Two Dimensional History Distorts Presidential Reality

I just watched an episode of the 2004 Discovery Channel series, "Decisions that Shook the World," about Lyndon Johnson. It was a great illustration of how people are not all that they appear to be; are not completely good or totally bad.

While remembered for letting the situation in Viet Nam get so terribly out of control, Johnson also did more than any president since Abraham Lincoln to advance the cause of civil rights. These days, when we especially vilify our political opponents by, for example, seriously equating President Obama to Hitler and calling him the worst president in history (move over Andrew Johnson), it is important to see our leaders as complex and not as two-dimensional caricatures. I'm not claiming to be above this tendency. Just ask me what I think of Sarah Palin. I dare you.

President Johnson was a man of the Old South who used the "N" word freely but also pushed through the Civil Rights Act (which Kennedy was unable to do), the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act. Johnson was, to me, not particularly likable. He was crude and rude, vulgar and macho. Yet he used his old-boy, back-slapping style to get things done in congress, and wasn't above threatening old supporters who opposed his legislation.

On the subject of presidents who are usually seen as either all good or all bad, there's a new movie on HBO about Ronald Reagan. The mere thought of Reagan, actually, literally, has upset my stomach for 35 years. No one except for George W. Bush has had that same effect on me. As early as 1976, I feared Reagan as a war-monger and malevolent disassembler of valuable social programs. In fact, my father lost his job as a county psychiatrist thanks to The Gipper, and millions of mentally ill people were turned out of institutions to become part of the nation’s homeless population.

Reagan getting credit for the fall of the USSR is as bogus as anything I've ever heard. It most certainly would have happened anyway, and certainly not because he told Mr. Gorbachev to "tear down this wall."

Reagan refused to acknowledge AIDS as a problem, and I always found his folksy friendliness as phony as a seven-dollar bill.

It pains me to try to see the good in him, but this HBO movie about Ronnie tries to show him as the complex human being he really was, not the sainted statue, or pariah, that we now make him out to be. Especially when today’s "Tea Partiers" claim him as their patron saint, Director Eugene Jarecki points out that the real President Reagan would not only be too liberal for them, but would probably be embarrassed that they were besmirching his good name.

Clearly, LBJ gets the short shrift in history. I'm willing to give Reagan another look. But don't ask me to reconsider “W” yet. It's too soon.

Peaceful End to Cold War Still Gives Me the Shivers

All the focus this week on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has me reliving those moments of 1989, and what effect the toppling of the Soviet empire had on me.

I’m sure to anyone younger than 20 or 30, the fall of the wall seems like ancient history – no more or less relevant to their lives than the Civil War or Great Depression.

But I remember the Cold War as a cold reality:

• The very real danger of US/USSR Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), particularly during the presidency of that war monger Ronald Reagan who, contrary to revisionist myth, is hardly responsible for the wall coming down
• Posters in my church about how many schools could be built for the cost of one hydrogen bomb
• Protesting with Nebraskans for Peace at a missile silo near Scottsbluff and seeing a plain-clothes official photographing all of the license plates of cars parked at the site (hopefully, my dad, who’s car I drove, wouldn’t get in trouble for my subversive activities)
• The night in 1983 when the Religion in Life group at Nebraska Wesleyan University got together and watched the terrifying and controversial television show, The Day After, about how serious a nuclear war would be – by then we’d figured out that ducking and covering under our desks wouldn’t be much protection

Yep, the Cold War was real, and it was scary. September 11, 2001 was horrifying to be sure, but what we feared about the Cold War, the destruction of the entire world with only minutes of warning, was terror on a different scale.

I grew up thinking that the Cold War could only end with terrible violence and destruction. It was unthinkable that the Soviet Block would just implode of its own weight (no thanks to Ronnie) and the desire of its people to be free. As wide-eyed East Berliners walked through the Brandenburg gate to West Berlin, I held my breath, waiting for those tanks which had always crushed freedom movements in the past. Only a few months earlier, a huge, hopeful, peaceful protest for freedom had been brutally crushed at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, reinforcing my belief that communism wouldn’t, couldn’t, go away peacefully.

But with only a few arrests and smatterings of isolated violence, from Germany to Poland to Hungary to Russia itself, Communism evaporated without a war, without a nuclear attack. I still get the shivers when I think of it.

One of the lessons of 1989 is that governments and peoples can change peacefully. While China, North Korea, and Cuba are still not democratic, it is possible to imagine that some day they will be, and massacres at Tiananmen Square will not be automatically assumed.