Presidential Stories

Fairy-tale presidencies leave real problems
Cynthia Tucker - AJC

Ronald Reagan liked a good story. Indeed, he preferred a good story to dreary facts, details or truths. He often repeated supposedly factual anecdotes -- stories of war heroes or welfare queens -- that were largely fact-free.

Speaking to a journalist who fervently believed that, as a child, he had seen Reagan filming a movie in his hometown, Reagan told the man he had never been there. But the president sympathized with the man's errant recollection, according to Reagan biographer Lou Cannon.

"You believed it because you wanted to believe it. There's nothing wrong with that. I do it all the time," Reagan said.

His was a fairy-tale presidency, dedicated to telling the American people what they wanted to hear. It was just what the voters were looking for after four years of Jimmy Carter, who had an annoying way of reminding Americans that the United States had made mistakes, that citizenship requires sacrifice, that might does not make right.

And so the Reagan presidency was a flimsy construction of myths -- a president can cut taxes while increasing spending, with no adverse economic consequences; there is no racism in America; a rising tide lifts all boats.

George W. Bush is the natural heir to the fairy-tale presidency. Like Reagan, Bush came into office with little grasp of federal policies, little understanding of the wider world and little patience for complexity. Like Reagan, Bush uses charm and a sunny disposition to mask the harshness of his hard-right politics. Like Reagan, Bush holds a handful of core beliefs that are never shaken by adverse evidence.

With his certainty that American power proved American righteousness, Reagan backed brutal dictators from Saddam Hussein to Chile's Augusto Pinochet. But he showed a certain pragmatism in choosing his invasions. After all, he did not fear that critics might paint him as insufficiently Reagan-esque. So he virtually ignored the vicious 1983 attack on a U.S. barracks in Lebanon that left 241 Marines dead; he invaded hapless Grenada, which could hardly have fended off the Georgia National Guard.

Bush has not been so discriminating. His invasion of Iraq has left U.S. soldiers facing a relentless insurgency, stretched the military too thin and provided a handy recruiting tool for al-Qaida. Even the White House has admitted that the torture photos from Abu Ghraib have stirred resentment that will plague Americans for a generation.

So much for Iraqis greeting us as liberators and Iraqi oil funds paying for reconstruction and Ahmad Chalabi as freedom fighter. Like so many of Reagan's tales, those were good stories. Like so many of Reagan's tales, they weren't true.