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President With an Agenda
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18929 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1991 |
3,695 Words |
| Author
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Lee Edwards
Lee Edwards is senior editor for the Current Issues section
of THE WORLD & I. His latest book is The Power of Ideas: The
Heritage Foundation at Twenty-five. |
AN AMERICAN LIFE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Ronald Reagan
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990
748 pp., $24.95
In February 1986, some nine months before his first summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, President Reagan sent the Soviet leader a handwritten, seven-page letter setting forth a series of new proposals designed to get the stalled Geneva talks on arms control "off dead center." His letter suggested significant reductions in nuclear, conventional, and chemical weapons but declared that SDI (the Strategic Defensive Initiative) could not be included in any agreement, proposed that both sides reduce the warheads on their strategic ballistic missiles to 4,500 and the ALCMs (air-launched cruise missiles) on their heavy bombers to 1,500, and set forth a detailed plan by which all INF (intermediate nuclear force) missiles in Europe and the Soviet Union would be eliminated by the end of 1989. His end goal, he declared, was "a world free from nuclear weapons."
The carrot-and-stick negotiating tactics were Nixonian, the rhetoric about a "nuclear-free" world was Rooseveltian, the decision to handwrite the lengthy letter was pure Reagan, who, despite eight years of often remarkable accomplishments as president, has become the favorite target of much of America's intelligentsia.
Barely an hour, let alone a day, goes by without a distinguished commentator on television or in print tracing each and every current problem confronting the United States to the Reagan administration and the 1980s, aka, "the decade of greed." The coming recession? The result, say the experts, of Reagan's supply-side economics. The experts decline to mention that the same economic policies produced the longest economic expansion in the nation's history, including the creation of 18 million new jobs. The $500 billion savings and loan scandal? The product of Reagan's deregulation policy. The experts do not point out that Congress grossly failed to exercise adequate oversight of the savings and loan industry and in fact encouraged its reckless ways as the belated Senatorial investigation of the Keating Five has shown. Budget deficits of $200 billion budget deficits and a $2.4 trillion dollar national debt? The inevitable consequence of Reagan's broken promise to balance the budget and control government spending. The experts do not report that in Reagan's last six years, federal tax revenues increased $375 billion but Congress increased federal spending by more than $450 billion.
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