Letters to the Editor
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Reagan's Destiny - And Our's - Was Written Behind the "Orange Curtain"
That's Orange County, California.
Do yourselves a favor and, if you can find it, read Haynes Johnson's Sleepwalking Through History. While you're at it, also read:
The Worst Years of Our Lives by Barbara Ehrenreich
Before the Storm and Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
What happened was this: A large group of right-wing businessmen backed Goldwater. When his candidacy, the first shot in the right-wing revolution, went down in flames they realized they needed a cuddlier bear. They latched onto Reagan. Ed Meese, George Schultz and - most signficantly - Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann beseeched Reagan to run for Governor of California against Pat Brown. It would be the second shot fired in the right-wing war to turn back not only the Great Society but the New Deal itself. Nixon watched Reagan's campaign and learned from it. So did others. Reagan debated Bobby Kennedy about the Vietnam war in '68 and, by all accounts, won (Bobby wasn't the debater Jack had been).
Then, in a California referendum in 1978, the third shot of the right-wing revolution rang out. Proposition 13, a wholly destructive measure to cut property taxes at the expense of EVERYTHING, passed in California despite numerous other propositions on the same ballot that would not have been so violent. But then that was the point, as then-Governor Jerry Brown desperately tried to tell people. Almost nobody listened, swayed as they were by largely false tales of elderly residents being taxed out of their homes.
The fourth shot of the right-wing revolution was the election or Ronald Reagan to the Presidency of the United States. That such a cypher, such an abject idiot could be elected to the highest office in the land horrified the entire left-wing intelligentsia. Folks like John Kenneth Galbraith rightly called it the worst moment in American politics. We've seen worse since then, but at the time he was right.
Those looking for Reagan perfidy need look no further than the "October Surprise" in 1980. Carter's diplomats had been working non-stop to get the hostages freed from Iran before the election. They were well on the path to doing so when, abruptly in the fall, all talks stopped. No one understood why, but after the death of of Chief Spy William Casey it became obvious - though not provable - that the Reagan campaign paid off the Iranians to keep the hostages until after the election. The in-roads made here were the reason the later Iran-Contra Hearings turned into a sick joke, and why Ollie North dropped on his sword. No one wanted to expose the Gipper to charges of high treason.
But the die had been cast. Such corruption would be the life's blood of the Republicans henceforth, and it culminated in the most brazenly stolen Presidency in the history of our nation, that of George W. Bush. His personal indolence led to 9/11 and the rest, as they say, is history. Recent history, more's the pity.
All that we now endure was planned by those cloth-and-flannel glad men who made a king of Reagan when he was nothing more than a voice for a third-rate western on TV. Such is the irony of history.