It has been suggested that no other president has come to office that offers a remotely comparable career of making public an ideologically consistent commitment to a political philosophy. Not only has Reagan been more devoted to and more uncompromising in his political principle than have previous presidents, but he has also departed from conventions in the kinds of stands he takes.
Reagan’s abstract positions on many issues are not centrist, even though at strategic times he has taken pains to avoid divisiveness by practicing the art of the possible and by dealing with adversaries in a conciliatory manner.
Reagan’s non-centrist view took shape during the mid-1950s and early 1960s phase of his post-Hollywood career. It was during this period that he was transformed from a youthful New Deal enthusiast to a middle-aged conservative, he crystallised his new views while working as a circuit-riding speaker, to the many units of the vast General Electric Company and to innumerable civic groups.
Reagan became a conservative orator, he honed to perfection a talk couched in the very simple readers digest prose that came to be know as “the speech”. “ A primer of conservative doctrine, it set forth a consistent, strongly stated series of admonitions: eliminate government restraint on the free market, devolve power from federal to lower jurisdictions, decrease taxes, and maintain a tough stance toward the soviet Union”. Reagan gave this speech in the 1964 campaign, after Reagan delivered this speech, Reagan gained a dominant position among conservatives. Reagan was much liked because he offered a broad appeal, he shared the notions of people such as Goldwater but Reagan would be much liked. One thing the American public hates is an out spoken candidate, and that’s what people such as Goldwater was, so Reagan was the ideal candidate. Goldwater was the extreme right of the Republican Party, Goldwater often criticised the policies of Dwight Eisenhower. He described his social policies as “dime – store New Deal” and strongly opposed the president’s decisions to use federal troops at little rock. Goldwater also believed that Eisenhower was too soft on trade unions and complained about his failure o balance the budget.
Reagan had an attractive personality and also had a good style as a political performer, this made Reagan a strong candidate, his notions and his ideology made him a candidate who might be able to represent conservative views, and more importantly be electable. Many candidates with strong political views, sometimes forget their political position once they are elected into office. However Reagan made it his goal to be true to his conservative principles, which he had been compiling for many years.
In 1981, Reagan put his principles into practice with regard to spending and tax-cutting. These types of action made Reagan standout as a unique president; he was always very consistent with his principles in his foreign as well as his domestic policy.
In Reagan second term things were to change immensely, there was large-scale changes of staff and personnel at the top. Despite the 1986 tax reform, Reagan's second term brought no victories comparable to the economic agenda of 1981, the Reagan administration went into the disaster of the Iran-Con-tra scandal. These second term troubles were due, to the change in chiefs of staff. Treasury Secretary Donald Regan and Chief of Staff James Baker decided to exchange jobs, and because of Reagan’s passiveness, Regan, Baker, Deaver, and Nancy Reagan had agreed on the switch before it was presented to Reagan. Characteristically, Reagan agreed to the staff decision without asking any questions.
When Regan came in to run the White House he had many personal priorities. He wanted to do away with the staffing arrangements of the first term that he felt led to staff conflict and leaks, and he was right, these things happened. He also wanted to make some personnel changes.
Regan's personal style and career suggested that he would take a different approach to running the White House. Regan had been an officer in the Marines and was used to being CEO of Merrill Lynch. “When I was chief executive and I said, ‘Jump,’ people asked, 'How high?' As secretary of the treasury, when I said, ‘Jump,’ people said, 'What do you mean by jump? What do you mean by high'?” One of Regan's aides suggests that, “He considers the executive branch to be like a corporation. Cabinet members are vice presidents, the president is the chairman of the board, the chief of staff is the chief operating officer.”
Whereas Baker had brought strong subordinates to work with him, Regan would brook no rivals for influence. The staffers he brought from the Treasury Department were known around the White House as “the mice” because of their meek approach to their boss. According to White House staff, Regan's personal staff aides were “almost obsequious and scared stiff of him.” A former colleague of Regan suggested that “His weakness is that his ego was so strong he did not pick good subordinates. Or if they were, he broke them. He couldn't stand the competition.”
Regan's wanting to "let Reagan be Reagan," led him to think that his own lack of strong policy preferences was a guarantee that he was serving the president's goals and no one else's. But to best serve the president, the White House staff must make up for Reagan’s weaknesses. In this case, the president's weakness was his passivity and not being willing to search out alternatives on his own. This meant that the responsibility of the staff to ensure that contrasting views was brought to the president's attention. In the first term this was ensured, despite the staff's intentions to protect the president from conflict, because the rivalries among the staff and the struggle between conservatives and moderates could not be entirely hidden.
Reinforcing the president's conviction that most policy problems were really very simple was another consequence of “letting Reagan be Reagan,” but this was not a favor to the president. In criticizing Regan, David Stockman called this “the echo principle” and argued that it shielded Reagan from hard economic realities. According to Richard Darman, one of the advantages of the first-term was that the president was forced to face up to some complex realities. “Seeing the interplay between us, a lot of things happened. First of all, Ronald Reagan learned much more about reality.”
Like his predecessors, Reagan has found that as his presidency was nearing its end things were no longer playing well in Peoria. The Iran-'Con-tra' debacle resulted in a failure to sustain the great popularity he enjoyed during his first six years in the White House. His various explanations of his role in the Iran affair were met with what for him has been unaccustomed scepticism. Polls conducted the month before and the month after the disclosure of the arms sales showed a decline of 17 per cent in his approval rating - a drop from 64 to 47 per cent. After the Tower Commission submitted it’s critical
report in March 1987, the rating dropped to 40 per cent and as many as 32 per cent of respondents said that Reagan should consider resigning. Furthermore, the polls also consistently showed a marked Tendency for respondents to disbelieve various aspects of the President's version of events related to the Iran affair. A Newsweek poll showed that 62 per cent did not believe Reagan's assertion that he had been unaware of the diversion of profits from the arms deal to the 'Contras'.
Journalists adopted a new tone after November 1986 saying, among other things, 'The Teflon is wearing thin' and, adapting the President's famous catch-phrase, 'We ain't seen nothing yet.' It was said of the 'great communicator' shortly after the scandal became known: “This was a Ronald Reagan never before seen on national television. His jauntiness has turned to strained sarcasm, his easy charm to defensiveness . . . This time the magic didn't work.” Another commentator said that there had been “n astonishing collapse of Ronald Reagan as an institution”Similarly: “'The President whose simple charm and simpler views worked magic to make America stand tall is now caught looking muddled and shifty.”
The loss of standing with the public has been, not surprisingly, an important factor in the President's loss of standing in Congress:
Such a sharp decline in public standing is particularly significant for President Reagan. Widespread public support has always been an important reservoir for this President in the pursuit of his. . . policy agenda; its decline thus diminishes a crucial political resource that he has come to rely upon in dealing with Congress.
Mervin commented on 'Reagan's lack of command of the detail of policy-making' and suggested that by distancing himself from detail he could also distance himself from criticism in Congress and elsewhere. This advantage was evident when the Tower Commission depicted Reagan as remote from wrongdoing subordinates. In the Commission's words, the President 'was poorly advised and poorly served'.
One of the main reasons why Reagan was so severely criticised is that there may have been a failure by the administration to comply with various laws. According to one analysis, four statutes may have been violated: the Intelligence Oversight Act, which requires prior congressional notification of covert operations; the Arms Export Control Act, which requires congressional notification of arms sales abroad; the Export Administration Act, which restricts exports to terrorist-supporting countries; and the Boland Amendment, which from October 1984 to October 1986 prohibited the use of American funds to aid the 'Contras' in Nicaragua. It is maintained that the sale of arms to Iran and the diversion of profits from the sales to the 'Contras' occurred while the Boland prohibition was in effect.
Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster,1991), Chap. 10 and p. 181
Hedrick Smith, The Power Game (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 305.
Donald Reagan, For the record (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p. 272.
The Reagan Presidency an early assessment. (Edited by Fred I. Greenstein ,1983 the John Hopkins University press.)
William R. Doener, “For Rhyme and Reason”, Time (January 21, 1985), p. 20.
Ed Magnuson, “Shake-up at the white house,” Time (January 21, 1985), p. 10.
Bernard Weinraub, “How Don Regan Runs the White House” The New York Times (January 5, 1986), p. 33.
Quoted in Cannon, Role of a Lifetime, p. 563.
Stockman, The Triumph of politics, p. 18 – 19.
Quoted by Bob Schieffer and Gary Gates, The Acting President (New York: Dutton, 1989), p. 200.
Newsweek, 24 Nov. 1986, p. 27.
William Shawcross, ‘The scandal breaks the Beltway’, The Spectator (London), 20 – 27 Dec. 1986, p. 10.
The Economist (London), 29 Nov. 1986, p. 13.
James McCormick and Steven Smith, ‘The Iran Arms Sale and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980’, Political Studies, Vol. 20, no 1
