Now, I’m just a youngin’. I wasn’t even born during Reagan’s presidency.
But a recent quote has captured my attention. Something to the effect of:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I have just signed a law outlawing Russia. We begin bombing in five minutes.”
I’ve been unable to find out if this is just a story conjectured by someone who wanted to make Reagan look bad or if he really indeed did say it.
Can anyone help me out on this?
He was at a microphone and did not realize the mike was live. He said it, he meant it as a joke, war did not break out, the soviets did not recall their ambassador.
Here’s a link . I googled “Reagan” “Outlaw” “Russia”.
This event is covered in an excellent book called “The Clothes Have No Emperor” by Paul Slansky. This hysterically funny and disturbing book exhaustively chronicles almost every day of the 1980s, and is a treasure trove of the bizarreness that took place in America during that time period. I don’t have the book in front of me, but what I remember of it, Reagan was getting ready to give a radio address and was just fooling around with the audio engineers when he said that. But to everyone’s horror, the mic was on. The setup seems suspiciously cliche to me now, almost the stuff of urban legends, but I believe this was in fact a real event.
I was around at the time. It was Big News, and there’s no doubt that it happened – not an invented item, nor “spun” news by the opposition. Reagan really did say it during a microphone test. I have to admit, it’s the kind of thing I’d probably do. But I’m not the President, and when something goes awry (as in this case), there’s a big flap over it. It’s like saying something bad about a prospective date, only to find that she’s right behind you. Only it’s worse.
My favorite outcome of this was a political cartoon that came out afterwards. It showed the Soviet leader at the time (Chernenko, I think, but they were changing pretty fast back then) during his microphone test:
Chernenko sitting at desk with microphone in front of him:
“Have just signed legislation outlawing United States. Bombing will start in Five Minutes.”
Several panels of him sitting there, impassive, saying nothing.
Panel of him sitting at desk, speaking into microphone:
“Is no joke.”
And the thing is, you could almost believe it.
That blunder happened in August 1984.
In case you still don’t believe he really said it, here’s a BBC link to the quote.
Is it just my imagination playing me false, or wasn’t this captured on videotape as well? I have a very strong memory of seeing a clip on TV of the actual incident.
And, now I feel really old after reading the OP…
I remember that. I remember the ‘big flap’ over it. Personally, I thought it was very funny. I couldn’t understand why these people didn’t have a sense of humour. (But then, I had a comic called Meet Mr. Bomb done in a '50s-PSA style. I wish I could find that again!)
A sense of humor? Don’t you really remember the early 80s?
Every member of the entertainment industry was convinced that Reagan was a dangerous cowboy who was going to get us nuked. Music videos ("Rock the Casbah), movies (“The Day After”), stand-up comics, Weird Al (“Christmas at Ground Zero”) and many others I cannot bring to mind right now were constantly telling us that we had elected an amiable, but hazardous dunce.
Unilateral disarmament? Volunteer hostages in target cities?
Damn, the Liberals were real scared then and did their best to make everyone else crazy.
Now, since Reagan seems to have been right about the best way to make the Soviet Union collapse, and has recently died, no one seems to remember the vitriol Hollywood heaped on him at the time.
You may want to take that last point to great debates about Reagan having a lot to do with the Soviets collapse. However, he was one funny old guy, yes? :dubious:
He did get one good one off, once. After his survival of assassination, he was speaking somewhere and a balloon popped loudly. He said, “Missed.”
I recommend that book, Clothes Have No Emperor.
Say what you will about electing an actor President- this is one of the good points.
I’ve also heard the story about him being Governor of California, and visiting one of their state universities (I believe either UCLA or UC Berekely) and being faced with a ‘silent treatment’ protest. Basically, after walking down a pathway lined with completely silent protesters towards the admininstration building or wherever it was that he was going, he turned around and gave them all the international sign of ‘sssh’. So, from what I can tell, for whatever faults he may have, he did at least possess a sense of humor.
Personally, given the world political situation, it sounds to me like a great way to test the microphones. It’s kind of the sort of an announcement that a President might make, filled with typical President-speech, brief enough to work as an audio test, and memorable enough to get the sound guys to pay attention, and perhaps disarming enough to loosen up those who hear it (knowing you’re just testing the audio) a little bit. Perhaps unfortunate for Reagan that it got caught on the air, but as I only heard about it years later, a sound clip whose existence I love.
As I recall, the reason this was such a big deal at the time was because the Soviets took him seriously and went into a full military alert. Cold war tensions were pretty high at the time. I remember thinking that the Soviets overreacted by quite a bit. I was like come on guys, you can’t possibly think that was a real threat?
Besides the open mic incident, there was also an incident involving a NATO training exercise where the Soviets really thought we were getting ready to attack them. Reagan finally realized that the Soviets thought he was a wild man that would attack them without provocation and backed down from a lot of the strong posturing that he had done earlier in his presidency.
Reagan was definately quick witted. My favorite quote was from when he got shot, and he told Nancy “Honey, I forgot to duck.” Here’s a good site of Reagan quotes, and by coincidence the OP’s quote is the first one listed:
I do indeed remember the early-'80s. I did think Reagan was a dangerous cowboy. While doing the post-high-school-backpack-through-Europe-thing my friend and I bemoaned that even if Reagan were to snuff it, we’d still have Bush. Then there was Al ‘I’m In Charge’ Haig. A common joke was ‘What’s worse than poison ivy in 1983? Reagan-Bush in 1984.’ (Yeah, lame; but still…) Remember Fun Boy Three? 'Go nuclear,’ The Cowboy told us / And who am I to disagree? / For when The Cowboy flips the switch / The nuclear will go for me / The lunatics have taken over the asylum… And I worked for a defense contractor, so I paid a bit more attention to the Cold War than a lot of people did. Yeah, Reagan was scary.
But I still knew that he was making a joke. I have a macabre sense of humour, and that he was scary made it funnier. He was, intentionally or unintentionally, poking fun at himself. The joke was in poor taste, but many jokes that are in poor taste are still funny. I thought the Press over-reacted.
Even though I thought Reagan was a phoney as a 3 dollar bill I think he was a lot better actor than he was given credit for. And he knew how to deliver a line so with good writers backing him he could be very funny.
The thing that surprised me was that even with all of his show biz experience he seemed to forget rule one about all microphones in your vicinity - always assume they are on.
Erata: The line in Fun Boy Three’s song was ‘When the madman flips the switch’.
How can you get away without mentioning the Genesis video “Land of Confusion” animated by claymation studio Spitting Image? “Water!”
Not to reanimate this particular zombie of a debate, but at best, Reagan gave them the final push. The Soviet economy had been long past bankrupt, and with the last of the chronically ill demogogues finally snuffing it, it was inevitable that change of some kind was going to occur. It’s more a kudos to Gorbachev for directing it in a positive manner rather than any external influence.
Reagan was a loss as an executive–the man reputedly fell asleep in Cabinet meetings while his advisors made critical decisions–but he did a good job of distracting the nation from real problems, a lesson Jimmy “Swamp Rabbit” Carter could well have used, as could have Reagan’s successor. (Clinton, on the other hand, knew the lesson and knew it well.)
Anyway, that quote is not my sound bite for incoming e-mail, which has already been a source of entertainment for me and my rocket engineer coworkers. Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern couldn’t have done it any better.
Stranger