Alan Axelrod: Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History

The junk being bought and sold hit the fan on October 19, 1987, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average (key measure of stock market performance) plunged 508 points—almost double the fall in the 1929 crash that brought on the Great Depression. As Herbert Hoover had assured the American public that “prosperity was just around the comer,” President Reagan dismissed the crash as “some people grabbing profits.” Fortunately, the market gradually recovered—but the high-flying era of Reaganomics had careened to a gut-wrenching end.

While many Americans stared with envy, admiration, or disgust at the Wall Street roller coaster, they turned a blind eye to the growing legion of homeless people who haunted the nation’s large cities and even many of its smaller towns. Certainly, the Reagan administration, having drastically cut back federal welfare funding, did little enough for America’s poorest. The administration likewise turned away from a terrifying plague that developed initially among homosexual men but was soon also diagnosed in heterosexual men, in women, and in children.

Throughout the 1980s, grass-roots AIDS organizations—including, most notably, Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)—mobilized. The organizations accused the government of failing to respond to an epidemic perceived to affect socially marginal groups—homosexuals and intravenous drug abusers (who contract the disease by sharing hypodermic needles tainted with infected blood). President Reagan failed. even to make public mention of the disease until April 1987, fully six years after health officials had determined that the epidemic was under way. Only through the efforts of AIDS activists was federal funding increased—from $5.6 million in 1982 to more than $2 billion a decade later.

If the Reagan administration did not engage AIDS vigorously, it did not hesitate to take on the Soviet Union, assuming an aggressive stance against what the president called “an evil empire.” Defense spending was dramatically stepped up, dwarfing domestic budget cuts in welfare and other programs.

The president also acted Aggressively to meet perceived military threats throughout the world, sending U.S. marines in the summer of 1982 to Lebanon as a peacekeeping force. On October 23, 1983, more than 200 of these troops were killed in their sleep when a truck laden with 25,000 pounds of TNT was driven into the marines’ Beirut headquarters building. Just two days after this disaster, the president ordered an invasion of the island nation of Grenada in the West Indies. Cuban troops had been sent to the tiny country (population 110,100) at the behest of its anti-American dictatorship, and the president was determined to protect the approximately 1,000 U.S. citizens there. The president also saw a successful liberation of the country as a kind of emotional compensation for the death of the marines in Beirut.

Ronald Reagan’s saber rattling was gratifying to some Americans and alarming to others, who were distressed by the stalemate of U.S.-Soviet arms-control talks as a fresh deployment of American nuclear missiles began in Europe during November 1983. Reagan protested to his critics that the build-up was needed to counter Soviet advances, yet the strategy produced no tangible positive diplomatic results.

During 1983, President Reagan announced the most spectacular, ambitious, elaborate, and expensive military project in world history. It was called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), but the popular press dubbed the system “Star Wars,” after the popular George Lucas science-fiction movie of 1977. Using an orbiting weapons system, the idea was to create a shield against intercontinental ballistic missile attack by destroying incoming ICBMs before they began their descent. The weaponry was so far beyond even the foreseeable cutting edge as to be fanciful: X-ray and particle-beam devices (as yet theoretical) operated by supercomputers that had to be programmed by other computers. Critics pointed out that Star Wars was not only a violation of the 1972 ABM (antiballistic missile) treaty, but a temptation to thermonuclear war because it promised to make such a war survivable. Others suggested that the system could never be made to work, and still others protested that the staggering cost of the program—$100 to $200 billion—would permanently cripple the nation.

Yet Presidents Reagan and George Bush pursued Star Wars to the tune of $30 billion, even though. the program produced few demonstrable results. Finally, in 1993, anonymous SDI researchers revealed that at least one major space test had been “fixed” to yield successful results. Caspar Weinberger, who had served as President Reagan’s secretary of defense, initially denied these charges, but subsequently claimed that the test in question—and perhaps the entire Star Wars program—had been an elaborate decoy. The program (Weinberger said) had been designed solely to dupe the Soviet Union into spending a huge proportion of its resources on a Star Wars program of its own—a program that U.S. scientists already knew was unworkable.

Whether one views Star Wars—and the rest of the gargantuan Reagan defense budget—as a vast misjudgment, which quadrupled the national debt from one to four trillion dollars, or as a costly but brilliant strategy to win the Cold War, the fact is that the Cold War did end. The government of the Soviet Union was first liberalized and then fell apart, the nation’s economy in tatters and the people clamoring for democratic capitalist reforms. Even though Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931), general secretary of the Soviet Communist party (1985-91) and president of the U.S.S.R. (1988-91), introduced unheard of liberal reforms, President Reagan prodded him to go even further. In 1987, standing near the Berlin Wall, brick, stone, and razor-wire symbol of a half-century of communist oppression, the president made a stirring speech calling out to the Soviet leader: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Two years later, Berliners began chipping away at the wall, tearing it down piece by piece, as a liberalized Soviet Union merely looked on.

Although communist hardliners staged a revolt against Gorbachev in 1991, progressive junior army officers refused to follow KGB (Soviet secret police) directives, and the attempted coup failed. Gorbachev then disbanded the Communist party and stepped down as leader of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin (b. 1931), radical reformist president of the Russian Republic, assumed leadership not of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—which ceased to exist—but of a loose commonwealth of former Soviet states.

The debate still rages over whether the policies of Ronald Reagan won the Cold War or whether the Soviet Union, shackled to a financially, intellectually, and morally bankrupt system of government, simply lost the half-century contest. Another episode of unorthodox world diplomacy continues to provoke controversy as well.

In November 1986, President Ronald Reagan confirmed reports that the U.S. had secretly sold arms to its implacable enemy, Iran. The president at first denied, however, that the purpose of the sale was to obtain the release of U.S. hostages held by terrorists in perpetually war-torn Lebanon, but he later admitted an arms-for-hostages swap. Then the plot thickened—shockingly—when Attorney General Edwin Meese learned that a portion of the arms profits had been diverted to finance so-called Contra rebels fighting against the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. As part of the ongoing U.S. policy of containing communism, the Reagan administration supported right-wing rebellion in Nicaragua, but Congress specifically prohibited aid to the Contras. The secret diversion of the secret arms profits was blatantly unconstitutional and illegal.