TV reports on Reagan fictitious fluff, not facts

By JIMMY J. PACK JR.

Every television network spent this past weekend eating up its newscasts with reports and commentary on the death of former president Ronald Reagan. From the morning news to the p.m. news magazines, the life of Ronald Reagan has been weakly analyzed and thinly reported; you can get more accurate reporting of a celebrity's life on Entertainment Tonight than from any of the major news networks on the Reagan Presidency.

This is one of those cases that easily prove the myth of the alleged "liberal media" stereotype. Few, if any, of the reports on the history and legacy of President Reagan have been based on truthful reporting.

Political pundits have apparently forgotten their obligation to tell the truth, that Reagan's only true greatness lay in his acting ability. His tax cuts for his ultra-rich political contributors created a huge chasm between the rich and the poor.

Reagan's election in 1980 was, no question, a landslide. Why? Though I was only 8 years old, I remember very few people saying anything good about Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer who was strong on ethics and weak on political horse-trading. (Surely now Carter is more celebrated for naming minorities to high federal posts and brokering a peace in the Middle East, although the one-sided policies of Reagan and the elder Bush helped wreck Carter's peace agreement.)

Carter was cursed by inflation, long gas lines and the Islamic militants in Iran who held 52 American hostages for 444 days because Carter allowed the Shah of Iran to come to the U.S. for cancer treatment. (That's what you get for being a decent guy.)

You'd never know it from the hagiography of the TV reports over the weekend, but Ronald Reagan was a once-liberal Democrat who sold his soul to the far right when he testified against many fellow actors during the McCarthy witch-hunts of the early Œ50s.

In his first four years as president, Reagan, despite claiming he was for "small government," raised defense spending by 50% (remember the countless billions for the "Star Wars" program that never even worked?) and cut taxes — for the rich, mostly. His policies created a $207 billion deficit by 1983. (He had blasted Carter during the campaign for running up a then-unprecedented deficit of $45 billion.) It was also during this term that Reagan did his best to ignore "the gay plague" — AIDS. He refused to help create any kind of program to help treat AIDS patients or fund researchers in finding an effective treatment. (Fact is, he never even said the word AIDS that first term.)

Sure Reagan can be thanked for helping rid the world of the greatest Communist threat to our country, but at what price? A giant deficit? The support of brutal, murderous dictators like Duvalier in Haiti, Pinochet in Chile, Somoza in Paraguay, Mobutu in Zaire, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and many others? Pushing American social progress back 100 years?

He covertly sold arms to Iran (a country ruled by Islamist fundamentalists) to help free American hostages, helping the mullahs continue a war with Iraq and diverting the cash to the Contras (who were fighting a war against a left-wing regime in Nicaragua), a policy that has come back to bite us. National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and National Security Council staff member Oliver North were all blamed for this disaster (and later pardoned by George H.W. Bush), letting the Teflon president off the hook.

The Gipper also suffered no political fallout from the death of 241 Marines in Lebanon, the creation of a huge recession, a blossoming federal debt and high unemployment. By contrast, look at what the American hostage crisis (none of whom died in captivity) did to the Carter presidency.

Reagan received credit for the fall of Soviet Communism, which was already collapsing from its own disastrous policies. The last Soviet Premiere, Mikhail Gorbachev, admitted as much on numerous occasions.

For the rest of the week we'll be inundated by more half-truths as Reagan's body lies in the rotunda of the nation's capitol, but don't depend on the "liberal media" to give you the truth about Reagan's presidency; pick up a history book instead.

Living with the BID

With a 17-0 vote last week in City Council, life in Chestnut Hill changed. With that vote, the legislation implementing a business improvement district in Chestnut Hill was approved. If the bill is signed by Mayor Street, owners of commercially-zoned properties in a prescribed area will be assessed a 10 percent surcharge of the property taxes in order to raise money for streetscape, marketing and security, parking ad circulation.

The business community leaders have worked hard over the past two years discussing the needs of the shopping district, and implementation of the improvement district. Longtime Chestnut Hill residents and businesspeople will look at the list of proposed projects and say that they've been done before without surcharges on tax assessments.

But the sad truth is that with many of the buildings owned by conglomerates across the country, the days of property and business owners putting their own muscle into strengthening the shopping district may be over. Sure, many of the current folks have done so and will continue to do so. But it seems that there are others who would sooner pay someone else to sweep outside their buildings or to find the right tenant for 19th-century buildings that do not have the square footage requirements demanded by 21st-century businesses.

The Chestnut Hill Business Association, like the Chestnut Hill Community Association, was built on the idea of the community members taking responsibility for Chestnut Hill's future. We owe Business Association president Tom Ivory, BID president John Levitties and others a great deal of gratitude in their efforts to make Chestnut Hill fit into the 21st century.

The BID will not be a license for people to avoid community participation: sharing responsibility and caring about our neighborhood must remain an imperative.

Katie Worrall

Opinion: Ronald Reagan taught us many lessons

by CLARK GROOME

It was as America's head of state rather than as our head of government that the late President Ronald W. Reagan, who died Saturday after decade or more's struggle with Alzheimer's disease, made his most enduring and, yes, endearing impact.

In most countries, these two roles are given to different people: in Britain, for instance, the head of government is the prime minister, while the monarch is head of state. Many countries have a prime minister and a president.

The United States combines both roles in its president. This means that after a day of being partisan and political, the same person may have to rally the nation at a time of national crisis, national mourning or national celebration.

For much of the last 40 years, many of our chief executives had difficulty doing this. Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43 often were perceived to have problems separating these two roles. Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter may have had the respect of the nation, but never could overcome the crises of their administrations: for Ford, the pardoning of Richard Nixon and for Carter, the Iran hostages.

It wasn't until 1981 when the conservative Ronald Reagan was inaugurated that this began to change.

Reagan, with whom many— myself included — had severe political differences, never came across as arrogant, doctrinaire or mean-spirited. Quite to the contrary, his humor (often at his own expense) and his genuinely held faith in America and her citizens' goodness, kept the discussions over those political differences at a level of civility that has long since disappeared from the political conversation.

Who can forget what just may have been his finest hour: his address to the nation after the space shuttle Challenger accident? What about those times when he used humor to make his point? My favorite was when the President (the oldest man ever elected to the presidency) said, during a 1984 presidential debate, that he refused to use age as an issue and wouldn't, therefore, use his opponent's youth and inexperience against him. The laughter was loud and appreciative, no more so than from his opponent, former Vice President Walter Mondale.

In the days when President Reagan lived in the White House, government was run from the middle out. Compromise was standard operating procedure. Those who were leading the executive and legislative branches wanted and often managed to reach a position that benefited most of the people.

Foreign policy, as had been the case for most of the 20th century, was bipartisan.

There was also a respect, and in the case of Reagan, an affection between members of the two parties. The friendship between the president and Speaker Tip O'Neill is legendary.

Today that civility — that sense of doing what's right for the country — is missing. Politics has become so polarized that bipartisan action is almost impossible. The Republicans hated Clinton. The Democrats hate Bush the Younger. The government is run from the extremes, leaving very little, if any, room for compromise.

People from both sides of the political aisle commented how much they liked and respected President Reagan even as they disapproved of his views on a particular issue. Even the allegedly mean-spirited press liked him.

What we should learn from Ronald Reagan is three-fold: decency doesn't mean weakness; compromise isn't a dirty word; and a sense of humor may be any leader's most important asset.