The Reagan Years
-- Another view
Memories for some less than golden
Many saw his social, racial policies as divisive
By ERIC PIANIN and THOMAS B. EDSALL, The Washington Post
From The State.com (SC) June 13,
2004
WASHINGTON - As the nation mourns the passing of its 40th president, much is being made of Ronald Reagan's role in reordering U.S.-Soviet relations and dramatically redefining the terms of the political debate over tax policy, defense, domestic priorities and social justice.
The outpouring of flattering tributes since the conservative icon died last weekend is what presidential historian Robert Dallek described as "hagiography" of an immensely popular political leader.
But the lavish praise obscures that much of Reagan's record throughout eight years in office was highly controversial and intensified social and political divisions. Nearly 16 years after he left office, some interest groups and key voting blocs most adversely affected by Reagan policies remain bitter about his legacy.
The controversies and scandals included:
* Attacks on the federal school lunch program and aid to the poor
* Anti-union tactics
* The illegal sale of arms to Iran
* Reagan's 1985 participation in a ceremony at a German cemetery where Nazi soldiers are buried.
No group may have chafed more at Reagan's policies than African-Americans, who assailed the president for opposing racial quotas, for seeking a tax credit for the segregated Bob Jones University and for deriding a Chicago woman as a "welfare queen."
"For many Americans, this was a time best forgotten," NAACP chairman Julian Bond said.
"He was a polarizing figure in black America. He was hostile to the generally accepted remedies for discrimination. His appointments were of people as equally hostile. I can't think of any Reagan policy that African-Americans would embrace."
Reagan offended blacks when he kicked off his 1980 general election campaign by promoting "states rights"
-- once southern code for segregation -- in Philadelphia, Miss., scene of the murder of three civil rights workers 16 years before.
Early in his first term, Reagan ordered some of his toughest budget cuts in Medicaid, food stamps, aid to families with dependent children and other "means tested" programs that were critical to large numbers of lower-income black families.
Until a public protest forced Reagan to back away, his Agriculture Department sought to cut the school lunch program and redefine ketchup and relish as vegetables.
Reagan had vowed to protect the "social safety net" of programs for the poor, the disabled and the elderly when he unveiled his economic recovery plan on Feb. 18, 1981.
But two years later, White House budget director David Stockman said the "safety-net" assurances were "just a spur-of the-moment thing that the press office wanted to put out."
Isabel Sawhill, who oversaw a project examining the economic and social consequences of Reagan policies for the Urban Institute, said Reagan took office as major economic forces were producing growing income inequality. Although his policies didn't cause the growing disparities of income between rich and poor, she said, they contributed to the trend through "tax cuts that were very tilted to the more affluent" and "cuts in programs for the less well off."
There were scores of other controversies:
* Reagan fired 13,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 after they staged a work stoppage and used the National Labor Relations Board to crack down on labor unions.
* His Interior secretary, James Watt, infuriated environmentalists by assaulting environmental safeguards and aggressively attempting to open public lands in the West to private developers.
* Reagan, during his 1980 campaign, blamed trees for emitting 93 percent of the nation's nitrogen oxide pollution
-- giving rise to jokes about "killer trees."
* The combination of a huge "supply-side" tax cut, a historic military buildup and a painful two-year recession produced huge budget deficits and a nearly tripling of the national debt that haunted the country and policy-makers for years and drained resources from social programs.
* The administration showed indifference to an emerging AIDS crisis: By the time Reagan delivered his first speech on the epidemic in 1988, more than 36,000 Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS and 20,849 had died.
Reaganomics failed to reduce the deficit, but the combined policies of the administration and the Federal Reserve Board helped usher in the longest peacetime economic expansion since the end of World War II - a nearly eight-year boom that made many people rich.
Reagan's June 12, 1987, speech at the Brandenburg Gate calling on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down" the Berlin Wall has been widely seen as the apogee of his moral leadership abroad.
But even his top aides considered his decision to go to a German military cemetery two years earlier as the nadir.
Ignoring pleas from Jewish leaders and numerous liberal and conservative thinkers, Reagan attended a commemorative ceremony in Bitburg where 49 soldiers of the Waffen SS were among the 2,000 buried.
The White House insisted the president had no choice but to honor the invitation of then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
But Holocaust survivor and Nobel prize-winning author Elie Wiesel condemned the visit as an insensitive act that had "wounded" Jews throughout the world and distorted history by equating Holocaust victims with Nazi soldiers.
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