Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (27 page)

To liberals and labor union leaders, Reagan’s behavior was anathema. An imperial presidency, they complained, had returned with a vengeance—and with long-range consequences, for Reagan’s action not only broke the strike; it further demoralized organized labor. Thereafter, the number of strikes per year—which had already been declining from their highs in the early 1970s—plummeted to all-time lows.
¹³
Some of the most dramatic of these failed, notably a bitterly contested strike of packers at Hormel in Minnesota in 1985–86. But the president, having acted boldly in 1981, remained deaf to complaints that he had sought to crush the union movement. Perhaps no single act of his administration better demonstrated that Reagan could be, and often was, a stubborn man of conviction. Millions of conservative Americans who had admired his courage when he was shot were now more certain than ever that they had a leader who stood behind his beliefs, even if these were harsh and might seem politically perilous at the time. His image as a consistent defender of a core of ideas helped him again and again to shrug off a host of criticisms, thereby causing opponents to lament that he was a “Teflon President”—nothing stuck to him.
¹⁴

Reagan, who was thoroughly enjoying himself, was delighted by the course of events during the first seven months of his term, but his economic policies remained extraordinarily controversial. Throughout his administration critics lamented that “Reaganomics”—tax cuts combined with increased military spending—created unprecedented budget deficits. Between the fiscal years 1980 and 1989, the national debt tripled from $914 billion to $2.7 trillion.
¹⁵
Some of this increase stemmed from congressional spending, driven by Republicans as well as Democrats who lavished federal funds on constituents and interest groups. The president and his advisers, failing to anticipate the power of pork barrel politics, could not stop it. Still, Reagan’s administration, which never submitted a balanced budget, was far and away the major source of governmental red ink.

As critics pointed out, the deficits required the treasury to borrow heavily to service the debt, and to pay high interest rates in the process. Reaganomics, they complained, deprived the government of money that it might otherwise have had available to spend for infrastructure and social needs, and swallowed up private investment (much of which was attracted by high-interest government bonds) that might have advanced more rapid economic growth. High deficits, they added, set a poor example, encouraging people to run up debt in their own lives and promoting higher levels of stress and insecurity throughout American society.

Worst of all, Reagan’s alarmingly high budget shortfalls seemed to indicate that the government itself, lacking fiscal discipline, had spun out of control. By the end of his term in office, the national debt was 53 percent of GDP, compared to 33 percent in 1981.
¹⁶
Some economists feared that disaster might loom ahead. An accomplished biographer, Lou Cannon, concluded in 1989, “The deficit is Reagan’s greatest failure.”
¹⁷

Liberal critics were equally appalled by Reagan’s hostility to large-scale spending for social welfare, especially when this parsimony was contrasted to the lavishness of Nancy Reagan’s lifestyle and to the glitter of the celebrations that had surrounded the inaugural ceremonies—“a bacchanalia of the haves.” Nancy Reagan’s wardrobe for these events was said to have cost $25,000.
¹⁸
Firing the air controllers, they added, was nothing more than union busting. Cutting taxes on the wealthy while paring benefits for the poor seemed especially unfair. “When it comes to giving tax breaks to the wealthy of this country,” O’Neill exclaimed, “the president has a heart of gold.” A joke went around (perhaps originating from the president himself) that Reagan’s right hand didn’t know what his far right hand was up to.

Liberals, however, did not laugh. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York was one of many Democrats who maintained that Reagan deliberately ran up deficits via tax cuts and military spending in order to starve social programs. This, Moynihan charged, was “Reagan’s Revenge,” a diabolical plot to sabotage the welfare state.
¹⁹
Moynihan could not prove that this was Reagan’s primary purpose, nor did the welfare state collapse, but he was correct that conservatives sought to cut social spending and that large deficits did stymie efforts for new liberal programs.

Reagan’s detractors highlighted other flaws, as they saw them, in his performance. A common complaint was that he spent too much time off the job. Compared to Carter, who was a workaholic, this was true. Reagan, who turned seventy in February 1981, refused to hold early morning staff meetings, and he was normally out of the Oval Office before five. Especially after his brush with death, he needed to nap, and it was rumored that he dozed at meetings in the afternoon. During his eight years in office he spent almost a year of days at his beloved ranch in California, as well as 183 weekends at Camp David. Another joke went around: Question: “Would Reagan be a threat to blow up the world?” Answer: “Only between the hours of nine to five.” Reagan did not in fact fall asleep at meetings, but he was clearly aware of the rumors. He joked that his chair in the Cabinet room should be labeled “Reagan Slept Here.”
²⁰
Humor did help disarm critics. He told reporters, “I am concerned about what is happening in government—and it’s caused me many a sleepless afternoon.” He quipped, “It’s true hard work never killed anyone but I figure, why take the chance?”
²¹

Other foes wondered if Reagan was really in control of his administration. Some thought that the power behind the throne was his wife, Nancy, who was known to consult astrologers and to hold very strong opinions about people who worked for her husband. If they knew what was good for them, they were careful not to cross her. Others considered Reagan to be putty in the hands of aides like Deaver, Baker, or Edwin Meese, his counselor, who trotted him out for grand ceremonial occasions and otherwise conspired to shelter him from the press. To many, including his own children, Reagan seemed to be oddly disconnected from people and from important events around him. White House staffers, finding him affable but elusive, liked to joke, “Who was that masked man?”
²²
O’Neill observed that Reagan, an actor by profession, was “most of the time an actor reading lines, who didn’t understand his own programs.” The president, he cracked, “would have made a hell of a king.” Baker recalled a time in 1983 when he left Reagan a thick briefing book on the eve of an economic summit meeting of the world’s democratic leaders. The next morning Baker could see that the book lay unopened. He asked Reagan why he had not looked at it. “Well, Jim,” the president replied calmly, “
The Sound of Music
was on last night.”
²³

Baker was not the only member of the administration who worried at times about the president’s inattentiveness. Deaf in his right ear and hard of hearing in his left, Reagan seemed passive during discussions at meetings.
²⁴
Saying little on such occasions, he left aides wondering what he wanted them to do. As Martin Anderson, a domestic policy adviser, later observed, Reagan “made decisions like a Turkish pasha, passively letting his subjects serve him, selecting only those morsels of public policy that were especially tasty. Rarely did he ask questions and demand to know why someone had or had not done something. He just sat back in a supremely calm, relaxed manner and waited until important things were brought to him.”
²⁵

Some people recognized that Reagan had difficulty at times separating fact from fiction. One of his favorite patriotic stories, which he told during the 1980 campaign, concerned an American bomber pilot in World War II whose plane had been hit and was going down. A badly wounded member of the crew, however, had been pinned inside the plane. As Reagan told the story, the pilot ordered the other members of the crew to bail out and then lay down beside the injured man. The pilot then said to the crewman, “Never mind, son, we’ll ride it down together.” The trouble with this story was that it never happened, except in a World War II movie,
A Wing and a Prayer
, starring Dana Andrews, that the president presumably had seen. Though critics complained publicly that Reagan had made it all up, he used the story again in 1982, while speaking to American soldiers in Europe. This time he contrasted the heroism of the pilot with the evil behavior of the Soviets.
²⁶
On another occasion Reagan told of having helped to film German death camps while an officer in the army air corps during World War II. This story, too, derived from his imagination—Reagan, who was extremely nearsighted, had done his wartime military service in the United States, mostly in Culver City near his home, during which time he worked at turning out government training and propaganda films.
²⁷

Some of these criticisms of Reagan were close to the mark. The president, knowing how to pace himself, was not lazy, but he was a hands-off administrator who seemed oblivious to the many disagreements and feuds that divided his top advisers. Unlike Carter, he did not often bother to scribble suggestions on memoranda or position papers.
²⁸
As Martin Anderson said, Reagan relied upon his top aides to bring things to him for decision. Passionate about a few matters—the iniquity of Communism, the need for high defense spending, the virtues of low taxes—he otherwise had narrow interests. As an advocate of smaller government, he seemed deliberately to ignore issues—housing, health care, urban problems, education, the environment—that he thought the free market ought to settle or that local officials should manage. “Government,” he said again and again, “is not the solution, it’s the problem.” In part for this reason, he was casual in making appointments of personnel—some of them disastrous—in these departments.
²⁹
On one public occasion he failed to recognize his only black Cabinet officer, Samuel Pierce of Housing and Urban Development.

W
HETHER
R
EAGAN’S ECONOMIC POLICIES
were good for the country was—and is—hard to judge. Most historians, however, credit his efforts to reverse the inflationary spiral that had deeply frightened Americans since the late 1970s. Reagan gave strong and undeviating support to Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker, who continued to pursue the tough monetary policies that he had initiated under Carter. The recession that Volcker’s stern approach had helped to create remained painful in late 1981 and 1982. Unemployment averaged 9.7 percent in 1982, the highest since the Great Depression. Republicans, blamed for widespread suffering, lost twenty-six House seats in the midterm elections. The recession helped to drive Reagan’s job approval ratings below 50 percent throughout much of 1982 and 1983. Though people still gave him high personal ratings, the recession served to stem some of the political momentum that he had established in the spring and summer of 1981.

But Reagan, making “Stay the Course” his slogan during the midterm election campaigns of 1982, exhibited his characteristic self-confidence throughout these difficult times. And Volcker’s medicine was curative in the long run. Inflation, which had seemed runaway in 1980, dropped to around 3.5 percent five years later and remained in this range, helped by disarray within OPEC that drove down oil prices after 1985, for the remainder of the decade. Gasoline prices at the pump dropped from $1.38 per gallon in 1981—an all-time high when adjusted for inflation—to a low of 95 cents in 1986, and remained in that range until 1990.
³⁰
Though unemployment was stubborn, it also declined, to around 5 percent by 1988.
³¹
The return of good times in the mid- and late 1980s was enormously reassuring.
³²

Reagan, moreover, was not so doctrinaire a conservative as liberals made out. While fond of damning big government—and of denunciations of “welfare queens”—he recognized that liberal interest groups had effective lobbies on the Hill, that major New Deal–Great Society social programs—many of them entitlements—were here to stay, and that rights-consciousness had become a powerful political force. He understood that though people said they distrusted government, they expected important services from it. So though he blundered badly in May 1981 by ineptly recommending nearly immediate cuts in Social Security benefits for early retirees (as a way of dealing with the program’s looming insolvency problems), he ducked for cover when a firestorm of opposition—from Republicans as well as Democrats—overwhelmed his proposal. Attacked from all sides, he took the politically more prudent step of appointing a bipartisan commission (headed by Alan Greenspan) to recommend ways of shoring up the resources of the program.
³³

Social Security was in truth a near-untouchable “third rail” of American politics—a cherished entitlement that at the time insured 140 million people and sent benefit checks to some 36 million retirees, disabled workers and their families, and survivors of workers who had died. Benefit checks for these purposes totaled $121 billion in 1980. Young people, too, supported Social Security, which promised to nurture their parents when they retired.
³⁴
Congressional leaders on the commission, trembling before the political power of seniors, shrank from recommending changes that might cut it back. After the election of 1982, however, the commission dared to act, recommending in early 1983 a series of amendments to the program. These called for increased payroll taxes, thereby building up a trust fund that would convert Social Security from a pay-as-you-go program to one that collected large sums of money that were to be used to pay retirement and disability benefits in the future. The amendments also hiked the retirement age (sixty-five) for full benefits; this would increase over time to sixty-six in 2009 and to sixty-seven in 2027.
³⁵