Tag: David Brooks

Right about Reagan

Journalist Lou Cannon, a biographer of Ronald Reagan, sets the record straight in today’s New York Times: Despite what David Brooks and James Taranto seem to think, Reagan’s appearance in Neshoba, Miss., near Philadelphia, was a huge issue in the 1980 presidential campaign. Cannon writes:

In the wake of Neshoba, Mr. Reagan’s critics pounced. President Carter’s campaign operatives portrayed Mr. Reagan as a divisive racist. At a money-raising event in Chicago, Mr. Carter told his audience: “You’ll determine whether this America will be unified, or, if I lose this election, Americans might be separated black from white, Jew from Christian, North from South, rural from urban.”

Cannon’s purpose is to absolve the charge that Reagan was a racist, or that his 1980 victory was based on racist appeals to white voters. In doing so, however, Cannon confirms that Brooks and Taranto are wrong to claim such accusations are a recent invention of liberals aimed at tarring Reagan’s memory.

Taranto’s wrong, too

Maybe after Rupe closes the deal, he’ll let Wall Street Journal commentators get LexisNexis accounts. The lack thereof is the only explanation I can think of for James Taranto’s endorsement of David Brooks’ factually deficient claim that Ronald Reagan’s speech in Philadelphia, Miss., was not a big deal during the 1980 campaign.

As I demonstrated last week, it was an enormous issue, with a number of media outlets reporting on what some saw as racial insensitivity on Reagan’s part, and with Jimmy Carter’s campaign beating the drums on several occasions.

Yet Taranto writes: “Why does Reagan’s Philadelphia speech loom so much larger in today’s liberal imagination than it did when Reagan was alive and active in politics? Because today’s liberals yearn for their elders’ moral authority.” Nice line. Too bad it depends on believing something that isn’t true. Taranto is generally one of the sharper knives in the drawer, but he’s wrong about this.

Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood. Some commenters to my previous item think I’m accusing Reagan of having been a racist. I’m not, although he clearly didn’t mind playing racial politics on occasion. My interest in this item is based solely on Brooks’ factually incorrect notion that the Philadelphia speech was not a big deal until recently. In fact, it was one of the biggest issues of the 1980 campaign. I remember it as someone who lived through it, and my research shows that I’m right and Brooks is wrong.

Hat tip on this to Media Nation reader MTS.

Wrong about Reagan

New York Times columnist David Brooks today claims that Ronald Reagan is being retroactively tainted by a partisan liberal smear of recent vintage. He writes:

It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale.

What dastardly deed is Brooks referring to? In August 1980, Reagan’s campaign managers decided to kick off the post-convention final push by having the Gipper appear in Philadelphia, Miss., a shrine to the civil-rights movement thanks to the murder of three young activists 16 years earlier. Reagan spoke to a white crowd and endorsed “states’ rights,” code for segregation. This, Brooks fulminates, is — in some sort of latter-day re-invention — being “taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism.”

But though Brooks wants you to believe that the idea of Reagan’s general-election campaign beginning with a racially insensitive act is a new one, he’s careful to add the caveat that it’s “been around for a while.” Well, yes. I followed the 1980 campaign avidly. And I distinctly remember that Reagan was accused at the time, repeatedly and vociferously, of playing to the prejudices of white southern voters.

Here’s a sampling of coverage from the 1980 campaign:

  • Newsweek, Aug. 18: “Reagan’s courtship of the black vote last week started out in a way that made many blacks suspicious. Speaking to a nearly all-white crowd at a county fair in Philadelphia, Miss. — the town where three civil-rights workers were murdered in 1964 — he spoke in favor of states’ rights, the code words for segregation in the 1950s.”
  • U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 25: “In early August, Reagan made a three-day trip to Mississippi, New York and Chicago that attracted mixed reviews. He spoke to a mostly white audience at the Neshoba County (Miss.) Fair and declared support for states’ rights. The outing may have helped him in a state that Carter narrowly carried in 1976, but it drew criticism from blacks. Neshoba County is where three civil-rights workers were slain by Ku Klux Klansmen in 1964 with the help of local lawmen.”
  • The Associated Press, Sept. 16: “It was the pulpit of the late Martin Luther King Jr., and Carter invoked his memory in urging that blacks exercise their hard-won right to cast ballots. ‘You’ve seen in this campaign the stirrings of hate and the rebirth of code words like states’ rights in a speech in Mississippi and a campaign reference to the Ku Klux Klan relating to the South,’ Carter said. ‘That is a message which creates a cloud on the political horizon.’ “
  • The Washington Post, Sept. 28: “Philadelphia, Miss., was the worst place in the world to mention ‘states’ rights.’ Whatever the term might mean to Ronald Reagan now and whatever it might mean to others, it means something else to Jimmy Carter. It was always a code phrase for racism. It did not mean that the state had some sort of right to tell the government to shove it when it came to occupational safety. It meant, bluntly, that the state could deprive blacks of their civil rights and there wasn’t a thing the federal government could do about it.”
  • The New York Times, Oct. 15: “Andrew Young, campaigning on behalf of President Carter, told an audience in Ohio last week that Ronald Reagan’s advocacy of ‘state’s rights’ in a speech last August in Philadelphia, Miss., ‘looks like a code word to me that it’s going to be all right to kill niggers when he’s President.’ ” (The White House distanced itself from that one.)

I could go on (and on), but you get the idea. The point is that, despite what Brooks would like you to believe, Reagan’s pit stop in Mississippi was one of the most controversial moments in the 1980 campaign. Liberals didn’t start attacking Reagan over that visit a few months ago — they did it repeatedly 27 years ago.

You don’t have to believe Reagan was a racist. You just have to look at the record. The truth is contained in Brooks’ caveat; the main thrust of his column is a gross distortion.