In Robert Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land he depicted a world leader whose wife routinely consults an astrologer, and then manipulates her weak husband to do whatever the astrologer told her to do.
When I read the novel in 1962, I thought that was one of the most outrageous ideas I had ever encountered, even though the book was filled with other fantastic things like a human who had been raised since infancy by Martians and thus imbued with incredible powers. I knew that astrology was nothing but a bunch of hokum, and I couldn’t imagine anyone who had attained the status of world leader taking it seriously.
Boy, did I have a lot to learn!
When Donald Regan, one of Ronald Reagan’s Chiefs of Staff, published his memoir For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington, he wrote:
Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise.
The astrologer was revealed to be Joan Quigley, whom Nancy had met on The Merv Griffin Show. Quigley eventually published her own book entitled What Does Joan Say?.
And then there’s this:
At the meeting with House and Senate leaders of both parties in the Oval Office late in 1986, Reagan took the opportunity to announce that military procurement expenditures didn’t add anything whatsoever to the national deficit. When Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield, a moderate Republican, disagreed, Reagan cried: “You have played havoc with the military defenses of our country and squandered it all on wastefulsocialprograms” (with Reagan, Texas Congressman Jim Wright observed, wasteful social programs came out as one word). When Hatfield reminded him that military spending had doubled (from $148 billion in 1980 to almost 300 billion in 1986), while discretionary spending had been cut by slightly more than 10 percent, Reagan responded: “Our problem is that you have spent less than I asked for military strength and more than I asked on wastefulsocialprograms!”
Government spending was government spending, Hatfield reminded Reagan. Wasn’t the President concerned with the overall spending rate and its effect on the national debt? Wouldn’t he agree “that a dollar spent on a bomb adds just as much to the deficit as the same dollar would if it were spent on a school book”? Reagan shook his head. “I do not agree with that,” he exclaimed, “and I would like Cap Weinberger to address that subject.” Secretary of Defense Weinberger then got up and explained that money spent on military procurement added nothing to the deficit, because it was spent with American manufacturers who employed laborers who bought consumer goods from merchants who paid taxes on their incomes. “And, therefore,” concluded Weinberger, “you see, it all comes back to the treasury in taxes.”
Reagan’s Congressional visitors were astonished. They realized that Weinberger’s reasoning could apply to almost any expenditures that added to the nation’s wealth (highways and waterways, for example, rather than weapons) and that it could apply even more forcefully to programs that were more labor intensive and less capital intensive. “There were probably twenty or more of us in the room,” Congressman Wright reported afterward. “Nineteen, including Weinberger himself, knew that his contention was sheer sophistry. But one man believed it, because he chose to believe it. The President of the United States actually believed that day that military expenditures did not add anything to the deficit.”
— Presidential Anecdotes by Paul F. Boller Jr.
I could go on, but those should suffice. Ronald Reagan was the stupidest person ever to hold the office of President of the United States. By a country mile.
It’s well known that he was a flaming liberal when he was married to Jane Wyman and then became a dyed in the wool conservative when he wed Nancy Davis. He was also known as an actor. But it’s probably more accurate to think of him as an empty shell who would say any lines that a strong personality would put in front of him.
Think of him as a sock puppet.
By the time he became president, he probably had so many hands sticking up his ass, it’s a wonder he didn’t explode.
When the election of 1980 came around, I had recently moved to Philadelphia. Philly’s city politics being what they were (and are), it didn’t make sense to register as an Independent if I wanted to have any say at all in city elections. The electorate is something like 80% Democratic and the winner of the Democratic primary generally is the winner of the general election. There have been a few exceptions over the years, such as when Republican Ron Castille won the District Attorney’s slot in the 1980s, but not many.
Thus I registered as a Democrat so I could at least vote in the primary elections, otherwise I might still be an Independent. Though, of course, it’s no secret that I have no love for the modern Republican Party, or for that matter for any of the silly third parties that only act as spoilers.
Still I was faced with the problem of whom to for in 1980. Obviously not Reagan, as I already considered him a certified idiot, just from his record in California. And I couldn’t see my way to voting for Carter again, even though he was the lessor of two evils.
But that was the year that Republican John Anderson mounted a third party challenge. Initially it seemed he had some momentum behind him, and I liked what he had to say, so he was definitely my preferred candidate. By the time November rolled around, however, it was pretty clear from the polls that Reagan was going to win Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. If Carter had had a chance, I would have held my nose and voted for him, but I was certain he would lose, so I voted for my preferred candidate, John Anderson. In the event, I was correct. Reagan won, but the margins were such that if all of Anderson’s votes had gone to Carter, he still wouldn’t have carried PA.
And so we ended up suffering through eight years Reaganism.
Reagan may have earned his nickname of Great Communicator, but his preferred form of communication was one-way, a carefully scripted monologue. He used television more often and better than any president who came before him and delivered more prime-time speeches-yet held far fewer formal press conferences than other chief executives, at least until George W. Bush aggressively mimicked the Reagan model. His radical new approach to leading the nation was clear from the early days of his administration; just nineteen months after Reagan took office, Time magazine fretted about his “TV presidency” and noted “our agreeable and anecdotal president is well suited for [the] medium,” while old-school senator J. William Fulbright mourned the fact that in making policy through TV appearances “your reasons are usually left out because they’re not flamboyant.”
— Tear Down This Myth by Will Bunch
Reaganism (it’s impossible to know who was responsible for which parts of it, Reagan himself, Nancy, their astrologer, or one of the many handlers with their hands up Reagan’s ass) led to much deregulation which continued after his time in office and eventually resulted in the loss of the financial safety net and the various large bank failures and sub-prime mortgage crisis.
Then there was the Iran-Contra scandal in which the Reagan administration illegally sold arms to Iran.
The thing is that Reagan’s policies were never very popular, but with his folksy demeanor, people just seemed to like him. Not me, of course.
In the years since, there have been all sorts of myths that have grown about him, and he’s practically a demigod to Republicans. Most of those myths can’t stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny.
I want to close with one more thing. When the AIDS crisis developed in the early 1980s, Reagan flatly refused to address it in any way for years. He couldn’t even bring himself to utter the word AIDS. And so many people were dying and people who were unknowingly infected with HIV were passing the virus on to others and into the nation’s blood supply. And the blood was being given to otherwise healthy patients who were recovering from operations, such as triple bypass heart surgery, for example.
One such patient in 1983 was Isaac Asimov, who became infected HIV, and this led to his premature death in 1992.
If the Reagan administration had taken aggressive action when AIDS was first discovered, would they have been able to protect the nation’s blood supply? I don’t know. But the point is, for whatever reason Reagan didn’t do a damn thing for years.