The Reagan Administration

Jimmy Carter's diagnosis of a national "malaise" was accurate but unwelcome. Along came Ronald Reagan, speaking of a shining city on a hill and recommending sugar-coated tax cuts to cure all our economic ills. As if on cue, the world discovered that OPEC had overplayed its hand, and the back of inflation was broken. A sharp recession early on was followed by a robust economy just in time for Reagan's reelection. And, of course, the hostages were released as his inauguration present.

Reagan even survived an assassination attempt, and America found his sense of humor about it reassuring. He had beaten "Tecumseh's curse" -- the macabre coincidence of death in office of presidents elected in years ending in zero since 1840 -- it was hard not to believe that this guy was unstoppable. (Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts with no such perception of confidence and invulnerability.) The Soviet Union, in contrast, suffered a series of enfeebled leaders before it found the reformer Gorbachev. Our teflon president was unaffected by the emergence of the AIDS crisis. He had a ready-to-launch invasion of Grenada when 241 marines were killed in Beirut. (How strange that the number 241 has stuck in my memory more than two decades later! I'm normally terrible with numbers.) The only time he really stumbled was over the Iran-Contra scandal midway through his second term -- but he survived partly because Democrats were savvy enough to realize that the nation had no stomach for impeachment proceedings twice in one generation.

If, on the other hand, the Reagan-Schweikert ticket had somehow won in 1976, the Gipper would have been saddled with the many reverses of the Carter years (plus a crisis over the Panama Canal). His environment-hostile policies would have collided with the Three Mile Island and Love Canal disasters. The Soviets would still have invaded Afghanistan, oil prices would still have risen, and Japan would still have seemed to be the world's economic superpower. Reagan might have stalled the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, but wouldn't have prevented them without military intervention. He'd have tried to rescue the hostages sooner; perhaps the rescue attempt would have been successful on any day other than the one it was actually tried; perhaps he'd have tried more than once.

But if the hostages were still in the embassy on election day, you can bet that our president during the next eight years (and three Supreme Court vacancies) would have been Walter Mondale. Or Teddy Kennedy.

No wonder there is so much right-wing hagiography of Ronald Reagan!