{"id":15297,"date":"2014-08-06T10:01:19","date_gmt":"2014-08-06T09:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=15297"},"modified":"2014-08-09T12:24:41","modified_gmt":"2014-08-09T11:24:41","slug":"american-presidents-5-ronald-reagan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=15297","title":{"rendered":"American presidents (5): Ronald Reagan"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, I was back at the City Lit<\/a> to resume the course on post-war American presidents. Our lecturer this time was Mark Bedford and we looked at Ronald Reagan who\u00a0was the 40th president and served from 1981-1989. He took us through Reagan’s ascent to the White House as well as his two terms as president – Reagan was the first person to serve two full terms \u00a0since Eisenhower – and he made good use of clips from television programmes.<\/p>\n

Everyone knows that Reagan started his career as a movie star in Hollywood, but I had forgotten that he was a member of the Democratic Party for 25 years (he declared: “My party changed. I didn’t.”). Also I had not appreciated the importance of his ‘GE years’, the seven years he spent as the spokesman for the General Electric company, fronting their media advertisements and touring the factories to speak to the company’s workers (he was dropped because his remarks had become too political).<\/p>\n

Reagan switched to the Republicans in 1964 and served as Governor of California from 1967-1975.\u00a0After making unsuccessful bids for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 and 1976, he obtained his party’s endorsement in 1980 when he beat Jimmy Carter in the worst electoral defeat of any incumnbet president in history and became the oldest person to win a presidential election at the age of 69.<\/p>\n

He was dubbed ‘the great communicator’ with a folksy style and his calm response to the assassination attempt of 1981 endeared him to the American public. He was never noted for his intellect and famously had a relaxed management style with disengagement from the detail of policy. This was his ‘excuse’ for the scandal of the Iran Contra affair when amazingly America shipped arms to Iran via Israel and then used the profits to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. .<\/p>\n

Reagan is remembered for his stalled Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed ‘Star Wars’, and increased arms spending in his first three years of office by 40% in real terms. However, he only used direct force on three occasions: the stationing of troops in Lebanon, the invasion of Grenada, and the bombing of Libya. He preferred to fund anti-communist forces in other countries, notably in Afghanistan (which led to the formation of Al-Queda) and Central America.<\/p>\n

Many Americans credit Reagan with winning the Cold War and we had a short discussion about who was responsible. Was it Reagan because of his fierce anti-communist rhetoric (he called the Soviet Union “the evil empire”) and build up of America’s arms arsenal?; was it Gorbachev with his policies of ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’?; was it a combination of both with their summits?; or was it – as one television commentator asserted – the result of a succession of post-war US presidents – both Democrat and Republican – resisted Soviet expansionism and maintained a strong military force.<\/p>\n

Domesrically Reagan was known as a low tax, small government politician. Certainly he cut social spending but, as we have seen, he boosted arms spending. In fact, the federal debt grew over his two terms from $9.8 billion to $2.6 trillion.<\/p>\n