12 things this millennial learned about the Reagan Era
Filling in the blanks of history as I've known it
The Book:
The Reagan Diaries
Edited by Douglas Brinkley
HarperCollins
2007
The Talk:
I was born in the middle of the Reagan presidency. As a result, the 1980s were never part of my formal education. In elementary school and high school, history ended with the Vietnam War. I don’t remember any history courses in college past the 1970s. What I’ve known about the time between Vietnam and the World Wide Web has mostly come from pop culture. When adults did talk about Reagan, it was either in vague platitudes (if they were conservative) or vague loathing (if they were liberal).
So listening to The Regan Diaries was a bit like watching a prequel to a movie I had seen a million times. Lots of Republicans from my childhood and young adulthood make cameos: George Bush, Bob Dole, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, John McCain, Alan Greenspan, Antonin Scalia, etc.
But there were also a lot of things that I had never heard of before. Here are a few that stood out:
1. Joe Biden ran for president during the Reagan presidency. Reagan notes in passing that Senator Joe Biden is running for president in 1987 and calls him a pure demagogue. The campaign was short lived, however, as Biden was plagued by a plagiarism scandal early on.
2. President Reagan met with Michael Jackson to promote the “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign. I’m not sure if this was big deal at the time, but it stood out to me as perhaps the most “80s” thing ever. Based on his movie watching, you get a sense of the America Reagan idealized; he loved Jimmy Stewart, Bob Hope, James Cagney, Cary Grant, etc. (Of course, he was a former Hollywood star himself.) What did he make of Michael Jackson?
3. The attempted assassination of Reagan occurred near the very beginning of his first term. March 30, 1981. Reagan had barely settled into office.
4. Reagan called his wife Nancy “mommy.” Throughout the diaries, which were meant as official record for posterity, Reagan refers to Nancy as mommy. At one point, when she’s away, he writes, “I miss mommy.”
5. Reagan briefly mentions a congressman’s idea that presidential terms should be a single 6-year term. I wonder how this would affect the presidency. The president wouldn’t be thinking about re-election, which might make them focus more on their agenda and legacy. But it would also make their time shorter. I think I like the current setup still: House for 2 years, President for 4, Senate for 6.
6. Reagan consulted with Nixon a lot about national security matters. Not surprisingly, Reagan seems to have disliked Jimmy Carter. He never mentions calling his predecessor for any advice. But he did talk to Nixon a surprising amount for a disgraced president. Nixon even did some informal meetings with Russian officials for Reagan.
7. George Schultz is mentioned more than anyone else in the diaries. George Schultz, who I had never heard of, was Reagan’s Secretary of State. National security issues take up most of the space in the diaries, and Schultz was involved in everything. For a long period, Schultz was trying to quit due to burnout, but stayed on until the end in response to the Iran-Contra scandal. He was a businessman prior to his role as Secretary of State, and would later be an informal advisor to George W. Bush, serve on the advisory board for the Citizens Climate Lobby and the board of directors for Theranos.
8. The U.S. invaded Grenada in 1983. Worry over Latin American governments was a major—if not primary—theme of the diaries over all eight years, even after cooperation with Russia began and its collapse was obvious.
9. The Soviets shot down a Korean Air Lines flight 007 in 1983. Late 1983 was perhaps one of the darkest times for Reagan’s presidency. Marine barracks had been bombed in Beirut. The invasion of Grenada was controversial. And a Soviet fighter shot down a commercial airline flight near Alaska, killing 269 passengers. Cold War tensions were at their peak. The ABC TV movie The Day After, portraying a fictional nuclear war, was also broadcast that fall, and it even shook up the president.
10. Ronald Reagan wore hearing aids. Based solely on his own diaries, Reagan led an active life to the end of his presidency. But he was 69 when he became president, and his second term diary grows increasingly filled with details of shots, surgeries, changes to his hearing aids, nights of sickness, etc.
11. The “Tear Down This Wall” speech in Berlin came late in his presidency, after increasing cooperation with “Gorby.” I had hear that famous line before. What was interesting to me is that his Berlin trip was in June 1987. The administration had been having increasingly intimate and warm talks for quite some time before this. Reagan notes years before that their intelligence shows the Soviet economy was in shambles. And Mikhail Gorbachev acted and spoke in a very different way than his predecessors. The speech has gone down in history, but Reagan had to feel that the wall was already falling in a way.
12. The Iran-Contra affair was much bigger than I realized. I had heard of Iran-Contra before as one of the scandals on the Reagan presidency. But it really consumes the final two years for the diaries. The Oliver North trial is an almost daily topic of discussion in the final year. Although Reagan denies he knew anything about the arms-hostages-aid deal going on, the Contras were constantly on his mind for all eight years of his presidency.