As I view the united states sainthood of Ronald Wilson Reagan on the television network that he, and a handful of general electric executives with ultra conservative views that used the military and government contracts they hand to keep the politicians governments businesses and financial partners an icon.

America should never forget what this man really was. A puppet! of corporate greed, plane and simple. I say this as tear run down my face viewing the site of a man who gave his soul to power! A real nice guy, who believed every thing he was told by the people who put him in the spotlight. Unfortunate for him and his family that the lights were on too long, and the constant baking of his brain may have contributed to his brain dieing which took him and the memories of his crimes against the American way of life.

I joined the US Navy like many immigrants, beleaving I was doing service for the country that gave me everything. See my Bio.

After being in the fleet for just one year, I learned that we were in the service of the Millitary Industrial Complex. Not to secure freedom at sea .but to insure that the killing machine was fed with the blood of war.

Setting up the problem

* The New Deal provided motivation for governmental action for fifty years. The material conditions of the nation could be cast into the frame of the New Deal and would motivate public action to address them. The way that they were addressed was framed by the New Deal's notion that the dispossessed of society were dispossessed because of the irresponsible actions of those at the levers of the economy. Government was their representative in addressing the failures of capitalist leadership to protect the common man and woman. By the 1960s, the television screens and magazines projected the pictures of the hungry of Appalachia. The uncaring practices of the coal companies, flush with the largesse of greed, were focused upon as the cause. The programs of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty provided leadership to organize people to address their problems. The New Deal form was reinstantiated.

* Ronald Reagan was to succeed in defusing the political power of the New Deal motive. In doing so, he managed the public/private line, moving many concerns back to being private concerns that the New Deal form had seen as public matters.

* Reagan was to accomplish this by substituting another motive that replaced the faith of Roosevelt with the faith of Reagan. We are interested in studying that process.

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Calling upon mythic America

* Franklin Roosevelt had called upon the myth of the American pioneer to give faith that our problems could be overcome. Political leadership often taps our myths to provide such faith.

* By "myth" we mean a fundamental and popularly recognized narrative form in which people believe and which shapes historical experience. Notice that myth does not mean that the narrative is false. Indeed, myth is a complex weaving of truth, often sprinkled with elements of the false, in which questions of fact pale beside the importance of the truth of the general narrative flow. Thus, Roosevelt used the myth of the pioneer who moved ever west, conquering each new frontier and bringing civilization to the entire American continent.

* Reagan called upon two powerful American myths:

* The Cowboy myth. This is actually a version of the myth of individual power. Americans portray the power of the single, dedicated individual to accomplish their dreams. Daniel Boone used his verve to conquer the wilderness of Kentucky; Andrew Carnegie founded a huge empire by being a dedicated pursuer of industrial organization. In the media world of the 1950s, the myth had become instantiated in the lone cowboy who would go into a town reeling under the oppression of the lawless and would through individual initiative clean up the town and restore peace and tranquility. The cowboy myth portrayed the power of the individual, even in his isolation, against the forces arrayed to destroy him.

* The market myth. Americans also believe in the "natural" market in which some freely sell and others freely buy and value is attached in the exchange. That the market is the natural state is one of the oldest beliefs of capitalism. Ancillary to this believe is the believe that through its natural mechanisms, the market transforms individual selfishness into community good. In the 1950s, this idea was represented by Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness. Also current at that time was a linkage between the market and democracy: the market was a kind of way that people voted by using their money to favor the things that they wanted. Thus, the market became linked with the free choice that was democracy.

* Reagan was to use these two myths as the rhetorical resources to construct a frame that would give his countrymen a new faith and in the process destroy the New Deal.

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Ronald Reagan

* Reagan had been a movie actor in the 1940s and 1950s. Among his roles were several films from the Cowboy genre including Santa Fe Trail and Law and Order. He had moved into television as the host of General Electric Theatre that produced dramas introduced by Reagan, and Death Valley Days that were stories from the Western genre. These television opportunities gave Reagan the role of narrator tying the dramas on the television to people's everyday lives.

* Although Reagan had been a supporter of the New Deal when younger, he became the darling of the conservatives by the 1960s.
* The conservative, or New Right, movement had begun as an intellectual movement in the 1950s. Its first journey into practical politics was Barry Goldwater's 1964 Presidential Campaign. Reagan was there. Goldwater lost in the greatest landslide to that point in American history.

* By 1980, Reagan was elected President as the political leader of the conservative movement.

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1980

* Our interest in 1980 is not in Reagan's election but in how he established the political power of his conservative message through his speaking.

* Several material conditions of the time provided opportunities for Reagan if he could transform them into political power through his discourse.

* The New Deal programs were now funneling money to the middle class. The dispossessed seemed relatively comfortable rather than the impoverished of the pre-Great Society days.

* By the New Deal's own measures (and measurement was critically important to the social engineering strategy of the New Deal), it was failing. Inflation had reached fifteen percent in 1980 and the New Deal programs committed the country to about three percent. Unemployment was between seven and eight percent in 1980 and the commitment of the New Deal was to three percent. In short, the New Deal appeared by its own measures to be powerless.

* An aging industrial structure was inefficient and these inefficiencies were leading to loss of business and unemployment.

* The economy was becoming less industrial. The New Deal had been a political motive constructed to frame and deal with the industrial age.

* The success of the New Deal had built tremendous bureaucratic structures of regulation. Where those regulations were aimed at the greedy, they now penetrated to most Americans lives. Thus, Americans in some ways were displaced by 1980 from the dispossessed to the greedy. The New Deal was less appealing and more threatening.

* Could Ronald Reagan transform these conditions into political power and reduce the power of the New Deal.

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The Changes in Media

* The other great change of the era was the growth of television.

* Television had emerged through the 1950s and 1960s.

* Television represented the growth of the mass media. The decline in public communication that had begun with the radio, accelerated. Television was a home living room phenomena. As politics moved into television, it moved out of public space into private space.

* Television did not so much present political messages in the early days. Although the first political commercials had run in 1952, they had been crude. Broadcast speeches were often merely eavesdropping on speakers speaking to audiences. The impact of television was not on discourse, but as a presenter of images of reality. Vietnam and the brutality of Southern racism presented a reality which discourse had to address.

* The question was how leaders could begin to use television in a way that enhanced their leadership.

* Reagan was to achieve the synthesis of speaking and television through the spectacle.

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Study Questions

* What material conditions did Reagan have to transform into political power in 1980?
* How did Reagan undercut the motivational power of the New Deal motive?
* Describe the way into which issues passed from public to private through Reagan's discourse.
* Did Reagan's discourse motivate political action? How?
* How did Reagan manage the dialectic of permanence and change?
* How did Reagan appeal to strong American myths?
* How did Reagan adapt to the television environment? How does that adaptation compare to FDR's adaptation to television?
* A recession hit the American economy in 1982. How would the New Deal have transformed the recession into political power? How would Reagan have transformed it into political power?
* Reagan has been called "the Great Communicator." Make the case for that label? Do you agree with the case? Why or why not?

Hollywood to Sacramento

Reagan, shown here in 1952, starred in more than 50 films and was also a spokesman for General Electric Corporation
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An actor finds his voice

(CNN) -- Ronald Reagan came to Hollywood in 1937 as a small-town Democrat with little more than a good voice and natural charisma. He emerged three decades later as a staunch conservative with a national reputation.

Over two decades in Hollywood, the tall, tanned Reagan achieved a small measure of fame and fortune, but -- by his own admission -- he never became a top-tier star.

Like the lifeguard he was for so long, Reagan loved to play the hero. He starred in more than 50 films, but in only one (a made-for-television film called "The Killers") was he the villain. Instead, he preferred to play upstanding, all-American men -- characters with which he had identified since childhood.

One of Reagan's favorite nicknames in the White House came from the 1940 film "Knute Rockne -- All American," in which he played Notre Dame football star George "The Gipper" Gipp. In Washington, he used the character's line, "Win one for the Gipper," to rally Republican teammates.

Reagan considered his performance as Drake McHugh in the 1941 film "King's Row" to be his finest. Shocked to discover a vengeful surgeon has amputated his legs, he shouts, "Where's the rest of me?" He later used that line as the title of a 1965 autobiography.

Reagan starred in "Hellcats of the Navy" in 1957  

Later, Reagan played opposite an ape in the 1951 movie "Bedtime for Bonzo"; he liked to joke that he was upstaged by his co-star.

Changing priorities

Reagan also owed his family life to Hollywood. In 1940, he married Jane Wyman, a promising young actress. The next year, Jane gave birth to a girl, Maureen Elizabeth. In 1945, they adopted a son, Michael Edward. Together, they were the model Hollywood family. Or so it seemed.

Reagan shared the benefits of his Hollywood success with his parents. He moved them from Dixon to California, bought them their first house, and gave his father a job fit for the proud parent he was -- handling his son's fan mail.

While delivering lines on-screen for a living, Reagan was also becoming interested in politics off-screen.

As a wary Hollywood became suspicious of Communist infiltration in the 1940s, Reagan's political beliefs -- first influenced by his Democrat father and by his Depression-era hero, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- were changing. He began to shift to the right, becoming more and more conservative.

During World War II, Reagan's poor eyesight kept him from combat, and he was assigned to make military training films. He was discharged as a Army captain in 1945, but not, he later said, before developing a disdain for the inefficiency of the military's bureaucracy.

Reagan also became increasingly anti-communist. He originally had dismissed the threat, but gradually became convinced it was real.

The charismatic Reagan began speaking out against fascism and communism, and became an outspoken ally of the anti-communism movement.

In 1947, he appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, naming groups within Hollywood that he believed were "following the tactics we associate with the Communist Party."

That same year, Reagan was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), a role he used to help defend colleagues he believed to be wrongly blacklisted.

"I do not believe that at any time, the Communist has been able to use the motion picture screen as a sounding board for his philosophy or ideology," he said.

Reagan's increasing role in SAG and his obsession with anti-communism took a toll on his personal life. In 1948, his marriage to Jane Wyman ended; she was unhappy with his growing political activism.

Ronald and Nancy Reagan, circa 1950  

Deeply depressed over the divorce and unhappy with his flagging movie career, Reagan continued his association with SAG. He served as president of the group from 1947-52 and again from 1959-60, when he led a long and successful strike against studios to win pay for actors when their movies were put on television.

It was also through SAG that he met Nancy Davis, a young actress whose name had mistakenly appeared on Hollywood lists as a communist sympathizer. In 1949, she appealed to the SAG president for help in clearing her name.

Reagan was enchanted by the intelligent young woman. They began courting, and married in 1952. Patricia Ann was born that same year; Ronald Prescott came along six years later.

From the silver screen to the small screen

After 17 years in Hollywood, with choice roles no longer coming his way, Reagan turned to the new medium of television. From 1954-62, he hosted the weekly CBS series "The General Electric Theater." As spokesman for the company, he traveled extensively, speaking to thousands of G.E. plant workers across the country.

At first little more than entertaining Hollywood anecdotes, Reagan's speeches soon turned to the problems of big government and rising taxes -- issues with which many working Americans identified.

Over the years, the speeches gave Reagan the opportunity to hone his skills as a public speaker and gauge the sentiment of the nation. In 1960, he campaigned as a Democrat for Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy. In 1962, the same year that Reagan registered as a Republican, he left G.E., emerging as a recognized conservative spokesman.

Finding a new voice

Campaigning for Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 while host of "Death Valley Days," his last Hollywood job, Reagan was asked to film a then-novel 30-minute television campaign commercial, a repeat of a speech he had delivered at a Republican fundraiser earlier that year.

The speech, "A Time for Choosing" was a condemnation of big government and a call for tax reform, themes that would become Reagan's conservative mantra for the next 24 years.

"There can be no security anywhere in the free world if there is no fiscal and economic stability in the United States," Reagan told the television audience. "Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation."

Time magazine called the speech the "one bright spot in a dismal campaign." Goldwater ultimately lost, but the speech brought record contributions to the Republican Party and put Reagan squarely the national political spotlight.

Impressed with the impassioned speech and the charismatic man who made it, Reagan was pursuaded by several well-heeled Califonia Republicans to run for office. With the backing of California power brokers he met through his Hollywood contacts and work with the Republican Party, Reagan threw his hat into the governor's race.

He ran against five candidates in 1966 to win the Republican nomination. Californians embraced Reagan's genial image as a cowboy coming to their state's rescue with traditional values. His friendly, down-to-earth manner came across in the campaign speeches he wrote himself.

Months later, despite his lack of experience, Ronald Wilson Reagan beat out two-time Democratic incumbent Pat Brown to win the race by almost a million votes.

Ronald, Nancy and their children set off for Sacramento, and a life in the public eye. The man who had never held public office was about to learn the business of governance at the helm of the nation's most populous state

California dreaming

During two terms as governor of California, Reagan cut spending on health, education and welfare and refined his conservative ideology

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Reagans pave road to the White House

(CNN) -- Reagan's first months in Sacramento would prove to be a crash course in the business of governing. Despite a slow start, Reagan went on to win a second term, refining his conservative ideology and building a political base that would carry him to Washington.

After arriving in the capital, Reagan set about immediately to fulfill campaign promises to lower taxes, cut spending and shrink the government.

With no governing experience and a staff of self-declared novices, Reagan's first decision as governor was a disaster. Facing a huge budget deficit and high state spending, Reagan instituted a 10 percent cut in government across the board.

When the hoped-for results didn't materialize, Reagan was forced to raise taxes by $1 billion.

The budget cuts angered students at the turbulent University of California at Berkeley, who protested in force. It was unsettling for Reagan, after years of playing the hero, to be cast as villain.

The student revolt reached a climax in the spring of 1969. Protesters had the campus paralyzed. Taking a hard line, Reagan sent in the California Highway Patrol, a move that heightened tensions and Reagan's disfavor among students.

But tired of the unruly demonstrations rampant in the '60s and '70s, Reagan stood up to the protesters with the slogan, "Observe the rules or get out."

In 1970, with little to show for his first term, Reagan ran for re-election and easily won.

If confrontation marked his first term, collaboration was key in his second.

Reagan's tax hike paid off, and he was able to give the public several tax rebates.

He also pushed through substantive welfare reform, which tightened eligibility and gave welfare recipients work while increasing payments to the neediest. More than 300,000 names were removed from the welfare rolls.

In the process, Reagan cultivated a loyal following of influential and well-heeled supporters whose help would be integral in getting him to Washington. It also gave him the confidence to continue in politics.

A steep learning curve

Biographer Lou Cannon chronicles in "Reagan" the political education by trial and error of a governor who "had goals, but no programs ... (and) did not know how government functioned or the processes by which it reached its objectives."

Reagan is sworn in for his first term as governor in 1966  

The future president, Cannon wrote, learned the ropes of leadership "at taxpayers' expense during which California's much maligned and highly professional state government bureaucracy did the actual governing."

Leaving the details to aides became a Reagan hallmark, sometimes with mixed results. But he stood by his style.

"I don't believe a chief executive should supervise every detail of what goes on in his organization," Reagan wrote in "An American Life," defending the management style he employed in California and, later, in Washington.

While leaving policy implementation to others, Reagan's ideology was of his own making.

Media charm

Even in his early political years, Reagan showed he could keep the upper hand with the media, controlling access while being charming.

Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who wrote speeches for Reagan in the White House, recalls a night in the governor's yard in the 1960s. A rookie reporter was hoping for an interview for a small wire service.

Nancy asked him to leave, but Reagan followed him down the driveway. With shaving cream on his face, Reagan said, "If you can spend the night in my back lawn, I can spend five minutes with you. Now what's the problem?"

While he knew how to charm them, Reagan also found ways to circumvent reporters. In a nod to the fireside chats of his early political hero, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, took his case straight to the American people via radio and television.

That approach "worked better than I ever dreamed it would" in winning over public opinion, Reagan boasted in his autobiography.

White House ambitions

All the while Reagan was in Sacramento, he had his eye on the White House. In 1968, just 18 months after he was elected to lead California, Reagan announced his intention to run for the presidency at the Republican National Convention. It was too late to take the Republican nomination from Richard Nixon but it put the party on notice of his ambitions.

Reagan sat out 1972, but in 1975 he left the governorship on a groundswell of support for another run at the White House.

The Reagans also bought their beloved Rancho del Cielo near Santa Barbara, which later served as a retreat from the pressures of Washington.

In 1976, Reagan challenged President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination. Trounced in the early primaries, Reagan held his ground, refusing to throw in the towel.

Looking for an issue to ignite the campaign, Reagan settled on one familiar to him -- the threat of a new communist menace.

He lost the candidacy by just 60 delegates, establishing himself as a viable candidate for a future run.

Four years later, Reagan tried again, this time easily winning the GOP nomination. He chose as his running mate a defeated rival and party stalwart, George Bush, who had been a Texas congressman, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and CIA director.

Reagan's platform called for a return to so-called American values, a reduced federal government, and tax cuts to stimulate economic growth, in keeping with a supply-side theory of growth. Reagan also promised to balance the budget. The conservative agenda included reduced business regulation, voluntary school prayer and opposition to abortion.

In the final pre-election debate, Reagan deflected President Jimmy Carter's attacks on his policies by suggesting distortions with the refrain, "There you go again." And he delivered the memorable closing line, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"

Public frustration with high inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis tipped the scales in Reagan's favor. He won 51 percent of the popular vote, and 44 states, to Carter's 41 percent and six states. At age 69, he also became the oldest man ever elected president.

As Reagan moved to the White House, he was poised to parlay his landslide into one of the most popular presidencies of the 20th century.
The White House years

The Reagans celebrate during the Inaugural Parade on January 20, 1981
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A conservative legacy

(CNN) -- President Reagan entered office in 1981 with two primary goals: to shrink government and to "make America strong again" by boosting the military.

"Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem," Reagan said at his inauguration, signaling a challenge to what he called the "unnecessary and excessive growth of government."

And, putting the international community, and particularly the Soviet Union, on notice, he warned, "Our reluctance for conflict should not be misjudged as a failure of will."

With these ideas in mind, he set about drastically cutting taxes and government spending while building up the country's military.

Reagan also pursued plans to pare down federal regulations and addressed trade issues, including problems created by the flood of Japanese auto imports.

In February, 1981, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart announced his intention to retire making room for fulfillment of Reagan's campaign pledge to appoint a woman to the court. Later that year, Reagan nominated Arizona Appeals Court Judge Sandra Day O'Connor.

Reagan had barely settled into office when an assassination attempt threatened to stop the so-called "Reagan Revolution" before it got off the ground.

During an appearance at a Washington hotel, Reagan was shot by John Hinkley Jr., who later said he was trying to impress actress Jodie Foster by killing the president.

With a bullet lodged just inches from his heart, Reagan handled the crisis with his trademark wit and self assurance. Upon meeting the doctor who was to remove the bullet, Reagan is said to have quipped, "I hope you're a Republican."

Reagan recovered rapidly, boosting his image as a strong and resilient leader. No sooner was he back at work than he pursued his economic policies at full throttle.

The economy sinks then rebounds

Americans had elected Reagan to fix the problems of double-digit inflation, high unemployment and high interest rates.

Reagan signs the Martin Luther King holiday legislation in November 1983  

With the cooperation of the Democratic Congress, Reagan cut taxes and government spending at the same time, a combination meant to stimulate growth in a "trickle-down" way from the rich to the rest.

The immediate results of "supply-side" economics were mixed. The 1981 tax cuts, 25 percent phased in over three years, were the largest in history. Inflation dropped, but the nation lapsed into a deep recession that forced a tax increase -- also the largest ever at the time.

With recession at hand, Reagan's fiscal policies, dubbed "Reagonomics," by critics, drew heavy fire. Unemployment was on the rise and Reagan's blue-collar supporters were defecting.

Reagan urged Americans to "stay the course," and indeed, the economy did rebound. Wall Street surged and by early 1983, the economy was moving forward at a healthy clip. The recovery would last an unprecedented eight years.

It was just the boost Reagan needed as he began to campaign for re-election. He ran against former Vice President Walter Mondale with a platform that played on America's renewed confidence. His campaign ads proclaimed, "It's morning again in America," and voters believed it.

The election was a landslide. Reagan won every state except Mondale's home state of Minnesota becoming, at 73, the oldest person to be elected president.

Reagan continued to pursue conservative fiscal policies in his second term. In 1986, he sold Congress on an overhaul of the income tax code, eliminating numerous deductions and exempting millions of low-income people.

He also slashed social programs, including Aid to Families with Dependent Children, school lunches and subsidized housing, earning him critics among advocates of the poor, who likened him to Herbert Hoover.

But Reagan didn't see it that way. By most accounts, he genuinely believed he was creating opportunity for the disadvantaged. He spared Social Security and promised to maintain a "safety net," for the elderly, disabled and needy. Still, by the time he left office, the disparity between rich and poor Americans was at an all-time high.

Taming the Bear

In a June 1987 speech at the Berlin Wall's Brandenburg Gate, Reagan told his Soviet counterpart, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."  

While Reagan cut social programs, he dramatically increased defense spending in the belief that the way to prevent a nuclear war was to have more weapons than the enemy -- in this case the Soviet Union. From a position of strength, he said, he would negotiate the end of nuclear weapons buildup. It was a theory that many Americans did not share.

Thousands held protests across the country, worried that the arms race would lead to disaster. But Reagan held firm, and defense spending grew 35 percent for the nation's largest-ever peacetime buildup.

Reagan also invested in his Strategic Defense Initiative, which promised to deflect incoming missiles with shields in space. Scientists derided the idea, calling it "Star Wars," but Reagan insisted on research.

Tax cuts and the largest military buildup in peacetime history did not come without a price. The federal deficit ballooned under Reagan's leadership, a situation the president blamed on Congress for not doing enough to cut federal spending.

While Reagan viewed himself as a champion of Everyman, he did much to please the business barons, removing government regulations said to be stifling growth and firing illegally striking air traffic controllers in 1981.

While deregulation had been one of the primary objectives of the Reagan Administration, results were mixed, with many of the targeted regulations dealing with health and safety standards being restored by the courts.

Results were also mixed on social issues. Whether or not it was owing to Nancy Reagan's much-maligned "Just Say No," campaign, drug use among high school students was declining as Reagan left office. AIDS, however, was on the rise, a trend some health officials blamed on a lack of White House leadership on the issue. Crime levels remained more or less the same.

"He was modest about his achievements and willing to share the credit with others, but he refused to acknowledge mistakes," biographer Lou Cannon observed.

Preaching and pushing democracy abroad

If Reagan's first term was defined by economic issues, his second was defined by his efforts to end the Cold War.

President Reagan and Russian General Secretary Gorbachev meet for the first time in Geneva in November 1985  

Reagan's international policies were based on an abiding antipathy for communism and a belief in the United States as a moral compass.

The defense buildup was a key component of the attempt to stare down what Reagan termed the "evil empire" -- the Soviet Union. That obsessive passion of anti-communism had been with the president since his days in Hollywood.

Amid the tough talk, Reagan met several times with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1987, the men signed a treaty to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

Reagan's international record was hardly without controversy. He persisted in 1985 with a planned visit to a German cemetery where some Nazi secret police were buried, despite criticism from Jewish groups.

Reagan also relied on the military to respond to international problems -- sometimes with mixed results.

He sent Marines into Lebanon as peacekeepers. But in 1983, the peacekeepers themselves were attacked; a bombing at their Beirut barracks killed 241 troops. When Reagan left office in 1988, extremists still held Americans hostage in Lebanon.

Also in 1983, American troops were called on to squelch a communist coup on the Caribbean island of Grenada. Critics claimed it was a risky overreaction.

Libya also proved problematic. In 1986, Reagan ordered a bombing raid on Libya after evidence emerged that Libyan terrorists attacked U.S. soldiers at a West Berlin nightclub.

And in 1988, near the end of Reagan's tenure, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Scotland, killing 270 people. Again, Libyans were blamed.

Reagan also carried his anti-communist push into Central America, where he sent arms and advisers to counter the Soviet Union's aid to the government in Nicaragua and rebels in El Salvador.

Testifying in the Oval Office on November 13, 1986, Reagan denied knowing that money from arms sales to Iran was being used to fund guerrillas in Nicaragua  

The Iran-Contra Affair

It was Reagan's ideological push south, combined with his management style of leaving policy details to advisers, that led to the scandal of his career.

"Reagan lacked a technical grasp of any issue, and he was usually bored by briefings. ... Most of his aides thought of him as intelligent, but many also considered him intellectually lazy," Cannon wrote.

Reagan had directed aides to find ways to help the Contras, Nicaraguan rebels fighting the leftist Sandinista government, after Congress barred further aid. He had authorized a CIA operation in Nicaragua in 1981. But, as usual, the specifics of implementation were left to others.

Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North and others in the administration operated the secret arms pipeline, which collapsed with public disclosure in 1986. Money from illegal arms sales to Iran was used to help finance covert support of the Contras.

Arms sales were also made to Iran in an attempt to win its influence in Lebanon to negotiate the release of American hostages.

Reagan had categorically denied he would ever trade arms for hostages, and said after the Iran-Contra scandal emerged that he never knew of diversion of funds to the Contras or even that excess funds existed.

Independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh concluded in 1994 that there was no evidence Reagan or Vice President George Bush had broken the law, or that they knew of the diversion of money.

Reagan salutes from the door of a helicopter at the U.S. Capitol on the last day of his presidential administration, January 20, 1989  

But Walsh said Reagan "knowingly participated or at least acquiesced" in the cover-up, and that Bush withheld evidence and "was fully aware of the Iran arms sales."

Despite the Iran-Contra scandal and the 1987 stock market crash, the Reagan Revolution didn't end with his second term. Bush rode his boss's coattails into the Oval Office in 1988.

In assessing the Reagan's presidential legacy, biographer Lou Cannon wrote, " Reagan may not have been a great president, but he was a great American with a compelling vision of his country. "

Historians will no doubt continue to debate the effectiveness of Reagan's policies, but few will dispute the patriotism and personal charm of one of America's most popular presidents.

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Yes, thanks to the 60 + years of his puppet training and the consolidation of media ownership by the powers that be can make a nice honest man, who was ignorant of evil, and who beleaved what he was told by those trapted in the flag and who went to war against what they didn't understand. Just like cowboys in th movies!

Gordon Soderberg

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