What Newt Gingrich Really Thought Of Ronald Reagan

He may be praising Ronald Reagan now, but Newt Gingrich was singing a different tune in the 1980s.

Nate Silver reports today that Newt Gingrich has mentioned the name of the 40th President of the United States more than any other Republican candidate during the debates that have occurred this election cycle. He’s called himself a “Reagan conservative.” He’s said that he helped Ronald Reagan defeat the Soviet Union, a revelation that would no doubt come as a great shock to Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and Reagan himself. He’s said that he was the architect of the 1981 Reagan Tax Cuts along with Jack Kemp and William Roth, again something I’m sure Kemp, Roth, and Reagan would find surprising. I’ve already noted that Gingrich is no Ronald Reagan in any sense of the word, and today at National Review, Elliot Abrams, who served  in President Reagan’s State Department for the entirety of his eight years in office reveals that Gingrich didn’t really think much of Reagan while he was in office:

In the increasingly rough Republican campaign, no candidate has wrapped himself in the mantle of Ronald Reagan more often than Newt Gingrich. “I worked with President Reagan to change things in Washington,” “we helped defeat the Soviet empire,” and “I helped lead the effort to defeat Communism in the Congress” are typical claims by the former speaker of the House.

The claims are misleading at best. As a new member of Congress in the Reagan years — and I was an assistant secretary of state — Mr. Gingrich voted with the president regularly, but equally often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides, and his policies to defeat Communism. Gingrich was voluble and certain in predicting that Reagan’s policies would fail, and in all of this he was dead wrong.

(…)

The best examples come from a famous floor statement Gingrich made on March 21, 1986. This was right in the middle of the fight over funding for the Nicaraguan contras; the money had been cut off by Congress in 1985, though Reagan got $100 million for this cause in 1986. Here is Gingrich: “Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire’s challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic change in strategy will continue to fail. . . . President Reagan is clearly failing.” Why? This was due partly to “his administration’s weak policies, which are inadequate and will ultimately fail”; partly to CIA, State, and Defense, which “have no strategies to defeat the empire.” But of course “the burden of this failure frankly must be placed first on President Reagan.” Our efforts against the Communists in the Third World were “pathetically incompetent,” so those anti-Communist members of Congress who questioned the $100 million Reagan sought for the Nicaraguan “contra” rebels “are fundamentally right.” Such was Gingrich’s faith in President Reagan that in 1985, he called Reagan’s meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”

Gingrich scorned Reagan’s speeches, which moved a party and then a nation, because “the president of the United States cannot discipline himself to use the correct language.” In Afghanistan, Reagan’s policy was marked by “impotence [and] incompetence.” Thus Gingrich concluded as he surveyed five years of Reagan in power that “we have been losing the struggle with the Soviet empire.” Reagan did not know what he was doing, and “it is precisely at the vision and strategy levels that the Soviet empire today is superior to the free world.

Gingrich’s attacks on Reagan were actually quite common among members of the hard-line right in the late 80s, especially once the President began pursuing a new relationship with the Soviet Union upon the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev. I recall reading some of that criticism the pages of National Review itself at the time, and hearing it on the airwaves from the likes of Rush Limbaugh. Reagan was a patsy, they said. He was letting himself be deceived by a man with a nice smile who was still, at heart, the same kind of Communist that his predecessors were. Some conservatives were even suggesting in the late 80s that Reagan’s openings to the Soviet Union and willingness to negotiate were signs of oncoming senility. Even the words of their British hero Margaret Thatcher, who described Gorbachev was “a man we can do business with” after meeting him for the first time, were not enough to mollify these critics, who seem to have gotten themselves so wrapped up in 45 years of Cold War that they couldn’t recognize real change when it appeared before them, or that the President they supposedly had all rallied behind knew something that they didn’t.

Like many other conservatives who criticized Reagan in those days, Gingrich has conveniently forgotten the manner in which he threw the President of the United States under the bus. To listen to them today, you would think that they were cheering on the sidelines for the entire eight years of the Reagan Presidency. Of course, as we’ve noted here at OTB before, conservatives tend to have a very selective memory of the Reagan years. They forget that Reagan compromised with the opposition, raised taxes when they needed to be raised, and, yes, negotiated with the Soviet Union to reduce the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. They forget that, like Gingrich, they weren’t constant cheerleaders, especially when Reagan insisted on pursuing peace rather than eternal conflict starting across a nuclear divide. They romanticize an era that was both good and bad, perfect and imperfect, and they ignore their role in undercutting their own President’s agenda.

Abrams continues:

There are two things to be said about these remarks. The first is that as a visionary, Gingrich does not have a very impressive record. The Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, just as Reagan had believed it must. The expansion of its empire had been thwarted. The policies Gingrich thought so weak and indeed “pathetic” worked, and Ronald Reagan turned out to be a far better student of history and politics than Gingrich.

The second point to make is that Gingrich made these assaults on the Reagan administration just as Democratic attacks were heating up unmercifully. Far from becoming a reliable voice for Reagan policy and the struggle against the Soviets, Gingrich took on Reagan and his administration. .

One wonders what Republican voters would think if they knew the real story about Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan, and the extent to which he and other conservatives were stabbing the President in the back just has he was working on what would ultimately become his biggest foreign policy achievement, the end of the Cold War.

FILED UNDER: 2012 Election, US Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. Kylopod says:

    A while back I read a nice book about how the Cult of Reagan developed on the right in the years after he left the White House: Tear Down This Myth by Will Bunch. (It mentions the Gingrich quote comparing Reagan with Neville Chamberlain.) Bunch argues that although mythologizing presidents after they leave office is absolutely normal, the Reagan phenomenon is unique in contemporary politics in the extent to which it dominates the conservative imagination.

  2. john personna says:

    The first rule of the Newt club is that no one is as smart as Newt.

  3. @Kylopod:

    I often wonder if things would have been different if Reagan had not essentially disappeared from public life in 1994 because of his Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

  4. Rob in CT says:

    Oh, look, Newty’s been a bomb-thrower all along. How shocking.

    Granted, I’m not terribly impressed with funding the Contras, but then Newt doesn’t appear to have been criticizing that the way I would’ve.

    One wonders what Republican voters would think if they knew the real story about Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan

    Well, that would require:

    1) Knowing the real Ronald Reagan, in context; and
    2) Knowing more about Gingrich than “oh, he was the Contract for America guy who made Bill Clinton balance the budget!”

    Fat chance.

  5. Rob in CT says:

    @Doug Mataconis:

    It allowed the post-mortem mythologizing to start early, I guess? It may also have muted some criticism, though I admit I don’t know if that’s likely.

  6. Kylopod says:

    @Doug Mataconis: Yeah, that’s occurred to me as well. If he’d continued to be an active and outspoken figure through the Clinton and Bush years, it might have at least halted the attempts to deify him, by reminding people that he’s a flesh-and-blood human being.

  7. sam says:

    “He’s said that he helped Ronald Reagan defeat the Soviet Union, a revelation that would no doubt come as a great shock to Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and Reagan himself.”

    Not to mention Charlie Wilson.

  8. WR says:

    Yes, but in the 80s Gingrich was talking about the real Reagan. Now he’s talking about Republican Fantasy Superhero Reagan, who is an entirely different person.

  9. Kylopod says:

    @WR: Anyone remember the Daily Show segment where Stewart hosts a “debate” between Gov. Bush and Pres. Bush? (If you don’t, you can see it here.) Maybe we ought to see a debate between President Reagan and Republican Fantasy Superhero Reagan.

  10. steve says:

    Reagan had done his homework. He had read and wrote on the Soviet Union for a long time. He was also much more of a pragmatist than any of the current candidates. He was willing to talk with the bad guys and reach a deal. He was not perfect, but he was more interested in results than posturing.

    Steve

  11. Brummagem Joe says:

    What Republican doesn’t invoke Reagan like a ju ju man. If this is Newt’s worst sin the Republican establishment must be scraping the bottom of the barrel. Is it just a coincidence that Romney’s campaign are out with an ad bashing Newt for his Reagan references and right on cue Abrams, Doug, and start pronouncing on the subject. As a cop of my acquaintance once said there’s no such thing as a coincidence. And btw Doug, Reagan didn’t end the cold war.

  12. Nightrider says:

    This reminds me of the time that God tried to take too much credit for helping Newt create the sun. Or when we ignored Newt’s warnings throughout the summer and fall of 1941 that the Democrats were about to bomb Pearl Harbor.

  13. mike says:

    Oh come on – the 80’s? That was so two wives and 7 interns ago for Newt. He is different now. He traded in the old wife for a new one, ate a 3rd grader (by the looks of his stomach), and is willing to peddle whatever America will swallow (which apparently is a lot looking at the SC primary)

  14. mattb says:

    @Kylopod and @Doug Mataconis:

    Agreed. Perhaps the most important thing in this — which I recently heard a political scientist discussing — is that the modern cult of Regan is more based around his rhetoric than his actions. The brilliance of Reagan as the great communicator, was to clearly communicate red meat to the base while being far more pragmatic behind the scenes

    I also suspect, if the nation did not experience the economic growth during the mid and late Reagan years, memories of him would be quite different.

  15. DGH says:

    Republicans, especially conservative base, tend to be members of authoritarian Christian churches – Baptists, Assemblies of God, etc. They are comfortable with preachers who, they believe, are their role model, and they like politicians who have similar styles. Looking back 40 years, Ronald Reagan is by far the most “preacher-like” of Republican Presidents.

  16. SJ Reidhead says:

    The problem with Abrams’ attack is that it has been completely debunked today. But, thanks to the one-sided headlines on Drudge, no one is paying attention to the rebuttal. There are at least a half dozen other members of Reagan’s administration, including Michael Reagan and Nancy Reagan who are saying the opposite.

    SJR
    The Pink Flamingo

  17. Jason Carnley says:

    It’s so easy to string some words together from a couple of speeches to make things appear one way. I note that Newt wasn’t attacking from the left but the right. Rush is also accused of attacking Regan. That should tell you something. Taken as a whole Rush strongly supported Reagan and his policies 95% of the time. To say that Newt was wrong isn’t necessarily true. If a harder stance had been taken would change have occurred more quickly? In hindsight we are all saying Regan was right but we didn’t know that for several years after he left office. It looked like we were locked in the same Cold War at the same level. Even today can we say our problems with Russia don’t exist? How often do we find Russian weapons in the hands of Islamic radicals. Are they helping Iran develop nukes?

  18. Freeman111 says:

    Nancy Reagan hasn’t said anything about newt recently. That quote was from 1995. She would probably say he passed the torch to newt but then newt burnt down the house.

  19. Eric Florack says:

    So, nobody in here has ever had a disagreement with a wife or other family member?