President Study Resources?

[Terabith]

Happy birthday to Ronald Reagan.

Oh, boy. This is a loaded one. Ronald Reagan is beloved and considered one of the best presidents ever, but his administration also had serious issues, the ramifications of which are still affecting us today.

Reagan was one of the oldest men to hold the title of president, but he was also one of the fittest. Reagan’s focus on fitness and athletics started early in life. As a teenager, he held the traditional teen job of lifeguard, at a camp, and he was apparently pretty good at it. By the time his lifeguarding career was over, he had saved 77 lives, including one poor soul who a different lifeguard had already given up on. But at this camp, for some unknown reason, part of the lifeguard’s duties involved picking up an axe and chopping a three-hundred-pound block of ice into a one hundred pound block of ice every day. I guess their freezer wasn’t big enough? I don’t know. But, for whatever reason he was told to do this, this furious chopping activity had the same effect for future President Reagan as it did for former President Lincoln. It made both of them extremely strong.

Reagan went on to attend Eureka College, where he was a cheerleader, and also studied sociology and economics. He was described as a mediocre student, a “jack of all trades” who got mostly C’s, but was also involved in athletics and theater, as well as cheerleading and serving as student body president.

After graduating from college, he got involved in radio, serving as a radio announcer for several stations and then started serving as the announcer for Cubs games. While traveling with the Cubs to California, Reagan took part in a screen test and got a contract with Warners Brothers films. His first move, Love Is In the Air, was filmed in 1937, and by the end of 1939, he already had been in nineteen films. In 1940, he played the role of George “The Gipper” Gipp, in the film Knute Rockney, All American, and from that film Reagan acquired the nickname “The Gipper,” which was applied to him for the rest of his life. In 1941, he was voted the fifth most popular movie star of the younger generation in Hollywood. In 1942, Reagan starred in King’s Men, which he referred to as “the movie that made me a star,” but shortly after that movie, he was called up to the Army. While in the Army, he served in a variety of ways, including in the Motion Pictures Unit, making training films, and also helping to discover Marilyn Monroe.

Reagan served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947-1952 and in 1959. During this tenure, he provided the FBI with names of actors whom he believed to be Communists, although he had misgivings about doing this.

In the late 1950’s, he got involved in television, including serving as the host of “General Electric Today,” a position with had him making upwards of 14 speeches a day. This role made him fairly well-known throughout American households.

Reagan gained national attention making speeches for the Goldwater campaign, and a speech he made during that campaign, “A Time for Choosing,” got California Republicans interested in Reagan as a candidate. He became governor of California in 1967 and served two terms. He ran for president in 1976, but lost the Republican candidacy to incumbent Gerald Ford, who was defeated by Jimmy Carter. Reagan ran again in 1980, against Jimmy Carter, and this time Reagan won in a landslide.

When Reagan was outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, a crazy man went and fired off six shots in order to impress an actress. Insane people not necessarily being crackerjack snipers, the bullets hit a number of people, but one of them managed to hit Reagan, bouncing off one of his ribs, collapsing his left lung and stopping an inch from his heart. All that healthy ice chopping had given Reagan bones of steel, so strong that bullets would bounce right off of them. The Secret Service initially believed Reagan was all right, up until he started coughing up three units of blood, so they took him to the hospital instead of the White House, as originally planned. Reagan insisted on walking into the hospital (despite, you know, having been shot only four minutes previously). The hospital’s trauma team did not believe that most people the president’s age would survive this kind of injury, but Reagan was in superb condition and continued to make jokes throughout the ordeal. When Nancy Reagan arrived, Ronald said, “Honey, I forgot to duck.” In the operating room, Reagan removed the oxygen mask to joke with the operating team, “I hope you are all Republicans.” He scribbled a note to a nurse, “All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” After the surgery, during which he lost half his blood, instead of resting like a normal human being, he stayed up all night entertaining the nurses with jokes.

No matter how jocular Reagan was about his situation, since the Vice President was away, it was rather chaotic for a time. When a member of the press asked who was running the country, the deputy press secretary answered, “I cannot answer that question at this time.” The Secretary of State announced that he was in charge until Vice President Bush returned, but he had the succession wrong. He was actually fourth, behind the Speaker of the House and President pro tempore of the Senate, although Haig later said he wasn’t speaking in terms of succession but merely who happened to be on scene at the White House.

While the doctors said most men of his age wouldn’t have survived, Reagan had “the physique of a 30-year-old muscle builder,” and they predicted he would be able to return to work in a month.

He was at work twelve days later, and he used the sympathy and support of his injury to push through legislation that would not otherwise have made it out of Congress. Not only that, but he had a gym installed in the White House, and at age seventy, he worked out so much and gained so much muscle that he had to buy new suits.

Reagan was tough, charismatic, funny, and a great communicator, and he had some of the greatest quotes in American history. He famously went to Berlin in 1987, and standing in front of the Berlin Wall, said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!” He was instrumental in ending the Cold War, although that might have been due more to the fact that the military leaders convinced him the Star Wars program to knock down incoming missiles had real promise, Reagan believed them, and the United States basically out-spent the Soviet Union until it collapsed. Reagan also negotiated the first actual arms reduction treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union.

However, despite Reagan’s personal charm and charisma, and the fact that his administration played a big role in the end of the Cold War, his administration did cause several not-so-great issues that we are still dealing with today. For one, up until the Reagan administration, the United States experienced comparatively low levels of income stratification (amount of money held by the richest versus the poorest of Americans), and average wages tended to go up over time. However, Reagan introduced “trickle-down economics,” which, um, worked out great for the upper echelon of the wealthiest of Americans (the 1%), but not so well for the rest of the country. The rich did indeed get richer, but despite the promise inherent in the name, that wealth never did trickle down to the rest of the country. Income inequality has been rising ever since. Also, up until the time of Reagan, nearly 40% of American workers, primarily in the working and middle classes, were members of unions. Union members had the power to strike to improve working conditions and improve salaries, and for this reason, wages tended to increase over time. However, Reagan put an end to this when he abruptly fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers who refused to go back to work when he told them to. Before Reagan had done this, firing striking union workers was seriously frowned on. It just wasn’t done. But he had put it on the table, and unions lost most of their power. Now only seven percent of workers belong to unions, and even they are relatively toothless. Companies get the benefit of increased productivity and profits, but profits and benefits somehow never get translated down to the level of the average employee. Inflation adjusted wages have been stagnant for decades, leading to desperation and massive income inequality.

Ronald Reagan was also credibly accused of rape. Actress Selene Walters claimed that Reagan forced her to have sex with him when he was the president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1952.

He was also bizarrely into astrology. He consulted astrologer Joan Quigley before scheduling any events from 1981 to 1989. She was in charge of picking dates for press conferences, most speeches, take offs and landings of Air Force One, and presidential debates.

Now, it’s hard to remember today what the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union was at the time. I mean, sure, we make fun of Russia and Putin, and we don’t like them interfering with our elections and stuff, but we don’t literally worry about massive nuclear war between two major superpowers. (Even our fears about nuclear war with North Korea are in no way similar, because North Korea doesn’t have even a fraction of the power or weaponry of the former Soviet Union.) We fricking hated the Soviets. They were the Evil Empire. They were Satan incarnate. It was tense.

So it makes sense that Ronald Reagan wanted to do everything possible to get at those nasty Communists. Besides the whole outspending them on defense, Reagan also intervened in other countries that he thought might be coming under the sway of the Soviet Union. Fighting Communism was the biggest task of the president. This led to the United States meddling in the elections of many Central American countries, but it was our intervention in Afghanistan that has come back to bite us in the butt in a major way. In 1978, a communist leaning group took of Afghanistan in a violent coup, which the United States was decidedly not cool with. Bad Communists! Bad! Since Afghanistan is pretty close to the Soviet Union, they were stoked about this. The majority of Afghanistan citizens, however, who were devout Muslims, were not so happy about this, and since the reforms the communists instituted involved killing bunches of them, who could blame them? Rebel Afghanistan forces rose up and began fighting the communist leaders, who were getting weapons and help from the Soviets. The Muslims asked us for help, and we were thrilled to do so.
So the United States began providing weaponry, training, and advice to these freedom loving Muslims wanting only to throw off the shackles of their communist masters. One of the leaders of the Muslim freedom fighters was none other than Osama bin Laden. We were so successful at helping them out, that the Soviets left, but we stayed, since we were all buddy-buddies with them by this time. And that was cool, until we stayed on and on, like houseguests that never, ever leave, until we up and left suddenly, leaving a vacuum. The moderate Muslim majority was overthrown by the fundamentalist Taliban; everyone eventually started hating us and then turned into our worst enemies, and since they were so incredibly well armed and so carefully trained, it’s been difficult to win.

 

[LauraClark]

Thank you thank you @Terabith!!!