This summer, as usual, I’m attending some short courses at the City Literary Institute in central London. The first one was a two and a hall hour session on US President Ronald Reagan delivered by college principal Mark Malcolmson who is incredibly knowledgeable and very fluent. These are some of my notes:<\/p>\n
Presidents tend to come from poor or rich backgrounds.\u00a0Reagan was from a poor family in Illinois.\u00a0Known as Dutch because of Dutch boy haircut as youth.\u00a0At college, very clubbable.\u00a0Became sports commentator on radio in Iowa.\u00a0Signed up for seven years to Warner Brothers as a B movie actor (\u201cBedtime For Bonzo\u201d)<\/p>\n
Following scandal involving other officers, President of the Screen Actors Guild for five years.\u00a0Until then, a New Deal Democrat – he claimed Dems went Left but actually he went Right. Then became face of General Electric Theatre on television and spoke at company\u2019s factories\u00a0-> became a very effective public speaker.<\/p>\n
By 1964, Republican Party in disarray (Barry Goldwater presidential candidate).\u00a0\u201cThe Speech\u201d – Reagan came out as Republican and declared for Goldwater.\u00a0In 1966 and again in 1970, elected as governor of California.\u00a0Tough on law & order but he raised taxes in order to balance the budget.\u00a0Signed abortion and no-fault divorce laws and opposed bill to ban gays as teachers.<\/p>\n
Reagan ran against Gerald Ford for the presidential candidacy but narrowly lost.\u00a0This weakened Ford who then lost to Jimmy Carter.\u00a0For next four years, Reagan was the leader in waiting.\u00a0Then in 1980 he won the Republican primary against George Bush and the following presidential election in a rout against Carter.<\/p>\n
He became the oldest president in history at that time (almost 70).\u00a0Put together a strong cabinet and left detail to his team.\u00a0Three months into his presidency, he was the subject of an assassination attempt which gave him a fillip in the polls and a huge amount of poltical capital during a shaky first two years in office.<\/p>\n
He supported small government and low taxes, but he massively increased spending on the military and ran a huge deficit.\u00a0Unemployment rose to over 10%.\u00a0Republicans hammered in the mid terms.\u00a0But then economy improved.<\/p>\n
He made three nominations to the Supreme Court, including the first woman member of the Court (Sandra Day O\u2019Connor), and tilted Court to the Right.<\/p>\n
In 1984, Reagan re-elected president against Walter Mondale in a massive landslide – biggest Electoral College vote in history.<\/p>\n
Foreign policy:<\/p>\n
Sent troops into Lebanon with no clear objective and went catastrophically wrong.\u00a0Then he ordered invasion of Grenada which went down well with US electorate.\u00a0He was a staunch supporter of apartheid South Africa.\u00a0He thought that detente had failed and Soviet Union should be opposed everywhere and American allies\u00a0 – however unpleasant (Chile and Nicaragua) – were supported.<\/p>\n
He launched the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) to counter \u201cthe evil empire\u201d of the Soviet Union which would have ended the notion of \u201cmutually assured destruction\u201d.\u00a0New Soviet leader Gorbachev responded with series of summits.\u00a0Many historians claim that Reagan broke the Soviet Union and won the Cold War.\u00a0Others argue it would have happened anyway because the USSR was economically unsustainable.<\/p>\n
Major scandal was his support of the Contras in Nicaragua by selling arms to Iran to raise the funds. It should have brought Reagan down. Was he already senile? Most doctors think not. Democrats were reluctant to impeach because it would look like a second removal of a landslide president (after Nixon).<\/p>\n
Two blind spots:
\nHe was opposed to civil rights with no understanding of race relations.
\nHe refused to have any concern about AIDS for a long time.<\/p>\n
Two major pluses:
\nResponse to the \u201cChallenger\u201d disaster.
\nManaged to have election of his Vice-President (Bush snr).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This summer, as usual, I’m attending some short courses at the City Literary Institute in central London. The first one was a two and a hall hour session on US President Ronald Reagan delivered by college principal Mark Malcolmson who is incredibly knowledgeable and very fluent. These are some of my notes: Presidents tend to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23307"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23316,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23307\/revisions\/23316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}