History will be the judge

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
History will be the judge				June 12, 2004

With the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, many of us thought that the wheels had come off the world and that we were headed for certain doom. The election had been scary enough, as those of us who had campaigned for Kennedy waited though an interminable night for the last votes from Illinois to come dribbling in.

But dribble in they did, and eventually Kennedy squeaked by Richard Nixon in one of the tightest races in the history of presidential elections. The ponderous, dormant years of the Eisenhower era were finally over, and we all looked forward to moving the country forward under the progressive leadership of a charismatic young man who could, unlike the mumbling Eisenhower, put together a speech that would magnetically attract you to the enthusiasm he projected.

Indeed, so overwhelming was the aura of adoration surrounding Kennedy, that years after his death he was still considered one of our greatest presidents. He had, after all, faced down Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis, and he took the first halting steps toward what would become one of the most iconoclastic upheavals in our history, the civil rights movement. But most important, he made us proud to be Americans.

With the passage of years, however, history and historians tend to have their way. As more and more documents become declassified and formerly silent administrative officials begin to tell their stories, the brilliance of a gilded image loses some of its luster, and what was thought to be greatness incarnate is reduced to being all too human.

For Kennedy there was the misguided debacle known as the Bay of Pigs, and it was Kennedy who would put us on the dangerously mined path to the death-filled jungles of Vietnam. Now we know too of Clintonesque White House liaisons and serious health problems that undoubtedly reduced Kennedy’s ability to govern.

But much of that was unknown at the time of one of the most poignant funerals ever witnessed in this country. As the caisson carried the body of the slain young president to the Capitol, we all wept and much of the world wept with us.

And so it was yesterday with the funeral of former president Ronald Reagan. Again we bade farewell to a charismatic leader whom many are already willing to enroll in the lists of our greatest presidents.

Known as the Great Communicator, Reagan, like Kennedy, had been blessed by the muses with an uncanny oratorical ability. And, like Kennedy, he went head to head with a leader of the Soviet Union in a time of great crisis. Indeed, it was during Reagan’s watch that Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the most progressive leaders of the USSR, emerged and, as a result of his insistence on perestroika and glasnost, left the iron curtain in tatters. In a uniquely ironic tribute to Reagan, Gorbachev attended the funeral of the man who at one point ordered him to “tear down this wall.”

As it was earlier for Kennedy, the question now for Reagan is how kindly history will treat him. Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, recently remarked that we’ll probably have to wait for another 30 years to know whether, through the lens of objectivity, we can view Reagan as a truly great president.

Yet, as with all administrations of the recent past, many of the plusses and minuses chalked up by the Reagan administration are known to us now.

There is, for instance, no doubt that Reagan, after its apparent death at the hands of Barry Goldwater, resuscitated the conservative movement and powered it into the forefront of American politics.That the three branches of government now are controlled by Republicans is adequate testimony to the effectiveness of Reagan’s political savvy. In addition, and as a result of luring thousands of Democrats to his cause, Reagan successfully divorced the Democratic Party from its leftist base and placed it on the centrist bier where it still reposes.

Yet, like Kennedy, Reagan had his less than perfect moments. In addition to bloated Reaganomic deficits, the Iran-Contra scandal will undoubtedly play a large role in history’s judgment of his tenure. The fact that, even after Congress ordered a halt to Contra money, Reagan continued to press the matter through covertly illegal means will weigh heavily on his historical inheritance. Indeed, his own defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, told Reagan that he might well land himself in jail if he persisted in his “anything goes” approach to American machinations in Honduras and Nicaragua. And this while mutterings of impeachment were buzzing in congressional ears.

To his credit, Reagan, though initially pleading ignorance, eventually confessed to the American people that the fanaticism of such operatives as Oliver North and John Poindexter had overtaken events and that the situation would be rectified. But by then the president’s image had been tarnished, and, oddly enough, he left office with approval ratings lower than Bill Clinton’s.

But perhaps the saddest imprint on Reagan’s legacy derives from the fact that it was during his term that the plague known as AIDS broke out. This previously unknown horror started claiming its victims in 1981. Yet, it was not until 1987 that Reagan dared mention its name. Bowing to the pressures of advisors such as Patrick Buchanan, who declared that AIDS was God’s method of punishing homosexuals, Reagan took action only after 60,000 gay men had been infected and 30,000 had died unimaginable body-wracking deaths.

Yet there is no indication that Reagan was a man filled with hate. Nor is there any doubt that he fought incessantly for his beliefs and displayed a visceral courage that most of us would envy. Nowhere was this more evident than in the last ten years of his life, when he bravely faced his own plague, the mind-dissolving scourge of Alzheimer’s.

How will history judge Ronald Reagan? At this point no one knows. Perhaps he was a great president, or perhaps he wasn’t. What we do know is that he was one of the most influential men of the second half of the 20^th century, and that is not a bad first step on the road to historical significance.