News flash: a tenured professor at a state university rates Ronald Reagan as one of the five greatest presidents of all time. “Eisenhower had the military-industrial complex to contend with; Reagan had the academic-media complex,” UVA professor Whittle Johnson noted in a Hoffstra University conference on the Great Communicator’s presidency back in 1995.
Nothing much has changed since. “To a certain extent, his lesser rating reflects the reality of political correctness,” John Patrick Diggins points out. “Recent American historiography has been dominated either by older liberals who were in thrall to Roosevelt and the New Deal or by young radicals from the sixties who blame liberalism for the Vietnam War and conservatism for the wickedness of Wall Street.”
“Reagan represents a special case.” Indeed he does.
Dr. Diggins himself attempts to set the record straight and offer an exhaustive, comprehensive treatment in his admirable book, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History. On the home front, during the Reagan years, “From 1986 to 1988 the top 5 percent of taxpayers paid 45.5 percent of all taxes, up from 41.8 percent in 1986,” Dr. Diggins writes. “The next 45 percent of taxpayers paid 48.7 percent of all taxes, down from 51.6 percent, and taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of all taxpayers declined to 6.6 to 5.7 percent.”
“The impression that the Reagan era was a time when the rich exploited the poor must be revised if history is to be faithful to statistics.” One would think so but thus far Dr. Diggins is about the only pedagogue making an attempt to rectify the two.
A professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Dr. Diggins has received interesting reactions to his work on Reagan from his peers. “A couple of them came up to me after the excerpt appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education and said, ‘We’re still not convinced,’” Dr. Diggins told me at the Cato Institute.
“It’s so nice to be in a room full of people who like Ronald Reagan,” he said in a speech at the libertarian think tank. “Since the era of Washington and Adams, Reagan was the only president in American history to have resolved a sustained, deadly international confrontation without going to war,” Dr. Diggins writes.
Dr. Diggins gives us several fascinating glimpses of how the Gipper pulled this off. In one head-on collision, Soviet premier Mikhail “Gorbachev emphasized the importance of trade, only to lead Reagan to withhold trade agreements unless human rights were addressed,” Dr. Diggins recounts.
Other 20th Century presidents would have responded by proffering trade credits. Just look at what they did.
But then, President Reagan, whose alleged lack of foreign policy experience was much derided, had something all of these other chief executives lacked—finely honed negotiating skills sharpened by more than a decade at the helm of the Screen Actors Guild union. He was able to employ these gifts in the service of not only his country but also, it could be argued, the world.
On the other hand, President Reagan once toned down a confrontational speech passage penned by Pat Buchanan, Dr. Diggins relates. “Pat, this has been a good meeting,” the elder statesman reportedly told his aide at one of the more successful summits with Gorbachev. “I think I can work with this guy.”
“I just can’t keep poking him in the eye.”
On an historical episode that only tangentially involves America’s 40th president, Dr. Diggins also imparts a revealing insight. The refusal of Hollywood screenwriters to answer questions about communist activities that were posed by the U. S. House UnAmerican Activities Committee has long been interpreted by some of the unfriendly witnesses’ most ardent high-profile defenders as proof of their innocence in the 1930s and 1940s.
Dr. Diggins’ encounter with one of the unfriendly shows that the Hollywood Ten’s advocates may be giving history a backward read. “In 1973, I had occasion to be in the company of Lester Coles [sic], one of the Hollywood Ten, while watching the Watergate coverage at a summer house in Laguna Beach,” Dr. Diggins remembers. “One evening a news bulletin interrupted the program to announce that the democratically elected Chilean government had fallen and [socialist premier] Salvador Allende had been assassinated.”
“Of course,” Coles said. “Will they ever learn?”
“There’s only one way to go.”
“What way is that?” Dr. Diggins asked Coles.
“Castro’s way,” the latter answered.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
