The Age of Reagan: I 1964 –1980
Steven F. Hayward
Prima Lifestyles, 2001
This is a very long book (718 pages + another 100 pages of notes etc.) and it is somewhat daunting to realise that in due course a second volume will come to complete the story. It might be as well to say that this is emphatically not a biography, not even a political biography; the title and the sub-title The Fall of the Old Liberal Order make this clear. It is more a history of the times, from the anti-Goldwater landslide of 1964 to the Reagan landslide of 1980. The cumulative impression of the book itself is its richness and how its detail ministers to its analysis.
And it is a sorry, not to say a frightening tale, telling as it does of the collapse of American self-confidence and the rise of the counter-culture of self-hatred amongst its elite. The narrative is admittedly partisan, but at the very least a case that needs to be put. As for the Presidents of the period, Hayward’s judgements are that Johnson was irresolute, reacting to events minimally, Nixon misguided, obsessive and unfortunate, Ford a mere stopgap and Carter simply disastrous. All of them seemed to have underestimated Soviet malevolence and overestimated Soviet stability; for the latter the intelligence services seem to have been especially at fault.
For anyone who has been misled into thinking that Reagan was an intellectual nullity, here is ample evidence that he was an independent and original thinker, often insisting on keeping to his own line or script in face of criticism from his advisers and speechwriters. Many of his statements, which at the time seemed naive, questionable, wrongheaded or too extreme now seem merely farsighted. He was also optimistic about America and had no time for any rationale for its decline, such as Kissinger, student of the rise and fall of European states, believed in, or at least feared. Nor was he put off by the “complexity” arguments of those who despised him for his simple attitude to problems and their solutions. Some of his difficulties with his own advisers and supporters lay in persuading them that this attitude could be made plausible to the public as electorate.
As much as the first two thirds of the book, however, has little mention of Reagan, for it is a history of how the US got into the messes that Reagan, it is fair to say, rescued it from. By far the biggest mess, which he was too late to do anything about, was, of course, the Vietnam War and it is quite plain that the left-leaning media and intellectuals, combined with political ineffectiveness and downright ignorance, contributed overwhelmingly to its being lost. To illustrate US political masochism: the two “war pictures” that had the greatest negative impact on home support – execution of the Vietcong prisoner and the napalmed little girl – won Pulitzer Prizes for the photographers.
It is not exactly necessary to be reminded, but it is necessary to bear in mind that it was under two Democrat Presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, that the US entered and enmeshed itself in the Vietnam “quagmire” (though this is not a term I recall being used by the author). The muddled, incremental escalation of the conflict by Johnson is described in Ch 4. It was also a Democrat Congress, not the President, the hapless Ford, that abandoned the South Vietnamese, even refusing to supply them arms.
Even more so was Cambodia betrayed, and the dignified reproaches of their leaders, as they refused the offer of evacuation by the American ambassador, to face certain death, make sad reading (p. 408). It is a terrible comment on what the consensus was that Reagan’s characterisation of the US effort in Vietnam as a “noble cause” was regarded as eccentric and chauvinist, just as later was “evil empire” (but for the latter’s vindication see The Week, 15/2/02, p. 13).
All through the account is woven the political manoeverings of various, almost forgotten presidential hopefuls and their minions. The ups and downs of Reagan’s two bids for the Republican nomination and the campaign that won him the Presidency, are given in great detail. On the other hand, his two terms as Governor of California are more lightly sketched in (or are perhaps less memorable). A fine book, which should be better known.
Sounds like interesting reading.
Regarding the Vietnam War .. any mention made about how the US could not go all out to fight it because we were always worried about Russia getting involved if we did?
As a child, I remember watching the news and every night there was an account of what the battles for that day had been. Then we got the body count for the day. Watching this night after night was demoralizing because it dragged on for years.
By the time I was a teen, I was one of those who wanted us to pull out of Vietnam. It became obvious we would not do what we had to do in order to win. We were just sending soldiers over to die.
So, I’m curious if the author has any comments on what the US should have done, given that we were always looking over our shoulders for Russia. I’m not sure what we could have done.
For those of us who grew up with air raid drills in school, air raid shelters in our downtown areas and weekly tests of our air raid sirens, the threat of war with Russia was very real and always on the mind.
I am truly glad that Reagan listened to those in his circle who had read The Strategy of Technology, and successfully outspent the Russians with the right game of technological stud poker.
Anyone who had read it would know that it didn’t matter whether or not Star Wars worked immediately, only that the Russians were credibly convinced that it would work and they had to keep pace.
There are some truly awsome Reagan quotes, many of which seemed over the top to the left at the time, which are completely reasonable now
Having grown up with air raid siren tests and whatnot, I look forward to volume 2 of this work very much.
Napoleon demanded of his generals that they be lucky, and in fact many prominent careers have depended on what in retrospect appears to be extravagant good fortune. Reagan’s was one of them.
He was fortunate most of all in the moment he became President, following a disastrous four years of Jimmy Carter than made Americans more than willing to accept Reagan’s radically different approach and after the Soviet Union was past its point of greatest strength. Reagan was lucky as well in having Congressional allies who were able to keep the fiscal damage of his 1981 tax cuts from becoming completely unmanageable. He was lucky in presiding over a massive tax reform effort that he never really understood and that bore fruit in 1986. He was exceptionally lucky with respect to SDI, which all retrospective rationalizations to the contrary was never intended as a bluff or an effort to bankrupt the Soviets — it was something Reagan genuinely believed would lead quickly to an effective defense against ballistic missile attack, about which he was completely and expensively wrong. He was finally lucky in the relative quiet that descended over international politics during most of his second term, when his advancing age and some ill-advised staff changes diminished his administration’s ability to form policy and react to crises.
I do not mean to overstate this; Reagan had genuine abilities, an intuitive grasp of the centrality of private enterprise to the world economy that past Presidents of both parties had lacked, and a sense of the dignity of the office of the Presidency that we sorely miss today. Among his many legacies, though, was a legion of followers who remember him as the last Republican able to bridge all the differences in the party, and who are therefore inclined to ascribe to him qualities of wisdom and foresight that he would never have claimed for himself and that are in no way justified by the available evidence.
I notice that Ann Coulter gives exactly the same account of events in her book “Treason”.
Yet, becauses she says that “liberals”, i. e. Socialists, behave as if they were taking their orders from the enemies of the U. S. — and that some of them actually do, she is being denounced as “blatantly irrational”.
A couple of comments here…
Nixon was quite effective in winning the Vietnam War, and in losing it. He won the war with the Christmas bombings of 1972. He lost the war because he was unable to overcome the strong leftist anti-war, hate-america zeitgeist, and because Watergate, and the press spinning thereof, led to the congress which, under Ford, gave South Vietnam to the Communists. Were it not for that disgraceful and embarassing behavior, South Vietnam would probably like South Korea today.
At the same time, Nixon was a statist and instituted more entitlement and misguided environmental programs than the Johnson!
Regarding Reagan being “lucky” – remember the old statement that “you make your luck.” It’s not as if Reagan suddenly appeared in 1980. He made his Republican debut in at the Republican Convention in 1964. He became a Governator (KalifoornIa), the best way to subsequently become president. He ran for president in 1976. He had a regular radio commentary where (it has recently been discovered) he wrote all of his own material, which was brilliant. He ran again in 1980.
As far as SDI, if Reagan didn’t understand it, apparently the Soviets didn’t either, since they fiercely opposed it, even though they had a system of their own. Although people claim that it is way too hard and expensive to build a ballistic missile defense, they start with some bad assumptions:
1) To be effective it must stop all incoming warheads. Actually, to achieve the effect of reducing the odds of nuclear war, it only has to stop enough weapons to reduce the odds of a first strike, and that isn’t hard to do (see #2).
2) You cannot use nuclear warheads on your ABM system. This is the same rule under which the current US system operates, and it makes such a system ineffective. The first US system (which was built and then abandoned) used Enhanced Radiation Warheads (“neuron bombs”), and the still existing Russian system uses nuclear warheads. Nuclear warheads greatly reduce the problem of decoys and screening (reflective balloons around the real warhead) that hit-to-kill systems employ. The ONLY reason for non-nuclear warheads is nuclearphobia on the part of the left, which won’t let the scientists built what they want.
So SDI was not a bad idea. It was just hobbled, like other Reagan efforts (Contras) by the left.
Furthermore, the program was approached with an Apollo Program method: lots of different, parallel approaches – after which you take the ones that work. Of course, it was not adequately funded for this due to the Democrats’ control of funding.
Additionally, most of the ‘expert’ critiques of the system were by scientists, not engineers. Thus were hear Computer Science professors pronouncing that it would be impossible to make software for the system that works correctly. But such folks tend to be mathematicians, not engineers, and tend to go for perfect solutions. Engineers just go for solutions that actually work. Add to that the common “intellectual” opinion that Reagan was an idiot, and the left’s influence in academia, it is not surprising that experts in things other than weapons would appear and tell us how impractical the system was.
The book looks very interesting. I will have to get hold of it (if my local, very left-wing librarians will stock it – since it has the word “Reagan” in it, they may not). As an older blogger, I watched or participated in some of these events (such as the Vietnam and some anti-war demonstrations). I also voted for Reagan.
With a successful test of a laser taking out an Artillery round in the sky, I say bogus that SDI could not work.
Of course, I said it could work from the beginning.
Those same people would probably have poo-pooed the System used by Ships to knock down enemy missles.
While I know the speeds used are different between an artillery shell and a warhead. Lets think of the differences, with an artillery shell you have about about a minute of time to take it down. With a warhead, you know when the launch happens, you track the missle up and when it gets close to breaking the Atmosphere, you shoot it down. No more missle, no multiple warheads. Nothing.
It is patently stupid to say it can not be done. People have been saying that since time began, and people have been proved wrong time and time again.
Pardon my rant.