Righting Reagan’s Wrongs?

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If you haven’t yet seen this piece by Bob Herbert of the NY Times, I suggest you read do.

Source: nytimes.com

Righting Reagan’s Wrongs?
By BOB HERBERT
Published: November 13, 2007

Let’s set the record straight on Ronald Reagan’s campaign kickoff in 1980.

Early one morning in the late spring of 1964, Dr. Carolyn Goodman, her husband, Robert, and their 17-year-old son, David, said goodbye to David’s brother, Andrew, who was 20.

They hugged in the family’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Andrew left. He was on his way to the racial hell of Mississippi to join in the effort to encourage local blacks to register and vote.

It was a dangerous mission, and Andrew’s parents were reluctant to let him go. But the family had always believed strongly in equal rights and the benefits of social activism. “I didn’t have the right,” Dr. Goodman would tell me many years later, “to tell him not to go.”

After a brief stopover in Ohio, Andrew traveled to the town of Philadelphia in Neshoba County, Mississippi, a vicious white-supremacist stronghold. Just days earlier, members of the Ku Klux Klan had firebombed a black church in the county and had beaten terrified worshipers.

Andrew would not survive very long. On June 21, one day after his arrival, he and fellow activists Michael Schwerner and James Chaney disappeared. Their bodies wouldn’t be found until August. All had been murdered, shot to death by whites enraged at the very idea of people trying to secure the rights of African-Americans.

The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.

That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”

Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”

Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.

That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.

Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.

He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about “states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you.

And Reagan meant it. He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation.

Congress overrode the veto.

Reagan also vetoed the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Congress overrode that veto, too.

Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people. There is no way for the scribes of today to clean up that dismal record.

To see Reagan’s appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in its proper context, it has to be placed between the murders of the civil rights workers that preceded it and the acknowledgment by the Republican strategist Lee Atwater that the use of code words like “states’ rights” in place of blatantly bigoted rhetoric was crucial to the success of the G.O.P.’s Southern strategy. That acknowledgment came in the very first year of the Reagan presidency.

Ronald Reagan was an absolute master at the use of symbolism. It was one of the primary keys to his political success.

The suggestion that the Gipper didn’t know exactly what message he was telegraphing in Neshoba County in 1980 is woefully wrong-headed. Wishful thinking would be the kindest way to characterize it.

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About big jonny

The man, the legend. The guy who started it all back in the Year of Our Lord Beer, 2000, with a couple of pages worth of idiotic ranting hardcoded on some random porn site that would host anything you uploaded, a book called HTML for Dummies (which was completely appropriate), a bad attitude (which hasn’t much changed), and a Dell desktop running Win95 with 64 mgs of ram and a six gig hard drive. Those were the days. Then he went to law school. Go figure. Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

11 Replies to “Righting Reagan’s Wrongs?”

  1. the columnists there are having a war

    a few days ago Krugman wrote one that said Reagan was a racist.

    then Brooks wrote one that said he wasn’t

    Now Herbert, the black guy, is trying to put the final stamp on the brouhaha that he absolutely was

    I don’t know if he was a racist, probably, but he played the racists perfectly and they voted him in. Against their own economic self-interest. Frank’s book, “What’s a Matter with Kansas” discusses that aspect quite a bit.

  2. I’m guessing that when historians perform the post mortem on American democracy they’ll conclude that the seeds of its destruction were sown in the Raygun years. Don’t forget, God wants you to be rich.

  3. …ronny had a way of utilizing his ‘vast acting reserves’ to appear kinda “ah, shucks”, humbly dumb, when it suited his purposes…

    …sorta reminds me of another american president, whose name slips me at the moment…but he doesn’t pull it off quite so well…

  4. “…sorta reminds me of another american president, whose name slips me at the moment…but he doesn’t pull it off quite so well…”

    Because he really IS that much of an idiot.

  5. Who….Carter? Face it…we’ve had idiots in that office for a LOOOOOONG time kids! Complete fucking puppet-ass idiots!

  6. Whenever some hippie tells me about the coming revolution, I always tell them the revolution already happened, and we lost. It was called the “Reagan Revolution.”

    That chippy jackass started it all.

  7. What John wrote is what I’ve always thought. The decline- and eventual end- is the Reagan revolution. It continues to this day.

    I was just a pup at the tme, but I vividly remember the debate and the “there you go again” comment. For me it marked the end of civil discourse and statesmanship. The brainless sheep- waiting to be led- cheered wildly.

    We’ve been sinking ever since.

  8. …i may be a fool but i still believe in “intent”…someone like jimmy carter was maybe trying to serve too many ideals to be truly effective, but i still believe in his ‘intent’…by virtue of their nature & commitment, carter & clinton are two of our best & most effective ‘ex-presidents’…they both foster an amazing amount of good will…

    …before anyone counters by stating ‘facts & policies’, i’d ask you to look at the overall picture of what is an unenviable job & it’s problems…

    …perhaps i should applaud reagan, because in graphic base terms, ronny’s “ah shucks, little buddy, this might feel better if you bend over deeply” approach is serviceable, as opposed to bushco’s “date rape, forced submission, too late now, bitches” methodology…

    …ronny was told by the powers that be, what had to happen & because he was an actor, his ‘performance’ was palatable in the eyes of the world…bush’s ‘nice guy idiocy’ is subterfuge for the railroading that’s gone on all during this administrations, & at this point on the world stage, his acting ain’t fooling nobody…

  9. Anyone who suggests that Reagan was a racist is an idiot and/or a lier. One should do a little research before accepting as doctrine the babbles of the author who wrote this dribble.

    Authors with have ethics will have little problems finding legitimate issues to write about exposing issues related to Reagan, but suggesting that he is a racist is pure bunk and smacks of an author with an agenda who is attempting to re-write history.

    Additionally, anyone who suggests that Carter was a great president is a fool. Carter’s policies caused double-digit inflation and unemployment. Carter was the worst president in the last fifty years, with the exception of Bush, Jr. One can only suggest otherwise if you are willing to ignore facts and history.

  10. …mtb-tn…if you were referring to my appreciation of carter ‘the man’ as opposed to carter ‘the president’ & reading anything more into it than exactly what i said, then i’d suggest you go back & re-study reading comprehension…

    …jonny, i think you nailed it with- “one who wasn’t above using race”…
    …ronny ray-guns was another devious frontman & while i may be wrong, i never felt that he came across as a racist…
    …clever speech writers also create ‘group specific’ hyperbolic so that everyone feels they’re being served…simply buying affections & votes…