He signed it into law. Only as abortion became an extension of welfare, would he wish he had paid more head to the bill's manipulative language. The very word "Therapeutic" was a medical euphemism, sanitizing essentially bloody procedures. It defined "mental health" as at-risk if a pregnant teen went out and smashed windows. In common with the more liberal laws it was to spawn at state and federal levels, the Act ignored the feelings of fathers.
Reagan was left with a sense of guilt. "If there is a question as to whether there is life or death, the doubt should be resolved in favor of life."
Reagan had especial contempt for government touts whose job performance was appraised by the length of their welfare client lists. “They go out and actually recruit people to be on welfare,“ he complained. His prejudice against AFDC was practical as well as moral. He believed it discriminated against the destitute-by encouraging the shiftless to promiscuity.
The California Welfare Reform Act became law in August 1971. Reagan called it ”probably the most comprehensive“ such initiative in American history. It had an inspirational effect on welfare policy across America, but Reagan would have to wait until 1996 before his basic dream, the repeal of AFDC, became a reality
Reagan's ambivalence over such a mission is evident in a speech he wrote : "The President has been blunt in his declarations that we will not under any circumstances desert an old friend and ally. give anything away, or betray or honor. If I am wrong and that should be the result--time then for indignation."
This was good enough for Nixon. In 1971, Governor Reagan found himself appointed special presidential envoy and dizzyingly transported to a throne room in Taiwan. Chiang Kai-Shek received him stiff with rage. "Look, I don't like this any more than you do, but it had to happen sooner or later."
Flying home, Reagan found that he had been converted by his own mission. Taiwan was more secure now than before since "the People's Republic," would have to respect its sovereignty or compromise the new rapprochement.
They reached George Washington University Hospital in three-and-a-half minutes. Reagan made himself get out and walk toward the emergency-room door. Just inside, out of public sight, his knees buckled.
[He was wheeled into surgery] with his wit intact: “Honey, I forgot to duck,” “Who’s minding the store?” and-to the solemn company costumed in surgical greens-“Please tell me you’re Republicans.”
The President’s chest was closed at 5:24 PM. He had “sailed through” surgery, the hospital announced, and was an “excellent physical specimen.” On April 11, the President was well enough to walk out of the hospital.
[After its passage], the Administration, overconfident, tried to restructure Social Security-which was clearly spending itself into bankruptcy-and discovered within days that “the will of the people“ did not extend so far as to mandate cutting the benefits of retirees.
Keynesian economic theory, codified by the social engineers of the 60s and 70s, called for high, progressive tax rates, manipulative government spending, and welfare-state ”entitlements“ centering around Social Security & Medicare/Medicaid. Reaganomics questioned the wisdom of all these tenets, with the exception of Social Security, by now clearly too much of an article of American faith even to be debated.
Just for a start, he announced that the US intended to rearm with 100 B-1 bombers, 100 MX multiple-warhead intercontinental ballistic missiles, a second generation of Trident subs, and a new, radar-invisible, stealth warplane.
This did not mean that the President forgave Begin and Ariel Sharon for encouraging the carnage in Beirut. Revealingly, at the height of Israel's bombardment of Beirut, he had invoked race memory in a phone call to Begin: "I told him to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately and said his symbol was becoming a picture of a seven-month old baby with its arms blown off." Begin called back within minutes to say that the attack had been stopped.
Only those veteran observers who remembered his willingness to compromise, when necessary, as president of the Screen Actors Guild and Governor of California, were reassured that Reagan knew what he was doing.
The most disturbing evidence of this attitude was Washington's funding of clinics that provided "birth control drugs and devices to underage girls without the knowledge of their parents." Sex was being secularized. "Are we to believe that something so sacred can be looked upon as a purely physical thing with no potential for emotional and psychological harm?" Apparently, yes, for that cynicism extended to the womb:
"Abortion on demand" now takes the lives of up to one and a half million unborn children a year. Human life legislation ending this tragedy will someday pass the Congress, and you and I must never rest until it does. Unless and until it can be proven that the unborn child is not a living entity, then its right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must be protected.
What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant US retaliation to deter a Soviet attack--that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles?
Current technology has achieved a level of sophistication where it's reasonable for us to begin this effort. My fellow Americans, tonight we're launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history.
I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents no to the cause of mankind and world peace; to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.
On Oct. 23, a grinning suicide bomber had driven a yellow truck full of explosives through the guard gate of the Marine headquarters at Beirut International Airport, killing 241 US troops. The next few days, Reagan was involved in post-tragedy and pre-invasion meetings.
“Operation Urgent Fury” was an embarrassingly clumsy success. The world’s ranking superpower, hampered by old tourist maps and incompatible radio frequencies, needed two full days to overcome the resistance of an island not much bigger than Washington DC. Democracy was restored, and some damp Cuban documents impounded, along with 24,768 signal flares-clear evidence of incendiary Red activity.
Isn't our choice really one of up or down? Down through statism, the welfare state, more and more government largesse, accompanied always by more government authority, less individual liberty and ultimately totalitarianism, always advanced as for our own good. The alternative is the dream conceived by our Founding Fathers, up to the ultimate in individual freedom, consistent with an orderly society.We don't celebrate Dependence Day on the Fourth of July. We celebrate Independence Day.
Poor decent, dull Walter Mondale realized Reagan [was unbeatable] when he debated him, and was famously rolled for trying to raise the age issue. “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience,“ Reagan promised. Even Mondale had to laugh.
Americans favored Reagan because for four years he’d kept, or fought to keep, all his campaign promises. He had cut taxes, harnessed government, revived the economy, freed the entrepreneur, and cursed the ungodly. The ship of state was realigned, empowered, larger, prouder-and for those reasons less considerate of people who sailed steerage, or of powers that got in its way.
Ahead lay four more years of opportunity to restate America's traditional values of "faith, family, work and neighborhood," to continue rebuilding its defenses and to redirect history "away from totalitarian darkness."
Twenty-five straight months of economic growth, the President went on, proved his tenet "that freedom and incentives unleash the drive and entrepreneurial genius that are at the core of human progress." But deficit spending (for which he took no blame) might cramp that drive even as it gathered force. To combat it, he would ask Congress to hold program spending at current levels for another full year.
What we have seen makes unforgettably clear that no one of the rest of us can fully understand the enormity of the feelings carried by the victims of these camps.Here lie people-Jews- whose death was inflicted for no other reason than their very existence. Here death ruled.
We are here because humanity refuses to accept that freedom or the spirit of man can ever be extinguished. We are here to commemorate that life triumphed over the tragedy and the death of the Holocaust. Out of the ashes-hope, and from all the pain-promise.
As we flew here, over the greening farms and the emerging springtime, I reflected that there must have been a time when the prisoners of Bergen-Belsen and those of every other camp must have felt that the springtime was gone forever from their lives. Here they lie. Never to hope. Never to pray. Never to love. Never to heal. Never to laugh. Never to cry.
Never again.
Reagan said, "I have an argument to share with you--our anti-missile shield. We don't know if it is possible, but we are optimistic. If we come up with a solution, let us share it, make it available to everyone. Remove all fear of a nuclear strike."
No idea could have seemed more addled to Soviet perceptions than a universal defense against the ultimate offense, unless the President's shield was the sort of defense that kills. Yet he was insisting, "It's not a weapon, it's a system, a worthy dream."
Gorbachev demanded something in return, "This all depends on you giving up SDI." Reagan had been bracing for this. "SDI isn't a bargaining chip. If you are willing to abolish nuclear weapons, why are you so anxious to get rid of a defense against nuclear weapons?"
Gorbachev kept smiling, while the president got angrier. Both realized that their rush toward a zero option in Europe had been cowardly, a feint to postpone the unresolved issue. "It's [that] or nothing," Gorbachev said.
"The meeting is over," Reagan said.
"Mr. President, you have missed the unique chance of going down in history as a great president who paved the way for nuclear disarmament."
Reagan said, "That applies to both of us."
Gorbachev said, "I don't know what else I could have done."
Reagan said, "You could have said yes."
"What you see is what you get," several of his intimates had warned me, when I asked about his hidden depths. Nevertheless, I could not believe how little one got and how shallow those depths appeared to be. At 75, he was taciturn much of the time, conducting meetings with only the barest of introductory remarks, which he would read from typed cards. When he was asked direct questions, he would refer again to his cards, and if there was nothing there to help him, he would smile, shrug, and let Shultz or Regan answer.
It was the reaction, in Regan's opinion, of a complete innocent. Or, it was the reaction, a cynic might say, of someone who had been found out. Guilt drains blood just as fast as shock.
Only the Admiral knows whether Reagan knowingly authorized the transfer of illegal funds from illegal mercenaries in the Middle East to another set of illegal mercenaries in Central America. My suspicion is that Reagan did authorize the transfer, not having the smallest comprehension of the laws he was subverting. Reagan's character by 1986 had become so lacking in curiosity & his life as president so repetitive, that when I went to interview him, I was reminded of the what-am-I-doing-here look of an actor between takes
To be fair, he made no moral distinction between homosexuality, heterosexuality out of wedlock, or abortion on demand. All three were abhorred by God, in his opinion. The best that could be said about the first sin was that its consequence was perhaps a caution against the other two:
"I think people were happier and better off when there wasn't the tremendous plague of single motherhood cases or abortions, the thousands & thousands & thousands that take place regularly now and whether it's going to take such a tragic thing as that disease. that horrible disease to return us to a sense of values that were very much a part of our generation."
Chairman of the CEA (Council of Economic Advisors) tries to make him understand the seriousness of the situation. "Mr. President, this is not just a little wiggle in the market we can ignore. This is a very serious condition." Reagan tries to look solemn, but this is difficult to do when one's mouth is full of jelly beans. He takes refuge in genial reminiscence, "Didn't we do better before there was a Federal Reserve?"
December 9, Regan demands a date for Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Reagan, "SDI is essential to our goal of total nuclear disarmament."
Reagan said, "Well, it's been so exaggerated. Millions, there aren't millions. Real research reveals probably 300,000 or less, nationwide. And a lot of those are the type of people that have made that choice. For example, more than 40% of them are retarded, mentally deficient people, that is the result of the ACLU. Look at the girl in NY who went to court after Koch had ordered her to get off the street and be put in a shelter. She went to court and actually fought, under her Constitutional rights, to go on living in that cardboard box on the street."
I've spoken of the Shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it.
My friends, we did it. we made the City freer, and we left her in good hands. All in all not bad, not bad at all. And so, goodbye. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America."
Dutch, 81 years old, stepped to the podium to give a short speech of thanks. "God bless, the United States of America." He said it so reverently that I wondered if love for country was not Reagan's one and only passion.
Afterward, in the receiving line, he took my hand and nodded with patent lack of recognition. Yet the following afternoon, his retirement chief of staff called to say that Reagan had remarked, "I saw Edmund in the reception line. I think he is waiting for me to die before he publishes his book."
Even in his dotage, he had seen something in my gaze that I did not want to acknowledge.
I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease.
In the past, Nancy suffered from breast cancer and I had my surgeries. We found through our open discussions we were able to raise public awareness. We were happy that, as a result, many more people underwent testing.
So now, we feel it is important to share it with you. Perhaps it will encourage a clearer understanding of the individuals and families who are afflicted by it.
At the moment I feel just fine. I intend to live the remainder of the years that God gives me on this earth doing the things I have always done.
In closing, let me thank you, the American people, for giving me the great honor of allowing me to serve as your President. I now begin the journey that will lead me to the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.
Thank you, my friends. May God always bless you.
"Dutch is days away from publication. but in the meantime, its publisher, Random House, is guarding copies zealously, party for fear of a controversy about Mr. Morris's writing style, which employs an unconventional technique that disturbs historians and former Reagan officials who have heard about it.
Simply put, Mr. Morris has invented a character: himself. For literary purposes, the author, 59, has essentially transformed his own life. revised his age, birthplace, identity and resume to become a Zeligesque narrator who is a Reagan contemporary."
NY Times review, "Is Dutch flawed by Mr. Morris's technique? To judge from the book's extensive notes, it in no way distorts the record of Mr. Reagan's life, only the viewpoint from which it is told."
One might compare my task to that of a film editor who has to integrate a few hundred close-focus frames with 20,000 feet of gauzy long shots. But biography is sometimes freer than film to rise to such challenges.
Any quest for the real Dutch is bound to be an exercise in frustration. Hence the dullness of many of the books that have been written about him, their inability to capture his magic. Since Reagan has primarily been a phenomenon of the American imagination, he can only be re-created by an extension of biographical technique.
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The above quotations are from Dutch, a Memoir of Ronald Reagan by Edmund Morris. Click here for a profile of Ronald Reagan.
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