It’s a small nitpick, but the DEA was created during the Nixon administration.
I was delighted to read this thread and Dopers’ near-universal condemnation of the Great Buffoon. In his way he might have been an idealist however (although his ideals were fully wrong-minded), so I wouldn’t call him the worst President ever. That distinction belongs to Reagan’s recent disciple whose Administration was one long defecation of thuggery, hypocrisy and evil. Reagan’s popularity may have been a prerequisite for GWB’s election, and therein lies Reagan’s profoundly sad legacy.
Although I’m happy to be in the majority here, I must take issue with some details:
In the world of real-politik, the Shah was an American success story for 25 years. As for Vietnam, I strongly doubt that Ike would have allowed the loss of so many American soldiers. (Perhaps neither Kennedy nor Johnson would have either, if acting alone. Some think America’s Vietnam tragedy resulted in part from a confused changing of Presidents mid-crisis.)
Yes, well, I’m afraid that’s exactly what the Iranians hate about it.
It being their country they kinda would have liked an Iranian success story…
And an ongoing American failure for 32 years and counting. It’s an example of how the real world translation of “real politck” is “stupid and short sighted”. Much of America’s foreign affairs consists of dealing with the long term disasters caused by such “realistic” people. People who can’t seem to grasp that slaughtering and oppressing and raping and torturing other people creates rage, which in turn creates the desire for revenge. They don’t seem to regard people outside the US borders as human, and refuse to attribute normal human responses such as vengefulness to them.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB126/index.htm
We have dirty hands in the overthrow of Mosaddeq in 1953. The British and American s overthrew an elected government because it was threatening to take over the oil in its territory. BP did not like that .
Our military does the dirty work for corporations.
Off topic I know. I’m reading (audio book) “Legacy of Ashes”, a history of the CIA. Very interesting coverage of some of our shenanigans back then. It wasn’t the military BTW.
I can’t wait to get to the Reagan years.
Be aware that Legacy of Ashes, while interesting, is largely unsubstantiated and unsourced allegations. Although many of the claims are reinforced by now-available records, take the claims with a grain of salt.
Stranger
Of course. But, there has to also be some special consideration involved in judging an organization who’s main purpose is secrecy and misinformation.
Fair enough. But much of Legacy of Ashes focuses not on the CIA proper, but rather the “Agency within the Agency,” i.e. an inner cabal whose loyalty was given to conservative and later neoconservative interests rather than the interests of the United States or the sitting President. There are necessarily few official records, and even personal recollections tend to be rather biased. The book does make a good case for why Carter was so badly undermined in his foreign policy efforts by the Agency and the State Department, and also why instigating the disastrous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (which is one of the few genuine primary external contributing factors to the dissolution of the Soviet Union) is associated in the public mind with the Reagan Administration even though the policy of supporting and supplying the mujahideen originated under Carter with Zbigniew Brzezinski. It is a thought-provoking book, but just don’t take all the claims at face value as being independently verified by multiple sources.
As a point of note when reading this book or any other history of the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency was primarily chartered to fight Soviet Communist expansion in the post-war era. This mission and the focus behind it has heavily prejudiced many of the analyses and interpretation of the CIA, and goes a long way to explaining many of the failures of that Agency to address other threats, or why the Agency got in bed with even larger threats without considering the long-term security impacts. Robert McNamara actually tried to have the CIA disbanded and its functions distributed among the military intelligence community and the FBI, as he had no faith in the impartiality of the analysis or the bias in the raw data that the CIA saw fit to relay in supposedly-unfiltered format. The powers that be–particularly Johnson, who hung his hat on the CIA-provided analysis about the global threat of Communist expansion in Southeast Asia–protected the CIA from serious auditing and evaluation, and it was not until the Church Committee hearings and the formation of the permanent United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that any real checks were performed on the CIA, which until that time was overseen almost exclusively by the executive branch with no independent checks. The more recent debacle of biased analysis supporting the supposed development of weapons of mass destruction by the Saddam Hussein regime is only one in a long line of flawed or fallacious analysis provided by the CIA.
Stranger
Getting back to Ronnie, I am reminded of a film theory class that I took in college (late 80’s) - in discussing the Western genre, the professor asked the class how many in the class had seen many photos of Reagan wearing a cowboy hat while riding a horse? Of course everyone had. Why was that? Well, it had to do with the Cowboy Myth, what it was representative of: rugged individualism, frontier spirit, manly courage, one who was straightforward and trustworthy. It was representative of a simpler time, one where complexity seemed not to exist, it was just good or bad, right or wrong, black or white.
Of course, anybody who knows anything about the Old West knows it was not “a simpler time.” Ronnie wore the cowboy suit because of* Death Valley Days*. (At least he could actually ride, unlike Shrub.)
Or maybe the American midcentury is that “simpler time”? When Ronnie ratted out every actor he considered a commie sympathizer to the Red hunters?
I’m sure there are also pictures of Ronnie in uniform. Hey, his nearsightedness kept him from going overseas in WWII but he made a bunch of training films.
Real knowledge of any history makes that “simpler time” meme an obvious crock. But it’s good propaganda.
That’s it. Reagan’s alleged greatness was based on his actor’s ability to say things that a lot of people wanted to hear, in a way that made them think he believed it and that they could be proud of believing it too. Mere factual reality had nothing to do with it.
There is still a substantial number of folks, even on the SDMB, who have yet to accept or even realize how completely they got fooled by that resonant, script-reading voice.
Of course, this could be said of any successful President. Certainly many people hold Clinton in very high regard because of his skillful manner of speaking and dealing with people and the accident of being elected President during one of the most economically prosperous times in American history to date, whereas a critical analysis of the Clinton Administration indicates that many of his major initiatives failed, and aside from a couple of peacemaking coups in Northern Ireland and the Middle East, a foreign policy that was unfocused, ineffectual, and utterly failed to address the clear threats that we are now dealing with. Having presided over the dissolution of one of the largest New Deal programs (AFCD) he can actually be regarded as one of the best Reagan-esque neo-con Presidents in history, despite being derided by the political right as being an uber-liberal.
Stranger
Excellent commentary at CNN.
*
People also ask me what was the most important thing Reagan accomplished as president. My answer is that he made the presidency work again. After the tragic assassination of President Kennedy, President Johnson being driven from office, President Nixon impeached, and Presidents Ford and Carter defeated running for re-election, Americans thought the presidency was too big and that no man could fill the role. Reagan filled it and made it work again.
Whatever the historians write, Ronald Reagan made the world and our country a better place. He restored pride in our nation and made Americans believe in the slogan from his 1984 campaign: “Prouder, stronger, better.”*
What a steaming pile.
He made the world a better place, did he? What was his greatest gift to the world, giveing WMD to Saddam Hussein, nurturing Osama bin Laden and the Taliban or selling weapons to an an enemy of the United States?
I thought that slogan was “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
Any nitwit who bought Reagan’s happy horseshit about “Prouder, stronger, better” deserved what they got.
Well, it was a better place from their point of view, presumably.
Authored by someone who worked in the Reagan administration during both terms, and who was the campaign director in the '84 election. Biased much?
As opposed to the completely unbiased comments from the usual suspects here?