Roundup: Talking About History

June 11, 2004

Rick Perlstein: Reagan the Divider

Rick Perlstein, in Salon (June 7, 2004): ... It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly. In 1964, observers horrified by Barry Goldwater pined for the sensible Robert Taft, the conservative leader of the 1950s. When Reagan was

June 11, 2004

Paul Krugman: The Reagan Economics Legend

Paul Krugman, in the NYT (June 11, 2004): In the movie"The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," a reporter defends prettifying history:"This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." That principle has informed many of this week's Reagan retrospectives. But let's not be bullied into accepting the right-wing legend about Reaganomics. Here's a sample version of the legend: according

June 11, 2004

John Patrick Diggins: Reagan Wasn't a Neocon

John Patrick Diggins, in the NYT (June 11, 2004): Almost everywhere in the press one reads that President Bush sounds an awful lot like Ronald Reagan. Commentators and politicians alike have drawn the comparison between Mr. Bush's"muscular" foreign policy and the Reagan doctrine. However macho and aggressive Mr. Bush's foreign policy may be, when it c

June 11, 2004

Fred Kaplan: Reagan's Real Role in Ending the Cold War

Fred Kaplan, in Slate (June 9, 2004): So, did Ronald Reagan bring on the end of the Cold War? Well, yes. Recently declassified documents leave no doubt about the matter. But how did he accomplish it? Through hostile rhetoric and a massive arms buildup, which the Soviets knew they couldn't match, as Reagan's conservative champions contend? Or through a second-term conve

June 11, 2004

The Letter the Council on Foreign Relations Refused to Publish (Re: L'Affaire Pinochet)

On June 5, 2004 the NYT reported: "The chief Latin American expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, the nation's pre-eminent foreign policy club, has quit as a protest, accusing the council of stifling debate on American intervention in Chile during the 1970's as a result of pressure from former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger." The expert, Kenneth Maxwell, says he resigned after the Council refused to publish his response to a letter criticizing his review of Pete

June 10, 2004

Reagan Needed Gorby to Succeed in Ending the Cold War

Marshall Goldman, in the Boston Globe (June 8, 2004):IF THERE WAS EVER AN ODD COUPLE IN WORLD AFFAIRS, IT WAS RONALD REAGAN AND MIKHAIL GORBACHEV. WHEN THEY FIRST MET IN GENEVA IN NOVEMBER 1985, THE WORLD HELD ITS BREATH. COULD THEY EVEN BE CIVIL TO EACH OTHER? There was President Reagan, one of the most unabashed proponents of capitalism and democracy and critic of the evil empire of the Soviet Union. As for General Secretary Gorbachev, he was one of th

June 10, 2004

Reagan's Response to Terrorism Was Uneven

Scott Shane, in the Baltimore Sun (June 8, 2004):The presidency of Ronald Reagan is widely credited with a muscular, assertive foreign policy that contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union. But his response to a wave of terrorism in the early and mid-1980s - when there were far more terrorist attacks worldwide than in recent years - was far less consistent, historians and terrorism experts say.Reagan's reaction to the bloodiest anti-American at

June 10, 2004

New Research: Shipwrecks in the Supposedly "Dark Ages" Indicate Existence of a Consumer Revolution

Dalya Alberge, in the London Times (June 9, 2004):RESEARCH has overturned centuries-old theories that the Dark Ages came soon after the turbulent decline of the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD. Sean Kingsley, a British archaeologist, has drawn up a new map of 222 shipwrecks dating from the 4th to 10th centuries AD, which shows the emergence of a consumer revolution with an epicentre in the Holy Land.The conclusions are dramatic, he said: "Rat

June 10, 2004

Reagan's Legacy of Debt

Loren Steffy, in the Houston Chronicle (June 9, 2004):DON'T be surprised if Ronald Reagan's death inspires members of Congress to try once again to put his face on the dime, replacing Franklin Roosevelt. Hard currency, though, isn't the best place for Reagan's likeness.A credit card would be a more fitting homage.Reagan reshaped our popular view of economics, and with it, our view of debt. He transformed us from the world's largest creditor to its

June 10, 2004

Where Reagan Ranks in a New Poll by Conservative Historians

James Taranto, in the WSJ (June 10, 2004):Ronald Reagan has had a hard time getting his due from scholars. In 1996 Arthur Schlesinger Jr. conducted a poll of historians asking them to rank the presidents, and Mr. Reagan came in 25th out of 39, putting him in the "low average" category. The Gipper had done only slightly better in a Siena College survey two years earlier, finishing 20th out

June 10, 2004

Liberia: 2 New Books Lay Out Its Complex History of Ties to the U.S.

Jennifer Jacobson, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (June 11, 2004) (subscribers only):As rebel forces closed in on Liberia's former president, Charles Taylor, last summer, most newspaper accounts gave Americans in-depth coverage of the fighting -- and only a single sentence or so as to why they should care. Reporters in Monrovia briefly noted that the United States had historical ties

June 10, 2004

David Corn: Reagan Supported Dictators ... As Long as They Said They Opposed Communists

David Corn, in tompaine.com (June 9, 2004):Aren't we mature enough as a democracy to memorialize our leaders with clear eyes? While the nation mourns one of its most popular presidents, it must be truthful in assessing his leadership. The very resolve being celebrated on op-ed pages across the country also led Reagan to ignore and sometimes sanction the brutality being committed in the name of figh

June 10, 2004

The Bush and Reagan Families ... Not Really Very Close

Elisabeth Bumiller, in the NYT (June 9, 2004):... Although [both the Bush and Reagan families are] ... offering nothing but tribute to the other during this week of Reagan nostalgia, over the past quarter-century the relationship between the families has been strained for periods by political ambition, social resentment and a lack of chemistry between two formidable first ladies....

June 9, 2004

LBJ's Presidential Tapes ... Excerpts Published in the Atlantic About JFK's Death

Max Holland, in the Atlantic (June 2004):In July of 1973, six months after the death of Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Atlantic published an article by a journalist and former Johnson speechwriter named Leo Janos. "The Last Days of the President," about LBJ in retirement, was elegiac in tone and fact, save for one dissonant paragr

June 9, 2004

Walter Russell Mead: Reagan's Role in Ending the Cold War

Walter Russell Mead, in Wash Post Book World (Nov. 24, 2002): In 1990, former President Ronald Reagan visited the birthplace of the Solidarity movement in Gdansk, Poland. As 7,000 people stood to cheer Reagan in heavy rain and hail, a priest presented him with a sword for, as the priest said, "helping us to chop off the head of communism." This story comes from Peter Schweizer's ambitious Reagan's War, a book that tries to show that Reagan deserved that sword.

June 9, 2004

Robert Parry: Reagan Didn't End the Cold War

Robert Parry, in consortiumnews.com (June 7, 2004): The U.S. news media’s reaction to Ronald Reagan’s death is putting on display what has happened to American public debate in the years since Reagan’s political rise in the late 1970s: a near-total collapse of serious analytical thinking at the national level. Across the U.S. television dial and in major American newspapers, the commen

June 9, 2004

Now Conservatives Have Ranked the Presidents ... It's No Schlesinger List

From a website promoting the sale of Presidential Leadership (Free Press, June 2004), by James Taranto, Leonard Leo and William J. Bennett: Rankings of presidential performances are common, and usually irritating: liberal academics love to place Ronald Reagan near the bottom and the likes of Slick Willie near the top. But now editors from two stalwart conservative organizations -- the Wall Stre

June 8, 2004

Paul Krugman: About Reagan's Tax Cuts

Paul Krugman, in the NYT (June 8, 2004): Over the course of this week we'll be hearing a lot about Ronald Reagan, much of it false. A number of news sources have already proclaimed Mr. Reagan the most popular president of modern times. In fact, though Mr. Reagan was very popular in 1984 and 1985, he spent the latter part of his presidency under the shadow of the Iran-Contra scandal.

June 7, 2004

D.M. Giangreco: What Happened on D-Day

D.M. Giangreco and Kathryn Moore, in the Kansas City Star (June 6, 2004): The storm had been building for more than two years. Some 3,600,000 Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen had assembled in England for the sole purpose of destroying the Nazi tyranny of Adolf Hitler which had engulfed nearly all Europe. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, described the force as “a great hum

June 6, 2004

David Corn: 66 (Unflattering) Things About Ronald Reagan

David Corn, in his blog; a rpt. of an article he published in the Nation in 1998 (June 6, 2004): The firing of the air traffic controllers, winnable nuclear war, recallable nuclear missiles, trees that cause pollution, Elliott Abrams lying to Congress, ketchup as a vegetable, colluding with Guatemalan thugs, pardons for F.B.I. lawbreakers, voodoo economics, budget deficits, toasts to Ferdinand Marcos, public housing cutbacks, redbait