Where's
the Rest of Him?
by ERIC
ALTERMAN
Both Republican candidates battled to claim
the mantle of the Gipper. John
McCain calls himself "a true Reagan Republican."
George W. Bush retorts,
"It is not Reaganesque to say one thing and
do another." The pundits keep
score but, once again, miss the point. If
McCain wants to enjoy another episode
of his now-famous penchant for public self-flagellation,
that's his business.
But Bush's exercise in unctuous untruth appears
to be accepted at face value.
It's as if Reagan, now diagnosed with Alzheimer's,
has given the rest of us amnesia.
For Ronald Reagan was many things, but most
undeniably he was a pathological liar.
True, he also gave every impression of being
an unbelievable moron (which is why SNL
could once parody his pathetic excuses for
the Iran/contra scandal with a skit that depicted
Reagan as--get this!--brilliant and competent).
His worshipful, if fanciful, biographer Edmund
Morris even calls him an "apparent airhead."
The President's famous cluelessness was so obvious
during his years in office that his defenders
would attempt to deploy it as a defense of his actions,
as if he were a small child or a beloved but
retarded uncle. The President tended to "build these
little worlds and live in them," noted a senior
adviser.
"He makes things up and believes them,"
explained one of his kids.
Recall that ol' Dutch frequently made arguments
about history based on movies he half-recalled.
He thought he'd liberated concentration camps.
He invented what he called "a verbal message"
from the Pope in support of his Central America
policies, news to everyone in Vatican City. In
1985, Reagan one day announced that the vicious
apartheid regime of P.W. Botha had already
"eliminated the segregation that we once had
in our own country."
Not only did Reagan make things up, he also
forgot some things that most of us consider pretty
important. Morris, for instance, lets us in
on the astonishing fact that the President not only did
not know his own Secretary of Housing and
Urban Development--no big whoop, as the guy
was, after all, black--but that Mr. Family
Values also failed to recognize his own son (his own
son!) while attending his graduation. If any
of us had a parent given to such behavior, we might
feel compelled to look into some sort of institutionalized
care, if only for his own protection.
But another, more significant, little-mentioned
tendency of the ex-President was his
fondness for genocidal murderers. I
do not use the term "genocide" lightly.
Take Guatemala. That nation's official Historical
Clarification Commission charged its own
government with a campaign of "genocide" in
murdering roughly 200,000 people, mainly Mayan
Indians, during its dictatorial reign of terror.
The commission's nine-volume 1999 report singled
out the US role in aiding this "criminal counterinsurgency."
The violence in Guatemala reached a
gruesome climax in the early eighties under
the dictatorship of the born-again evangelical, Gen.
Efraín Ríos Montt. Nine hundred
thousand people were forcibly relocated and entire villages
leveled. As army helicopters strafed a caravan
of 40,000 unarmed refugees seeking to escape to
Mexico, Reagan chose that moment to congratulate
Ríos Montt for his dedication to democracy,
adding that he had been getting "a bum rap"
from liberals in Congress and the media. His
Administration soon provided as much aid to
the killers as Congress would allow.
Reagan showed a similar indulgence toward the
terrorists in El Salvador. The President and his
equally immoral advisers consistently behaved
as if they were hired public relations agents for the
murderers of children, nuns, priests and peasants.
Not long after these killings reached the
amazing level of more than 200 per week--in
a country with just 5.5 million people--Reagan
mused aloud that they were not the work of
"so-called murder squads" on the right, but of
"guerrilla forces" who think they "can get
away with these violent acts, helping to try and bring
down the government, and the right wing will
be blamed for it." In fact, only days later, Vice
President Bush flew to San Salvador to insist
that "every murderous act" committed by
"right-wing fanatics...poisons the well of
friendship between our two countries," and that "death
squad murders" could cost the killers "the
support of the American people." Didn't Reagan know
what Bush knew? Does anyone care? After the
war, the Catholic archdiocese in San Salvador
documented the number of killings on each
side. The tally: military and government-assisted
death squads, 41,048; left-wing guerrillas,
776. Reagan was off by almost 5,500 percent. Liar or
moron? You tell me.
Historians are starting to provide a useful
corrective, perhaps in anticipation of an orgy of
dishonest eulogies like those for Richard
Nixon in 1994, while pundits casually credit Reagan
with inspiring Moscow's capitulation in the
cold war, via his obsession with Star Wars. But as
Frances FitzGerald demonstrates in her new
book, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan and
Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, the
historical record does not even remotely support
this wishfully ignorant thesis. Similarly,
in Matthew Evangelista's new work, Unarmed Forces,
we discover the key role played by transnational
forces in convincing Gorbachev & Co. to shut
down the arms race in spite--not because--of
the belligerence emanating from Reagan and his
men.
Public Affairs is about to reissue an updated
edition of Reagan expert Lou Cannon's
comprehensive biography, President Reagan:
The Role of a Lifetime. Cannon ignores
Guatemala and bends over backward to be generous
to his subject's odd belief structure. But as
Herbert Mitgang observed of the 1990 edition,
simply "by being eminently fair," the book proved
"a devastating account of Ronald Reagan's
presidency."
Despite Cannon's solid historical reconstruction
and Edmund Morris's nutty nonfiction novel,
the key question about Reagan remains not
only unanswered but unasked.
It is just this:
How did this childlike fantasist and friend
of genocide convince a nation of reasonably
intelligent, God-fearing and generally
decent citizens to avert its eyes from the heart
of darkness that beat beneath Ronald Reagan's
congenial smile?