Salon/Blumenthal: Rewriting the Script (Reagan's presidency)

[kskiska]

Unlike the current occupant of the White House, Reagan was willing to improvise on the far-right script, which is what ultimately saved his presidency.

Ronald Reagan's presidency collapsed at the precise moment on Nov. 25, 1986, when he suddenly appeared without notice in the White House briefing room, introduced his attorney general, Edwin Meese, and instantly departed from the stage. Meese announced that funds raised by members of the National Security Council and others by selling arms to Iran had been used to aid the Nicaraguan Contras. Anti-terrorism laws and congressional resolutions had been willfully violated; eventually 11 people were convicted of felonies. In less than a week, Reagan's popularity plunged from 67 percent to 46 percent, the greatest and quickest decline ever for a president.

On Dec. 17, 1986, the day William Casey, the mumbling director of the CIA, was scheduled to testify on the Iran-Contra scandal before the Senate Intelligence Committee, he collapsed into a coma, suffering from brain cancer, never to recover. Lt. Col. Oliver North, Casey's action officer on the NSC, explained to members of a select congressional investigation that the profoundly conservative Casey had been the mastermind in creating an "overseas entity ... self-financing, independent," that would conduct U.S. foreign policy as a "stand-alone." Called the "Enterprise," it was the apotheosis of the Reagan doctrine, the waging of a global war for the rollback of communism.

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At his first meeting with new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in November 1985, Reagan had perplexed him by talking about how they might work together if there were an invasion of aliens from outer space. Colin Powell, who became the national security advisor in 1987 after the Iran-Contra scandal decimated the NSC, later revealed that he and others had tried to contain Reagan's talk of "little green men," as Powell put it. Reagan had got his idea from the 1951 science fiction movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still," in which an alien warns of Earth's apocalyptic destruction if nuclear weapons are not abolished.

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http://salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2004/06/10/reagan/index.html