The Enduring Lies of Ronald Reagan
First to go is the myth that Reagan was the most popular president since FDR. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting reminds us, “During the first two years of Reagan’s presidency, the public was giving President Reagan the lowest level of approval of all modern elected presidents. Reagan’s average first-year approval rating was 58 percent—lower than Dwight Eisenhower’s 69 percent, Jack Kennedy’s 75 percent, Richard Nixon’s 61 percent and Jimmy Carter’s 62 percent.” At the end of his second year, (remember the Reagan recession?) Reagan’s approval rating was 41 percent; after the Iran-Contra scandal was revealed, Reagan’s approval rating stood at 46 percent. His approval rating for his entire presidency was lower than Kennedy’s, Eisenhower’s and even Johnson’s, and at times he was one of the most unpopular presidents in recent history.
Also forgotten is Reagan’s own embarrassing propensity to just make things up. Reagan was a dunce and a fabricator. One of his most famous assertions was, “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do,” and he maintained, wrongly, that sulfur dioxide emitted from Mount St. Helens was greater than that emitted by cars over a 10-year period. (In one day, cars emit 40 times what Mount St. Helens released in a day even at its peak activity.) In 1985, Reagan praised the P.W. Botha’s apartheid regime of South Africa for eliminating segregation, a blunder then-Press Secretary Larry Speakes had to correct a few days later.
Other examples abound: During a 1983 Congressional Medal of Honor ceremony Reagan told a story about military heroism that New York Daily News columnist Lars-Erik Nelson wrote never happened. Nelson had checked the citations on all 434 Congressional Medals of Honor awarded during WWII. The scene Reagan described did appear, however, in the 1944 film A Wing and a Prayer. Larry Speakes’ response? “If you tell the same story five times, it’s true.”
And let’s not forget the wages of “trickle down” economics and “Reaganomics,” from which we have still not recovered. In 1982, the Congressional Budget Office found that taxpayers earning under $10,000 lost an average of $240 from Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts, while those earning more than $80,000 gained an average of $15,130. By that fall, the jobless rate hit 10.1 percent—the worst in 42 years, and a year later 11.9 million were out of work. In 1983, the country’s poverty rate rose to 15 percent, the highest level since the mid-’60s. In 1984, a congressional study reported that cuts in welfare had pushed more than 500,000 people—the majority of them children—into poverty. Then-Attorney General Ed Meese’s response? “I don’t know of any authoritative figures that there are hungry children … people go to soup kitchens because the food is free and that’s easier than paying for it.”
