Reagan's closest adviser was always his wife, writes Conor O'Clery, North America Editor
A few months ago, CBS was preparing to broadcast a mini-series called "The Reagans," when all hell broke loose. The series was considered by conservatives to be insulting to the ailing former president and former first lady, Nancy Reagan. Protests poured in and the network capitulated, relegating the programme to a smaller cable channel.
The episode was a measure of the reverence and affection with which Reagan had come to be held 16 years after leaving office, especially near the end of a 10-year battle with Alzheimer's disease.
It wasn't always so. When the one-time B-movie star first ran for president in 1980 he frightened a lot of people with his right-wing rhetoric, much of it borrowed from Barry Goldwater. But his opponent Jimmy Carter was seen as an ineffectual president. The Democratic president seemed unable to cope with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the hostage crisis in Iran. Unemployment and consumer prices were rising. The country wanted strong leadership. Reagan was a skilful communicator, good with one-liners, such as "There you go again!" - a phrase I heard him use in Cleveland, Ohio, with devastating effect in a televised debate which Jimmy Carter was up to then winning on an intellectual level. His protest "Sir, I paid for this microphone," when a moderator tried to cut him off in a debate in the New Hampshire Republican primary had an equally powerful effect. It made Reagan look ready to take charge and his opponent George H. W. Bush later said, "It blew me away". Reagan conveyed a boyish charm and he made Americans feel good about themselves with his infectious optimism, offering to bring them to the "shining city on the hill". He appealed not just to Republicans but blue-collar workers, the so-called Reagan Democrats.
Anti-abortion and hostile to civil rights legislation, he was a big hit in Boston Irish pubs. He appealed to the business world with his promise to cut taxes by 30 per cent in three years. He was, some analysts say, the first of the neo-conservatives, the former liberals in American who have turned to the far right. In office he quickly showed himself to be a hard-line conservative.
His legacy was to redefine the Republican Party, whose social policies in the pre-Reagan times were in line with Democratic policies today. Reagan's administration set out - not very successfully - to downsize government, which Reagan called the problem, not the solution. His administration slashed disability benefits, unemployment insurance, food stamps and government loans for students. (Its proposal that ketchup be calculated as a vegetable in evaluating school lunches was dropped after widespread ridicule). The Republican president cut taxes and popularised "Reaganonomics", the theory that benefits given to the rich would trickle down to the rest. One of the first things things Reagan did in office was to break the Air Controllers Union strike, a shattering blow to American labour from which it never fully recovered. His ruthless firing of air traffic controllers sent a message at home and abroad that he would not cave in to pressure. Reagan at first presided over a recession but helped by a collapse in world oil prices, the economy boomed and created 16 million jobs. The corporate climate changed. His was the era of mergers and acquisitions. It became more acceptable during his era for companies to lay off workers even when profitable. But the deficit Reagan ran up helped cause a stock market meltdown on October 19th, 1987. When he left office there were more homeless people, many evicted from mental homes, and more people living below the poverty line.
His deregulation of banks left another legacy, the savings and loan scandal which cost taxpayers billions of dollars.
On foreign policy, Reagan saw the world in terms of good against evil. He called the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire", a characterisation repeated in President George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech two decades later to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea. The militantly anti-communist "Reagan Doctrine" meant waging proxy wars against the Soviet Union. In Afghanistan the Reagan administration armed the mujahedeen against Soviet forces. This brought about the defeat of secular Afghanistan. (I remember meeting women teachers in Afghanistan in 1988 who were, rightly as it turned out, terrified of the repressions against women the US-backed Islamic extremists would bring). The emergence of the Taliban government is part of the legacy of both the Soviet leaders of the time and Ronald Reagan. Other aspects of Reagan's foreign policy had disastrous outcomes. In 1983 he sent Marines to Beirut where a suicide-bomber drove a truck loaded with explosives into the Marine compound, killing 241 Americans. Reagan immediately withdrew the US forces. This sent a powerful message to America's enemies - reinforced some years later by the precipitate withdrawal from Somalia after "Black Hawk Down" - that American forces would cut and run if bloodied.
Many historians say Reagan's most important legacy was to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, mainly by his tough attitude of containment. He forced the impoverished Russian empire to try to match America's massive expenditure on armaments and Star Wars. Many historians today argue that the USSR was most likely destined to collapse from internal strains, but it was Reagan's good fortune to be US president at the time. Europeans saw Reagan then in negative terms, much as they see George W. Bush today. In England there were huge protests at the deployment of US nuclear missiles aimed at Russia. Abroad, Reagan was still seen as "scary", someone who could joke when testing a microphone, "I just signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We bombing begins in five minutes." But he ended up up meeting Mikhail Gorbachev, visiting Russia and signing a treaty to reduce nuclear weapons.
Reagan's strategy of fighting proxy wars in the battle against communism meant arming and supporting the right in central America, whose brutal methods caused Irish priests and nuns regularly to protest in Dublin. In El Salvador, America supported the violent suppression of a Marxist-dominated insurgency. In Nicaragua, the Reagan White House supplied money, which had been gained from the secret sale of weapons to the "outlaw state" of Iran, to the US-sponsored Contras fighting the left-wing government. The illegal scheme was masterminded by Col Oliver North, who used an Irish passport for clandestine trips abroad. The scandal when it emerged blemished Reagan's presidency and left a black mark on America's image in the world. Reagan at first denied any knowledge of the affair and then said his heart told him his denial was true, but "the facts and the evidence tell me it is not". It may have had an upside. Nancy Reagan, who exercised a strong influence on her husband, was said to be so concerned that his legacy would be defined by Iran Contra that she pushed him to sign the arms deal with Gorbachev, which helped shape his reputation as a statesman.
Reagan announced his readiness to sign a deal with Gorbachev to eliminate medium-range missiles in Europe just two days after the Tower Commission reported on the Iran-Contra affair. Four years after he left office, Iran-Contra helped sink President G. W. Bush's chances of a second term when a Congressional inquiry reported, on the eve of the election with Bill Clinton, that Bush, who had been Reagan's vice-president, knew more than he had said about the affair.
Since leaving office, Nancy Reagan has again played a role in softening the image of a presidency not known for its emphasis on social issues. (It took 4,000 deaths from AIDs in America before Reagan publicly mentioned the word). During Ronald Reagan's long fight against Alzheimer's, Nancy Reagan became one of the most important activists for research, for which she has raised $17 million. She is also a strong advocate for stem-cell research, the use of embryo tissues in pharmaceutical experiments and which the current president opposes.
In many ways, Ronald Reagan's legacy is Nancy's too.