As a description of the public consensus at the time, your statements are reasonably accurate.
I think the guys at the top were plenty involved, but I don’t think there’s any way now to establish what Reagan knew and when. You’ve described the situation pretty well though, the corruption starts at the top. Everyone in the food chain will want to cash in on it after that.
Note: I am not intoxicated. Sadly my plans didn’t work out that well.
I watched Oliver North and his secretary testify, remember agreeing she was hot, but can’t really comment on the allegations. I will offer my views on the participants.
Ronald Reagan - The role of this overrated man might be compared to King Henry II’s “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”, the difference being that Reagan’s quote was “(mumble mumble) What are the early symptoms of Alzheimers again?”
Oliver North - I actually admired the guy. :smack: I didn’t agree with his politics, but his serving his Commander-in-Chief seemed a refreshing change from other Beltway actors who are mostly concerned with their personal greed. My acceptance of North did not endear me to my liberal friends.
John Poindexter - He was a major villain in the affair but, despite being convicted of multiple felonies (overturned on appeal), went on to a high post in the GWB administration, planning ways to usurp Americans’ privacy.
A despicable irony, of course, is that Iran-Contra was about helping terrorists and was committed by the same cast of characters now only wanting to speak of their “War on Terrorism.” Would that they wage war against themselves!
The thing about Reagan is going back to his time as Governor of California his “management philosophy” was that the chief executive’s job was not to be a micromanager. He saw himself more as a “big ideas man” who would define broad strokes but give vast power to subordinates.
Under Reagan the White House Chief of Staff probably was at its zenith of power, some people have referred to James Baker as a “Prime Minister”, and all of Reagan’s staff and cabinet had a lot more autonomy than is normal in an American Presidency.
What this means is with Reagan it is genuinely very hard to know if he had given orders or if he was unaware of something, his management style makes it credible that he wouldn’t be aware of a lot of things. At the same time, if his Alzheimer’s had started to effect him as early as 1985, then that could also factor in to his not being aware of what was going on under him.
This contrasted a lot with Nixon, who was an obsessive-compulsive micromanager and who was caught on tape talking about the minutiae of his big scandal. I’m willing to bet if we had recordings of all of Reagan’s conversations with Robert McFarlane, Admiral Poindexter, and any other National Security Council people we’d never have heard anything as damning as we heard on the Watergate tapes. Even if Reagan directly ordered this stuff, I know just from Reagan’s personality and his management style he would never have been involved in the details (like Nixon was with Watergate.)
As I recall, the general situation was that the people at the bottom were caught doing things that were illegal. But the general claim was that they were following orders from people above them. The public consensus was that it wasn’t right to punish the people at the bottom who were following orders while ignoring those at the top who gave the orders. So rather than punishing those who were caught, the investigation tried to focus on following the trail upwards to find out who initiated these programs.
At the top you had Reagan and his cabinet officials. None of the low level guys had attended cabinet meetings so they couldn’t testify about what people said. These guys at the top had plausible deniability - nobody could ever prove that they had directly ordered anything illegal. They just made suggestions that it would be nice if some things were to happen and people below them actually made these things happen.
Somewhere in the middle you had the people who actually gave the orders. The ones who said “Let’s do this thing.” But nobody could ever prove who these people were. Everyone was able to either point the finger upwards to somebody above them and downwards to somebody below them and divert responsibility from themselves. Everybody acknowledged that crimes had been committed but nobody could determine who decided to commit the crimes.
To answer one questions the OP asked, “Did Oliver North really volunteer to take the blame?” the answer is no. He claims he made that offer but he certainly never followed through. In reality North took an immunity offer and testified against his superiors. That’s the reason he wasn’t sent to prison.
Thanks so much for all the input and insight. It makes sense to me, a little anyway, why Reagan didn’t come out as bad as I had originally thought he should with public perception and historical greatness.
However, Warren Harding is widely regarded to be one of the worst presidents of all time, not necessarily because of any corruption on his part, but because his cabinet was quite corrupt and his management style allowed for it.
Why isn’t Reagan held accountable for the actions of his inferiors like historians do for Harding? Even if Reagan only gave broad, general directives and didn’t micromanage, it’s still ostensibly his fault to some extent, just like in Harding’s case, am I right? Do we give him a pass JUST because the cold war happened to end?
I’ve always personally enjoyed a lot of Reagan’s quotes and speeches I’ve seen/read, so I have nothing against him, and even though I lean to the left, I’ve always respected him. I’m really trying to understand the whole affair and see if maybe I shouldn’t hold him in as high esteem as I do.
The simple reason: People are idiots. I wish that didn’t sound the way it does, but that’s it. Unfailingly, human beings prefer a comfortable lie to distressful truth. The US was in decline because of foolish behavior in the 60s and 70s, and Reagan offered an optimistic vision of America based on lies. He didn’t improve the economy, he raised taxes, he sent the national debt and deficit spending into the stratosphere, he failed to see the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union, and propped it up with economic opportunites, he sent Marines on a suicide mission to Lebanon, he was asleep at the switch while the AIDS epidemic swept across the country. But the common thread that ran through his vision still infects the conservative movement in this country: Our failings aren’t our own fault, they’re someone elses. Blaming it on someone else makes you feel better, and if you feel better, then the economy must be good, the world is safer, and prosperity is just around the corner.
:smack: It’s so frustrating. And then the other part of it that is so fishy is how many records and documents were destroyed, and then how Bush evidently pardoned anyone who was left with convictions in the last few days of his presidency. WTF? It’s so despicable. Nobody in the end was held responsible for their actions, and there was so much cover up, nobody really knows the truth, and it’s frustrating. In the absence of any other evidence, and in light of the massive cover up, it seems that Reagan should definitely be held responsible for this, and Bush should be ashamed for pardoning the few people who actually had convictions that stuck. It’s like he was saying “yeah we sanctioned all of this and you’re good to go now.”
Not even that much excuse. The cold war was still going on when Reagan left office.
Reagan was just an incredibly charismatic person. But there was almost no substance below the surface. I started a thread a few months back asking people who liked Reagan what specifically he had done as President they thought was good. And all the posts came down to either “feel good” stuff like “he made America proud again” or things which hadn’t actually happened like “he reduced the government/won the cold war/balanced the budget”.
Harding has been dead almost 100 years now, history won’t write dispassionately about Reagan for a long time. Hell, history doesn’t write dispassionately about Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson yet. Napoleon has been alternatively considered the world’s first modern era dictator and one of history’s great men, and the academic consensus on him has fluctuated wildly from one generation to the next.
What helps with analyzing Harding’s presidency is it was short and no one really gave much of a shit about Warren Harding then, let alone right now. It’s easy for historians 80, 90, 100 years later to write in an unbiased manner about a President who never inspired anyone, was never a great part of history, and was never really anyone’s favorite son.
Further, the Iran-Contra scandal in the grand scheme of things isn’t as big as many other scandals. The amount of money involved is small, and if it went down as the public believes it did, it wasn’t as nefarious as most other scandals.
Nixon was using the power of the Presidency to illegally destroy political opponents. A common and oft-repeated lie is that “Nixon didn’t do anything other Presidents haven’t, he’s just the only one who got caught.” That isn’t true at all, the scary thing about Nixon is he was illegally using the power of the Presidency to win reelection (I think the only reason the truly sinister nature of this act hasn’t ever been as fully recognized is because Nixon would have beaten McGovern without any of the dirty tricks because McGovern was a failure of a political candidate), and he continued to use the power in a manner that essentially undermined our very democratic system.
Harding’s schemes involved huge sums of money for that time, and while Harding wasn’t involved with any of them his supervision of his cabinet is probably even worse than was Reagan’s. One of Harding’s appointees literally fled the country with a briefcase stuffed with $1 million in cash (back when that was “real walking around money.”) Under the Harding Administration graft was at such a point it is almost fair to say if he hadn’t died on that tour to Alaska the entire United States may have been sold off piece by piece to the highest bidder by the end of Harding’s four year term.
Plus, there is no “but he did…” to counterbalance Harding’s reputation. With Lincoln we have many abuses of power but a mountain of good things that most people feel counterbalanced all of that. Many people are very much pro-Reagan and thus his faults do not exist in a vacuum. If Harding had been a great President who had cabinet members that were involved in graft he’d be rated much higher. But he was essentially a short-term do nothing President whose cabinet was engaged in graft.
True. People think well of Grant and Truman even though their presidential administrations had a lot of corruption in them. But neither man was personally corrupt and they’re remembered for other genuine accomplishments. In Harding’s case, he was pretty much chosen to be a figurehead so there’s nothing to counterbalance the corruption that went on around him.
Oliver North was a Marine, not a soldier as is stated in the song. There is a difference.
No one has yet mentioned the letters which spell Ronald Wilson Reagan can be rearranged to spell “insane anglo warlord” with no letters left over. Spooky, eh? For those of you who don’t know, the word “anglo” is used by Hispanics to mean “white guy”.
Hahaha… And if you count the letters in each of his names you get 6 6 6!!!
Seriously though, what GOOD did Reagan do? Other than be Charismatic, what accomplishments help him be remembered so well? As far as I know he was strong on defense, and the economy improved under his presidency (I think), but can we really point to anything Reagan actually did as an accomplishment, like we can do for Grant (civil war leader) or Lincoln (keeping the country together, freeing slaves, etc)? I know that deficits skyrocketed under Reagan, and he also cut a lot of welfare and social programs for mentally ill people, right? Is this why we consider him to be great?
Bringing an end to the cold war is commonly attributed to Reagan, whether he actually did or the Soviet Union would have imploded no matter who was our president is irrelevant since it’s the perception.
In the heirarchy of scandals, it’s expected politicians will lie. It’s expected they’re greedy. It’s expected that they have trouble keeping their pants up if they see a pretty intern. Watergate was something more. It was an attempt to undermine a foundation of our democracy, free elections. Nixon’s main accomplishment was negotiating for us to quit a war that we didn’t have the political will to win; not enough to overall be judged favorably at the time or by history.
While I’m not by any means a Reagan supporter, I’m confused by part of your logic chain:
How does giving, not selling, make a profit for anyone? Or are you saying US tax money was used to purchase arms from Us corporations, which were then given away?
Martin Hyde, concur with your summary of why Nixon’s actions were so offensive, although I would have substituted “intentionally” where you wrote “essentially.”
Your otherwise solid-looking summary of Iran-Contra did not address the mining of the Nicaraguan harbors, unless I missed it. That’s the part that always gets me – the use of explosives to kill and destroy property to influence political decisions – isn’t that our definition of “terrorist?”
Okay, this is somewhat difficult for me to admit, but I have to give Reagan some credit for his nuclear strategy. I recently readRichard Rhodes’ book, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. Rhodes, not apparently a fan of Reagan, nevertheless describes in detail the negotiations that led to the Reykjavík Summit. Reagan, in true “big idea man” fashion as Martin Hyde described, apparently really did dream of eradicating all nuclear weapons and ending the threat hanging over mankind. It might not have been practical, and it did not come about, and most of the serious concessions were initiated by Gorbachev…but he dreamed big and reached for an ideal, and he even tried to resist the machinations of his advisers, although ultimately (tragically) he did not overcome them. (It’s true that hanging onto the SDI program was a cherished idea of Reagan’s which sabotaged his larger goal, but his advisers cynically played on his fondness for SDI to keep him from eliminating nukes, and if I read the book right, there was a point in the negotiations where it’s possible to imagine he might have made the concession after all, given different advice.) So he comes across as a little, tiny bit of a tragic hero for that, despite his other cynicisms and failings.)
Sorry, that wasn’t real clear. This started as an arms deal. Someone in Iran had money, US arms manufacturers had weapons, an arms dealer wanted to make the sale and take a percentage for profit. The missing piece was permission from the US government to allow this transfer of arms. Everything else about moderates, hostages, and Contras came after the fact to justify the sale, and then after it was uncovered, to provide a justification. It’s not that I know that for fact, I just know that all the evidence to the contrary came from people who were criminally culpable, and Iran, and I don’t believe them. It doesn’t make sense. If the US thought we could trade arms for hostages, why would we need an intermediary to do so? And if we wanted to find a way to transfer money to the Contras, why didn’t we do it through third parties in Central America, as we had been doing all along (something I do know was happening).
Reagan won the cold war, this country was literally threatened with nuclear annihilation for over 50 years by an implacable enemy intent on ruling the planet. Hundreds of millions of people were living under impoverished lives under tyranny. All our leaders just said we had to live with the fear and hope the Russians love their children too. Reagan had a plan and a vision to win the cold war. He implemented that plan and two years after he left office the cold war ended hundred of millions of people were freed and humanity was saved from the threat of global thermonuclear war and possible extinction. Maybe it was coincidence that victory in the cold war came right after a president whose number one priority was victory in the cold war but in the face of such a massive accomplishment banging your spoon about Reagan trying to get around the Boland amendment seems like blaming someone who just rescued your entire family from a burning building for not wiping his feet on the welcome mat.
Reagan did nothing to end the Cold War. He actually prolonged it. And there was no belief that the Soviet Union would collapse before Reagan left office.
Did too