Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (84 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
Must Read:
And the Band Played On
by Randy Shilts.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
EDMUND WHITE
(b. 1940), American writer, in
States of Desire: Travels in Gay America
(afterword to 1986 edition):
The Aids epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all of the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease, and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam war.
ANTHONY PERKINS
(1932–92), American actor best known for his role as Norman Bates in
Psycho
(quoted posthumously in
Independent on Sunday
, September 20, 1992):
I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cut-throat, competitive world in which I spent my life.
What happened to the Evil Empire?
History’s long-range judgment of the Reagan years must wait, but the wear and tear of more than a dozen years out of office have not dulled his “Teflon” finish. Suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, which was first diagnosed in 1994, Ronald Reagan remained a much-loved president at the turn of the century. (A majority of Americans surveyed in a 1999 Gallup poll predicted that Reagan will rank higher than other modern presidents.) Historians were tougher critics. In one post–Reagan era poll, academic historians and political scientists ranked him twenty-second among the then forty U.S. presidents. However, a C-Span poll in 2009 placed Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004, as the tenth best president.
Of course, much of the judgment is partisan. To admirers, Reagan’s successes in changing the American mood, reducing marginal tax rates from 70 percent, and altering the political terrain in America, place him in the pantheon of great presidents. His critics point to his failures, most notably the creation of an enormous national debt; the foreign policy misadventures, in particular Iran-Contra; and a shortsighted plan to assist the rebels fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The aid given to the Afghan Islamic mujahideen effectively weakened the Soviet Union. But the failure to remain engaged in Afghanistan allowed that country to slip into the chaos and power vacuum in which the Taliban and their allied terrorist group Al Qaeda flourished. A few years after Reagan left office, the tremendous burden of debt his administration’s policies had created during eight years was seen as an anchor on the American economy. The economic boom of the 1990s, which eventually produced budget surpluses, if only temporarily, had erased the worst of that black mark.
But Reagan ultimately may well go down in history for his unique role in altering relations with the Soviet Union and spearheading the beginning of the end of Soviet bloc Communism in Europe. Although the finish would not come until 1991, when his successor George Bush was in office, by the end of Reagan’s second term, the handwriting was on the wall. The Soviet Union had been spiraling downward for a long time. A fatally inefficient industrial system; official corruption; deep political and social problems; competitive pressures not only from the United States but from China, Japan, and other emerging Asian countries; independence movements—some of them Islamic—within the various Soviet republics; and a long, costly, debilitating war in Afghanistan were all factors that had weakened the Kremlin’s control over its empire. The Soviet economy was so deeply flawed that it has to be examined as the first cause of the USSR’s collapse. For years, the Soviet Union had devoted as much as 25 percent of its national output to unproductive military expenditures. (By comparison, the United States allocated in the range of 4 to 6 percent of its much larger gross domestic product to defense.) While the rest of the world was speeding toward the twenty-first century, with rapidly changing technologies and increasing trade, the Soviet Union was saddled with a Third World economy stuck in the 1950s and an agricultural system that still resembled one from the nineteenth century.
In spite of these deep internal structural problems, the military might of the Soviet Union, its sheer size, and its authoritarian control over the Eastern European bloc had dominated relations with the United States for more than forty years. There was almost no aspect of life or history in America after World War II that was not impacted in some way by the competition known as the Cold War.
Reagan’s second term coincided with the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev as the leader of the Soviet Union. The two men began a remarkable working relationship that ushered in a new era in Soviet-American cooperation. At a 1987 summit meeting in Iceland, they agreed to the first treaty in history to reduce the nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers. When Reagan left office in January 1989, the Berlin Wall, long a symbol of division between Germany and all of Europe, was still standing. Within a year, it had been torn down. Germany was unified in 1990, and the Soviet Empire fell apart. On Christmas Day 1991, Gorbachev stepped down. In an astonishingly brief and peaceful revolution, the Cold War was over and European Communism, enforced by years of brutal Soviet suppression, was finished. Gorbachev, who won the Nobel Prize in 1990, was clearly the man who had taken history into his own hands. Other key players in the demise of the Soviet system and the end of the Cold War were England’s Margaret Thatcher, George Bush, Germany’s Helmut Kohl, Polish labor leader Lech Wałesa, and Pope John Paul II, the first pope from a Communist country, whose travels to Eastern Europe helped fuel the anti-Soviet mood in that part of the world.
As Lou Cannon wrote, “His legacy in foreign affairs . . . shines brighter with the benefit of hindsight. Reagan launched a military buildup premised on a belief that the Soviet Union was too economically vulnerable to compete in a celebrated arms race and would come to the bargaining table if pressured by the West.
The message of freedom that he believed could energize the people of Eastern Europe and penetrate within the Soviet Union itself.
Many members of the political establishment thought these views were at best naive. They also were alarmed by Reagan’s provocative comments about communism, particularly his description of the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire.’ But times changed.”
Must Read:
President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime
by Lou Cannon.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER COLIN POWELL
to Ronald Reagan on his last day in office:
The world is quiet today, Mr. President.
Colin Luther Powell (b. 1937) was born in New York City, the son of Jamaican immigrants. With assistance from an affirmative action program designed to increase minority college enrollment, he graduated from the City College of New York and earned an MBA degree from George Washington University. Commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army in 1958, he served in Vietnam with the 23rd Division in 1968–69, and later commanded forces in South Korea, West Germany, and the United States. In 1986, Powell became commanding general of the Fifth Corps in Frankfurt, Germany, and President Ronald Reagan named him national security adviser, the first black man to fill that position, in 1987. During the next decade, he would extend those achievements.
In the spring of 2002, Russia was invited to join NATO, which had been created to stem the tide of Soviet Russia’s military strength. Although Russia joined the defense alliance as a nonvoting member, it was still a remarkable turnabout in the history of Europe, America, and the world.
Chapter Nine
From the Evil Empire to the Axis of Evil
What was Operation Desert Storm?
How do you “downsize” a president?
Can a man called Bubba become president?
Who took out a Contract with America?
What is “irrational exuberance”?
Why the Federal Reserve Matters: A Glossary of Financial Terms and “Fedspeak”
Is that chad dimpled, pregnant, or hanging?
Where is Fox Mulder when we need him?
America in 2000: A Statistical Snapshot
War in Afghanistan: Who? What? When? Where? Why?
Milestones in the War in Afghanistan
How do you keep a “bubble” from bursting?
How did America elect its first black president?
T
o many Americans, the Reagan years had brought about a clean break with the long post-Vietnam, post-Watergate mood of the country. This was true despite the fact that budget deficits were ballooning toward nosebleed territory. Wall Street was tottering through another periodic scandal—this time it was over manipulating “junk bonds.” A banking crisis was costing taxpayers billions. Crack cocaine had become epidemic, bringing with it a deadly wave of urban crime. And the specter of AIDS had completely reshaped the American landscape. Still, on the surface at least, the Reagan years seemed to have restored a semblance of confidence in the country. And the chief beneficiary of that confidence was Reagan’s vice president, George Bush.
What was Operation Desert Storm?
George Bush looked like a sure two-termer early on.
In his first two years as president, Bush had witnessed the stunning unraveling of Communism in Europe. In a reverse of the domino theory, which held that Communism would win successive victories in such countries as Vietnam if the U.S. allowed, the Berlin Wall crumbled, East and West Germany united, once-captive nations embraced democracy, and, astonishingly, the Soviet Union, the longtime adversary that Ronald Reagan had called the Evil Empire, simply and bloodlessly disintegrated. Not with a bang but a whimper.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931) had attempted to restructure the Soviet economy (
perestroika
) and loosen political restraints (
glasnost
). But he had let the genie out of the bottle. The Cold War was over. George Bush was the president on hand to usher in, he thought, a New World Order.
But even as the Evil Empire unraveled and a half century of Cold War tension and conflict wound down, Bush’s presidential high point was to come in a part of the world that has confounded every American president since Truman: the Middle East. In Bush’s case, the crisis came from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of neighboring oil-rich Kuwait. Mobilizing the United Nations against Saddam Hussein, Bush first ordered Operation Desert Shield, a defensive move to protect the vast oil fields of Saudi Arabia. Although there was considerable rhetoric about protecting freedom and liberty, it was difficult to make a case that the U.S. was going to war to defend democracy when it came to either Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, monarchies in which political parties are illegal and women are still treated as property. A quick move by Iraq’s army into the Saudi kingdom would have given Iraq control of more than 40 percent of the world’s oil reserves, a frightening prospect given Saddam Hussein’s proven willingness to measure up to his chief role model, Joseph Stalin.
Leading a coalition of thirty-nine other nations and with United Nations approval, the United States spearheaded Operation Desert Storm, a devastating air war, followed by a 100-hour ground offensive. It was to be George Bush’s shining moment.
The fourteenth former vice president who became president, Bush was the first vice president elected in his own right since Martin Van Buren in 1836. When someone gave Bush a portrait of Van Buren on Inauguration Day, he may have politely failed to mention that Van Buren served only a single term. He was turned out of office because of the terrible shape of the American economy back then! So you think history doesn’t repeat itself?
August 2
The UN Security Council issues a resolution condemning Iraq’s invasion.
August 6
The UN Security Council imposes an embargo that prohibits all trade with Iraq except for medical supplies and food in certain circumstances.
