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The american nation cannot,
must not, and will not permit the
establishment of another communist government in the western hemisphere.
If America's soul totally becomes poisoned part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.
Let us be united in peace
let us also be united against defeat.
For General Electric,
here is Ronald Reagan
Good evening ladies and gentlemen tonight it's my pleasure to appear
in the General Electric theater
In 1970, attorney general John Mitchell gloated:
'This country is going so far right that you're not going to recognize it.'
But how much further to the right could the US go?
In 1970 there was Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, nuclear threats, surveillance,
sabotage, dirty tricks, official lies, racial polarization, crime,
and still to come were war on drugs, Chile and Watergate.
But compared to the world that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush
would usher in, one could almost look back nostalgically on the
Nixon era.
Right-wing forces have always operated freely and openly in
the dark chasms of American life where racism, militarism,
imperialism and blind devotion to private enterprise festered.
The raw underbelly of fanaticism has spun groups as disparate as
the Ku Klux Klan
Nazi party
the Liberty League
the American First'ers
the John Birch'ers
the McCarthyite's
and the Tea Party
spilling either hatred, bigotry or simply ignorance of history.
Beginning with Nixon's courting of a new republican south
and the success of George Wallace as a third party candidate
these forces migrated from the fringes of American politics
and the nether reaches of rationality to a new home in the republican party
which gradually banished its once thriving moderate and liberal wings.
Nixon had once said, domestic politics interested him about as much as
But on his watch, whether he liked it or not, 18 year-olds won the vote
censorship declined,
and gays and lesbians emerged from the shadows.
He established the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency
supported the equal rights amendment
and new regulations governing the health of workers
and even strengthen the voting rights act.
His former right-wing allies were belatedly recognizing that
this was not the 1950s anti-communist hatchet man Richard Nixon they had known
Though he was pulverizing southeast Asia, he horrified the right when he
turned around and, seeking to ease the stresses of US land war in Asia,
recognized red China in 1972.
And on top of that, he went to the Soviet union and signed the
historic SALT 1 treaty, placing limits on missile and anti-missile systems.
When Nixon took the country off the gold standard and imposed wage
and price controls in 1971, and then
pulled all of remaining US troops out of Vietnam in '73,
it seemed he had lost his mind and totally betrayed his base.
By the time of Watergate, Nixon had made far too many enemies
on both left and right that he could afford.
Facing a probable impeachment, he resigned on aug. 9, 1974.
The presidency was now in the hands of the amiable Gerald Ford,
a man who, Lyndon Johnson said,
could not fart and chew gum at the same time.
As we can see the Ford popularity is
certainly on a sharp rise here
Ford announced that our long national nightmare is over.
But, sending all the wrong signals, pardoned Nixon:
an absolute pardon onto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the US which he,
Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed.
But, even more troubling for the future was that, Nixon's fall
brought out the deepest impulses of rage and revenge from the core of
Nixon's new republican party.
His legendary anger became theirs,
but now directed against the government itself.
Reinvigorated by anger at a so-called liberal media which had
played such a toxic role in their mind in distorting Vietnam and
driving Nixon from the presidency,
a network of conservative think-tanks as well as rich foundations
invested large sums of money to push
for their agendas.
Among these was a radical return to the concept of privatization
that had been, in their minds, destroyed by Roosevelt's loathed new deal.
Roosevelt's old enemies, the money class, were back.
The burgeoning right-wing network had little use for a
relative moderate like Gerald Ford and itched to put a
real right-winger like former governor Reagan of California
into the white house.
Bowing to pressure, Ford and Donald Rumsfeld -a young congressman
who'd made a name attacking the Soviets in the '60s- engineered
a major cabinet check-up known as the Halloween Day Massacre in oct. '75.
Rumsfeld, who Nixon had called a ruthless little bastard, took over Defense.
Kissinger, staying on at State, lost his national security post to
gen. Brent Scowcroft
Bush took over the CIA and Dick Cheney, a protégé of Rumsfeld's,
replaced him as Chief of Staff.
Vice-president Nelson Rockefeller, a moderate, was forced off the ticket
in '76.
Rumsfeld helped block a new SALT treaty, and Ford banished the term
détente, associated now with Henry Kissinger from the white house.
But the people wanted change, and in the interest of the presidency
in 1976, the governor Jimmy Carter a former peanut farmer and long time
sunday school teacher from Plains, Georgia who narrowly defeated Ford.
Carter was anything but a typical candidate.
He sought to end the arms race, revive détente,
restore America's moral standing and learn from Vietnam, saying:
Never again shall our country become militarily involved
in the internal affairs of another nation,
unless there's a direct and obvious threat to the security of the US.
He said at the UN that the US would cut its nuclear arsenal by 50%
if the Soviets did the same.
Following his gut, Carter scored some significant early successes.
He helped secure the Camp David Accords in 1978
leading to Israeli withdrawal from
Egyptian territory captured in the 1967 war
and established diplomatic relations
between the two countries.
He negotiated a SALT 2 treaty with the Soviets
mandating a reduction in nuclear missiles
and bombers.
But Carter knew little about foreign policy and had been deeply influenced by the
ideas of Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security advisor.
An ... professor and fierce anti-communist he tapped the rising, though still little known,
Carter from membership in the
a group founded by Chase Manhattan Bank chairman David Rockefeller in 1973
to bolster the world capitalist order.
With 180 elite members and offices on 3 continents, most rejected the
rigidity of right-wing anti-communism.
But Brzezinski, like Kissinger before him, marginalized the moral liberal
secretary of State, and engineered a return
to cold war orthodoxy.
He bragged about being the first Pole in 300 years in a position
to really stick it to the Russians.
Massive US arms sales to Iran, half of all US sales worldwide,
had kept the unpopular Shah in power, and despite his dismal human rights record
Carter shared a lavish new year's eve in Tehran:
There is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal friendship.
Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability
in one of the more troubled areas of the world.
Within a year the Shah had imposed martial law, and his troops
shot down 100s in the street.
Fearing that Soviets would occupy Iran's oil fields in this chaos
Brzezinski warned Carter that the US now faced
Two months later the Shah fled for his life.
Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile demanding the Shah's return to face trial.
Carter, under pressure from Brzezinski, Kissinger and David Rockefeller
allowed the Shah into the US for medical treatment of his cancer
infuriating the Iranian public: The US embassy in Tehran has been
invaded and occupied by Iranian students.
Americans inside have been taken prisoner.
In november, students burst into the embassy and seized
52 american hostages whom they held for 444 days,
effectively destroying Carter's presidency.
Crises seemed to be flaring all over.
Central america, after suffering decades of poverty, brutality and corruption
under US backed right-wing dictators, was ready to explode by the late 1970s.
In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas seized power in july of '79
Latin America’s first successful revolution
since Cuba's 20 years earlier
and began an ambitious program of land, education and health reform.
Brzezinski argued for military intervention
fearing the revolutionary ... would establish forces in neighboring
Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador where 40 families had ruled for over a century.
Right-wing death squad murders and tortures increased
and the progressive Salvadorian archbishop Oscar Romero
was assassinated in 1980.
Later that year the FMLN insurgents were
on the brink of another successful revolution
when Carter, pressured by Brzezinski, restored significant needed military aid
to the government.
Another storm was brewing in Afghanistan,
an impoverished remnant from the British empire where
life expectancy was 40 years.
Only 1 in 10 could read and most lived as no-man's or farmers
in muddy villages scarcely different from when Alexander the Great
had passed through 2000 years before.
It was in july 1979 that Brzezinski had
Carter sign a little known directive
for secret aid to the Islamic fundamentalist opponents
of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.
In that day Brzezinski proudly noted that
His intention was to drag them into their own Vietnam.
Brzezinski understood the Soviet's fear that the
Afghan insurgency might spark an uprising by the 40 million muslims
in Soviet central asia.
He compared it in its effect on the US to a communist insurgency in Mexico.
The Soviets concluded correctly that the americans were instigating the insurgency.
possibly with help from China.
But they still hesitated to intervene.
Veteran foreign minister Gromyko knew that
With their top heavy bureaucratically ossified economy stagnating,
the Soviets saw arms control as their chance to finally escape
the wartime treadmill.
The provocation worked.
President Brezhnev, a Stalin unimaginative Soviet leader
insisting the war would be over in 3 to 4 weeks, launched
a full scale invasion of 80,000 Soviet troops into Afghanistan
on christmas day 1979.
The inexperienced Carter hyperbolically called the invasion
the greatest threat to world peace since WW2.
A NY Times columnist felt compelled to remind them of the Berlin blockade,
the Korean war, the Suez crisis, Cuban missile crisis, and
the war in Vietnam.
Carter withdrew the US ambassador and took SALT 2 off the table.
He cut trade between the two countries,
banned US athletes from the upcoming Moscow olympics
and sent his defense secretary ... Chinese leaders about
military ties.
He effectively extended the Truman doctrine to the
adjacent Persian gulf region, including Iran
which now would be regarded as a US vital interest.
Muslim nations condemned the Soviet aggression.
Saudi Arabia sent money, and thousands of young muslims
from all over the middle east now began the journey to Afghanistan
for jihad, holy war against the Soviet infidels.
Brzezinski traveled to meet with the dictators of Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia to work out financial and military aid for the holy warriors
who were particularly upset over the Soviet supported
government's reforms to emancipate and educate their women.
Brzezinski has repeatedly denied having any regrets about
fueling Islamic fundamentalism which would blow back against US on 9/11
and plague it for years to come.
because your cause is right and God is on your side.
Later he would say:
What is more important in world history? Taliban or the collapse of
the Soviet empire? Some agitated muslims or the liberation of
central europe and the end of the cold war?
At what price?
In seeking to destroy the Soviet empire, Brzezinski instead destroyed
Jimmy Carter's presidency.
Carter never fulfilled his promise to reduce defense spending
increasing it from 115 billion to 180 billion.
Carter more than doubled the number of warheads aimed at Soviet union.
Carter even repudiated his earlier criticism of the Vietnam war.
Vietnam veterans became
Carter's policies ironically in the end laid the groundwork for the even
more extreme actions that Ronald Reagan would bring to the white house.
It's morning again in America. Today more men and women
will go to work than ever before in our country's history.
With interest rates and inflation down more people are buying new homes
and new families can have confidence in the future.
America today is prouder, and stronger, and better.
Why would we want to return to where we were
less than 4 short years ago?
There's never been a president quite like Ronald Reagan with his
charm, humor, elegant good looks and driving compulsion to
transform America into a conservative fortress.
A foxy home-spun actor turned General Electric pitchman,
Reagan served 8 years as California's governor.
He was underrated by many as a B-actor in Hollywood,
and titled his first autobiography 'where's the rest of me?'
based on his 1942 movie Kings Row, a gothic classic about small town America.
In the film, his legs were amputated by his girlfriend's sadistic surgeon father.
The film marked his transition from new deal liberal to cold war conservative.
He had discovered his missing half in his fight against communism;
a fight that, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, turned him into a highly
public crusader against the red menace as well as a secret FBI informer
who denounced colleagues as communists.
Political consultant Roger Ailes who would later create Fox News,
drawing on tactics he'd developed with Richard Nixon, reminded the
73 year-old Reagan 'he got elected on themes, not details';
happy thoughts like Morning in America,
or the puritan belief that America was the shining city on a hill.
His critics were 'defeatists who would blame America first'
or there were dark fictional themes such as
We're in greater danger today than we were in the day after Pearl Harbor.
Our military is absolutely incapable of defending this country.
The facts never quite mattered if there was a good punch line.
He loved to repeat the story about the Chicago welfare queen
with 80 names, 30 addresses and 12 social security cards
who had a tax-free income of 150,000 dollars.
He preferred films to reading and had visual aids, especially prepared
on issues such as the Soviet threat or the problem in the middle east.
For meetings even with a few people in the room, Reagan would
read his lines like an actor from 3x5 index cards.
At one meeting with US automobile leaders he read from the wrong cards
until he finally caught on.
He liked to go home to his beloved wife Nancy punctually
late in the afternoon, exercise, eat dinner in his pyjamas, watch TV
and be in bed early.
There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable,
that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.
General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace,
if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,
if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate.
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
Less than 2.5 years later, the wall did indeed come crashing down.
And by 1991 the Soviet empire had collapsed.
The cold war was over. Many credit Reagan with winning it.
Admirers lionized him as the greatest president since WW2,
one of the greatest ever.
But the real story is far more complex.
Reagan left behind a bloody trail of death and destruction,
but also came excruciatingly close to achieving enduring greatness.
Reagan's disengaged style and lack of foreign policy experience left a void that
the administration's anti-communist hawks scrambled to fill.
Leading the pack was William Casey.
The movies could not have invented a man like Casey.
A catholic knight of Malta, he attended mass daily and
proclaimed Christianity to anyone who asked his advice.
Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion on Long Island.
He'd been the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and before that
he'd worked with the OSS.
According to Casey's deputy Robert Gates the Reaganites saw their arrival as a
hostile takeover.
Casey had read Claire Sterling's ... The Terror Network, and was convinced
that Soviet union was behind international terrorism
including the recent assassination attempt on the Polish born Pope
and a fellow catholic.
The head of the CIA's office for Soviet analysis Melvin Goodman
said that much of Sterling's evidence was based on black propaganda
anti-communist allegations that the CIA itself had planted in the european press.
Yet, Casey told analysts that he'd learned more from Sterling than
from all of them.
Al Hague, the hardcore secretary of State, agreed and thought
the Soviets had tried to assassinate him when he was the head of NATO in europe.
Experts knew that the Soviets actually disapproved of terrorism
and had not supported the nihilist terrorist groups of western europe.
But Casey and Gates purged analysts who refused to knuckle under,
crippling the agency in such a way that, when the Soviet union fell apart
later in the decade, the agency was unable to predict it.
At his first press conference using the language of John F. Dulles
and James Forrestal, Reagan quickly reversed almost 2 decades of progress
in easing cold war tensions when he declared
that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause
meaning they reserve under themselves the right to commit any crime
to lie, to cheat in order to attain that
America's morality, he insisted, was different:
I'd always felt that from our deeds it must be clear to anyone that
Americans were a moral people who had always used our power only as a force
for good in the world.
In reality, Reagan's election encouraged right-wing elites throughout the 3rd world
to take back perceived losses of land or power resulting from
indecisive American leadership since Vietnam.
The methods would be cruel.
The colonel who headed the US advisory team in El Salvador said
an apt description of US leaders' efforts to test their new post-Vietnam
counter-insurgency doctrines and defeat uprisings without
a large commitment of US forces.
Many top Salvadoran, Honduran and Guatemalan army officers were trained
at the US Army School of the Americas in Panama, and then after 1984
Fort Benning in Georgia.
The emphasis on counter-insurgency techniques honed from Vietnam
was expanded.
Visiting neighboring Honduras in 1982 Reagan met with Guatemalan president
gen. Efrain Rios Montt, a born-again evangelical Christian
who'd recently seized power in a coup.
Reagan complained that Montt had received a bum rap:
I know that president Rios Montt is a man of great personal integrity
and commitment.
Roughly 100,000 Mayan peasants living in the region of leftist insurgency
would be killed between 1981 and '83 by the Guatemalan army.
Across the Nicaraguan border in Honduras, former members of
Somoza's thuggish national guard gathered with Casey's assistance.
They plotted a return to power. They called themselves the
counter-revolutionaries or Contras.
The war began in march of 1982. Congress then banned the use of
government funds to overthrow the Sandinista government.
But Casey and NSC official Oliver North concocted a plot right out of WW2 OSS days;
an elaborate, illegal operation aided by Israeli arms dealers. The US sold missiles to
its enemies in Iran at exorbitant prices and used the profits to fund the Contras
with Latin American drug dealers often serving as intermediaries and receiving
easier access to American markets in return.
The 15,000 men Contra army employing kidnapping, torture,
rape and murder, targeted health clinics schools, agricultural cooperatives,
bridges and power stations.
I was aware that resistance was receiving funds directly from
third countries and from private efforts, and I endorsed those
endeavors wholeheartedly. But let me put this in capital letters
I did not know about the diversion of funds.
Reagan and Casey lied to Congress about what the CIA was up to.
According to his deputy Gates, Casey was guilty of contempt of
Congress from the day he was sworn in.
Reagan defended the covert war by saying in 1984:
The Nicaraguan people are trapped in a totalitarian dungeon by a
dictatorship made all the more dangerous by the unwanted
presence of thousands of Cuban, Soviet block and radical Arab helpers.
He went so far as to call the Contras
the moral equivalent of our founding fathers.
His moral equivalence were responsible for most of the
deaths of the 20 to 30,000 Nicaraguan civilians during the war.
Similar atrocities occurred in neighboring
El Salvador, where US trained troops stabbed
de-capitated, raped and machine gunned 767 civilians in the village of El Mozote
in late 1981, including 358 children under age 13.
Congress ended up funneling almost
$6 billion to this tiny country
making it the largest recipient of US
foreign aid per capita in the world.
Wealthy landlords were running the right-wing death squads
that murdered thousands of suspected leftists.
The death toll from the war reached 70,000.
I go, alright, just take her
If you send her back they will kill her, rape her, mutilate her
You don't know what it's like in El Salvador.
The Salvadoran population of US expanded 5 times, to half a million
by 1990, many of these illegal entries.
Yet, Nicaraguan supposedly fleeing communist oppression, if not the
Contra war, were allowed into the US.
Many Salvadorans would turn back.
Bogged down in protracted proxy wars in Nicaragua and
El Salvador, and haunted by the memory of defeat in Vietnam which he called
a noble cause, Reagan hungered for an easy military victory to
restore Americans' self-confidence.
In 1983 a powerful truck bomb set off by the anti-Israeli terrorist
organization Hezbollah, the Al-Qaeda of its time,
blew up a US Marine barracks in Lebanon leaving 241 dead
and dealing another devastating blow to US pride.
Two days later US troops invaded not Lebanon, but Grenada
a tiny Caribbean island with 100,000 inhabitants.
Reagan claimed it was a Soviet-Cuban colony being
readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy
We got there just in time.
As in one of his old Westerns, he sent 7,000 american soldiers into battle.
Then in media, supposedly for their own safety, he offered government
footage instead. The entire op was bungled from the start.
19 soldiers died and more than 100 were wounded, as a
small force of poorly armed Cuban
construction workers resisted.
9 helicopters were lost.
The invasion from a military POV was a farce, with the Army
awarding almost 275 medals for valor to 7,000 troops of whom
only about 2500 saw a limited form of combat.
Well lt. what are we waiting for?
Alright you devil dogs let's take this fucking hell
Reagan proudly announced: our days of weakness are over.
our military forces are back on their feet and standing tall.
Halfway across the world, Reagan and Casey transformed Carter's
limited support for the Afghan insurgents into the CIA's largest
covert operation to date, totalling over $3 billion.
They channeled aid through Pakistan's general Zia,
a corrupt dictator who funneled the arms and dollars to the most
extreme Afghan-Islamist faction under Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
a man of legendary cruelty whose forces were rumored to
patrol the bazaars of Kabul throwing viles of acid in the
faces of women not wearing full burkas
and specialized in skinning prisoners alive.
The CIA provided the insurgents between 2000-2500 US made
Stinger missiles.
The US helped both sides in the bloody Iran-Iraq war.
Reagan in 1983 sent special envoy Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad
to re-assure Saddam Hussein of US support.
Under a license from the commerce committee
US companies shipped several strains of anthrax later used in
Iraq's biological weapons program and insecticides for chemical warfare.
As president, Reagan persisted in the scare talk:
So in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals
I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely
declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault
to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an
evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding
and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong
and good and evil. Let us be aware that, while
they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over
individual man and predict its eventual domination of all peoples
on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.
In late '82, although US was ahead in every meaningful category, he said:
Today, in virtually every measure of military power, the Soviet union
enjoys a decided advantage.
And he amped up the defense spending which, by 1985, had increased 35%
over 1980 expenditures.
The US arsenal now contained 11,200 strategic warheads, to the Soviet's 9,900
New and upgraded weapon systems rolled off assembly lines including the
long delayed and very costly MX program which moved missiles
around loops that hid their precise location, making them invulnerable
to a Soviet first strike.
Despite massive protests throughout Europe, the US deployed
ground launched cruise missiles to Britain, and Pershing 2 missiles
to west Germany in november '83.
Some Soviet officials were convinced that a US attack was imminent
as relations reached their lowest point in more than 2 decades.
To finance this, he slashed federal support for discretionary programs
effectively transferring 70 billion from domestic programs to the military.
He waged war on labor and the poor:
If they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have
forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.
busting the Air Traffic Controllers union, meanwhile giving
elegant parties in the white house
for his millionaire friends.
A sense of the 1890's Gilded Age,
the Four Hundred of American Society returned to Washington.
In june of '82 almost a million people rallied against the arms
race in NY City's Central Park.
Among them was a young Colombia undergraduate named Barack Obama.
The movement unnerved Reagan
who saw it as a serious threat
to his re-election.
Despite all his bluster, Reagan too feared the possibility of war
which he associated with the biblical armageddon. After
watching the enormously popular 1983 ABC tv movie The Day After
Reagan wrote in his diary that it
Whether influenced by his wife or her astrologer we don't know,
but concerned about the bad blood he may have engendered
Reagan began to rethink his approach to the Soviet union.
He later wrote in his memoirs:
3 years had taught me something surprising about the Russians.
Many were genuinely afraid of America and Americans.
Incredibly, if this diary is to be believed, it had never dawned
on president Reagan that the Soviets might indeed fear a
US first strike.
Hoping possibly to appease the growing anti-nuclear sentiment
in march of 1983, Reagan proposed the strategic defense initiative, SDI
a space-based defense shield around the nation itself;
or as his critics called it, Star Wars.
It isn't about retaliation, it's about prevention.
It isn't about fear, it's about hope.
And in that struggle, if you'll pardon my stealing a film line,
the force is with us.
The fantasy of star wars became an enormously expensive
anti-ballistic missile system.
Despite the fact that no such Soviet project existed, the pentagon had
begun research in the 1970s to counter a supposed Soviet
breakthrough in energy beam weaponry.
In march of 1985, an extraordinary development changed
the course of history.
A 54 year-old agricultural expert like Henry Wallace years before
Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet union.
Like Khrushchev, he had survived with his diplomacy, with luck
and with a rare degree of honesty, a brutal obstacle course of inefficiency
and lies.
He'd travelled wildly in the west and, like Khrushchev, sought above all
to improve the lifes of his people.
He saw the problem with clarity.
To achieve parity with the US, the Soviets were spending nearly
a quarter of their gross domestic product on defense.
Defense production consumed a highly disproportionate amount
of the Soviet budget.
Their planned economy, which had stagnated since the late 1970s,
was run by a military-industrial academic establishment
immune from reality.
To revitalize society, he knew he would have to slash military spending.
Gorbachev set out to end the arms race and redeploy resources.
He also took steps to end the war in Afghanistan,
a conflict, he thought, from the beginning was a fatal error and a bleeding wound.
As a very young man he'd witnessed the horrors of war,
and in a series of extraordinary letters to Reagan proposed,
like Henry Wallace 40 years earlier, friendship and peaceful competition.
Reagan responded encouragingly.
The two leaders met for the first time in Geneva in november '85
connecting on a human level, if not a political one.
Gorbachev continued writing letters through 1986 calling for
the elimination of all nuclear weapons by 2000.
It didn't change Reagan's mindset.
The US announced plans for a new series of nuclear tests and
increased support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan.
In oct. '86 Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavik, Iceland
The 2 leaders would come within a few words of changing history forever.
Gorbachev offered a stunningly bold set of disarmament proposals.
Even Paul Nitze, who had done so much to harm relations
between 2 countries, observed that the Soviet proposal was
Nitze and secretary of State George Schultz urged Reagan to accept a
sweeping arms control deal.
Reagan turned to hardliner Richard Perle who feared such
a deal would strengthen the Soviet economy.
Perle warned that the agreement would effectively kill Reagan's SDI
or Star Wars plan.
Perle and other advisors knew Reagan's vision of SDI was a pipe dream,
a fantasy. Only Reagan believed it would work.
When negotiations stalled, Gorbachev urged Reagan to act boldly.
Reagan shocked observers, 'it would be fine' he said, 'if we eliminated
all nuclear weapons'. Schultz agreed: let's do it.
Gorbachev said he was ready to eliminate nuclear weapons if Reagan restricted SDI
testing to the laboratory for 10 years.
Gorbachev and Soviet scientists knew that SDI would do nothing to
protect US from a full scale Soviet attack, but feared
US moves to weaponize space and recoiled at the thought of giving up
the anti-ballistic missile treaty, the only tangible constraint upon the arms race.
Reagan explained that confining tests to the laboratory would damage him
politically at home. They had reached an impasse.
The meeting ended. As they were leaving the building Gorbachev tried one last time
Mr. president, I'm prepared to go back inside right now and sign
the documents we already agreed upon if you drop your plans to militarize space.
Reagan answered reportedly: I'm very sorry.
The US and Russia had come within a hair's breadth of beginning the
process of eliminating nuclear weapons
thwarted by a Star Wars fantasy, that had hardly entered the lab. in 1986.
Gorbachev was furious and blamed the failure on Reagan's plan to exhaust
the Soviet union economically through an arms race the US
subsequently spent well over $100 billion, with final cost projected
to exceed $1 trillion.
With the issue of multiple decoys overwhelming this system,
among other issues, the creation of an effective Strategic Defensive Initiative
to this day is still highy uncertain.
Both sides hoped to revive the talks, but before that could happen
a scandal that same month rocked Reagan's administration.
In oct. of '86 a cargo plane was shot down over at Nicaragua
the only survivor admitted it was a CIA operation.
Congressional hearings revealed an administration up to its eyeballs
in illegality, corruption, blundering and subterfuge involving American
hostages in Lebanon, arms sales to both Iraq and Iran, ill-fated attempts
to cultivate non-existent moderates in Tehran and collaboration with a
whole set of unsavory characters including Manuel Noriega in Panama.
In a flagrant violation on Congress' ban on government support to
overthrowing the Nicaraguan government,
Americans also learned that the CIA mined
Nicaraguan harbors which provoked the conservative icon
sen. Barry Goldwater to scold Bill Casey
I'm pissed off, he wrote, this is an act of violating international law
it's an act of war.
Details of the murky convoluted operation consumed much of Reagan's last 2 years.
Pathetically he told a news conference that he was not fully informed of the
Iran policy, one aspect of which was seriously flawed.
that so much of this can go on and the president not know it,
he is the president of the US, why doesn't he know?
because somebody didn't tell him, that's why
It was apparent that he had little grasp of and less control over
what his underlings were up to:
A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade
arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me
that's true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.
As the Tower board reported, what began as a strategic opening to Iran
deteriorated in its implementation into trading arms for hostages.
This runs counter to my own beliefs, to administration policy
and to the original strategy we had in mind.
There are reasons why it happened. But no excuses. It was a mistake.
As an apology, it wouldn't have worked for Nixon. But, perhaps
Ronald Reagan had too kindly an aura to have to defend himself
much less go to prison.
And the Washington establishment apparently concluded that
the country could not withstand another impeachment or forced resignation
and thus, allowed Reagan to serve out his term.
He left office a befuddled old man.
His subordinates were not so lucky.
Among those convicted of crimes were
2 national security advisors, one of whom
attempted suicide, as well as Oliver North
and asst. secretary of State Elliott Abrams
who would re-emerge in the 2nd Bush administration.
Defense secretary Weinberger, Abrams and
several others were convicted or indicted, but pardoned by the next president.
The CIA director cheated his fate, dying of a brain tumor the day after
the hearings began.
Vice-president George Bush managed to avoid prosecution. He insisted he was
but in his private diary, which he never thought he'd be forced to release,
he admitted before the scandal began to break
As a result, the independent council's final report noted the criminal
investigation of Bush was regrettably incomplete.
In the midst of this sordid affair Gorbachev wanting to salvage
something came to Washington in dec. '87 and signed the
intermediate range nuclear forces treaty, a major milestone.
It was the first agreement ever to destroy an entire class of nuclear weapons
one in which the Soviet union had superiority.
In Afghanistan, Soviet withdrawal began in may 1988.
When the Soviets sought it out the US on collaborating to curb Islamic extremism
the US, having achieved its goals, washed its hands of the problems
that it had helped to create.
Up to 20,000 Arabs had flooded into Pakistan to join the jihad
against the Soviet infidels,
among them a very young Saudi construction heir
able to support an army of volunteers, Osama Bin Ladin.
Thousands more flocked to Pakistan's madrasas where
they were indoctrinated in radical Islam and recruited for jihad
often with books produced in Omaha, Nebraska, with USAID funding
and distributed by the CIA.
The Saudi's in the 1980s spent $75 billion to spread their brand of
Wahabi extremism.
A million Afghans had died in the war.
5 million, 1/3 of the population had fled to Pakistan and Iran.
In the late '80s Islamists linked to Pakistani intelligence seized control
of Afghanistan.
One Rand Corp. analyst said that the US had to throw the worst crazies
against the Soviets. The reason we don't have moderate leaders in
Afghanistan today is because we let the nuts kill them all.
Among the victims of these American armed and trained fanatics
were Afghan women who were driven back into the dark ages.
Warned repeatedly that the fanaticism he was unleashing would threaten
US interests, Bill Casey insisted the partnership between Christianity
and Islam would endure,
and in the spring of 1985 even backed the mujahideen
cross-border raids into the Soviet union
and the hopes inciting Soviet muslims to revolt.
Although Reagan left office in near disgrace, conservatives have annointed him
as one the nation's great presidents crediting him with restoring America's
faith in itself, after the failed presidencies of Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter.
But, what is Reagan's real legacy?
Once a Roosevelt democrat, he developed an extreme contempt
for government that was legendary.
Yet, he spent enormous sums on the military while cutting social
programs for the poor.
He reduced taxes on the wealthy,
doubled both the military budget and the national debt,
and in a revolutionary change transformed the US from the
world's leading creditor nation in 1981 into the biggest debtor nation
by 1985.
He deregulated industries, eroded environmental standards,
defiantly ripping down the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had put
on the white house roof,
weakened the middle class, busted unions,
heightened the racial divides, widened the gap between
rich and poor
greed, for lack of a better word, is good
and abetted companies in shipping manufacturing jobs abroad.
He deregulated savings and loans institutions, which led to the
first giant too-big-to-fail government bail-outs of
troubled banks, and failed savings and loans which by
1995 would cost the taxpayers
87 billion dollars.
Under the guise of privatization and Reagan's extolling of market's forces
Wall st. went on an enormous greed-is-good looting binge
that resulted in oct. 1987 in the worst stock market collapse
since the great depression.
In a parting gift to future conservatives in 1987 the FCC, with Reagan's help,
repealed the fairness doctrine which had required broadcasters
since 1940's to give adequate and fair coverage to opposing views
on issues of public importance.
As a result, Rush Limbaugh and talk radio exploded on the scene
finding a massive audience.
This and the gradual loosening of the limitations on the number
of stations a company could own had, by 1996, enabled the growth
of a right-wing media empire.
With it came a number of interlocked well-funded conservative think tanks
that helped shape a new Washington group think.
Playing up fears, resentments and hatred of government by the end
of the '90s Clear Channel, Rupert Murdoch's Fox News,
Talk Radio Network, Salem Radio,
the USA Radio Network, and Radio America
as well as the proliferation of cable TV networks had created
a movement that would dramatically lower the standards of
Amerian political discourse, and
in general doomed prospects for progressive change.
The Hoover institution at Stanford a respected conservative mecca
described Reagan as a man whose spirit seems to stride over the country
watching us like a warm and friendly ghost.
Even democratic presidents like Clinton and Obama, whether
pandering to conservative forces or suffering from historical amnesia,
would bow to pressure to flaunt their religiosity, extol the virtues of
a free capitalist market place, perpetuate the myth of the universal
middle class and trumpet the notion of American exceptionalism.
They would feed the insaitable appetite of the military-industrial
complex, expand the search for threatening enemies at home and
abroad, and move heaven and earth to maintain the resulting empire.
Even in Nicaragua, those scolded Reagan won the long contra war, wrecking its
economy and exhausting the local population who would soon lose faith
in the Sandinista's ability to bring progress to the country.
By 1990, the religious pro-Washington candidate
helped by US funding as well as its embargo
triumphed in a democratic election
allowed by the supposedly communist Sandinistas who stepped aside peacefully.
As far as Reagan's much ... role in winning the cold war,
the lion's share of credit goes to Mikhail Gorbachev,
a true visionary, and it turns out the real democrat.
If Reagan had entered into the sincere partnership offered by Gorbachev
as Roosevelt did with Stalin in WW2
the world would have been transformed.
But Ronald Reagan, at the least, let the chance to rid the world of
nuclear weapons slip through his fingers because he wouldn't
let go of a space fantasy.
Appreciating Gorbachev's extraordinary effort, the leading Soviet expert on US
warned his American counterparts: We will do the most horrible thing to you.
We will leave you without an enemy.
Unfortunately, he was wrong.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
A totalitarianism and a brutality that is naked and unprecedented
in modern times.
And that must not stand.