inflation

This is the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth, an event greeted with armies of hagiographers and one heart-felt personal book by his progressive son, Ron Reagan. It's also the 30th anniversary of Reagan's ascendancy to the presidency and the end of Jimmy Carter's one failed term in office. Carter is seen as the most successful and admirable former president, but still a personal riddle, as a new Rolling Stone article explores. As if Reagan was not one: Charismatic to the masses, friendly in person (I met him once, as part of a group of other journalists), but utterly distant and opaque beyond that to everyone except, perhaps, Nancy. Some of this sounds like Barack Obama. Maybe there's a certain sociopathic streak that comes with modern presidents. Either way, we live in Reagan's shadow, whether it's for good or bad. But we also live in Carter's.

A few years before he died, Hamilton Jordon, Carter's White House chief of staff, befriended me. He was nothing like the scheming party boy I had been taught to imagine as a young Republican. Instead, I found a man of uncommon depth, intelligence and grace, tempered by a long fight with cancer. It's not giving up any confidences to say Jordan found his boss could be as frustrating as he appeared to us on the outside. My problem with Carter, aside from the Goldwater it took years to cleanse from my system, was his Baptist preacher sanctimony. And, with the Afghanistan invasion by the Soviets and especially the Iranian embassy hostage debacle, he appeared weak and willing to preside over American decline.

But of course the story is more complicated. Ask who started the deregulation movement, appointed Paul Volcker as Fed chairman with a real mandate to break inflation, pushed the MX Missile and modernization of NATO's nuclear forces, as well as presided over building the world's most lethal ballistic missile submarine class, and you'd likely answer, "Reagan." In fact, it was Carter. Ask which president was more pragmatic, most pushed the Soviet Union on human rights, grew to genuinely hate nuclear weapons and proposed banning all ballistic missiles, and whose life-ling hero was Franklin Roosevelt, you'd probably answer, "Carter." It was, of course, Ronald Reagan. The U.S. policy (quietly) invoked to justify both Persian Gulf wars and our huge military presence there is the Carter Doctrine.