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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Unlike the current occupant of the White House, Reagan was willing to improvise on the far-right script, which is what ultimately saved his presidency.
Jun 10, 2004 | Ronald Reagan's presidency collapsed at the precise moment on Nov. 25, 1986, when he suddenly appeared without notice in the White House briefing room, introduced his attorney general, Edwin Meese, and instantly departed from the stage. Meese announced that funds raised by members of the National Security Council and others by selling arms to Iran had been used to aid the Nicaraguan Contras. Anti-terrorism laws and congressional resolutions had been willfully violated; eventually 11 people were convicted of felonies. In less than a week, Reagan's popularity plunged from 67 percent to 46 percent, the greatest and quickest decline ever for a president.
On Dec. 17, 1986, the day William Casey, the mumbling director of the CIA, was scheduled to testify on the Iran-Contra scandal before the Senate Intelligence Committee, he collapsed into a coma, suffering from brain cancer, never to recover. Lt. Col. Oliver North, Casey's action officer on the NSC, explained to members of a select congressional investigation that the profoundly conservative Casey had been the mastermind in creating an "overseas entity ... self-financing, independent," that would conduct U.S. foreign policy as a "stand-alone." Called the "Enterprise," it was the apotheosis of the Reagan doctrine, the waging of a global war for the rollback of communism.
The hard-line secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger (who was later pardoned before his trial by President George H.W. Bush), and his neoconservative underlings were summarily dismissed, the NSC purged. "Let Reagan be Reagan" had long been the cry of conservatives. Now they screamed that Reagan was either being held prisoner or had sold out. "There was no Reagan revolution, only a Reagan rest stop," wrote an editor of the National Review, the leading right-wing journal.
In interviews with investigators, Reagan said dozens of times he couldn't recall what had happened. But he retained his utopianism and idealism that had propelled him from left-wing liberal in Hollywood to right-wing man on horseback, switching his ideologies but never his temperament.
At his first meeting with new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in November 1985, Reagan had perplexed him by talking about how they might work together if there were an invasion of aliens from outer space. Colin Powell, who became the national security advisor in 1987 after the Iran-Contra scandal decimated the NSC, later revealed that he and others had tried to contain Reagan's talk of "little green men," as Powell put it. Reagan had got his idea from the 1951 science fiction movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still," in which an alien warns of Earth's apocalyptic destruction if nuclear weapons are not abolished.
