Government's Responsibility

In the last analysis, employment and prosperity are the function and responsibility of private enterprise. It is government’s responsibility to end the harassment, roadblocks, and regressive taxation and to offer, wherever practical, tax incentives that will help to provide jobs and a friendly business climate. - Ronald Reagan at the University of Southern California on April 19, 1966

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Pearl Harbor 1941

Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941

We resolve that our strength, our vigilance, and our devotion will forever keep America the land of the free and the home of the brave. We resolve that we will keep faith with those we have loved and lost. And we resolve that, always, we will remember Pearl Harbor. - Ronald Reagan

Proclamation 5751 – National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, December 7, 1987

Seventy years ago, on December 7, 1941, at 7:55 in the morning the Japanese began an air attack on the US Navy Base at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii.

More than one hundred Japanese airplanes dropped incendiary bombs or fired torpedoes at the unsuspecting port city and the naval base in a first wave of attack that lasted about 35 minutes. Newspapers reported later that untold damage has been done to the Pacific Fleet.

A second strike occurred at 9:00 and lasted for about an hour.

The entire naval base and the Hickam Army Airfield Field have been destroyed by 353 planes that took off from six Japanese aircraft carriers. 2, 390 American men, women and children perished and more than one thousand were wounded that fateful Sunday morning in a surprise attack which was planned as a measure to neutralize the US Pacific Fleet and prevent American military intervention in South East Asia.

The news of that savage air raids came as a shock not only to the people in Hawaii. The members of Congress were outraged because the attacks occurred without any formal declaration of war by Japan at a time when the Japanese officials were still negotiating with the US Secretary of State Cordell Hull on lifting US sanctions that were imposed on Japan after continuing Japanese aggression against China.

On December 8, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his "Day of Infamy" speech to a joint session of Congress and via radio, to the entire Nation. Immediately afterward, the Congress declared war on Japan. 

The Japanese declaration of war on the United States and the British Empire, which was published in Japan on December 8 on front pages of all Japanese newspapers, reached the American government hours after the attack.

Although the American relations with Japan were deteriorating rapidly, the Pearl Harbor attack came as a surprise. It changed the flow of history and precipitated American entry into World War II.

By Dominique Allmon

Dominique Allmon ©2011

America, the Great

The greatness of America doesn't begin in Washington; it begins with each of you - in the mighty spirit of free people under God, in the bedrock values you live by each day in your families, neighborhoods, and work-places. Each of you is an individual worthy of respect, unique and important to the success of America. And only by trusting you, giving you opportunities to climb high and reach for the stars, can we preserve the golden dream of America as the champion of peace and freedom among the nations of the world. - President Ronald Reagan, November 5, 1984

Quote source: Ronald Reagan: Address to the Nation on the Eve of the Presidential Election

Ronald Reagan - 100th Birthday Anniversary

 

President Ronald Reagan in Germany, 1987

"General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" - President Ronald Reagan on June 12, 1987 in Berlin, Germany

Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, was born in Tampico, Illinois on the February 6th, 1911.

Reagan entered politics after an acting career. He first served as the 33rd Governor of California and was elected to Office in 1980. Reagan served two terms between 1981 and 1989 and survived an assassination attempt in March 1981. 

As president, Reagan implemented sweeping political and economic reforms. His policies that were later dubbed "Reaganomics" advocated reduction of tax rates to incite economic growth, control of the money supply to reduce inflation, deregulation of the economy, and reduction of the government spending. Reagan took a hard line against labor unions, completed the deregulation of the airline industry and ordered military actions in Grenada. 

He was reelected in a landslide election in 1984. His second term was primarily marked by foreign policy concerns, such as the relationship with Russia, military action against Libya, and the revelation of the Iran-Contra affair. 

Like no other president before him, Reagan was determined to fight communism and end the Cold War. He publicly called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and supported anti-communist movements worldwide.

Reagan left office in 1989 and was diagnosed later with the Alzheimer's disease.

In 2007, Polish President Lech Kaczyński posthumously awarded Reagan with the highest Polish distinction, the Order of the White Eagle. Reagan inspired the Polish people to work for change and mobilize against the oppressive regime. Together with Pope John Paul II, Reagan backed Poland throughout his presidency and supported the anti-communist Solidarity movement.

Today, many conservative and liberal scholars alike, agree that Reagan has been the most influential president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was a man of a great charisma who left his imprint on American politics, diplomacy, culture, and economics. He rehabilitated conservatism, turned the nation to the right, and practiced a pragmatic conservatism that balanced ideology with the constraints of politics. 

25th Anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster

 Space Shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986

25 years ago on January 28, 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after its launch at Cape Canaveral in Florida. Six astronauts and one civilian, five men and two women, died that day in a tragic accident that was caused by the failure of the booster engine. This was worst space disaster ever. Millions of people across America and abroad watched it live on television.

Those who perished were: Challenger's commander Francis Scobee, pilot Michael Smith, mission specialists Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe, who was selected to be the first teacher in space.

The Space Shuttle Challenger crew

Challenger was named after two vessels: a British corvette HMS Challenger that was the command ship for the Challenger Expedition undertaken from 1872 through 1876, and the Apollo 17 lunar module Challenger, which landed on the Moon in 1972.

Following its first flight in April 1983, Space Shuttle Challenger quickly became the workhorse of NASA's Space Shuttle fleet, flying far more missions per year than the Space Shuttle Columbia. Challenger flew on 85 percent of all Space Shuttle missions in 1983 and 1984. Even when the orbiters Discovery and Atlantis joined the fleet, Challenger remained in heavy use with three missions a year between 1983 and 1985. The fateful flight twenty five years ago was Challenger's twenty fifth flight.

According to Rogers Commission Report, the disaster was caused by the failure of the pressure seal in the aft field joint of the right Solid Rocket Booster, due to a faulty design that was unacceptably sensitive to several factors such as the effects of temperature, physical dimensions, the character of materials, the effects of re-usability, processing and the reaction of the joint to dynamic loading. The investigation also revealed that NASA was more concerned with schedules and public relations than with the safety of its program.

On the night of the Space Shuttle disaster, President Ronald Reagan went on national television to pay tribute to the courage and the bravery of those who perished in the disaster. In an address to the Nation Reagan said: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."

President Reagan, who ordered an immediate inquiry into the disaster, also stressed that the space program would continue in honor to the dead astronauts.

Official ceremony to commemorate the 25th anniversary of this tragic accident took place on the January 28th, 2011 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Among the special guest was the widow of the Challenger's commander, June Scobee Rodgers, who was also the prime mover behind the Challenger Center for Space Science Education.

Missing Reagan

 40th President of the USA, Ronald Reagan

By Chester Pach

Historians have had difficulty assessing Reagan's contradictory record. The most recent poll of scholars, completed three years ago, placed Reagan in the "average" category, far below the greatness of Washington and Lincoln but comfortably above the failures of Harding and Buchanan. Yet this composite ranking is misleading, since many members of the panel thought that Reagan was anything but average. Seven of the thirty-two jurors considered Reagan's record "near great," but nine thought he was a "below average" chief executive. Four consigned his presidency to "failure." 

Surely these polarized evaluations remind us that there are no universal standards for evaluating presidential performance. Even criteria that gained wide acceptance, such as those advanced forty years ago in Richard Neustadt's masterly study of Presidential Power, tended to generalize too much from the "active" leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt, while slighting the "passive" stewardship of Dwight D. Eisenhower. 

Yet whatever standards scholars might use to rate presidents, none is objective. Historians try to be fair and judicious, but their evaluations necessarily reflect personal values and cultural norms. Presidential reputations wax and wane not only because we learn more as previously restricted archives and personal papers become available, but also because we alter our views of what constitutes success in the Oval Office. It's no accident that Eisenhower, once derided for providing little more than inertia during the supposed complacency of the 1950s, now looks better simply for avoiding the excesses of his imperial successors.

Reagan rarely spoke or wrote about presidential greatness. But on one of the few occasions when he did, the 250th anniversary of George Washington's birth, Reagan invoked criteria that are as good, if not better, than most others. "He did more than live up to the standards of the time," Reagan proclaimed of Washington, "He set them." The first president was able to do so because he possessed "a vision of the future" and "exceptional character."  

In many ways, Reagan was far more ordinary than he was exceptional. He possessed only modest intellectual gifts, and he used them indifferently. What impressed more was his smile, sincerity, and soothing rhetoric, talents he honed as an actor and as a spokesperson for the General Electric Company.

But Reagan cared deeply about some issues, and by the early 1960s he had developed a clear, conservative philosophy, whose core was opposition to big government and the evils of communism and that guided him throughout his political career. As president, he possessed an unshakeable certainty that his vision of the future would prevail - that tax cuts would produce prosperity even as the recession of the early 1980s deepened; that communism would ultimately be relegated to "the ash-heap of history," as he predicted in 1982, even as the Cold War grew more intense. 

With remarkable effectiveness, Reagan set the political agenda for the 1980s. The issues that he considered most important - including tax reform, deregulation, reductions in social welfare programs, and increases in defense spending - dominated the politics of the decade. Reagan was brilliant and beguiling in rallying support for his programs. But his public pronouncements, often laced with assertions of principle and moral certainty, masked a tactical flexibility that was one of his most notable assets as president. Reagan, despite his unconventional background, was hardly just an actor who happened to be good at saying his lines. He was an accomplished and resourceful politician.  

Yet before we place Reagan alongside Washington, we should remember that even the Great Communicator could not persuasively explain some of the major contradictions in his own record. Reagan never submitted a balanced budget to Congress despite his commitment to fiscal restraint, and the national debt tripled during his presidency. While insisting that his administration would never negotiate with terrorists, the president secretly approved the trading of weapons for hostages that became public knowledge during the Iran-contra scandal. And although he expressed a genuine compassion for the poor - a sympathy so great that he occasionally sent personal checks to people who wrote to him about their privations - his policies exacerbated the disparity between rich and poor.

However we assess this complex and sometimes puzzling record, we ought to do so with caution and modesty and with a clear sense that our judgments must be provisional. In recent years we have learned to appreciate, in the phrase of historian John Lewis Gaddis, "the unexpected Ronald Reagan." The fervent anti-communist who condemned the Evil Empire surprisingly became Gorbachev's partner in ending the Cold War. The opponent of the nuclear freeze movement actually abhorred nuclear weapons, so much so that he discussed their complete elimination at his summit conference with Gorbachev at Reykjavik in 1986 and signed the INF treaty in 1987 that liquidated all U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range nuclear missiles. 

As the Presidential Records Act leads to faster and more predictable opening of documents at the Reagan Library, there are indications that we might expect more of the unexpected. Our first glimpses at the President's Handwriting File, for example, have challenged some of the myths about Reagan's lethargy. Reagan was notorious for his "hands-off" and disengaged style of administration, even to the point that he joked about nodding off at cabinet meetings. Yet Reagan's newly opened files show that the president answered much of his correspondence himself, not just to long-time friends but occasionally to ordinary citizens who sent letters of praise or complaint. While many of Reagan's most memorable phrases came from the brilliant speech writer Peggy Noonan, quite a few of the president's speeches contain long passages that came from Reagan's own pen. And while there's no doubt that Reagan took naps and frequent vacations, the paper trail shows that he spent hours on the phone or meeting face-to-face with undecided or wavering members of Congress as crucial votes approached.

That Reagan often spoke from scripts that he wrote, rather than those others prepared for him, hardly makes his ideas profound or wise. And it is still not clear, aside from a few crucial issues like the Strategic Defense Initiative, exactly what role the president played in the evolution of policy. But it seems a safe bet that the documents that will be the foundation of the new Reagan scholarship will force us to reconsider some of our familiar views of Reagan. 

Evaluating the Reagan presidency is challenging and controversial. While it may be tempting - maybe even unavoidable - to use the standard categories of "great," "average," and "failure," these terms seem to fit an unconventional leader like Reagan even less than most presidents. For now, maybe we should be content with recognizing that Reagan was an exceptional president who will continue to surprise us.

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