The night before Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president, he made sure that he got a good night’s sleep, carefully instructing his aides not to wake him until 8 a.m. Jimmy Carter, meanwhile, about to step down from office, had been awake for 48 hours, supervising the negotiations over the release of American hostages in Tehran. In the early hours of the morning on Inauguration Day, he called Blair House, where Reagan was sleeping, with exciting news about progress. Mike Deaver, the president-elect’s aide, told Carter it was too soon to wake him. At 8 o’clock, when Deaver finally tried to rouse the new president, telling him it would soon be time to be sworn in, Reagan groaned: ‘Do I have to?’ On the way to the ceremony, he tried to chat with the exhausted Carter, regaling him with tales of his Hollywood days long ago at Warner Bros. ‘He kept talking about Jack Warner,’ Carter later complained. ‘Who’s Jack Warner?’ But once on the podium, Reagan was a master. He stood facing Arlington, reading his own words, written in longhand on a yellow legal pad. His inaugural speech included a story about a Wisconsin boy, Martin Treptow, killed in action in France in 1917, who wrote on the flyleaf of his diary: ‘America must win this war.’ Fact-checkers had found no corroboration of the story: there was no diary, no record of Treptow’s burial in Arlington. No matter. Reagan kept it in, describing the crosses at Arlington, and the young soldier, buried under ‘one such marker’, who had displayed the passionate faith that Reagan hoped would once more unite the nation. This is a good moment for the appearance of a new history of Reagan’s presidency. His week-long state funeral in 2004 (and its round-the-clock coverage on TV) marked his political canonisation. Among conservatives, it goes without saying that Reagan is the greatest American president of the 20th century: the man who vanquished Soviet Communism abroad and liberal politics at home. The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project is dedicated to naming a landmark after him in each of America’s 3067 counties (the group has also supported campaigns to replace Roosevelt’s image on the dime with Reagan’s). The lineage of many of the most powerful figures in America today – Dick Cheney, George Bush, John Roberts, Samuel Alito – can be traced back through the Reagan administration. Conservatives disaffected with Bush accuse him of the worst sin they can imagine: betraying Reagan’s legacy. Even Democrats have forgotten the harsh feelings they once harboured. After Reagan’s death, John Kerry praised him for ending the Cold War and, in a dig at Bush, for his ability to govern without partisan rancour. In 1985 Richard Reeves published The Reagan Detour, a book aimed at fellow Democrats who were disheartened by Reagan’s stunning victory in the 1984 election. He assured his readers that Reaganism would be short-lived: Americans still supported Social Security, they still trusted the federal government. Reaganism may have brought the country back from post-Watergate malaise and disillusionment, but liberals would surely be back in power soon. In his new book, however, Reeves acknowledges that

Be Dull, Mr President Kim Phillips-Fein

what education I got all by myself and so forth, and I think it is sheer demagoguery to pretend that this economic programme which we’ve submitted is not aimed at helping the great cross section of people in this country that have been burdened for too long by big government and high taxes.’ His words echoed the kind of speech he would have given thirty years earlier at General Electric. This confidence in the free market as the liberator of the working class enabled Reagan to preside over a great upwards redistribution of wealth, while being fully certain that his policies were in everybody’s best interests. He cared little for the specifics. In an early speech to the nation about the economy, he called for the funding of 83 government programmes to be slashed, including food stamps, school lunches and student loans, insisting that ‘the taxing power ofgovernment . . . must not be used to regulate the economy or bring about social change.’ The New York Times described the speech as ‘figure-studded’, but Reagan had left blanks in his handwritten draft for others to fill in the numbers. (This lack of interest in policy details did not mean that he left Congressional support of his programme to chance: Reeves describes Reagan working the phones with Congressmen to shore up their votes. Of Billy Tauzin, Louisiana Democrat, Reagan wrote: ‘He’s with us – like me he dreams of the day we can get rid of the whole d—n windfall profits tax.’) He didn’t flinch when breaking the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981, signalling to the nation’s business community that the federal government would make a

President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination by Richard Reeves. Simon and Schuster, 571 pp., £20, March, 0 7432 3022 1

the Reagan era changed American political life seemingly for ever, by exalting free enterprise and the market and putting government permanently on the defensive. ‘Amazing things, good and bad, happened in the 1980s,’ he writes, ‘because President Reagan wanted them to happen . . . There is no doubt that he established the Republicans as the country’s governing party.’ During the 1980s, liberals criticised Reagan for his lack of pragmatism, his somnolence, his shallowness and his inability to master details of policy. They argued that he was manipulated by his staffers, that he was no more than an actor and a figurehead, a fumbling old man. Reeves now believes that Reagan’s disregard for the nitty-gritty ephemera of governance was precisely the secret of his charisma. He was a man for whom ‘the speech was the real work.’ His politics were alluring because he had a sense of the world-historical in his every action, and he possessed this confidence because he saw himself as a participant in a global anti-Communist struggle, a rebel against the forces of socialism. Although Reeves doesn’t point this out, it’s Reagan’s certainty that has given his politics a new lustre at a time when conservatives can no longer appeal to the unifying faith of antiCommunism. Reeves’s Reagan is a man driven by political idealism. In 1989, on a visit to the SovietUnion for a summit talk with Gorbachev, he attended a lunch organised by Moscow’s literary elite. From underneath a gigantic sculpture of Lenin’s head, Reagan spoke to the collected Russian poets, writers and movie directors. ‘The most important thing is to have the vision,’ he told them, citing Eisenstein. ‘The next is to grasp and hold it. You must see and feel what you are thinking . . . That is the very essence of leadership, not only on the movie set where I learned it, but everywhere.’ Where had Reagan’s vision come from? From the 1950s, when he had been a spokesman for General Electric. At the time, the company was staunchly opposed to the labour unions, and Reagan rode around the country on a train – he hated flying – from one factory to the next, speaking to groups of workers about the dangers of creeping socialism. Like Friedrich Hayek, Ludvig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt, whose work he deeply admired, Reagan even in the 1950s saw the New Deal welfare state as profoundly dangerous. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society – with its health insurance for the old and the poor, its food stamps and easier access to welfare – only intensified Reagan’s antipathy towards the mixed economy that emerged from the Depression. He argued that high taxes on the rich, the power of unions, and other such limits on the market would one day lead to totalitarianism. In 1964, in the speech he made for Barry Goldwater’s ill-fated presid

ential candidacy, a speech which launched his own political career, he quoted the 19thcentury economist John McCulloch: ‘The moment you abandon the cardinal principle of exacting from all individuals the same proportion of their income or their property, you are at sea without a rudder or compass and there is no amount of injustice or folly you may not commit.’ Although Reagan lambasted progressive taxes, labour unions, workplace regulations and anti-poverty programmes, his vision did not appeal only to the rich. On the contrary, the idea of the market had a strong romantic pull; it suggested the power of the individual, the rejection of hierarchies based on class and status. Reagan insisted that he wanted to be the president for ‘the entrepreneur, the farmer, the small businessman, the independent’, not for big business; at one point, he told Fortunemagazine that what mattered most to him was the support he received from ‘all those people I shake hands with who have callouses on their hands’. When Tip O’Neill, the Democratic speaker, accused him and his ‘wealthy and selfish advisers’ of not understanding ‘working people’, Reagan lashedback: ‘I grew up in poverty and got

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

ILAN PAPPE

World renowned Israeli historian

In conversation with OMAR AL-QATTAN founder of Sindibad Films and director of Al-Qattan Foundation

Monday 16th October, 6.30pm The Darwin Lecture Theatre Darwin Building (basement) UCL, Gower Street, WC1 Tickets: £5, £2 concessions, available on the door

The 1948 Palestine-Israel War is known to Israelis as 'The War of Independence', but for Palestinians it will forever be the Nakba, the 'catastrophe'. Around a million people were expelled from their own country at gunpoint, civilians were massacred and hundreds of Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed. Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called "ethnic cleansing."

In his new book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine(Oneworld Publications) Ilan Pappe argues passionately for the recognition of this tragedy. With meticulous research, and drawing heavily on the Israeli military archives and cabinet meeting minutes, as well as the diaries and memoirs of the key players, Pappe reconstructs the strategic planning and military operations involved, as well as describing the events as they unfolded.

17 london review of books 19 october 2006