R.W. Johnson’s latest book is South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country since the End of Apartheid.
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Vol. 10 No. 5 · 3 March 1988
pages 3-5 | 3654 words
Doctor Feelgood
R.W. Johnson
- Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home by Garry Wills
Heinemann, 488 pp, £14.95, February 1988, ISBN 0 434 86623 7
‘Would you believe,’ asked Ronald Reagan, opening his campaign for Governor in 1966, ‘that 15.1 per cent of the population of California is on welfare?’ A pretty shocking figure, you might think, for the Golden State in the midst of the Vietnam War boom: no wonder Reagan’s well-heeled backers were so righteously indignant about all their tax money going to all those layabouts. But we haven’t answered the question: would you believe it? Well no, actually – the real figure was 5.1 per cent. Unfazed, Ronnie’s backers simply redoubled their efforts and their campaign contributions. The expert handler put in to manage him discovered that ‘he knew zero about California when we came in, I mean zero.’ Instead, everything had to be reduced to little memorisable gobbets on 5 × 8-inch cards and, above all, Ron had to have a handler with him at every waking moment: ‘goofproofing Reagan was a task that called for eternal vigilance.’
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[*] Out of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration’s Secret War in Nicaragua, the Illegal Arms Pipeline and the Contra Drug Connection by Leslie Cockburn. Bloomsbury, 287 pp., £13.95, 11 February, 0 7475 0066 5.
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Letters
Vol. 10 No. 8 · 21 April 1988
From Ira Marder
SIR: R.W. Johnson, in his review of Reagan’s America (LRB, 3 March), makes some mis-statements of perhaps no great importance individually, but which may tend to reinforce the skewed ideas about America that seem to be endemic among English reviewers. You can put my words into their proper context by noting that I am a middle-of-the road Democrat, not a Republican apologist. Mr Johnson writes: ‘The early Sixties saw the rise of Goldwater, a Jewish supermarket millionaire from the far West, while the Nixon Administration brought to Washington a veritable mafia of getrich-quick Floridians and Californians.’ Senator Goldwater is a distinguished public servant of great integrity, however one may disagree with his conservative views. He served very visibly in the Senate for many years and only ‘rose’ to run against Lyndon Johnson for the Presidency in 1964. His father, who was Jewish, founded the well-known department store bearing his name in Phoenix, Arizona. His mother was a Wasp and the Senator is a born-rich Episcopalian. There were no get-rich-quick, get-rich-slow or other types of Floridians in the Nixon Administration, Mr Bebe Rebozo, real-estate-rich Floridian, was merely a social friend of Mr Nixon. The Californians numbered primarily two of consequence, John Ehrlichman and John Haldemann, both young then, eager and not-yet-rich, nor, as far as I know, to-be-rich. Their sins were not an excess of greed, but, as Talleyrand warned, an excess of zeal. The Nixon crowd was never blamed, or praised if you want to be cynical, for enriching themselves during that ill-fated Presidency. The Nixon Administration was truly an aberration of American history, whereas the Reagan Administration is both an aberration and an accident.
If the Iranians had not been holding Americans hostage at the end of President Carter’s term, Reagan would never have succeeded him. In Nixon the voters got a surprise package. With Reagan they got what they thought they wanted, some of them anyway: an All-American charmer who stepped out of a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover and promised to turn the clock back to a time that never was. You can’t be too hard on an electorate that has such sweet dreams. I think their alarm radios are now playing ‘Sleepers, Awake’. As the long-suffering Brooklyn Dodger fans used to say, wait till next year.
Ira Marder
Englewood, New Jersey
