Autobiographers From The United States

"the world may not last. Just the other day Ronald Reagan said that the arms race is necessary. He has to be insane. INSANE! And all the people listening. They have to be insane too."

"Reagan's boys called Jimmy Carter a weanie and a wuss although Carter wouldn't give an inch to the Ayatollah. Reagan, with that film-fantasy tough-guy con in front of cameras, went begging like a coward cockroach to Khomeini, pleading on bended knee for the release of our hostages."

"The New York Times, in its canned obit, wrote that Reagan projected, "faith in small town America" and "old-time values." "Values" my ass. It was union-busting and a declaration of war on the poor and anyone who couldn't buy designer dresses. It was the New Meanness, bringing starvation back to America so that every millionaire could get another million. "Small town" values? From the movie star of the Pacific Palisades, the Malibu mogul? I want to throw up."

"The deaths lie on him [Reagan] and the defeat in Lebanon lies on him and him alone.... The trouble with this fellow is he tries to be tough rather than smart."

"He knows less about the budget than any president in my lifetime. He can't even carry on a conversation about the budget. It's an absolute and utter disgrace."

"Pride in our country, respect for our armed services, a healthy appreciation for the dangers beyond our borders, an insistence that there was no easy equivalence between East and West — in all this I had no quarrel with Reagan. And when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I had to give the old man his due, even if I never gave him my vote."

"I would think to myself [...] that the battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: Never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain."

"He [Reagan] demonstrated for all to see how far you can go in this life with a smile, a shoeshine and the nerve to put your own spin on the facts."

"If you can control the access of the press to [Reagan], you have a hell of a lot better chance of him not screwing up."

"It shows you how a man [Reagan] of limited mental capacity simply doesn't know what the Christ is going on in the foreign area."

"I have gradually, over the course of many years, come to the conclusion that he was a great president. More interesting to me than greatness, however, is that he was throughout his life such a strange combination. Innocence and wisdom; charm and hard force; gregariousness and aloofness; egocentricity without conceit; aggression without cruelty; imaginativeness and cultural ignorance; sentimentality and emotional coolness; I could go on for a quarter of an hour and not exhaust his contrary opposites. He is also – to finish with a simple statement – the bravest and most incorrupt figure I've ever studied."

"Reagan, who as governor of California in 1969 called in troops to repel the Third World Liberation Front student strikes, initiated "Reaganomics" as president a decade later. By the mid-1980s, Reagan's actor smile and easy oratory eloquence had won the hearts and minds of Middle America, and laid the groundwork for the corporate welfare state we suffer today…The economic policies Reagan initiated in the 1980s would come to full realization twenty years later during the George W. Bush years. Anything or anyone interrupting profit by utilizing tax revenue for social welfare became an enemy of the state, including the single mother needing assistance; poor and working-class youth of color seeking an equitable public education; the impoverished elder needing home care; and, in general, the discontented public demanding a socially just economy."

"As perhaps the chief public face of American science during this period, Carl Sagan wasn’t merely a popularizer but a fierce advocate for the proper use of science in the real world. During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan necessarily became his chief foe, for Reagan brought anti-science into the American political mainstream as never before."

"Former aides say Ronald Reagan was a man who read his horoscope and the "funnies" before the rest of the paper. They say he wasn't only indulging his wife — that the former president also believed in astrology."

"I don’t want to be controversial, but I do see that under Ronald Reagan and Bush’s administration there was a fantasy created of a third World War. And this fantasy really damaged the mentality of the military in Guatemala and Guatemalan fascists, and they still believe that communism exists. I don’t know what they’re referring to, but the truth is that here in Guatemala, women were raped, girls were raped, they strangled children, they assassinated and wiped out entire indigenous peoples, just because they thought they were so-called subversives and communists. So humanity really has to look into what occurred."

"Half the lies he tells you are not true. John Martyn, "Glorious Fool""

"I'm trying to explain to you that Ronald Reagan was the devil! Ronald Wilson Reagan? Each of his names have six letters? 666? Man, doesn't that offend you?"

"Huey Freeman: Excuse me. Everyone, I have a brief announcement to make. Jesus was black, Ronald Reagan was the devil, and the government is lying about 9-11. Thank you for your time and good night."

"Ronald Reagan: Turns out that God really doesn't have that much of a problem with racism. He doesn't even remember slavery, except in February. Personally, I hate black people, Ruckus. That's why I did everything I could to make their lives miserable. Crack? Me. AIDS? Me. Reaganomics? (chuckles) C'mon. I'm in the name."

"I cannot say I am black and so Ronald Reagan has nothing to do with me. Because it's true, he doesn't have anything to do with me, but I have a certain amount of power, because for example I can vote, because I can speak to other Americans. Now most of them, who are white, will not hear me, but some of them will. That is a responsibility of mine. So that is one kind of power that I have."

"The backlash we spoke about almost theoretically in the late '60s and early '70s has become real and has given rise to Ronald Reagan and to the “Moral Majority”...Personally, I think what we're seeing is the result of not following through on important issues. Take, for instance, the women's community. Our inability to deal with very real issues of homophobia, racism, and ageism has in many respects led to the kinds of fractures which weaken our ability to resist…We need to examine the dialectic that operates between our differences to ask, where do we want to go? The differences I'm talking about are those between people who share a common goal. I'm not interested in exploring the differences between me and Ronald Reagan; but I am interested in exploring the differences between me and you."

"(Sinda Gregory: “Science fiction seems to appeal to a lot of Americans today who are concerned about the things you write about, who feel that something drastic needs to be done before we blow ourselves up or completely destroy our environment.”) Le Guin: We have to thank Reagan and friends for this mood, maybe. They've scared us. Poor Jimmy Carter, who was perfectly aware of what World War Three would be like, couldn't get through to the public. We let him do the worrying for us, and then blamed him for our problems."

"Since Tuesday, election day, when Ronald Reagan was elected, I'm wearing my ERA button everywhere. We have got to come awake again. We've got to work really hard. That's all I know, but in what exact ways, I don't know."

"It was, and to some extent is, fashionable to mock Ronald Reagan. I suspect that the verdict of history will be that he was America's most effective post-war President. When he entered the White House US power was in decline, its people demoralized and its currency distrusted. When he left it, America had become the world's only remaining superpower, and its people had rediscovered their pride."

"Reagan wasted little time in knocking down the fiscal gains that middle- and low-income people had made over the past four decades. Seemingly as quickly and deeply as Congress allowed and the poor economy justified, Regan cut taxes for the rich and social programs for middle- and low-income families, while increasing the military budget. Reagan seemingly did offscreen what Sylvester Stallone had done on-screen, first knocking out elite Blacks the way Rocky had knocked out his opponent Apollo Creed in Rocky II (1979). And then, amazingly, Reagan befriended these Creeds- these racist or elite Blacks he had knocked down in previous fights- and used them to knock down the menacingly low-income Blacks, as represented by Rocky's opponent in Rocky III (1982), Clubber Lang, popularly known as Mr. T. During Reagan's first year in office, the median income of Black families declined by 5.2 percent, and the number of poor Americans in general increased by 2.2 million. In one year, the New York Times observed, "much of the progress that had been made against poverty in the 1960s and 1970s had been wiped out." (p. 431)"

"Days earlier, on August 3, 1980, the press did show up in full force when the former California governor more or less opened his presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair. The event was just a few miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights activists had been killed in 1964. It was a clever strategy that improved on the tactics Nixon had mastered before him. Reagan never mentioned race when he looked out at some of the descendants of slaveholders and segregationists, people who had championed "states' rights" to maintain White supremacy for nearly two centuries since those hot days in the other Philadelphia, where the US Constitution had been written. Reagan promised to "restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them." He then dodged Carter's charges of racism. Thanks in part to southern support, Reagan easily won the presidency. (p. 430-431)"

"Ironically, it was a former Hollywood star who came to embody Rocky Balboa in real life; and at the same time, to embody the racist backlash to Black Power in politics. This real-life Rocky decided to challenge incumbent Gerald Ford for the presidential seat on the Republican ticket in 1976. Ronald Reagan fought down all those empowerment movements fomenting in his home state of California and across the nation. Hardly any other Republican politician could match his law-and-order credentials, and hardly any other Republican politician was more despised by antiracists. When Reagan had first campaigned for governor of California in 1966, he had pledged "to send the welfare bums back to work." By 1976, he had advanced his fictional welfare problem enough to attract Nixon's undercover racists to his candidacy, gaining their support in cutting social programs that helped the poor. On the presidential campaign trail, Reagan shared the story of Chicago's Linda Taylor, a Black woman charged with welfare fraud. "Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000," Reagan liked to say. Actually, Taylor had been charged with defrauding the state of $8,000, an exceptional amount for something that rarely happened. But truth did not matter to the Reagan campaign as much as feeding the White backlash to Black power. (p. 424)"

"He [Reagan] was the triumph of image over truth, paving the way for even more vapid spokesmodels like George W. Bush. He was, as everyone agrees, exactly what he appeared to be—nothing. He made me ashamed to be an American. If there was any justice in this world his Presidential Library would contain nothing but boys' adventure books and bad cowboy movies, and the only things named after him would be shopping malls and Potter's Fields. Let the earth where he is buried be seeded with salt."

"When you talk to Reagan, you sometimes wonder why it occurred to anyone that he should be president, or even governor. But what you historians have to explained is how so un unintellectual a man could have dominated California for eight years, and Washington already for nearly seven."

"Ronald Reagan, the former president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the only union member ever to have ascended to the presidency, came to power in 1980 and unleashed utter hell upon the United States' labor movement. Transportation workers would bear the brunt of his anti-labor, pro-business conservative agenda, and his attack on the airline industry would come to symbolize the Republicans' enduring hatred for unions. Though Reagan is infamous for the many terrible policies he inflicted on the American people, within the world of labor, his most reviled action remains his brutal evisceration of the 1981 Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike."

"That I am lesbian is my usual awareness. My close people are almost all lesbians, mostly not Jewish. I live in Santa Fe, among gentiles; and though I am lonely for Jews, I don't go to shul, and never did; and don't pray, or even know the prayers. I think Israel a boiling contradiction; and besides, they don't give queers citizenship. But the rise of Klan activity, Reagan and his white-on-white cabinet, synagogues bombed in France, have me in a sweat. Dreams of the camps. I need to know the network I may be forced to count on. I want to know the tradition, what binds us besides danger."

"Most Americans favored exactly those federal programs of social support that Reagan tried to eviscerate, or eliminate altogether."

"Reagan, who more than any president in history railed against government benefits and spending, set the standard for all members of his administration. In addition to his presidential pension of $99,500 a year for life and his annual pension as a former governor of California of $30,800 ... he received Secret Service protection from forty full-time agents and other security at a cost to the government estimated at $10 million annually, more than double that of other living presidents. A suite of offices atop a new thirty-four-story office building twenty minutes from his home, commanding a view that extended from the Pacific Ocean to the towers of downtown Los Angeles, cost the government $173,000 a year to lease."

"Reaganomics. Based on the belief that the rich had too little money and the poor had too much. That's classic Reaganomics. They believe that the poor had too much money and the rich had too little money so they engaged in reverse Robin Hood - took from the poor and gave to the rich, paid for by the middle class. We cannot stand four more years of Reaganomics in any version, in any disguise."

"His [Reagan's] errors glide past unchallenged. At one point ... he alleged that almost half the population gets a free meal from the government each day. No one told him he was crazy. The general message of the American press is that, yes, while it is perfectly true that the emperor has no clothes, nudity is actually very acceptable this year."

"The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife — the one that you remember — because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon."

"During Mr. Reagan's trip to Europe ... members of the traveling press corps watched him doze off so many times — during speeches by French President Francois Mitterrand and Italian President Alessandro Pertini, as well as during a one-on-one audience with the Pope — that they privately christened the trip "The Big Sleep.""

"When Reagan was nominated in 1966 by the Republicans it marked a qualitative turn for the worse in California and national politics. Now the Right was not simply an organized force within a major party but had actually gained control. Johnson's landslide victory over Goldwater in 1964 had not discouraged the ultra-Right, but only increased its determination to dig in for the long haul."

"I really believe Reagan is fundamentally a decent and honest man. His politics? When the Government of the United States borrows a large part of the savings of the world, the consequence is that capital must become scarce and expensive in the whole world. That's a problem."

"Reagan's only contribution [to the subject of the MX missile] 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 WarGames, the movie. That was his only contribution."

"Reagan's theory was really "trickle down" economics borrowed from the Republican 1920s (Harding-Coolidge-Hoover) and renamed "supply side." Cut tax rates for the wealthy; everyone else will benefit. As Reagan's budget director David Stockman confided to me at the time, the supply-side rhetoric "was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate." Many middle-class and poor citizens figured it out, even if reporters did not."

"From day one his [Reagan's] standard operating procedure ... was a blend of ignorance, amnesia, and dissembling. Like a panicky passenger lunging for a life preserver, he would, under stress, concoct almost any fact or anecdote to advance his ideological beliefs. Ronald Reagan brought to mind Will Rogers' comment that "It's not what he doesn't know that bothers me, it's what he knows for sure that just ain't so.""

"This loathing for government, this eagerness to prove that any program to aid the disadvantaged is nothing but a boondoggle and a money gobbler, leads him to contrive statistics and stories with unmatched vigor."

"Soon to declare his own candidacy for the presidency of the United States, Reagan had already made it clear what he thought of detente: "[I]sn't that what a farmer has with his turkey—until thanksgiving day?" His rise to power, like that of Deng, Thatcher, and John Paul II, would also have been difficult to anticipate, but at least his acting skills were professionally acquired. His fame as a film star predated the Cold War, even World War II, and gave him a head start when he went into politics. It also caused his opponents—sometimes even his friends to underestimate him, a serious mistake, for Reagan was as skillful a politician as the nation had seen for many years, and one of its sharpest grand strategists ever. His strength lay in his ability to see beyond complexity to simplicity. And what he saw was simply this: that because detente perpetuated—and had been meant to perpetuate—the Cold War, only killing detente could end the Cold War. Reagan came to this position through faith, fear, and selfconfidence. His faith was that democracy and capitalism would triumph over communism, a "temporary aberration which will one day," he predicted in 1975, "disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature." His fear was that before that happened human beings would disappear as the result of a nuclear war. "[W]e live in a world," he warned in 1976, "in which the great powers have aimed . . . at each other horrible missiles of destruction . . . that can in minutes arrive at each other's country and destroy virtually the civilized world we live in." It followed that neither communism nor nuclear weapons should continue to exist, and yet detente was ensuring that both did. "I don't know about you," he told a radio audience in 1977, "but I [don't] exactly tear my hair and go into a panic at the possibility of losing detente." It was that jaunty self-confidence—Reagan's ability to threaten detente without seeming threatening himself—that propelled him to a landslide victory over Carter in November, 1980, thereby bringing him to power alongside the other great contemporaries, and the other great actors, of his age."

"Ronald Reagan plays with fire. He doesn't care about international peace. He sees the world like the theater.... Reagan is mad. If he were here, I would tell him the truth about us. He hears about us only through hostile sources."

"I have nothing to say to him [Reagan], because he is mad. He is foolish. He is an Israeli dog."

"Every place I go and everything I hear, there is a growing, growing sentiment that Governor Reagan cannot win the election. We don't want, can't afford to have a replay of 1964. A very conservative Republican can't win in a national election."

"With only six months remaining in his presidency (and still under the cloud of the Iran-Contra scandal), the US president made his first- and extraordinarily remarkable- visit to Moscow. With no treaties to sign, it was nonetheless a gala event, with the Soviet capital lavishly adorned to greet its seventy-seven-year-old adversary. Reagan met with human rights activists and delivered an address to students at Moscow State University, calling for "freedom [to] blossom forth at last in the rich fertile soil of your people and culture" and for a "new world of reconciliation, friendship, and peace." He also strolled with Gorbachev in the Red Square, where, responding to a reporter's query about the "evil empire," he announced: "I was talking about another time, another era." Yet despite all the signs of geniality, Reagan underscored the power imbalance by refusing to issue a joint statement that endorsed the Kremlin's old creed: "Equality of the states, noninterference in internal affairs, and freedom of sociopolitical choice [are] inalienable and mandatory standards of international relations.""

"Reagan’s success owed less to luck as such than to recognizing and using luck. He inherited a defense buildup started under his predecessor Jimmy Carter as well as a burst of high-tech creativity which that buildup nourished. In Paul Volcker he inherited a head of the Federal Reserve who had pushed interest rates to double digits a year before Reagan took office, a brutal recession-causing step that by early in the new presidency had cut inflation to 3.5 percent, so clearing a path to the long economic boom that lasted into the new century. Reagan inherited a superpower rivalry that the United States was on course to win as its Soviet adversary, mired in its own failures and shadowed by a rising China, began to implode. With practiced grace and skill, Reagan made the most of those opportunities. He knew when to push at an open door, calling out dramatically in Berlin in June 1987, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Reagan left office (January 1989) at a moment of American contentment and strategic success that would have shone credit on a lesser politician. As it was, skill, luck, and timing confirmed him among contemporaries as a historic figure. On the American right, all factions could claim Reagan for their own. By contrast, Republicans who later followed him in the White House, George W. Bush (2001–9) and Donald Trump (elected 2016) divided their own party as successfully as they held off the Democrats."

"Reagan pulled together the Republican Party’s free-market optimists, ultraright libertarians, family-values moralists, and America Firsters. As had Nixon earlier, he won the votes of disappointed ex-Democrats disturbed by urban crime and resentful about stretching the aims of civil rights from nondiscrimination to corrective preference. Aided by superior speechmakers, Reagan had a fine ear for a divided country that relished partisan conflict while longing to feel good about itself as a nation. He appealed to both the left and right wings of American liberalism: New Deal Democrats and tight-money, big business Republicans. A divorced, nonchurchgoer, Reagan could tell a fundamentalist Christian audience with apparent sincerity that everyone was “enjoined by scripture and the Lord Jesus” to oppose “sin and evil.” He made the gospel of American liberty ring for latter-day Jeffersonians and Jacksonians across the West and Midwest proudly convinced of their self-reliance. He made it ring for whites in the South disturbed by dogooding liberal Northerners intruding once again on a society, it seemed, they did not understand, as well as for clever young libertarians scattered across the nation in its graduate schools. A good ear alone was not responsible for Reagan’s success. A thematic umbrella under which the factions of the right could gather was hostility to government. Reagan rocked audiences with jibes at the expense of “big government” so skillfully that they forgot that big government was what he was asking them to let him run. He spoke out against government spending and waste but watched deficits soar, boasting that he might be old but was not stupid, and never once sent Congress a balanced budget. No matter. In the antigovernment gospel, the right under Reagan found a thematic unifier that it had lately lacked. For each of the right’s factions, a convenient villain was big government: for business and banks, with its credit, work-safety, and consumer and environmental regulations; for moral conservatives, with ever greater liberal permissiveness of the law; for America Firsters, with its ruinous war in Vietnam, its foreigner-coddling multilateralism, and its boneless on-off flirtation with Soviet détente."