January 20, 1981, 40 years ago: On his last day as President of the United States, Jimmy Carter finally gains the release of the last 52 hostages taken by revolutionary militants on November 4, 1979.
Except, in one last act of spite, they wait to do the actual release until after 12:00 noon, Washington time, so that Carter is no longer President when it happens. Ronald Reagan, a former actor and a former Governor of California, who had overwhelmingly defeated Carter on November 4, 1980 -- one year to the day after the Iran Hostage Crisis began -- is sworn in as the nation's 40th President. The announcement that the hostages were free was made at 12:35 PM Eastern Time, 35 minutes after Reagan took the Oath of Office.
The Republicans also gained control of the U.S. Senate, and what turns out to be not a numerical majority in the House of Representatives, but frequently a "working majority" of Republicans and conservative Southern and Western Democrats that occasionally outflanks the Speaker of the House, Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill of Massachusetts.
Some conservative voters are so dumb (How dumb are they?), they believe Reagan deserves the credit for getting the hostages home. After all, he was President when they were freed; he hosted the welcome home ceremony at the White House a week later; and, they believe, the reason the Iranians let the hostages go was that they were afraid Reagan would drop an atomic bomb on them if they didn't let them go while Carter was still President.
It was the 1st Presidential Inauguration to be held on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, which Reagan had wanted because there was room on the National Mall for bigger crowds, and also so that the TV cameras could show such structures as the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Smithsonian Institution. Previous Inaugurations going back to 1817 had been held on the East Portico of the Capitol, with less room, and a view that included the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress, but not much else.
The first true conservative to be elected since Herbert Hoover in 1928 (and that didn't exactly work out very well), Reagan told the people, "Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem." And then he spent 8 years proving that government is not the problem, bad government is the problem. To paraphrase Robert Young's line from 1970s TV commercials, reminding us that he starred as Marcus Welby, M.D.: Ronald Reagan wasn't a great President, but he played one on TV.
Look at what his supporters claim his accomplishments were, and look at the truth. Take it from someone who was around then, and knows (me):
* "He turned the economy around." Bullshit. He brought inflation and interest rates back to earth. But he actually wrecked the economy.
When Reagan became President on January 20, 1981, unemployment was 7.2 percent. Not good, but not terrible. It was still around that for much of the year. Then, in August, he signed his tax cut into law. By January 1982, it was 8.2 percent. By November 1982, it was 10.8 percent, the highest it's been since the Great Depression. Indeed, it didn't even get that high during the 2007-10 George W. Bush recession.
So, in early 1983, Reagan, who knew that he couldn't "save the world from Communism" if he didn't get re-elected, and couldn't get re-elected if he had an unemployment rate that approached the one Herbert Hoover ran with in 1932, did what George H.W. Bush later did in 1990, and what George W. Bush refused to do until 2008: He compromised with the Democratic leaders of Congress, and he raised taxes. That's right: Ronald Reagan raised taxes.
Result? By January 1984, the unemployment rate had dropped below 8 percent. On November 6, 1984, the day Reagan stood for re-election, the rate was 7.2 percent -- the same as it was on November 4, 1980, when he won by saying the economy was bad. But Reagan was wrong, and the Democrats were right: Raising taxes worked.
And yet, unemployment still didn't drop below the rate he inherited until November 1985, near the end of his 5th year. For as long as he was President, it never dropped below 5 percent, which is generally, if erroneously, thought of as "full employment."
Oh yeah: On October 19, 1987, the stock market crashed. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 22 percent of its value in one day of trading, six and a half hours.
But there was no new recession (at least, not until the savings & loan scandal of 1989 and other causes led to the 1990-93 downturn), because the Federal Reserve Board stepped in. In other words, what really saved Reagan from becoming another Herbert Hoover was... the heavy hand of the federal government.
What else did Reagan do that his supporters love to claim that he did?
* "He won the Cold War." Bullshit. The Cold War was won by Lech Walesa -- who was something that Reagan hated: The leader of a labor union. (Never mind that younger, Democratic Reagan was the President of a union, the Screen Actors Guild.)
On June 12, 1987, Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate -- in front of a crowd half the size of the one JFK addressed at West Berlin's City Hall in 1963 -- and said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" On January 20, 1989, Reagan left the Presidency, and the Berlin Wall still stood.
On November 9, 1989, the East German government passed a law that rendered the Wall meaningless. And the only thing Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had to do with it is that he... did absolutely nothing to stop it.
Meanwhile, Reagan signed a trade deal with China. Red China. Reagan strengthened the world's largest Communist country.
What else did Reagan do that his supporters love to claim that he did?
* "He stood up to terrorists." Bullshit. Reagan gave Iran weapons in exchange for money and hostages. Then he used the profits to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. We liberals correctly called them "death squads" at the time, but we can also say they were terrorists.
Then there was his veto of sanctions on the government of South Africa, whose apartheid policies were, in part, terroristic. Congress properly overrode that veto, one of the dents in Reagan's reputation for strength and beating liberals.
And then there was the fact that he sent American money and weapons to the anti-Communist rebels in Afghanistan. These were the guys who became al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Ronald Reagan made Osama bin Laden, as we came to know him, possible.
Conservatives love to talk about "the law of unintended consequences" when they want to show that "throwing money at poor people" actually hurts them; but when it turns "freedom fighters" into 9/11 hijackers, they don't want to hear it.
In other words, if someone else had been President from 1981 to 1988, the Berlin Wall would still have fallen, but the World Trade Center would not have fallen.
And I haven't even gotten to the criminal charges. Just from Iran-Contra, Reagan's Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and 2 National Security Advisors, Bud McFarlane and John Poindexter, were convicted. Secretary of the Interior James Watt, whose paranoia about religion and drugs marked a bridge between the old John Birch Society and the current Tea Party, was convicted. His White House Chief of Staff Michael Deaver and his Press Secretary Lyn Nofziger were convicted. His Attorney General Edwin Meese resigned as part a deal to avoid prosecution.
Ronald Reagan was a disgraceful President.
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