Will Historians Distort A ‘Modern’ President’s Memory?
With the recent loss of a president, revisionist historians will wait awhile before adjusting the public memory of Reagan. For now they will have to endure all of Reagan’s triumphs with modest mentioning of his controversies or failures. Of course, it is neither fair nor accurate to consider anything that is currently discussed about a president as being non-controversial, successful, or failure. What decision, after all, can a president make that is not controversial? What policies, procedures, and actions can a president take that cannot be viewed as either a success or a failure depending on which historian is describing them?
Personally, I would not consider Reagan’s overall handling of the economy a triumph, but others will. On balance, there were at least sixteen million jobs that had been created by the end of Reagan’s second term. That can certainly be viewed as an economic positive. The bombing of Libya could go as a success from many perspectives, but that Reagan had to resort to death diplomacy by air would be considered a failure by many. Few Americans will find anything positive in the deaths of some two hundred marines in Beirut, but Reagan excelled in other corners of foreign affairs. Many think the Iranian hostages were released because the Iranians did not want to deal with Reagan; that could certainly be viewed as a success. At the time Reagan was making deals with the Soviets in arms reductions, I could find few positive comments outside his administration on the proposed arrangements. Now that the Cold War has ended, it is difficult to find any criticism of those plans. I also consider the firing of air traffic employees to be successful. Others will be disapproving. Shutting down the Equal Rights Amendment, splitting AT&T, and challenging the welfare system were laudable efforts to me, controversial to most, and imperfections to some.
When revisionists do go after Reagan wholeheartedly, though, they will undoubtedly begin with Iran-contra and the Savings and Loan debacle. However, those historians should look through the widest of lenses when preparing the picture of Reagan’s public perception. Both Iran-Contra and S&L truly came within the last year or year and a half of Reagan’s presidency, and the consequences of both seemed to unfold during Bush’s administration rather than Reagan’s.
Undoubtedly many historians think because Iran-Contra dominated the TV news it must have been an important event. The OJ Simpson murder trial was on the news far longer than Iran-Contra. Does that mean this event was more important? No. When observing an event that dominates the news, historians need to ask themselves why that event was in the news. I daresay we would not even be discussing Iran-contra now if it had not been election year and if the Republicans had not lost control of the Senate in Reagan’s second term. Within years, the central characters who had been convicted for wrong doing in the scandal had their convictions overturned. Was Iran-Contra not that bad in the end?
When observing a TV news event, historians need to be more concerned with why it was on TV. They then need to learn whether that event made a large group of Americans do anything differently in their routine life. I know how the S&L controversy affected upper-class Americans; I know how WWII changed my grandparents' lives; I know how Vietnam changed my father’s life; and because I am married to a Chinese immigrant, I even know how the last Chinese revolution changed my American life. My entire family has had life changes because of various national and world events that have consumed the news media.
What I do not know is how guns going through the backdoor to some obscure, foreign country affected me or my family or even my family’s friends and their families. Indeed, I do not know how the arms trade concerned even a minority of Americans. This event did not hurt Reagan, and it certainly did not keep Bush from winning election. Apparently not many Americans were solicitous of Iran-Contra. Should historians be then? Perhaps at first, but they should not be at last. Yet I cannot pull out any popular encyclopedia and examine Reagan’s biography without also reading about Iran-Contra.
Many of the events that caused the S&L fiasco happened before the 1980s in spite of Reagan’s deregulation. Although those events do not expunge the president’s role in the S&L debacle, I still consider the way Reagan handled the payoffs to the consumers a success rather than a failure. What is a failure or a success will always be debatable. What some see as positive, others will see as negative and vice versa. Even so, I do not need a historian to portray any of these events for me as being either positive or negative, though that is surely what some historians feel should be done. I do not need narrative to understand the consequences of these events; I just need the facts.
Unfortunately, some historians will see for only what they are looking and, in doing so, most historians change the perceptions of governmental figures over time. Some say they are “just correcting them.” The result is that many historians take things that were not that important during yesterday’s time and make them over-important in today’s time. They did it to Kennedy and they will eventually do it to Reagan.
Seeking a tabloid element is apparently the trendy way in which researchers can contribute something new to the body of work that deals with a president. As John F. Kennedy faded from the living public memory, some researchers took a more abrasive stance with him. Recent trends especially seem to revolve around his improprieties in the White House.
In Thomas Reeves’s A Question of Character, only one word is needed to describe Kennedy: amoral. JFK also had an “eagerness for deception” and a “macho aggressiveness.” Nigel Hamilton, in JFK: Reckless Youth, adds exposé to otherwise valid research of John Kennedy. Hamilton’s title is self-explanatory. Kennedy was a playboy, and the book stops before JFK turns thirty. John Hellmann, in The Kennedy Obsession, portrayed Kennedy at one point to be a sickly boy, and he concluded that advertisements of his precocity and bravery were effective political aversions. Through Hellmann’s eyes, Kennedy had been the “most glamorous politician.” In Richard Reeves’s work, President Kennedy, Reeves is concerned with the president who created possible security threats due to an immoral sexual appetite. Kennedy was also vain, easily susceptible to ennui, overly authoritarian, and undisciplined. This president was a “poor administrator” and his “management style bordered on the chaotic.” Health issues and extramarital affairs are a focus in James Giglio’s Presidency of John F. Kennedy.
The list could go on. Research on John F. Kennedy has clearly moved away from the completely favorable opinions espoused by Arthur Schlesinger in A Thousand Days. Schlesinger does not mention Marilyn Monroe or Kennedy’s likely connection with the mafia, and he has been criticized for it. Yet he knew Kennedy personally and clearly had a living memory markedly different from contemporary researchers. Those researchers will say he was biased.
If you ask some graduate students today what kind of person President Kennedy was, they will likely say immoral or amoral, weak, sickly, deceptive, macho, vain, glamorous, undisciplined, irresponsible, careless, or unqualified to be president. If you ask their parents, they will likely say Kennedy was a great person. While separating the person from the leader begins a whole new argument, my point is that some authors have already begun to change the memory of Kennedy for the next generation.
Whenever a student reads something for the first time, there is a tendency to keep that reading in their heads as the truth. When narrative comes along later that somewhat changes a previous perception, they have a predilection to support their first belief, which has become ingrained over time. As neophyte students read these new books that now have a salacious aura about them, they will go with the new perceptions flowing from those books. Eventually Kennedy’s original public memory will be lost.
Some historians found a few shallow and petty characteristics, small episodes, and innocuous circumstances that the public either did not care about, did not know about, or could not know about Kennedy during his time. In the end, they took all that and tried to make today’s public think it was more significant than it actually was. Media standards in Kennedy’s time that excluded personal and sexual foibles helped protect him politically. Historians’ standards of what ought to be important today will not protect any president’s legacy.
To this day and after all my readings, it is still difficult for me to see Reagan in the S&L or Iran-Contra picture without also seeing the economic events that preceded Reagan, an imminent presidential-election campaign, Democratic politics, and a liberal news media. Even if I read everything Speaker Tip O’Neill wrote about Reagan (the Speaker detested Reagan), I would probably still come away feeling positive about Reagan. Even if I read the negative stories in the New York Times, I would probably not have my view of Reagan changed. Why is this?
It is not because he has died recently. To me, he had been gone for years because of his Alzheimer’s disease and we have had three presidents since him. Is it because I lived through Reagan’s time and have not needed historians to tell me how I should be viewing him? Probably.
Of course, the next generation might very well need historians to tell it what kind of president Reagan was. That will be when historians can significantly change the public perception of Reagan. No politician and no historian could change Reagan’s infallibility while he was in office. They will have to do that when the majority of those living during Reagan’s era are no longer around to contest a distorted view emanating from academia.
I remember in my twenties noticing how Reagan could do no wrong. This is the perception I and my family had of him; he was infallible. Several of my family members did not vote in his second election -- a mistake of youth -- because they knew a Democrat had no chance of winning. If Reagan was portrayed in overwhelmingly positive proportions in the news during his presidency and especially during his public mourning, let me just say that is how I remember him. And, before some historians twist this perception of him for the next generation, that is indeed how he is widely remembered now.
This writing is not an analysis essay. It is not a hagiography. It is, most certainly, an essay of remembrance. It serves to show how Reagan was remembered during his time and is remembered now by many. It serves to remind historians that as public memory of Reagan inevitably becomes imprecise, they will be given a great opportunity to bring clarity back to the public memory of a modern president. Will it be the accurate memory?
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