March 8, 1983: Ten years after a different Republican President, Richard Nixon, went to Orlando, Florida and told the media, "I am not a crook," President Ronald Reagan goes to the same city, and is believed by many more.
Reagan, the 1st divorced man, and the 1st divorced-and-remarried man, to become President, and a man who already had a terrible record concerning the poor and race relations, was speaking before the National Association of Evangelicals. Of course, their record wasn't exactly Christian, either.
This was a low point in Reagan's Presidency. In August 1981, he signed his tax cut into law. This sent unemployment soaring from 7 percent to 11 percent in a little more than a year. The economy was still in recession. The American manufacturing sector had been severely damaged. And his policy of belligerence toward the Soviet Union -- who had recently replaced the long-ailing, leader-in-name-only Leonid Brezhnev with the much more energetic Yuri Andropov -- was making the Cold War worse.
Reagan needed an audience that was solidly in his corner. And he needed a speech they would love.
He could have spoken to the NAE about his opposition to abortion. He could have spoken to them about his support for reinstating teacher-led prayer in public schools (which is unconstitutional). He could have spoken to them about using federal government money to help religious private schools (which is also unconstitutional).
Instead, he wanted to talk about the Cold War, and the battle against what had long been known as "godless Communism." And those phony Christians ate it up.
He started by buttering them up, saying, "I can’t tell you how you have warmed my heart with your welcome. I’m delighted to be here today. Those of you in the National Association of Evangelicals are known for your spiritual and humanitarian work." He moved on to decrying secularism at home.
He went on to tell a truth: "There is sin and evil in the world, and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might." Then he told a bald-faced lie: "There is no room for racism, anti-Semitism, or other forms of ethnic and racial hatred in this country." He was in the South, and had pandered to the South for years. He knew goddamned well that one major room for racism in this country was the Oval Office.
He moved on to attacking the Soviets: "As good Marxist-Leninists, the Soviet leaders have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is that which will further their cause, which is world revolution." And how was that different from the conservative movement, trying to tear down liberalism all over the world, from Britain's national health service to the officially secular government of Turkey to the liberalism that took hold in Japan after World War II?
He talked about the dangers of a nuclear freeze. That is, America stopping its production of nuclear weapons. He was sure the Soviets would only say they were doing the same, but would keep on making them.
And then he delivered the two words by which the speech would be remembered: "So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely, uh, declaring yourselves above it all, and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding, and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil."
He closed by quoting Thomas Paine: "Yes, change your world. One of our founding fathers, Thomas Paine, said, 'We have it within our power to begin the world over again.' We can do it, doing together what no one church could do by itself. God bless you, and thank you very much."
Huge applause in the room. Like Reagan himself, they were idiots. Thomas Paine was a proud atheist.
Some people point to the Evil Empire Speech as the turnaround moment in the Reagan Presidency, when he went from an unpopular President who had recently gotten the Republican Party clobbered in the Congressional midterm elections to a wildly popular President who won 49 out of 50 States in 1984.
In fact, while the speech did help him shore up his conservative base, he remained unpopular with a majority of Americans. The economy wasn't getting appreciably better. And the Cold War was getting worse. There would be three separate incidents in 1983 that could be called close calls for a nuclear war.
On September 1, the Soviet Air Force shot down a South Korean commercial airliner that had strayed into their space, thinking it a spy plane. The other two incidents were not known to the public at the time, only revealed years later in declassified documents. In October, a mistake made by a Soviet missile-monitoring base almost resulted in the launching of missiles. And in November, the Soviets' misinterpretations of NATO's "Able Archer 83" wargames almost set things off.
At the close of 1983, Time magazine named Reagan and Andropov their Men of the Year. What only his inner circle knew was that, even as he succeeded the dead Breznhev in 1982, Andropov, too, was seriously ill, with kidney failure. On February 9, 1984, he died, and was replaced with Konstantin Chernenko. And then he died early the next year. Reagan asked, "How can I talk to the Russians, if they keep dying?"
Fortunately for Reagan, and for everyone else, the next Soviet leader wasn't an elderly Communist who remembered the original Bolshevik Revolution. It was the much younger Mikhail Gorbachev, and he and Reagan would meet in "summits" in every year of Reagan's 2nd term. And the world would be better off for it. On Reagan's 1988 visit to Moscow, he was asked if he thought the Soviet Union was still "an evil empire." He said it wasn't.
America's troubles with Russia took a break. But they couldn't stay away forever.
*
March 8, 1983 was a Tuesday. Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. There were 7 games played in the NBA that night:
* The New York Knicks beat the Seattle SuperSonics, 107-98 at Madison Square Garden.
* The Atlanta Hawks beat the Portland Trail Blazers, 110-93 at The Omni in Atlanta.
* The Detroit Pistons beat the Indiana Pacers, 107-101 at the Silverdome in the Detroit suburb of Pontiac, Michigan.
* The Dallas Mavericks beat the Phoenix Suns, 120-99 at the Reunion Arena in Dallas.
* The Cleveland Cavaliers beat the Houston Rockets, 102-99 at The Summit in Houston. (The building has been converted into an evangelical "megachurch," Dr. Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church Central Campus.) World B. Free led all scorers on the night with 37 for the Cavs.
* The Denver Nuggets beat the San Antonio Spurs, 129-118 at the McNichols Arena in Denver.
* And the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Golden State Warriors, 116-112 at the Oakland Coliseum Arena.
There were 9 games played in the NHL:
* The New York Rangers lost to the Vancouver Canucks, 7-3 at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver.
* The New York Islanders lost to the St. Louis Blues, 6-0 at the St. Louis Arena.
* The New Jersey Devils lost to the Washington Capitals, 5-4 at the Brendan Byrne Arena at the Meadowlands. So all 3 of the New York Tri-State Area's NHL teams lost.
* In the League's oldest rivalry, the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens played to a tie, 3-3 at the Montreal Forum.
* The Boston Bruins beat the Quebec Nordiques, 11-5 at Le Colisée de Québec.
* The Edmonton Oilers beat the Hartford Whalers, 9-4 at the Hartford Civic Center. (Now the PeoplesBank Arena.)
* The Chicago Black Hawks beat the Philadelphia Flyers, 4-1 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia.
* The Minnesota North Stars beat the Buffalo Sabres, 5-1 at the Metropolitan Sports Center in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota.
* The Los Angeles Kings beat the Calgary Flames, 6-4 at The Forum outside Los Angeles in Inglewood, California.
* And the Detroit Red Wings, the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Winnipeg Jets were not scheduled.
No comments:
Post a Comment