He was easily the greatest president since FDR. Truman was the architect of the second half of the 20th century, and Johnson was the most successful legislative president, but Reagan was the only president of the the post-WW2 era to have achieved greatness in both domestic and foreign affairs. His legacy - the defeat of communism, the liberalisation of the American economy - is quite monumental.

There will indeed be much snide carping from the kind of people whose deluded beliefs were crushed during the 1980s. The leftist elites, including the likes of Galbraith and Schlesinger, have never forgiven Reagan for making their pessimistic predictions of Soviet permanence and economic superiority (which Galbraith was asserting as late as 1984) look so utterly preposterous.

But, ultimately, it is the opinion of ordinary Americans that matters. At Mount Rushmore, there is a book where visitors can write the name of the president they would most like to be added to the rockface. Guess who tops the list? It's not Jimmy Carter.

It would also be interesting to see the reaction of Eastern Europeans this morning. Their countries were suffering under the communist yoke only 15 years ago. They are now vibrant, sovereign, democratic members of the EU and NATO, with flat tax rates of 20% (Reagan would have loved that) and a bright future ahead of them. Their freedom, security and prosperity owes something to Ronald Wilson Reagan, as does our own.

Two posts by an Iranian student at FreeRepublic:

1) "I'm an Iranian student living in Iran. I'd like to say my condolences over Mr. Reagan's death.

He was very beloved among us and people are sad to hear the news about his death.

Just wanted to post my sympathies and say that we also mourn and miss him."

Posted on 06/06/2004 4:56:23 AM PDT by Khashayar

2) "I don't want this post become political but let me clear one thing for our American friends here:

Regime hates you, not the people. Moreover they try to show their anger toward you to abuse and control us. They say "Death to America" to keep us cheated about their abuses, corruption, brutality and suppression of the people."

Posted on 06/06/2004 5:58:48 AM PDT by Khashayar

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1148462/posts

And from Jonah Goldberg:

"NATAN SHARANSKY, the former Soviet dissident, tells a great story about how he first learned of Ronald Reagan's famous (or infamous) "evil empire" speech. Writing in the Washington Post in 2000, Sharansky recalled:

"Nearly 20 years ago, confined to an 8-by-10 cell in a prison on the border of Siberia, I was granted by my Soviet jailers the 'privilege' of reading the latest copy of Pravda, the official mouthpiece of the Communist regime. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of Ronald Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an 'evil empire.'"

Sharansky and the other inmates didn't share Pravda's outrage. "Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, prisoners quickly spread the word of Reagan's 'provocation' throughout the prison. The dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth."

Whatever you may think of the "axis of evil" declaration in the president's State of the Union address, we can be sure that there are dissidents in Iran, Iraq and North Korea who feel the same way Natan Sharansky did nearly two decades ago."

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/jonah020602.asp

"I haven't spotted a single cynical comment about the D-Day commemorations"

Over on Channel 4, there were plenty of cynical comments being liberally spewed by revisionist German historian Jorg Friedrich.

You have to remember that, for the Mirror/Guardian/Independent/BBC/Channel 4 crowd (not to mention my country's CBC), the collapse of the USSR was a tragedy, not a triumph.

As I've said, they were on the wrong side of history when Reagan was President, and they're on the wrong side of history now. Screw 'em.

How was FDR a great President? He went into WWII for the wrong reasons (ie to bail out his failed welfare socialism), he abused the constitution in a myriad of ways and he create lots of bloated bureaucracies.

Lend-lease was a deplorable act that condemned Britain to going broke. The US should have been in the war from the get go and FDR was a moral coward in not getting them in sooner.

Reagan was far better a person, politician and a leader than FDR.

"Lend-lease was a deplorable act that condemned Britain to going broke"

Not so.

From the Britannica:

lend-lease:

system by which the United States aided its World War II allies with war materials, such as ammunition, tanks, airplanes, and trucks, and with food and other raw materials. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had committed the United States in June 1940 to materially aiding the opponents of fascism, but, under existing U.S. law, Great Britain had to pay for its growing arms purchases from theUnited States with cash. By the summer of 1940, the new British prime minister, Winston Churchill, was warning that his country could not pay cash for war materials much longer.

In order to remedy this situation, Roosevelt on Dec. 8, 1940, proposed the concept of lend-lease, and the U.S. Congress passed his Lend-Lease Act in March 1941. This legislation gave the president the authority to aid any nation whose defense he believed vital to the United States and to accept repayment “in kind or property,or any other direct or indirect benefit which the President deems satisfactory.” Though lend-lease had been authorized primarily in an effort to aid Great Britain, it was extended to China in April and to the Soviet Union in September. The principal recipients of aid were the British Commonwealth countries (about 63 percent) and the Soviet Union (about 22 percent), though by the end of the war more than 40 nations had received lend-lease help. Much of the aid, valued at $49,100,000,000, amounted to outright gifts. Some of the cost of the lend-lease program was offset by so-called reverse lend-lease, under which Allied nations gave U.S. troops stationed abroad about $8,000,000,000 worth of aid.

The interesting thing about Reagan is that he came into office insisting that the Soviet economy was poor and deteriorating, and that the system of Communism was unsustainable. At this time, leading academics strongly disagreed with this premise, including most economists of the Left (Lester Thurow's comments were particularly scathing). He proceded to order a military buildup on that assumption, although he added to this quite remarkable arms control agreements. (President Reagan's reasoning was that given that the US could outproduce the USSR, it merely had to threaten and show the willingness to do so, and the USSR would take peace and disarmament as a second option. Witness the Minutemen and SS-20 arms deal.)

After the fall of the USSR, Reagan's academic opponents, who previously had been steadfast in their insistance that the Soviet system was perfectly fine now insisted that it was always doomed to failure, and that Reagan was merely lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Even if that were so, he deserves credit for being one of the only ones to loudly and repeatedly predict its demise, and say that it was inevitable.

Either Reagan did a large part to bring about the end of the Soviet Union, in which case he deserves credit for that, or he was one of the only accurate visionaries when all the Sovietologists and academics were wrong, in which case he deserves credit for that, or some combination of the two.

Not all Sovietology was hopeless, although perhaps some practitioners might have felt it was pointless. The French historian Alain Besançon (See "Present Sovietique and Passe Russe" - a collection of essays written between 1976 and1981) - had devastatingly described the insubstantiality of the Soviet economy. But he was ignored by bien-pensant opinion and school text-books went on parrotting the old exploded Soviet-sourced statistics for the following ten years. Even his enemies described President Mitterrand as wily, brilliant cultivated etc, and yet he got the USSR completely wrong and was surprised (and not a little piqued) by the fall of the Berlin wall. Reagan, on the other hand, widely derided as a dumb film actor cow-boy got it right. How? Did he read Besançon and Pipes? Or was the truth about the Soviet Union, in some mysterious way, obvious?

(I'm not BTW claiming it was obvious to me. I was taught from those aforementioned text-books with their weirdly desolating pictures of grain silos 'owned not by rich individuals but by the people' . I think I, and my teachers, believed in some grim compromise between East and West whereby clothes, buildings, hairstyles and food would be uniformly ugly but there wouldn't actually be a prison camp on Amersham Hill. My friends, particularly when revising for exams, claimed to believe in inevitability of a nuclear holocaust. This sounded improbably exciting to me.)

It's interesting to compare the left's current demonisation of GWB to the 1980's attacks on Reagan. Remember how Reagan could never be any good beacause he was a "Cowboy" and a "Filmstar"? Perhaps we can learn that the BBC/Grauniad/Independent just can't come to terms with the possibility that a right-wing politician might have some good ideas. Prejudiced? Oh no, not the BBC, never...

"I think I, and my teachers, believed in some grim compromise between East and West whereby clothes, buildings, hairstyles and food would be uniformly ugly but there wouldn't actually be a prison camp on Amersham Hill."

There was such a compromise, of course. It was called The Seventies.

A true word spoken in jest Mr Murray, you are pretty much right. Although I was 16 at the beginning of the eighties, the feeling was that the 70's would endlessly repeat themselves but with a growing austerity which would somehow be good for us. Reagan and Thatcher spared us this grim fate but their successors have not been able to prevent the return of flares .....

Even now the sneering of the media doesn't stop.

I watched an edition of Channel 4 News yesterday with a female newscaster whose name I didn't catch moderating a discussion between Tony Benn and a representative, whose name I also didn't catch, from the Oxford Institute for American Studies or some such body.

Newscaster to man from OIAS - "Reagan was not a popular President, was he?"

Man from OIAS - "Well he won his first election by taking forty four states to Carter's six and got re-elected by winning forty nine states to Mondale's one. I don't quite know how you can be much more popular than that".

Newscaster - "But he was divisive President, wasn't he?".

Man from OIAS - "That is factually incorrect. When he left office he had the highest approval ratings of any President in history".

The newscaster did not even have the grace to look ashamed.

Just what is it with these people?

What a bizarre selection of posts. Impolite, it seems, to mention Reagan's fiscal profligacy (just how much debt did he rack up for future generations), his lying and suborning of Congress during Iran-Contra, his support for the murderers and rapists known as the Contras (remember the 1984 World Court judgement condemining him for the illegal blockading of Nicaraguan harbours?), the disgraceful social policy that saw destitution amongst the poor reach record levels, the bizarre fantasies (how many death camps did the old fraud liberate?), the kowtowing to red-baiters when President of the Screen Guild, that wonderful anti-drug policy known as, er, Just Say No, the brave and wholly purposeful invasion of Grenada, the cutting and running in Beirut in 83 (just as resolute as FDR, sure enough), et bleeding cetera . . .

All his death proves is that if you live long enough, any bunch of fools will scrape together a eulogy for you.

Just to add a little more balance:

66 (Unflattering) Things About Ronald Reagan

By David Corn, The Nation
June 6, 2004

The firing of the air traffic controllers, winnable nuclear war, recallable nuclear missiles, trees that cause pollution, Elliott Abrams lying to Congress, ketchup as a vegetable, colluding with Guatemalan thugs, pardons for F.B.I. lawbreakers, voodoo economics, budget deficits, toasts to Ferdinand Marcos, public housing cutbacks, redbaiting the nuclear freeze movement, James Watt.

Getting cozy with Argentine fascist generals, tax credits for segregated schools, disinformation campaigns, "homeless by choice," Manuel Noriega, falling wages, the HUD scandal, air raids on Libya, "constructive engagement" with apartheid South Africa, United States Information Agency blacklists of liberal speakers, attacks on OSHA and workplace safety, the invasion of Grenada, assassination manuals, Nancy's astrologer.

Drug tests, lie detector tests, Fawn Hall, female appointees (8 percent), mining harbors, the S&L scandal, 239 dead U.S. troops in Beirut, Al Haig "in control," silence on AIDS, food-stamp reductions, Debategate, White House shredding, Jonas Savimbi, tax cuts for the rich, "mistakes were made."

Michael Deaver's conviction for influence peddling, Lyn Nofziger's conviction for influence peddling, Caspar Weinberger's five-count indictment, Ed Meese ("You don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime"), Donald Regan (women don't "understand throw-weights"), education cuts, massacres in El Salvador.

"The bombing begins in five minutes," $640 Pentagon toilet seats, African-American judicial appointees (1.9 percent), Reader's Digest, C.I.A.-sponsored car-bombing in Lebanon (more than eighty civilians killed), 200 officials accused of wrongdoing, William Casey, Iran/contra. "Facts are stupid things," three-by-five cards, the MX missile, Bitburg, S.D.I., Robert Bork, naps, Teflon.

David Corn, Washington editor of the Nation, is author of 'The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception.'

John T

Apart from the fact that some of these things were good, eg sacking striking air traffic controllers, a politician will always make mistakes / wrong judgments. Compared to saving the world from communism however, all of these things are small beer.

Also funny how the claim of Voodoo economics is thrown by leftists whose grasp of the dismal science is so shaky.

Jonathan L,

"...some of these things were good...a politician will always make mistakes..."

Priceless. Perhaps you can point us towards all the other good things in the list above.

"...funny how the claim of Voodoo economics is thrown by leftists whose grasp of the dismal science is so shaky."

As anyone with an ounce of objectivity would recognise, most of what passes for mainstream economics is utter tosh. You might as well accuse some one of having a shaky grasp of alchemy or astrology.

Such vomit inducing sycophancy towards a man who can only be described as a sick, terrorist supporting lune.
I think you'll find it difficult to find many "lefties" mourning the loss of the Soviet Union - and for that we have Gorby to thank.
However, many of us found it incomprehensible that the US should respond to the liberation of country from brutal dictatorship by backing para-military terrorists.
I'm sure it will be dry eyes all round for the relatives of the 50,000 Nicaraguans that were killed by the contras.

John T - the only problem with blaming Reagan for the deficits of the 1980s is that it is not based on honesty.

Reagan, with what he actively did, caused more funds, numerically, to come into the US 'current account'. The Congress, with what *they* actively did, actually spent way more than was being brought in. Since the Congress was of the party opposed to Reagan, how does it become Reagan who is responsible for the deficits ?

If *your* spouse spends more money than you can earn, is that *your* fault, or the fault of your spouse for overspending ?

Or are you telling us he's responsible cuz he didn't bring in *enough* revenue ?

Of course, what I say is based on rational verifiable facts, not emotional response.

Similarly, the S&L scandal occurred because 4 prominent Senators on a sub-committee told investigators to STOP investigating and NOT to investigate until it was too late. Let's see - they were Cranston, Biden, Kennedy - can anyone remember the 4th ?

John T - now, which party were the 4 senators from ?

The "Silence on AIDS" meme is especially irritating. Reagan gave us Koop, probably the *best* Surgeon-General that the US has had in recent memory. AIDS wasn't even known until 1983, and Reagan was out of office less than 6 years later. In 1985, he was already earmarking significant funds for AIDS-related projects, and speaking about it officially, even before there could be mainstream scientific consensus. We are now some 15+ years past Reagan leaving office, and it's *still* all his fault ?

Consider the contrast with Shalala who, how many years later, when shown scientific studies supporting the effectiveness of needle-exchange programs in slowing the transmission of HIV, *still* did her best to prevent cities from instituting such programs.

And yet the meme continues - Reagan and Republicans evil, Democrats good ...

John T - by all means continue to be a victim of the Evil Ronnie if that's what your ego needs to be able to survive - the rest of us, like President Reagan, will get on with *doing* things rather than blaming others. We'll do good things; we'll make mistakes; and, overall, the planet, as with President Reagan will be a better place.

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