De mortuis nil nisi bonum

June 7, 2004

One never of course wishes to speak ill of the dead, but I found this Washington Monthly article, Reagan's Liberal Legacy (published in Feb 2003) to be a penetrating look inside the Reagan myth machine:

One would have to go back to FDR to find a comparable example of a president portrayed in such consistently glowing terms--and the swashbuckling triumphs depicted in these books mythologize Reagan to a degree which exceeds even that. As one might expect, most gloss over or completely avoid mentioning the many embarrassing and outright alarming aspects of his presidency: from consulting astrologers to his fixation with biblical doom to the tortured rationalizations that enabled him to believe that he never traded arms for hostages... The effort to gild Reagan's legacy also seems to demand that any accomplishment that didn't explicitly advance conservative goals be ex-punged from his record. And so they have been. > Joshua Green, Reagan's Liberal Legacy

File under: Ephemera

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