his agenda and handed it to him in a form for which he could readily lobby Congress. The result was a legislative steamroller propelled by Reagan’s breezily appealing confidence and steered by hard-nosed EOP bureaucratic operatives.

OMB

The president did not rely on lobbying alone to assert executive legislative leadership over Congress. The Reagan budget was the heart of the domestic policy popularly known as Reaganomics, and OMB director David Stockman became Reagan’s point man for pushing his budgetary agenda through the legislature.

Reagan sent Stockman charging up Capitol Hill under the banner of supply-side economics, the theory that the economy thrives by stimulating the production of goods and services (the supply side) because (according to advocates of the theory) supply creates demand. To stimulate the supply side, the president called for a sharp reduction in government regulation of commerce and industry and aggressive tax cutting for wealthy investors and for businesses. This, Reagan and Stockman claimed, would free up money for investment and employment, the benefits of which would ultimately “trickle down” to the middle and working classes in the form of more and better jobs.

Deregulation and tax cutting required aggressive budget cutting—and that is what Stockman and Reagan had to sell to Congress.

They did not do it exclusively through lobbying. Stockman deftly used the very law Congress had passed to rein in Nixon’s imperial presidency, the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (see Chapter 23), to reclaim from the legislature control over the budget. As Sidney M. Milkis and Michael Nelson explain in The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776-2007 (see Appendix C). Stockman used the “reconciliation” provision of the 1974 act, which allowed the congressional budget committees to consolidate all of a president’s budgetary changes into a single bill, to create a budget package that was far easier to push through Congress than each separate authorization would have been.

Having seized the whip hand on the budget, the Reagan White House slashed both taxes and spending on social programs—going further than any president after FDR to dismantle the New Deal—while simultaneously making unprecedented increases in defense spending (tripling the national debt from just under $1 trillion in 1981 to $2.9 trillion in 1989).

Building the “Reagan Court”

President Reagan reached out to the judicial branch as well as the legislative. No president since George Washington has had a greater effect on the judiciary.

President Reagan appointed four Supreme Court justices: Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman associate justice; William H. Rehnquist, whom Reagan later appointed chief justice; Antonin Scalia; and Anthony M. Kennedy. All were chosen for their conservative orientation, which the Reagan White House defined as a reluctance to create new constitutional rights for the individual and due deference to states’ rights; however, both O’Connor and Kennedy proved more moderate than conservative on the bench.

Executive Event

Ronald Reagan’s appointments profoundly skewed the federal court system to the right; however, he was not always successful in appointing the judges he wanted. Senator Ted Kennedy, Democrat from Massachusetts, led the opposition to the confirmation of Robert Bork, citing on the Senate floor a resolutely conservative record: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.” On October 23, 1987, the Senate rejected Bork’s confirmation, 58 to 42. Reagan then nominated Judge Douglas Ginsburg, who withdrew from consideration after admitting to having smoked marijuana.

Beyond the Supreme Court appointments, Reagan disseminated his conservative philosophy widely throughout the federal judiciary with life-tenured appointments to 372 federal benches, including key appeals court positions.

The President as Party Leader

Complementing Reagan’s leadership of all three branches of government was his leadership of the Republican Party. The president’s ambition was to ensure Republican domination of American political life for a generation or more—maybe even permanently. His motive was not simply to acquire and hold power, but to transform the nation ideologically, to move it from New Deal-based liberalism to laissez-faire conservatism. Reagan therefore sought to instill throughout the party a conservative mind-set. Whereas previous party leaders emphasized politics—locally based and relying on quid pro quo patronage to create loyalty—Reagan sold ideology. The Republican Party would henceforth be the “party of ideas,” by which was meant the party of conservative ideas.

Iran-Contra and the Curse of the Second Term

Two related clichés have long dominated American political life: “There are no second acts in American politics” and “No president has a successful second term.” As with most clichés, tired though they may be, there is some truth to both.

President Reagan was reelected in 1984 with 59 percent of the popular vote over Democratic challenger Walter Mondale’s 41 percent; however, the Democrats retained a large majority in the House and, in 1986, took the Senate as well. There was a growing sense among the public that the Reagan presidency, from the beginning a rhetorical presidency, was little more than rhetoric. The feel-good message that had worked so well against the Carter “malaise” in 1980 began to ring hollow. Worse, the president often seemed out of touch, his edge dulled, perhaps, with age. The extraordinary machine that was his EOP began to appear too efficient, too powerful, as if the machine were running the president rather than the other way around.

A New Watergate?

In November 1986, President Reagan confirmed reports that the United States had secretly sold arms to Iran, the nation that had held the U.S. embassy staff hostage for 444 days during the Carter administration. After initially denying rumors that the arms sale had been intended to gain the release of U.S. hostages held by terrorists in Lebanon, Reagan later admitted the existence of an arms-for-hostages swap. Hard on the heels of this admission came the revelation from Attorney General Edwin Meese that a portion of the arms profits had been diverted to finance the Contra rebels fighting against the communist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. The Reagan administration favored a right-wing rebellion in Nicaragua, but Congress, hoping to avoid a Central American incarnation of the Vietnam War, specifically barred Contra aid. The diversion of the secret arms profits was therefore blatantly unconstitutional, and the affair was variously dubbed the “Iran-Contra scandal” or, more pointedly, “Iran-gate.”

A congressional investigation gradually revealed how, in 1985, an Israeli group had approached National Security Adviser Robert MacFarlane with a scheme in which Iran, in exchange for arms, would use its influence to free the Lebanon hostages. Secretary of State George Schultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger objected to the plan, but (MacFarlane testified to Congress) the president agreed to it. That is when U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Oliver (Ollie) North suggested adding the twist by which profits from the sales would be funneled to the Contras. The beauty of the scheme was downright Nixonian: Illegal arms sales produced illegal profits, which would be totally concealed from Congress because the money would be slipped to the Contras.

In what seemed an eerie replay of Watergate, the congressional investigation climbed the White House ladder, ascending through national security advisers John Poindexter and MacFarlane, through CIA Director William J. Casey (who died in May 1987), and up to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. This left one question: Was President Reagan in on the scheme or was he the dupe of rightwing zealots in his administration? Either answer was bad.

The Teflon Legacy

As a result of the congressional inquiry into Iran-gate, North, Poindexter, CIA administrator Clair E. George, and Weinberger were either indicted or convicted. All of the convictions except Weinberger’s were overturned on appeal, and Weinberger, like the others, was subsequently pardoned by President Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush.

As for Ronald Reagan, Iran-gate was biggest of several second-term missteps. He had sleepily bumbled his way through a 1986 summit with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, and he had watched helplessly as the stock market, in the high times that followed deregulation, crashed precipitously in 1987.

Within a single month after the revelation of the Iran-Contra scheme, Reagan’s approval rating fell from a lofty 67 percent to an earthly 46 percent. Yet there was no truly serious talk of impeachment, and people took to calling him the “Teflon president”—a chief executive against whom nothing could be made to stick.

What They Said

I was cooking breakfast this morning for my kids, and I thought, “He’s just like a Teflon frying pan. Nothing sticks to him.” —Rep. Patricia Schroeder (Dem., Colorado), quoted in Boston Globe, October 24, 1984

There was a backlash against the Reagan presidency for a few years following the end of his second term, some historians even ranking him among the worst of American presidents. But driven in part by “Reagan Republican” acolytes, the public and academic assessment of Reagan dramatically improved with age. Even before his death in 2004 at the age of 93, government buildings, schools, roads, and Washington’s in-town National Airport had been named in his honor. After his death, there were rumors that the Reagan likeness would soon appear on some coin—possibly even replacing Franklin D. Roosevelt on the dime.

Over the years, Republican presidential candidates—and even some Democrats—have scrambled to compare themselves to Ronald Reagan. As of 2008, however, that trend seems destined to diminish if not die as the nation reels from an economic meltdown caused to a significant degree by the massive deregulation of the financial sector begun during the Reagan years and accelerated during the two terms of George W. Bush. As of this writing in 2009, it remains to be seen whether the Teflon that served President Reagan in life will flake away from his posthumous legacy.

The Least You Need to Know

◆ Ronald Reagan successfully campaigned against incumbent Jimmy Carter by inviting Americans to throw big government off their backs in a return to greatness built on rugged individualism.

◆ Dubbed the “Great Communicator,” Reagan brought the rhetorical presidency to a height not seen since Franklin Roosevelt.

◆ Reagan restored highly effective relations between the president and Congress based largely on party discipline and his own popularity.

◆ Ronald Reagan had an impact on the Supreme Court and federal court system greater than any other president since George Washington.