I dunno about Ford and Ike; I’m pretty ignorant about their administrations. Carter, however, is problematic, notably for [url=http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1018-06.htm]his support for
Ahem. Mercury. Gemini. Apollo. Nixon had been in office for 6 months when we landed a man on the Moon. The Democrats, in the White House and in Congress achieved the single most difficult space mission ever undertaken.
Reagan was around to collect on that particular pot, but to say that he “won” the Cold War is to ignore the efforts of many who came before him (Eisenhower, Willy Brandt, and Lech Walesa in particular) which directly contributed to the support of social and political autonomy in Eastern Europe and the eventual turnover in the Soviet Union, not to mention, of course, the establishment of the “Sinatra Doctrine” and internal economic and social reforms by Mikhail Gorbechev. Reagan may have stood up and given a few bombastic speaches–ones that brought the pre-glasnost Soviet leaders to the brink of preparing for nuclear war–but it was the actual efforts of the above and numerous nameless others who brought about the conditions under which the Soviet system met its inevitable demise. Even insofar as credit may be given to his administration (the START treaty, for instance), the actual responsibility lies with the policy makers like Baker and Haig, while Reagan (quite notoriously) would snooze his way through Cabinet meetings.
Reagan won the Cold War like your Uncle Bob yelling at the t.v. won the Superbowl for the Colts.
I can’t say much for the merit of gun control initiatives stimulated by Reagan’s shooting, either; several seemed to involve banning hypothetical ammunition (“Devestators”, “cop-killer bullets”) most of which never existed in the first place or was never available for civilian sales. (KTW “armor piercing” bullets–the most hyped of the “cop-killers”–have never killed a single law enforcement officer in the hands of a criminal and have never been sold to anyone other than federal law enforcement and military customers.) The various background check systems–against which I don’t have any principled objection–have been only modestly effective in even preventing nominally legimate sales of firearms to people who do not qualify, and because of the opposition of gun control advocates to a national instant background check system without a permenant registry, we end up with a crippled and fragmented system. The Brady Law and the VCCLEA are similarly defective, largely in their focus on superficial attributes at the expense of addressing the root causes of violent crime.
In any case, Reagan did not, either prior to or successive of his shooting promote, advocate, or support increased controls on firearms sales.
Anyway, back to the OP’s premise: a “massive failure”? Nah. He was quite a popular sitting president, and while he left something of an economic mess for his successor, his administration did exhibit a fairly consistant, if somewhat morally iniquitous, foreign policy, which placed him well ahead of the previous five administrations. As a figurehead, he was actually quite presentable, and his advisers were at least competent. I’d put him down the middle–less than FDR, Ike, or Woody, but ahead of Truman, Harding, or Ford, not to mention blunderers like Johnson or Nixon.
My vote for the least acknowledged competent chief exec of the XXth Century: George H.W. Bush. He may not have been much of a talker, he tossed his dinner on the Japanese P.M., and he left the Kurds out to dry, but he also extracted us from Iraq in a timely manner, he managed as best he could the dramatic changes occuring in the Soviet Union early in his tenure, and he presided over the dismantling of ill-advised nation-building exercises in Latin America and the Carribean, as well as making some needed cuts and stand downs of military capacities without utterly gutting the Armed Forces the way his successor did. I can’t say I much like the man, but he very quietly tackled the issues that needed to be addressed (at least in the foreign policy venue) without making the kind of hash and mess that many of his predecessors and certainly his current list of successors has. If Kiddo Bush had a tenth of Daddy W’s good sense, or at least the wisdom to hire and keep some of his better advisors, we wouldn’t be where we are today.
Stranger
Dammit!
I dunno about Ford and Ike; I’m pretty ignorant about their administrations. Carter, however, is problematic, notably for his support for the genocidal government in Indonesia:
Maybe there’s another side to this story, a side that makes his support for this horrific government forgiveable. I’ve not heard it.
Daniel
Yes, the Dems started it with JFK. Since then, we’ve largely ignored it, saying other social programs are more important. The Pubs have spent more money and time on it. And I would argue that the manned space station was equally difficult.
Wow, you are tough. I thought Carter would at least make the cut.
Ford completed the pullout of Vietnam and basically forgave/pardoned everyone on all sides of everything. (I exaggerate heavily but I was only 8-10 when he was in. He worked at “Healing a divided America”. The Draft Dodgers were allow to come home and Nixon went home. No major foreign policies I know of. Began stepping down the military and I think he ended the began the ending of the draft.
Ike: I know very little about, I just threw his name out there, because he was one of the least political Presidents ever.
Jim
Hey, when I said I’d send most presidents to prison, I wasn’t kidding. A running theme in my political experience has been abject horror at what the folks in charge are up to.
Like I said, I don’t know much about Ford or Eisenhower. One of these days I’ll learn about them.
Daniel
Haven’t the space shuttle and the space station especially been unmitigated disasters?
Not failures, but disappointments.
We need to use differentiate rockets for jobs instead of the most costly pickup truck ever. The Shuttle is a classic example of design by large committee.
The Station is fine and will probably (hopefully) yield many positive results.
Jim
I suppose that depends on your definition of disaster. The country re-invested in the space program as a whole largely due to the space shuttle. We didn’t get immediate results, but space exploration is too important to be ignored.
I’ll drink to that. (Milk 
)
Personally I have no particular issues with Reagan’s term, but I do have to wonder if, given the slot that Bush I filled, would he have done the same things? He was a president who stirred up the boat and personally I respect that, and felt that Clinton was neglecting his duties for not utilising the same sheer amount of charisma and ability to get people to do what he wanted. But was he only good at shaking things up, or did he know what he was doing? Like Wesley Clark, I was too young to remember him. In the end he’s just an image on TV; “Walt Disney” and “Ronald Reagan” those old, friedly seeming fellows flashing up there.
I did never feel (again as a kid) that Bush’s term significantly differed from Reagan’s, just post-war. So personally I am putting him down as being as capable as Bush I, but actively using his powers try and change the world instead of just hanging back and tying up loose ends. Which equals out to pretty darn good, but without doing some real research, I couldn’t admit to having an informed opinion.
The space station we are speaking of is the international space station right? Hasn’t that been more or less declared a waste of money and by necessitating the existance of the Space Shuttle keeping that money waster alive. What good have we gotten from the space station and the space shuttle.
Ford: what about covert US backing for the FNLA in Angola? I’m just reading about it now, but this comes across as an attempt to do an end-run around the Constitutional separation of powers.
Eisenhower: overthrowing a democratically-elected government ought to be a felony.
I would love to see just one president who doesn’t make me think of King Lear. I’ve not yet seen them.
Daniel
Actually, Reagan gutted the Space Program, after talking up the proposed Mars mission, when he discovered the cost involved in building Space Station Alpha (the “beachhead” station for the $120B Mars mission). The station was rechristened “Freedom Station” and dedicated strictly to zero-gee research–i.e. a ticket to nowhere. The STS (Shuttle) mission also saw some last minute revisions–the orignal Shuttle fleet was reduced from 4 to 3 (later back to 4 in the post-Challenger environ), and then he restricted the Air Force from future development of independent launch systems that would compete with Shuttle payloads in order to preserve a need for the Shuttle, which became a serious flashing red light problem when Challenger underwent her dramatic diving excursion. This has hampered military and commerical launch systems to this day and is the reason we’re paying the Soviet Union to put payloads in orbit for us. Also under his Administration, although probably not under his direct instruction, the STS-II system (a fully reusable two-stage Shuttle with liquid fuel flyback boosters, doubling the payload capacity) was cancelled in conceptual design, and proposal work on future replacement systems was scaled back despite the fact that the STS was clearly not living up to either its claimed launch frequency or operational lifespan.
Reagan loved the Space Program like you love your smelly old greataunt Sadie; 'cause his advisors told him it would be a popular thing to support. For more info on the topic, check out Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System : The First 100 Missions, which goes all through the development of the STS.
Nixon–the man who not only cancelled the remaining Apollo lunar missions but also terminated Apollo Applications (using surplus Apollo hardware), Apollo-N, Apollo Plus, and damn near cancelling off the Shuttle proposals–was absolutely no friend to the space program in any way, shape, or form. And for all of his talk, George W. Bush doesn’t seem to have much genuine interest in funding or supporting a realistic space exploration effort, as anyone familiar with the CEV and M2M proposals can attest.
I can’t say that the execs from either party have had much to offer in actual support, beyond the political hubris it brings them, for the space program. Even Kennedy’s enthusiasm seemed to extend mostly from a desire to create a central, non-military cause about which the nation could gather.
Stranger
Sorry, the facts just don’t support that claim. In constant dollars from 1960 to 2005, you can see spending on the space program was much higher under Democrats from 1960 to 1969, fell of dramatically under Nixon and Ford, was flat under Carter and most of Reagan, than grew again at the end of Reagan and during Bush. But it never even approaches the financial commitment made by Kennedy and Johnson. The big surprise is, adjusted for inflation, funding for the space program under Bush II has never risen to the peak of spending during the Clinton administration in 1997. Overall, there is no support for your claim.
Had there been no shuttle or no space station, there would be no Hubble. Which, for all its problems, was worth every single penny, and IMO they pulled it way too soon.
Quite honestly, though, I put you in the camp that has already made up its mind against space exploration, and no force is going to change that, no matter what I put in front of your face.
The shuttle was essential for Hubble, but the ISS played no part at all.
Why couldn’t they haved used a rocket to put it up there?
:dubious:
And what do you base this on?
Actually, it rose steadily during Reagan, not just at the end. The first space shuttle launched in April of 1981; he took office in January. It continued to rise during Bush I. And Johnson didn’t really do anything for the space program that Kennedy hadn’t already put into place.
Except spend more money on the space program than any Republican to follow him.