Presidency of Ronald Reagan

• 1. Introduction

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  Ronald Reagan had been president of the United States for only 69 days when gunfire broke out beside the Washington Hilton Hotel on the 30th of March 1981. The shooter, John Hinckley Jr., hit Reagan, his press secretary James Brady, Washington police officer Thomas Delahanty and Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy. When Reagan reached George Washington University Hospital, early reports said he was close to death. In fact he had a broken rib, a punctured lung and internal bleeding. After surgery he recovered quickly and went home on the 11th of April. He became the first serving president to survive a wound from an assassination attempt.

  The public reaction was striking. Polls put his approval rating at around 73 percent. Many journalists and pundits later treated the shooting as a critical turning point, because that burst of goodwill gave him momentum for his domestic agenda.

  So what did a former Governor of California do with that momentum? He cut taxes deeply, yet the federal debt climbed. He took on a union and won, and he built up the military while calling the Soviet Union an evil empire. Then he sat down with a Soviet leader and signed a treaty. He also presided over a covert scheme that sent weapons to Iran. This documentary asks why historians rank him in the upper tier of American presidents, and why critics still point to deficits and inequality.

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• 2. The Conservative Tide

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  "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" Reagan put that question to voters in his single debate with President Jimmy Carter, held one week before election day. When Carter described his record on Medicare, Reagan answered with four words that outlived the campaign: "There you go again." Many voters had been undecided, and the large majority of them broke for Reagan.

  The result was lopsided. Reagan took 50.7 percent of the popular vote and 489 of the 538 electoral votes. Carter won 41 percent and 49 electoral votes, and independent John B. Anderson collected 6.6 percent. Republicans also won the Senate for the first time since the 1950s, although Democrats kept the House.

  The ground had been shifting for years. The Watergate scandal left Americans suspicious of government, and a religious right emerged as a united political force. Population moved from the cities to the suburbs, creating voters with weaker ties to New Deal economics. Civil rights laws of the 1960s brought a new Democratic black electorate, but they also erased the old argument that Southern whites had to vote Democratic to protect segregation.

  Reagan's own road had not been smooth. He narrowly lost the 1976 Republican primaries to President Gerald Ford. In 1980 George H. W. Bush beat him in the Iowa caucuses, but Reagan won New Hampshire and had an insurmountable delegate lead by the end of March.

  Reagan first wanted Ford as his running mate, then backed away from the idea out of fear of a "co-presidency." He chose Bush instead. After winning the nomination, Reagan moved toward the center. He dropped his support for free trade and for privatizing Social Security, and he promised to consider arms control treaties. Carter, with an approval rating in the low 30s, was also dealing with the Iran hostage crisis. His campaign leaned on a warning that Reagan could bring war.

  The people Reagan chose to carry out the new agenda would shape the next eight years.

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• 3. The Tax Cut Gamble

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  In July 1981 the Senate voted 89-11 for a sweeping tax cut, and the House followed with a 238-195 vote. The Economic Recovery Tax Act dropped the top marginal rate from 70 percent to 50 percent. It lowered the capital gains tax from 28 percent to 20 percent and more than tripled the amount of inherited money exempt from the estate tax. One columnist compared the victory to the Hundred Days of Franklin Roosevelt.

  The idea behind it was supply-side economics. Economist Arthur Laffer was among the thinkers who argued that lower taxes would reduce inflation, against the prevailing Keynesian view. Supporters also claimed that growth would raise government revenue, a claim many economists challenged. The approach echoed the 1920s policies of President Calvin Coolidge and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.

  Passing it took bargaining. Democrats controlled the House, so Reagan met often with members of Congress and courted conservative Southern Democrats such as Phil Gramm of Texas. The bill grew out of an earlier effort by congressman Jack Kemp and senator William Roth, which Carter had stopped over deficit worries.

  Then the arithmetic caught up. In 1982 Reagan signed the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which doubled the federal cigarette tax and rolled back part of the corporate cuts. Conservatives condemned it, but Reagan argued he could not win further spending cuts without it. Another tax increase followed in 1984.

  The 1986 Tax Reform Act, negotiated with Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill, cut the number of brackets to four and set the top rate at 28 percent. It also removed six million poor Americans from the income tax rolls. Across all of Reagan's tax bills, the overall burden held steady at roughly 19 percent of gross national product.

  Spending was harder to cut. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 trimmed food stamps, school lunches and Medicaid, and it ended a program that had employed 300,000 workers. Defense was spared. Efforts to reduce Social Security backfired, and a bipartisan commission instead recommended higher payroll taxes and some reduced payments. Social Security became known as the "third rail" of American politics.

  The national debt more than tripled, rising from $914 billion in fiscal year 1980 to $2.7 trillion in fiscal year 1989. Reagan never submitted a balanced budget. Congress passed the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act to force automatic cuts, but lawmakers found ways around it, and the deficits led to yet another budget law in 1990.

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• 4. Recession, Strikes and Deregulation

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  Unemployment reached nearly 11 percent in 1982, and the poverty rate rose from 11.7 percent to 15 percent. Reagan had inherited stagflation, a mix of high inflation and high unemployment. A recession began in July 1981. Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker was fighting inflation with high interest rates, which brought pain before relief.

  Many in the administration blamed Volcker, but Reagan never did. He even nominated him for a second term in 1983. The country left the recession that year, though not everyone shared equally in the recovery. Inequality and homelessness both grew during the decade. Inflation fell to about 3.5 percent in 1985, and unemployment dropped to about 5 percent in 1988.

  In August 1981 the air traffic controllers' union, PATCO, voted to strike for better pay and benefits. Reagan gave the strikers forty-eight hours to return to work. When the deadline passed, he fired more than 10,000 controllers, though about 40 percent of union members had come back. Union leaders were furious, but his conservative base approved.

  The effect spread well beyond aviation. Strikes became far less common. Several that did occur, including the 1983 Arizona copper mine strike, the 1983 Greyhound drivers' strike and the 1985-86 Hormel strike, ended with strikers being dismissed. Union membership fell from about a quarter of the workforce to about a sixth.

  Deregulation was the other pillar. Historian William Leuchtenburg wrote that by 1986 the administration had eliminated almost half the federal regulations in place in 1981. The Federal Communications Commission scrapped the Fairness Doctrine. Interior Secretary James G. Watt opened federal land to oil drilling and surface mining, and Anne Gorsuch's EPA saw its budget sharply reduced.

  The 1982 Garn-St. Germain Act freed savings and loan associations to take on riskier business, and some leaders embezzled funds. In all, 747 financial institutions failed and needed $160 billion in taxpayer money. Writer Martin Mayer called the theft from taxpayers "the worst public scandal in American history."

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• 5. Judges and Moral Battles

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  Sandra Day O'Connor was Reagan's first Supreme Court pick, named in 1981 to succeed Potter Stewart. He had promised during the campaign to appoint the first woman to the Court. Democrats who had planned to fight his nominees approved her. The Christian right was dismayed, fearing she would not overturn Roe v. Wade. She served until 2006 and was generally seen as a centrist conservative.

  In 1986 Reagan elevated William Rehnquist to Chief Justice after Warren Burger retired, and he named Antonin Scalia to fill Rehnquist's old seat. The last vacancy, left by Lewis F. Powell Jr., proved harder. The Senate rejected Robert Bork in October 1987. Douglas H. Ginsburg withdrew a month later. Anthony Kennedy was finally confirmed in February 1988 and joined O'Connor as a key swing vote for decades.

  Below the Supreme Court, Reagan appointed 368 judges to the courts of appeals and district courts, more than any other president. Many were tied to the conservative Federalist Society. Because Congress created new judgeships in 1984, he had appointed nearly half of the federal judiciary by 1989.

  His social agenda fared worse in Congress. He wanted a federal abortion ban and an end to desegregation busing, and neither passed. On school prayer, he proposed a constitutional amendment in 1981, and in 1985 he called the effort "an uphill battle." Senators Lowell Weicker and Barry Goldwater helped block a bill by Jesse Helms to keep the Supreme Court out of the question.

  On civil rights he gave ground reluctantly. He signed a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1982 after grass-roots pressure, and he accepted Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday. In 1988 he vetoed the Civil Rights Restoration Act, and Congress overrode him.

  The AIDS crisis became a national concern in 1985 when his friend, actor Rock Hudson, was revealed to be receiving treatment. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop wanted a public health campaign that promoted condoms. Reagan favored abstinence-only education instead. By 1989 about 60,000 Americans had died of AIDS, and liberals sharply criticized his response.

  His immigration law came with a sentimental setting. Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in November 1986 beside the newly refurbished Statue of Liberty. It banned knowingly hiring illegal immigrants and granted amnesty to roughly three million people who had lived in the country continuously since before the 1st of January 1982. The law largely failed to stop illegal immigration, and the estimated population rose from 5 million in 1986 to 11.1 million in 2013.

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• 6. Quiet Wars Abroad

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  By 1987 the United States was sending more than $600 million a year to Afghanistan. The money, along with weapons, intelligence and combat expertise, went to Mujahideen fighting the Soviet Army. It was one expression of the Reagan Doctrine, under which the administration openly and secretly aided anti-communist resistance movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In Poland, the CIA helped the opposition group Solidarity stay afloat under martial law. The Soviets announced a withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1987, yet the Taliban and al-Qaeda later grew out of the Mujahideen.

  The doctrine also meant embracing leaders with ugly records. Reagan said Guatemala's Efraín Ríos Montt was getting a "bum rap" and called him "a man of great personal integrity." Guatemala's military was accused of genocide against the Ixil people and other indigenous groups. Congress refused to restore military aid, though nonmilitary assistance went through.

  Closer to home, the island of Grenada drew attention because Cuban construction workers were building an airfield. On the 16th of October 1983, forces led by Hudson Austin staged a coup against the left-wing leader Maurice Bishop, who was arrested and executed. Nine days later Reagan sent about 5,000 soldiers. After two days of fighting, which killed 19 Americans, 45 Grenadans and 24 Cubans, Austin's government fell. Reagan declared that "Our days of weakness are over." The United Nations General Assembly called the invasion "a flagrant violation of international law."

  In Lebanon, Reagan sent a multinational force that included U.S. Marines as peacekeepers. In October 1983 two nearly simultaneous bombings in Beirut killed 241 American Marines and 58 French soldiers, and the force pulled out in 1984. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger drew lessons that became known as the Powell Doctrine, which urged military intervention only as a last resort with clear and limited goals.

  After a bomb exploded in a West Berlin discothèque in April 1986, injuring 63 American military personnel and killing one serviceman, Reagan blamed Libya. On the 15th of April 1986, American aircraft struck targets in Libya. Margaret Thatcher allowed the use of British air bases. The General Assembly condemned the attack by a vote of 79 to 28, with 33 abstentions.

  Meanwhile, the Shia group Hezbollah in Lebanon began taking American hostages. By the middle of 1985 it held eight. Freeing them would soon become an obsession inside the White House.

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• 7. The Iran-Contra Affair

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  Congress passed the Boland Amendment in 1982, which barred the CIA and Defense Department from spending their budgets to aid the Contras, the rebels fighting Nicaragua's Sandinista government. The Sandinistas had overthrown the Nicaraguan president in 1979 and installed Daniel Ortega. The Reagan administration still wanted the Contras supported, so it sought money from private donors and foreign governments. When Congress learned that the CIA had secretly mined Nicaraguan harbors, it passed a second Boland Amendment that barred any assistance at all.

  The second thread was the hostages held by Hezbollah. The administration decided to sell American arms to Iran, then at war with Iraq, hoping Iran would press Hezbollah. Defense Secretary Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz both opposed it. National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, and later John Poindexter, handled the operation instead.

  Over 2000 missiles were sold without telling Congress. Hezbollah freed four hostages and seized six more Americans. Then National Security Council aide Oliver North redirected the proceeds of the missile sales to the Contras.

  By early November 1986 the deals were public. Reagan first denied wrongdoing, but on the 25th of November he announced that Poindexter and North were gone and that a commission led by former senator John Tower would investigate. Federal judges appointed Lawrence Walsh as special prosecutor. The Tower Commission's report in February 1987 confirmed the trades and the diversion of money, and it criticized chief of staff Donald Regan, among others. Regan, who had often clashed with Nancy Reagan, left the administration. Former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker replaced him.

  Reagan said of the report: "As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities." A poll in March 1987 found that 85 percent of respondents believed in an organized cover-up. Half thought Reagan himself was involved. Congressional Democrats weighed impeachment but decided it would waste political capital against a weakened president.

  President George H. W. Bush ended the inquiry's momentum by pardoning Weinberger before his trial. Walsh found no conclusive proof that Reagan knew about the Contra aid. His report did say Reagan had "created the conditions which made possible the crimes committed by others." It added that Reagan had "knowingly participated or acquiesced in covering up the scandal."

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• 8. From Evil Empire to Thaw

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  "No," Reagan told a journalist in Moscow in 1988, when asked whether he still considered the Soviet Union the evil empire. "I was talking about another time, another era." It was a remarkable reversal for a president who had once described the Soviet Union and communism in moral terms as evil.

  His first term pointed the other way. Reagan feared the Soviets had gained a military edge, and he hoped higher spending would give the United States superiority and strain the Soviet economy. He funded the B-1 Lancer and B-2 Spirit bombers, cruise missiles, the MX missile and a 600-ship Navy. After the Soviets deployed the SS-20, NATO placed Pershing missiles in West Germany. Talks on a treaty called START continued, aiming to cut existing arsenals rather than merely cap them as the 1970s SALT treaties had.

  In March 1983 Reagan unveiled the Strategic Defense Initiative, a plan for ground- and space-based systems to shield the country from ballistic missiles. He believed it could make nuclear war impossible. Critics called it costly and technologically unrealistic, and nicknamed it "Star Wars." The Soviets saw it as a violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and broke off talks. Relations fell to their lowest point since the early 1960s. Nuclear fear showed up in the 1983 films The Day After and WarGames, and in Nena's song "99 Luftballons." The program was canceled in 1993.

  Three Soviet leaders died between 1982 and 1985. Then Mikhail Gorbachev took charge, convinced that the country needed reform. In 1986 he introduced perestroika and glasnost, and he wanted to cut military costs and revive arms talks. Reagan, whose ambassador Jack F. Matlock Jr. said he saw nuclear weapons as "totally irrational, totally inhumane," responded warmly.

  At the 1985 Geneva Summit the two men issued a statement that neither side would "seek to achieve military superiority." They began exchanging private letters. Conservatives objected. Columnist George Will accused Reagan of "elevating wishful thinking to the status of a political philosophy."

  In October 1986 at Reykjavík, the two leaders came close to an agreement to greatly reduce or eliminate both nuclear stockpiles over ten years. It collapsed over SDI. They then agreed to pursue separate treaties for intermediate-range and strategic weapons.

  At the 1987 Washington Summit they signed the INF Treaty, which abolished their short- and medium-range missiles. It dismantled only about one-twentieth of the world's nuclear arsenal, but it was the first time either side had agreed to eliminate a type of nuclear weapon. In May 1988 the Senate ratified it by 93 votes to 5. At Gorbachev's request, Reagan then lectured on free markets at Moscow State University.

  In December 1988 Gorbachev effectively renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine, opening the way to democratization in Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, ten months after Reagan left office. At the Malta Summit the following month, the Cold War was unofficially declared over.

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