Ronald Reagan — hero of a hundred days

Press, 13 May 1981, Page 21

Ronald Reagan — hero of a hundred days

By

ANTHONY HOLDEN

‘Observer,” London

“We have every right to dream heroic dreams,”, said Ronald Reagan last January, on taking the oath of office as the fortieth President of the United States. “Those who say we’re in a time when their are no heroes, they just don’t know where to look.”

They do now. In the ensuing 100 days — for reasons he cannot have envisaged, let alone hoped for, on that heady inaugural day — Reagan himself has become an authentic American hero. His brush with death, still reenacted most days on the nation’s TV screens, has left him the most popular president in the history of the union.

Eighty per cent of Americans, many of them disagreeing with his economic policies in the same breath, tell pollsters they approve of the job Reagan is doing. What they really mean is that it is hard to knock the guy right now, regardless of what he’s about to do to the country — and perhaps the world. The “second honeymoon,” it seems, will be lasting a while yet.

Even his most diehard political opponents joined with a will in the several standing ovations the President received at his first public reappearance, an address to a joint session of Congress. Those few who didn’t will now have received bulging mailbags of complaints frorri constituents.

Ronald Reagan, the first president to get shot on the job and carry on thereafter, appears to be making rapid progress towards immortality.

All in a hundred days. The milestone is, of course, among the most arbitrary, not to say premature, available for the judging of political leadership. It has been in common practice in the United States since the dynamic first hundred days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose furious spate of liberal legislation Reagan is now trying to erase from the record. But it dates back, historically, to the period between Napolean’s escape from Elba and his defeat at Waterloo.

At least Napoleon achieved something in those hundred days: he worked remorselessly towards his ultimate demise at the hands of the Duke of Wellington. American presidents get scarcely anything done in their first three months in office (though John Kennedy did manage to tuck in the Bay of Pigs, and Jimmy Carter a humiliating rebuff from Moscow on arms control). It’s really a time for putting selected campaign promises on display in the congressional shop window. More to the point, as Reagan himself observed to the Congress, is the fact that it is now six months since the American people gave him a convincing mandate to

set up a siege economy. No such legislation has yet been signed. Half a year of American history, and nothing at all has been done. The would-be assassin’s bullet has, it seems, now ensured passage of Reagan’s proposed budget cuts — if not, perhaps, of the tax cuts he would like to accompany them. Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill disappointed his fellow Democrats the other day by conceding defeat to the President in the great Capitol Hill numbers game. Foreign policy, however, is a very different story. The real reason Secretary of State Haig has been in such trouble is that his tantrums have been distracting public attention from Reagan’s assault on the domestic economy. Every foreign policy bungle of the last three months, it is now clear, has been caused at root by presidential dithering, followed by a presidential decision made entirely for domestic political advantage. Haig, in his notorious confirmation hearings, promised a diplomacy of “consistency, reliability and balance,” he has not been able to deliver. The ensuing three months have been chaos and disarray worthy of the worst of the Carter years — the villain of the piece again being

an American president’s craven desire to please domestic special interest groups. Both Haig and the Defence Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, have toured Europe and beyond to explain that arms control talks must be shelved because of the Soviet Union’s “threats of violence or intimidation” against Poland. They returned to Washington to find that the President was lifting the Soviet grain embargo — ostensibly because of Russia’s “restraint” in Poland, but in truth to line up America’s farmers behind the grand economic strategy. A.W.A.C.s surveillance planes are to be sold to the Saudis, over Israel’s vociferous protests. Nobody in the White House will take much notice of Israel’s feelings about anything until June 30, when they will find out who is to lead that country for the next few years. In the meantime the interests of the Pentagon and the Energy Department have been allowed, once again, to override those of State.

Europe’s concerns about Reagan’s belligerence towards Moscow might have suffered a similar fate. But Europe has a trump card in the 1979 N.A.T.O. agreement on deployment of United States nuclear missiles. The

Administration has been forcefully reminded of late that that agreement was dependent upon progress towards arms limitation.

So Reagan will drift slowly and reluctantly towards a summit with Brezhnev, once his economic programme is in place. Duststorms like El Salvador will meanwhile come and go, and will continue to be handled in a gung-ho way which will rightly cause the Western allies considerable concern. Haig’s days in office may well be numbered, but even his departure would be unlikely to ease Reagan’s alarming penchant for macho, muscle-flexing brinkmanship. The solemn truth is that the. Reagan Administration does not yet have a foreign policy, beyond the President’s apparent determination to answer Soviet adventurism with a renewed and immensely costly arms race. If his economic programme falters — as all manner of think-tanks, including . the Congressional Budget Office itself, believe it will — defence spending alone will ensure a deficit approaching $lOO million by 1984, the target year for a balanced budget. Whatever dark days lie ahead, at home or abroad, Reagan himself seems set to remain immensely popular. He has already restored to his office much of the dignity and prestige Jimmy Carter

squandered with his sordid, panic-stricken, two-year campaign for re-election. He has in three months established better relations with Congress than were dreamt of in Carter’s philosophy. Reagan has also restored the grandeur Americans look for in their leadership. When you enter the west wing of the White House now, a razor-sharp marine presents arms with great ceremony. As a right royal head of

state, Reagan is turning in an .Oscar-winning performance; as a decisive chief executive, he has yet to prove himself better than Bgrade. His first three months have provided a surfeit of evidence that he is a wellintentioned, courageous and disarmingly pleasant man. They have not proved reassuring about his ability, to keep an unsteady world on an even keel.