A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  Perceiving that Carter was distracted, the USSR staged a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and installed a puppet government in Kabul. Carter belatedly ordered a defense buildup and sent warships to the Persian Gulf, but Afghanistan was already in Soviet hands.

  With such futility in the Oval Office, it is not surprising that the brightest moment for Americans scarcely involved government. It came at the Winter Olympic Games held at Lake Placid, New York, when the U.S. ice hockey team, substantial underdogs to the professional Soviet skaters, played one of the most heroic games in Olympic history. The U.S. team grabbed the lead and, as the clock ticked down, the pro-American crowd waved American flags and chanted “U-S-A, U-S-A.” In the final seconds, broadcaster Al Michaels delivered one of the most memorable lines in all sports history as the amateur American team beat the Soviets: “Do you believe in miracles? Yeeeesssss!” If only symbolically, the American Olympic ice hockey team had done what Carter could not.

  Whipsawed between Afghanistan and Iran, in April 1980, Carter, having lost all initiative and the element of surprise, finally approved a risky scheme to rescue the Iranian hostages. The complex plan called for a hazardous nighttime desert rendezvous, with numerous aircraft, and operated on what military people call zero margin—no room for error. En route mechanical difficulties aborted the mission, but the choppers still had to refuel, and one, in the process of taking off during a windstorm, clipped a fuel plane with its rotor, causing a massive fireball. International news later broadcast video of Iranians waving the mutilated body parts of charred American troops. It is safe to say that even including the burning of Washington, D.C., in the War of 1812, the United States had never sunk to a lower, more humiliating point internationally.

  Treating his inability to govern as a virtual crisis, Carter retreated to Camp David, emerging to deliver his famous “malaise” speech, although he never used the word specifically, blaming the American public for a national “crisis of confidence.”47 Andrew Young had already resigned in controversy, and Cyrus Vance quit in a disagreement over the Iranian rescue. Carter’s solid personal character had been overwhelmed by his insistence on micromanaging the administration.

  Absorbed with Afghanistan, Iran, and the Middle East, Carter failed to comprehend the significance of one of the most important and sweeping movements of the twentieth century, when a powerful resistance movement to communism arose in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland, John Paul II, had been elected pope in October 1978, the first non-Italian to be so honored since 1522, and quickly became the most popular pontiff in history. John Paul II energized anticommunism from the outside, while Polish shipyard worker Lech Walesa led a resistance from the inside in the form of strikes.

  Ironically, Carter was not the only one distracted by Afghanistan: the Soviets seemed paralyzed by the growing independence of the trade unions in Poland and, in any event, could not financially continue to support the rotting carcass of the Eastern European communist states. The sword cut both ways. Where Stalin would have moved in to crush Walesa’s Solidarity Union, so too a Truman or a Teddy Roosevelt would have moved to support such a movement. Instead, both Brezhnev and Carter floundered in the Iranian deserts and Afghan mountains.

  “Well, There You Go Again!”

  On every front, the United States seemed in decline. Economically, socially, and in international relations, by 1980 America was in retreat. Yet at this point of weakness, the nation stood on the edge of its greatest resurgence since the months following Doolittle’s bombing of Tokyo. The turnaround began with an upheaval within the Republican Party.

  Since the defeat of Goldwater in 1964, the American conservative movement had steadily given ground. Nixon and Ford, at best, were moderates on most hot-button conservative issues, and other potential Republican alternatives to Jimmy Carter—Nelson Rockefeller, for example—represented the blue-hair wing of the country-club GOP, which offered no significant change in philosophy from the Georgian’s. Then onto the scene came a sixty-nine-year-old former actor, Goldwaterite, and governor of California, Ronald Wilson Reagan. At one time a New Deal Democrat who had voted four times for FDR, Reagan was fond of saying that he “didn’t leave the Democratic Party; it left me.” Reagan contended that the liberals of the 1970s had abandoned the principles that had made up the Democratic Party of John Kennedy and Harry Truman, and that those principles—anticommunism, a growing economy for middle-class Americans, and the rule of law—were more in line with the post-Nixon Republican Party.

  Born in Illinois (and the first president ever to have lived in Chicago), Reagan created an alter ego for himself with his portrayal of Notre Dame football player George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American (1940), in which he immortalized the line spoken by the dying Gipp to the Fighting Irish football team, “Go out there and win one for the Gipper.” Later in public life, Reagan enjoyed being referred to as the Gipper. His most critically acclaimed role, however, had come in King’s Row (1942). At Eureka College, he led a successful student strike aimed at restoring faculty members whom the school had fired, which later gave him the distinction of having been the only U.S. president to have led a student protest march. He headed the Screen Actors Guild in 1947, the Hollywood labor union for motion picture artists, energetically working to excise communists from its ranks, while at the same time endeavoring to clear the names of noncommunists who had been unfairly targeted by the FBI or HUAC. Just as the student strike had made him unique, the union experience marked him as the only twentieth-century American president to have served in a union position.

  Never as overtly religious as Coolidge before him or George W. Bush after him, Reagan’s moral sense was acute. When he learned that the Los Angeles Lakeside Country Club, to which he belonged, did not admit Jews, he resigned. At a World War II celebration of United America Days, where he honored a Nisei sergeant, Kazuo Masuda, who had died in the war, Reagan reminded the audience, “The blood that has soaked into the sands of the beaches is all one color. America stands unique in the world—a country not founded on race, but on…an ideal.”48 Only after his death in 2004 was Reagan’s Christian faith more completely examined and publicized.

  During the 1960s he began to explore a political career, first working for Goldwater, then running for governor of California. Reagan won the 1966 gubernatorial election, then reelection. He reformed welfare in one of the nation’s most free-spending states, vetoed more than nine hundred bills (of which only one passed over his veto), and imposed a rule of common sense.49

  Branded by his opponents as an extremist and an anticommunist zealot, Reagan in fact practiced the art of compromise, comparing success in politics to a batting average. He warned conservatives that the game required give and take, working with Democrats in California to shed seventy-five thousand from the state’s welfare rolls while increasing benefits for the poorest. Bolstered by a winning smile, an indefatigable charm, and the ability to shrug off criticism with a wink and a grin, he drove his opponents into even greater froths. The most gifted presidential orator of the twentieth century, Reagan was ridiculed for reading from index cards, a habit he had picked up from his years on the rubber-chicken circuit giving speeches before chambers of commerce and community groups as official spokesman for the General Electric Corporation. Ridiculed for his acting background and characterized as a dim bulb, Reagan, in fact, wrote extensively, on almost every subject, with deep understanding.50 The Gipper also put things in everyday language. Speaking of the dismal economy, he said, “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. A recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”

  In the general election campaign, Reagan ran on three simple promises: he would revive the economy through tax cuts and deregulation, cutting the size of government; he would wage the cold war with renewed vigor; and he would address the nation’s energy problems by seeking market solutions. He mollified moderates by naming George H. W. Bush
of Texas, former CIA director, as his running mate, but the race belonged to Reagan. Turning Carter’s own once-winning question around on the Georgian, the Gipper asked, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”51 He also dusted off the misery index, which had risen sharply under Carter. Short-term interest rates, which had stood at 5.35 percent when Carter took office, had more than doubled to 12.29 percent in 1980, which Reagan did not hesitate to point out. The price of gold, traditionally a barometer of inflation, had gone off the charts during the Carter years, reaching its record high of $875 an ounce. At the same time (1980), Japan passed the United States as the world’s largest auto producer, and one third of all Americans drove a Japanese car. Even if Carter been a competent president and candidate, those numbers would have done him in.

  Though not trailing significantly in the polls, Carter knew he was in trouble. Democratic strategists had placed much of their hopes of keeping the White House on the presidential debates, where it was thought the younger, Washington-toughened Carter might expose Reagan as a doddering inexperienced political newbie. Yet whenever Carter distorted Reagan’s record or tried to portray him as an extremist, the Gipper smiled, cocked his head, and quipped, “Well, there you go again,” five words that Reagan credited with winning him the election. The debates made the incumbent look like a sincere but naive child arguing with his wise uncle. On election eve, despite surveys showing Reagan trailing, the Californian came back so strongly that Carter appalled Democrat strategists by conceding the campaign while the polls were still open in California. Reagan carried the electoral college 489 to 49, the most stunning and overwhelming loss for an incumbent since the ill-fated Hoover had gone down in 1932. The Republicans also gained thirteen seats in the Senate to win a majority there for the first time in nearly thirty years, and they picked up thirty-three House seats. But the desire for change in the nation was far deeper than that. Among the Democrats who had won election, some thirty to forty “boll weevils” from conservative districts supported stronger defense and tax cuts, and they voted for the Reagan proposals consistently. Many of them eventually switched parties.

  Reaganophobia

  Liberal textbook writers have endeavored to distort and taint Reagan’s record more than they have any other subject except the Great Depression. They began by attempting to minimize the extent of Reagan’s massive and shocking victory by pointing to low turnout, which had in fact been exacerbated by massive drives by liberals to register voters who in fact had no intention of ever voting.52

  Another strategy to discredit Reagan was to attack his acting career, pointing to the absence of many critically acclaimed roles. This allowed them to label him a B actor. Yet this argument contradicted another line of attack on the Gipper, claiming that he had no genuine political instincts or serious policy ideas, and that he was merely a master of the camera. For example, a photo caption in American Journey, after acknowledging Reagan’s communication skills, dutifully noted that “critics questioned his grasp of complex issues.”53 Reagan “was no intellectual,” announced the popular textbook The American Pageant.54

  Both the Democrats and the media continually underestimated Reagan, mistakenly thinking that his acting background and camera presence had supplied his margin of victory. Neither group took seriously his ideas—or the fact that those ideas were consistent and appealed to large majorities of Americans. Refusing to engage in combative dialogue with his media enemies Reagan repeatedly used them to his advantage, and kept his eyes on the prize. Reagan was in fact widely read and perceptive too: in 1981, he had latched on to a pathbreaking book by George Gilder, Wealth & Poverty, which to the lament of mainstream academics, turned the economic world upside down with its supply-side doctrine and stunning insights.55

  Symbolically, although Carter had negotiated an end to the hostage crisis, the ayatollah did not release the prisoners until January 20, 1981, the day of Reagan’s inauguration. (It was characteristic of Reagan, in his diary, to note how sorry he had felt for the departing Carter, who did not have the fortune of seeing the hostages released.) Symbolism aside, the Reagan Revolution shocked the FDR coalition to its roots. Even unions started to splinter over supporting some of Reagan’s proposals, and although publicly the Democrats downplayed the extent of the damage, privately Democratic Party strategist Al From was so shaken that he initiated a study to determine if Reagan was a fluke or if a broad transformation of the electorate had started to occur.56 He did not like the answers. Going in, Reagan knew that fixing more than a decade’s worth of mismanagement in energy, monetary policy, national security, and other areas of neglect would be a long-term prospect. It required a policy style that did not veer from crisis to crisis, but which held firm to conservative principles, even when it meant disregarding short-term pain. Equally important, it meant that Reagan personally had to ditch the Carter “malaise” that hung over the nation like a blanket and replace it with the old-fashioned can-do optimism that was inherently Reaganesque.

  The Gipper accomplished this by refusing to engage in Beltway battles with reporters or even Democrats on a personal basis. He completely ignored the press, especially when it was critical. Laughing and joking with Democrats, he kept their ideology, which he strenuously opposed, separate from the people themselves. These characteristics made it intensely difficult even for Washington reporters and die-hard Democrats to dislike him, although Carter resented the election loss for more than a decade. Reagan frustrated reporters and intellectuals with a maddening simplicity, asking why we needed the Federal Reserve at all and why, if the ozone layer was being destroyed, we couldn’t replace it. He possessed a sense of humor and self-deprecation not seen since Truman. Having acted in his share of bad movies, Reagan provided plenty of ammunition to critics. When one reporter brought him a studio picture from a movie he had made with a chimpanzee, Bedtime for Bonzo, the Gipper good-naturedly signed it and wrote, “I’m the one with the watch.”57 Just two months after his inauguration, Reagan was the victim of an assassination attempt by John Hinckley. With a bullet still lodged in his chest, Reagan, taken into surgery, quipped to the doctors, “I hope you’re all Republicans!”58 In his 1982 State of the Union address, the Gipper quoted George Washington. Then, lampooning his own age, he added: “For our friends in the press, who place a high premium on accuracy, let me say I did not actually hear George Washington say that, but it is a matter of historic record.” Aware the nation needed to revive the spirit of achievement, Reagan introduced everyday “American heroes” in his State of the Union messages.

  When celebrating triumphs—whether over inflation, interest rates, unemployment, or communism—Reagan used “we” or “together.” When calling on fellow citizens for support, he expressed his points in clear examples and heartwarming stories. An example, he said, was always better than a sermon. No matter what he or government did, to Reagan it was always the people of the nation who made the country grow and prosper. Most important, he did not hesitate to speak what he thought was the truth, calling the Soviet Union the “evil empire,” a term that immediately struck a note with millions of Star Wars fans and conjuring up the image of a decrepit Soviet leader as the “emperor” bent on destroying the Galactic Republic (America). Once, preparing to make a statement about the Soviet Union, Reagan did not realize a microphone was left on, and he joked to a friend, “The bombing begins in five minutes.” Horrified reporters scurried about in panic, certain that this gunslinger-cowboy president was serious.

  But Reagan relied on more than language to accomplish his goals. Criticized as a hands-off president, he in fact was a master delegator, using a troika of Edwin Meese, James Baker, and Donald Regan (who held various advisory positions, with Baker and Regan actually trading jobs in 1985) to supervise every important issue. That left Reagan free to do the strategic thinking and to galvanize public opinion. Indeed, Reagan flustered his opponents, who thought him intellectually weak, precisely because he did not micromanage and thus devoted himsel
f to the truly important issues, often catching his adversaries completely unaware. His grasp of the details of government, clear in his autobiography, An American Life, shows that in one-on-one meetings over details of tax cuts, defense, and other issues, Reagan had mastered the important specifics. However, he also believed in getting the best people and letting them speak their mind, even when he had made up his. He repeatedly left hotly charged meetings, telling the participants, “I’ll let you know my decision,” rather than embarrass the losing side in front of the winners.

  Tax Cuts Revive the Nation

  To say that Reagan had a single most important issue would be difficult, for he saw rebuilding America’s economy and resisting Soviet communism as two sides to the same coin. Nevertheless, the key to the second came from success with the first: reviving the economy had to occur before the nation could commit to any major military expansion to resist the USSR. According to the traditional explanations, since the mid-1970s Reagan had steadily gravitated toward supply-side economics, touted by economists Arthur Laffer and Jude Wanniski. The supply-siders emphasized tax cuts to stimulate investment by making it more lucrative to build plants and start businesses instead of stimulating consumer demand, as Keynes and the Democrats had practiced for years. Cuts on the margin made a tremendous difference in purchasing and investing, the supply-siders argued, and the Laffer curve proved that tax cuts could actually increase revenues.59 Reagan’s vice president and opponent for the nomination, George H. W. Bush, had called supply-side cuts “voodoo economics,” but it was common sense, representing a revival of Mellon’s and Kennedy’s tax policies, both of which proved extremely successful. In Reagan’s hands, it became “Reaganomics.”