America's Greatest 20th Century Presidents (32 page)

Regardless, on both accounts – economics and social policy – the Republican Party has created an image of Reagan as a free-market Christian Crusader, a legacy that lives on more strongly in words than actions.  But imagined legacies are not necessarily less important than real ones.  What has been the impact of Reagan the free-market Christian on post-Reagan American politics?

Certainly the Reagan mythology helped catapult the Republican Party out of its post-World War II abyss.  In 1994, the Republicans captured a majority in the House for the first time in decades and held them.  In some sense, Bill Clinton's Democratic Presidency was heavily influenced by Reagan, with a welfare reform bill similar to something Reagan would have championed as its landmark achievement.  The following President, George W. Bush, took the Reagan mantra and put it on steroids, slicing and dicing taxes and social spending while rapidly increasing defense spending and military engagements in the Middle East.  Reagan's influence continues to be felt in American politics, even if it is a projection of a Ronald Reagan that existed more in myth than fact.

With the financial collapse of 2008 and that year's presidential election, however, the Reagan legacy was thrown quickly into question, and remains unsettled today.  What role did free-marketism of the Reagan variety play in spearheading the crisis?  Was the interventionism in the Middle East wise?  The late 2000's diminished Republican electoral strength, though it resurged in a big way in 2010.  With a presidency only decades past, Reagan's legacy remains fluid.  The results of the 2012 presidential election will help shed further insight into his place in history.

For the time, though, a few things are clear: Reagan, as President, injected an unfounded sense of optimism into a country that sorely needed it.  He positioned his country to hold an upper hand over its opponent superpower, and ultimately to become the one and only superpower.  While this happened on Reagan's watch, the verdict remains unsettled on whether this was Reagan of Gorbachev's prerogative.  Regardless, though, Presidents are remembered largely for the accomplishments that take place while they occupy the White House.  In Reagan's case, the nation's economic health improved while it won a decades-long international struggle. That, along with Republicans casting him as the party’s standard bearer, ensures that Reagan’s legend will continue to live on.

Reagan Bibliography

Brinkley, Alan and Davis Dyer. 
The American Presidency: The Authoritative Reference.

             
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Collins, Robert M. 
Transforming America: Politics and Culture During the Reagan Years.

             
New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Tygiel, Jules. 
Ronald Reagan and the Triumph of American Conservatism. 
New York: Pearson

              Education, 2006.

Wilentz, Sean. 
The Age of Reagan: A history, 1974-2008. 
New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.

Bill Clinton

Chapter 1: Early Years

4 year old Billy

On August 19, 1946, William Jefferson Blythe III was born to Virginia Dell Cassidy and William Jefferson Blythe, Jr., a traveling salesman who had died in an automobile accident a few months before his son was born. He was born in Hope, Arkansas, the place that would later inspire his play on words in his campaign slogan to become the forty-second President of the United States: “I still believe in a place called Hope.” In recessionary times of the early 1990’s, this slogan would resonate with voters, but young Billy (as he was then known) clearly was not born into hopeful circumstances. With his father having died before he was born, his mother and his grandparents helped raise him during the earliest years of his life. Billy’s grandparents, James Eldridge Cassidy and Edith Grisham Cassidy, ran a small “mom and pop’s” grocery store in Hope, Arkansas. It was a simple store like many others, but with one significant difference: their grocery store served and sold to people without regard to race. Given that their store was located in the Deep South before the Civil Rights Movement, it was highly unusual.

In 1950, Virginia married Roger Clinton and later gave birth to young Billy’s half-brother, Roger Clinton, Jr. in 1956. Not much is known of the emotional feelings between Virginia and her second husband, though it is
known that Roger was an alcoholic who abused both Virginia and their son Roger. Now a teenager, Bill sometimes needed to intervene and protect Virginia and his half-brother Roger from the wrath of his stepfather. Years later, in his post-Presidential years, Bill Clinton would discuss that difficult part of his life in a televised interview by saying that “I hated what [my step-father] did but I could not hate him.” In fact, when Bill turned 15, he formally and officially took the “Clinton” surname.

Despite the early hardships, Bill saw fit to make the most out of a difficult situation. At St. John's Catholic Elementary Elementary School, and through to Hot Springs High School, Bill excelled as a musician, especially with the saxophone, as his many relaxed Presidential photographs would show. Bill played the tenor saxophone and won first chair in the state band's saxophone section, and he participated in his school’s chorus. Clinton initially harbored dreams of being a professional musician, but he grew out of it in high school, later writing, "Sometime in my sixteenth year, I decided I wanted to be in public life as an elected official. I loved music and thought I could be very good, but I knew I would never be John Coltrane or Stan Getz. I was interested in medicine and thought I could be a fine doctor, but I knew I would never be Michael DeBakey. But I knew I could be great in public service."

Chapter 2: College Life

Thankfully, Clinton could fulfill his new dreams because he was also a fantastic student. Clinton was selected to attend Boys’ State and then Boys’ Nation where he would meet President John F. Kennedy, one of the self-described defining moments of his life. Bill earned a scholarship to pursue his Bachelor’s at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. An avid and ambitious student leader, Clinton ran for President of the Student Council but lost.

It was at Georgetown that Clinton also had the chance to meet Senator J. William Fulbright, in whose office he later interned. At this stage in their lives, most young people (now as in the 1960’s) still try to find themselves, but Clinton’s priorities seem to have been rather clear, at least to himself. Even at this age, Clinton acknowleged that he was interested in “greatness.” While in college, he became a brother of Alpha Phi Omega and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Clinton also was a member of a freemasonry brotherhood, though he never formally became a freemason himself.

College is something that Clinton had attended with the help of scholarships. It would have been unattainable otherwise on the salary of Virginia or his stepfather, and Clinton obviously had no funds or ancestral wealth. But what was spectacular about this time in his life is that whatever misgivings or insecurities of being a “scholarship man” that Bill may have had he did not reveal. Nor did those insecurities significantly hinder his ambitions or stop him from walking toe to toe with people of wealthier means. Perhaps this was a sign of the times, with the Vietnam War dividing societies and social stratifications — on racial, sexual, class levels — breaking up or evolving. This was also the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, and Clinton was so moved and inspired by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech that he famously memorized it. Years later, on the occasion of his first presidential inauguration in 1993, Clinton would travel to Washington, D.C. from the slave-owning and internally contradictory Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia.

King giving his “I Have a Dream” speech

To a degree, Clinton had his own contradictions. On the one hand, he has always expressed his support for racial, gender, and other equality, but he also signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), 28 U.S.C. § 1738C,
[1]
and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy concerning lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals (LGBT) serving in the United States military. To some, this represented political capitulation to Congressional conservatives, including some Southern Democrats, who were reluctant to pass anything progressive or rights-enhancing that concerned LGBT persons in the military. These days, in his post-presidential years, Clinton has publicly called DOMA and DADT his great failures while in office, and he referred to DADT as “out of whack” in particular. His LGBT rights adviser Richard Socarides has openly referred to DOMA, which he had asked Clinton to sign despite his reservations, as an election year necessity and the price of having lost Congress to the Republicans in 1994.

At the same time, Clinton’s self-professed mentor, Senator Fulbright, was perhaps one of the strongest segregationists ever to work in the United States Senate. Senator Fulbright signed the “Southern Manifesto” in 1956, in response to the Supreme Court of the United States’s decision to strike down segregation in
Brown v. Board of Education
(1954).
[2]
It was a ruling that everyone knew the Court would follow up with subsequent decisions in
other
areas of public accommodation such as swimming pools, clubs, and other facilities. Worse still, from the perspective of the segregationists, Congress would and did pass law after law enforcing those same civil rights protections for minorities and women. The Manifesto’s language was unambiguously pro-segregation.
[3]
Similarly, Clinton even as President held a certain sympathy or commiseration for the racists with whom he grew up not because he agreed with their ideology (he did not) but because he understood them as human beings. It was not altogether dissimilar from the approach that Clinton would take years later towards his abusive stepfather, whom he loved as a person but whose rage and abusive conduct Bill detested.