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Behind the Ronald Reagan myth: “No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed”
Behind the Ronald Reagan myth: “No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed”by William Leuchtenburg at Salon
http://www.salon.com/2015/12/27/behind_the_ronald_reagan_myth_no_one_had_ever_entered_the_white_house_so_grossly_ill_informed/
"SNIP..............
No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed. At presidential news conferences, especially in his first year, Ronald Reagan embarrassed himself. On one occasion, asked why he advocated putting missiles in vulnerable places, he responded, his face registering bewilderment, “I don’t know but what maybe you haven’t gotten into the area that I’m going to turn over to the secretary of defense.” Frequently, he knew nothing about events that had been headlined in the morning newspaper. In 1984, when asked a question he should have fielded easily, Reagan looked befuddled, and his wife had to step in to rescue him. “Doing everything we can,” she whispered. “Doing everything we can,” the president echoed. To be sure, his detractors sometimes exaggerated his ignorance. The publication of his radio addresses of the 1950s revealed a considerable command of facts, though in a narrow range. But nothing suggested profundity. “You could walk through Ronald Reagan’s deepest thoughts,” a California legislator said, “and not get your ankles wet.”
In all fields of public affairs—from diplomacy to the economy—the president stunned Washington policymakers by how little basic information he commanded. His mind, said the well-disposed Peggy Noonan, was “barren terrain.” Speaking of one far-ranging discussion on the MX missile, the Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, an authority on national defense, reported, “Reagan’s only contribution throughout the entire hour and a half was to interrupt somewhere at midpoint to tell us he’d watched a movie the night before, and he gave us the plot from War Games.” The president “cut ribbons and made speeches. He did these things beautifully,” Congressman Jim Wright of Texas acknowledged. “But he never knew frijoles from pralines about the substantive facts of issues.” Some thought him to be not only ignorant but, in the word of a former CIA director, “stupid.” Clark Clifford called the president an “amiable dunce,” and the usually restrained columnist David Broder wrote, “The task of watering the arid desert between Reagan’s ears is a challenging one for his aides.”
No Democratic adversary would ever constitute as great a peril to the president’s political future, his advisers concluded, as Reagan did himself. Therefore, they protected him by severely restricting situations where he might blurt out a fantasy. His staff, one study reported, wrapped him “in excelsior,” while “keeping the press at shouting distance or beyond.” In his first year as president, he held only six news conferences—fewest ever in the modern era. Aides also prepared scores of cue cards, so that he would know how to greet visitors and respond to interviewers. His secretary of the treasury and later chief of staff said of the president: “Every moment of every public appearance was scheduled, every word scripted, every place where Reagan was expected to stand was chalked with toe marks.” Those manipulations, he added, seemed customary to Reagan, for “he had been learning his lines, composing his facial expressions, hitting his toe marks for half a century.” Each night, before turning in, he took comfort in a shooting schedule for the next day’s television- focused events that was laid out for him at his bedside, just as it had been in Hollywood.
His White House staff found it difficult, often impossible, to get him to stir himself to follow even this rudimentary routine. When he was expected to read briefing papers, he lazed on a couch watching old movies. On the day before a summit meeting with world leaders about the future of the economy, he was given a briefing book. The next morning, his chief of staff asked him why he had not even opened it. “Well, Jim,” the president explained, “The Sound of Music was on last night.”
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59 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Old news to you, LuvNewcastle: The coup d'grace was "serving" Pruneface as veep.
At a dinner during Republican National Convention, Detroit, 1980.
George Bush Takes Charge: The Uses of ‘Counter-Terrorism’
By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58
A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.
During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.
Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.
The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: [font size="5"][font color="green"]As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.[/font color][/font size]
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Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.
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NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985
The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.
[font color="red"]The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.
The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.
Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified.[/font color] The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.
CONTINUED...
CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40.
Nobody's touched CIA ever since. And Reagan is a saint.
Agents for Bush
The 1980 Campaign
by Bob Callahan
Covert Action Information Bulletin
George Bush owed his recent political fortune to several old CIA friends, chiefly Ray Cline, who had helped to rally the intelligence community … and started … "Agents for Bush."
Bill Peterson of the Washington Post wrote in a March 1, 1980 article, "Simply put, no presidential campaign in recent memory – perhaps ever – has attracted as much support from the intelligence community as (has) the campaign of former CIA director George Bush."
George Bush’s CIA campaign staff included Cline, CIA Chief of Station in Taiwan from 1958 to 1962; Lt. Gen. Salm V. Wilson and Lt. Gen. Harold A. Aaron, both former Directors of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Also included were retired Gen. Richard Stillwell, once the CIA’s Chief of Covert Operations for the Far East, and at least 25 other retired Company directors, deputy directors and, or, agents.
… Angelo Codevilla, informed a congressional committee that was "aware that active duty agents of the CIA worked for the George Bush primary election campaign.
… Ray Cline claimed that he had been promoting the pro-CIA agenda that Bush had embraced for years, and that he had found the post Church-hearings criticism had died down some time ago. "I found there was a tremendous constituency for the CIA when everyone in Washington was still urinating all over it," Cline said. … "It’s panned out almost too good to be true. The country is waking up just in time for George’s candidacy. …
In July 1979 George Bush and Ray Cline attended a conference in Jerusalem. … (with) leaders of Israel, Great Britain and the United States. … The Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism was hosted by the Israeli government and … most of Israel’s top intelligence officers … were in attendance. …
… The Israelis were angry with Carter because his administration had recently released its annual report on human rights wherein the Israeli government was taken to task for abusing the rights of the Palestinian people on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. …
The Republican delegation was led by George Bush. It included Ray Cline and Major Gen. George Keegan (former USAF intelligence chief) and Harvard professor Richard Pipes.
Looking for a mobilizing issue to counter the Carter-era themes of détente and human rights, the Bush people began to explore the political benefits of embracing the terrorism/anti-terrorism theme.
… Ray Cline developed the theme that terror was not a random response. … but rather an instrument of East bloc policy adopted after 1969 when the KGB persuaded the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to accept the PLO as a major political instrument in the Mideast and to subsidize its terrorist policies by freely giving money, training, arms and coordinated communications. …
… Within days after the conference the new propaganda war began in earnest. On July 11, 1979, the International Herald Tribune featured a lead editorial entitled "The Issue is Terrorism," which quoted directly from conference speeches. …
SOURCE: Covert Action Information Bulletin No.33(Winter 1990) "The Bush Issue"
http://mediamayhem.blogspot.com/2004_04_11_archive.html
History doesn't seem to repeat so much anymore; it vibrates on one resonant frequency. The people who call the shots see that it does.
Thank God we dodged that bullet.
