Transcript
Two Clocks
January 20, 1981
WASHINGTON 11:57 A.M. TEHRAN 8:27 P.M.
January 20, 1981. For the first time, a president takes the oath on the Capitol's West Front, facing down the Mall.
Ronald Reagan In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.
Six thousand miles east, in Tehran, it's almost nine at night.
Two Algerian airliners start their engines. One of them carries fifty-two Americans, hostages for 444 days.
They took off at about 12:25, Washington time. Jimmy Carter worked his last night to free them. He had been out of office less than half an hour.
The new president told Congress at lunch. Some 30 minutes ago, the planes bearing our prisoners left Iranian airspace and are now free of Iran.
Reagan had promised to shrink the government that Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson built. What would he cut, and what would voters refuse to give up?
Are You Better Off?
1976–1981
To explain an election, start with the years before it.
In 1980, prices rose 13.5 percent.
Every night, the news counted the days the hostages had been held.
Reagan's coalition had three parts: free-market conservatives, evangelical Christians and Cold War hawks.
A week before the vote, they debated in Cleveland. Carter said Reagan had campaigned against Medicare. There you go again.
Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago?
Reagan won 44 states and 489 electoral votes to Carter's 49.
Millions of blue-collar Democrats had voted for him. Pollsters later called them Reagan Democrats.
Republicans won the Senate for the first time in 26 years.
Five currents run through the years ahead.
Five currents run through the years ahead. A conservative turn, the Cold War's end, computers and closed mills, new immigrants, and after 2001, a war on terrorism.
Forty Billion Dollars
1981
"In this present crisis."
The crisis Reagan meant was the economy. Most people quote him without those four words.
Ronald Reagan Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it's not my intention to do away with government.
Ronald Reagan It is rather to make it work—work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back.
His advisers believed in supply-side economics. Cut tax rates, and people will work, save and invest more, and the whole economy grows.
On March 30, sixty-nine days into his term, a gunman shot the president outside a Washington hotel. The bullet stopped near his heart.
In the operating room he told the surgeons he hoped they were all Republicans. One of them answered: Today, we're all Republicans.
James S. Brady
Three other men were wounded. His press secretary, James Brady, was shot in the head. He used a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
Four weeks later, to a standing ovation, he asked Congress for his program. Conservative Southern Democrats, the boll weevils, helped pass it.
The Economic Recovery Tax Act cut income tax rates about 23 percent over three years. The top rate fell from 70 percent to 50.
Cutting taxes was the easy half. Reagan also asked Congress to cut $41.4 billion from the next year's spending.
On August 13, at his California ranch, he signed the tax cut and about $35 billion in spending cuts. Defense rose almost $28 billion the next year. The tax cut cost about $38 billion in its first year and $139 billion in its third.
In September, the Agriculture Department proposed that schools could credit "a condiment such as pickle relish" as a vegetable. Critics said ketchup. The rule never did, but the name stuck, and the White House pulled it three weeks later.
Forty-Eight Hours
1981–1983
At 7 a.m. on August 3, 1981, almost 13,000 air traffic controllers walked off the job.
Their union, PATCO, wanted better pay and shorter hours. Federal law banned strikes by federal workers.
PATCO had endorsed Reagan in 1980.
Ronald Reagan …as president of my own union, I led the first strike ever called by that union.
Ronald Reagan …if they do not report for work within 48 hours, they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.
August 5, 1981 The deadline passes
Two days later he fired more than 11,000 who stayed out, and barred them from the FAA for life.
Supervisors, military controllers and the few who hadn't struck kept the planes flying, with fewer flights.
Many historians call it a turning point for unions. More private employers began replacing strikers instead of bargaining with them.
Meanwhile the Federal Reserve, under Paul Volcker, had pushed interest rates to record highs to break inflation. The prime rate hit 21.5 percent.
Home builders mailed Volcker two-by-fours. Help! Help! We Need You. Please Lower Interest Rates. Car dealers mailed him coffins full of keys.
In late 1982, unemployment reached 10.8 percent, the highest since the Great Depression.
Then inflation broke: 13.5 percent in 1980, 3.2 in 1983. The economy came back fast. Carter had appointed Volcker; Reagan backed him when it hurt.
Morning Again
1983–1988
One block in the budget room was about to break: Social Security.
Without a fix, the checks would be late by July 1983.
A bipartisan commission found one. Higher payroll taxes, a retirement age rising slowly to 67, and a tax on some retirees' benefits.
Ronald Reagan This bill demonstrates for all time our nation's ironclad commitment to social security.
Rescued, not shrunk.
Reagan also cut rules for business. A 1982 law let savings and loans make riskier loans with deposits the government insured.
Ronald Reagan All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.
The deficits kept coming. The national debt nearly tripled in eight years. In 1985 America became a debtor nation for the first time since World War I.
So the president who cut taxes signed several tax increases, too.
By 1984, inflation was down and jobs were back. It's morning again in America. Today, more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country's history.
Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did.
Asked in a debate about his age, Reagan, 73, said: I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience.
Reagan won 49 states.
In 1986 both parties rewrote the tax code. The top rate fell to 28 percent, and about six million low-income people stopped owing income tax.
The recovery was real. So was a widening gap between the richest Americans and everyone else.
Whose Family?
1980–1992
The New Right had a second agenda: traditional values.
Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority brought evangelical voters into politics.
In 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle criticized a TV character, Murphy Brown, for mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone A year later, The Atlantic ran an article called "Dan Quayle Was Right."
Reagan made Sandra Day O'Connor the first woman on the Supreme Court.
His later picks moved it right. It let states limit abortion, but it kept Roe v. Wade.
The Equal Rights Amendment died in 1982, three states short. A 1986 law gave legal status to about 2.7 million immigrants.
In June 1981, a government health bulletin described five young gay men in Los Angeles with a rare pneumonia. It was the first report of AIDS.
By the end of 1987, about 41,000 Americans had died of AIDS.
By the end of 1987, about 41,000 Americans had died of AIDS. By the end of 1995, almost 320,000 had.
Reagan first spoke about AIDS at length in 1987. His surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, a conservative evangelical, mailed this to 107 million homes. Who you are has nothing to do with whether you are in danger of being infected with the AIDS virus. What matters is what you do.
ACT UP said the government was moving far too slowly. Its poster took the pink triangle the Nazis forced on gay prisoners and turned it point up. Why is Reagan silent about AIDS? Turn anger, fear, grief into action.
Compare a 1988 book from Focus on the Family, a Christian ministry. It worries about how TV shows love and marriage, and teaches parents to model family at home. One demands that the government act. The other asks families to guard the home. Both argue over who defines a family.
At sunrise on October 11, 1987, volunteers unfolded the AIDS Memorial Quilt on the Mall. It had 1,920 panels, each about the size of a grave.
Read My Lips
1988–1994
Reagan left office very popular. His vice president, George H. W. Bush, ran in 1988 on one promise above all.
And they'll push again, and I'll say to them, 'Read my lips: no new taxes.'
George H. W. Bush We as a people have such a purpose today.
George H. W. Bush It is to make kinder the face of the Nation and gentler the face of the world.
The deregulated savings and loans collapsed. Cleaning them up cost taxpayers about $124 billion.
Deficits kept growing. In 1990 Bush and the Democratic Congress agreed to raise taxes, and the top rate went from 28 to 31 percent.
One New York paper's front page read: 'Read my lips: I lied.'
In March 1990, about sixty disability activists left their wheelchairs at the foot of these stairs and climbed them on their hands and knees. They wanted the House to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act.
George H. W. Bush Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.
The law banned discrimination against people with disabilities in jobs, transportation and public places.
After a recession, Bush lost in 1992 to Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas, who called himself a New Democrat.
You're going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country.
Clinton pushed NAFTA through anyway, with more Republican votes than Democratic ones, over the unions' objections.
His plan to guarantee health insurance to every American died in 1994 without a vote.
In September 1994, 367 Republican candidates signed a Contract with America on these steps. That fall they won the House for the first time in forty years.
The Era of Big Government
1995–1996
The new Congress and the president fought over the budget until the government shut down twice.
Bill Clinton The era of big Government is over. But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.
People remember his first sentence and forget the second, the way they drop Reagan's first four words. Compare them. Both men promised less government. Both, in the next breath, promised not to leave people on their own.
In August, Clinton signed a welfare law the Republican Congress had written. It ended AFDC, the cash aid program begun in 1935. States got block grants instead. Adults had to work within two years, and aid stopped after five.
Conservatives had argued for years that welfare trapped people in poverty. Three of Clinton's own officials resigned in protest.
Go back to the budget room. It's 1996.
Fifteen years after Reagan promised to shrink it, the government was smaller at its edges and bigger at its center.
The arguments kept going: over free trade, over the safety net, over how closely to watch the banks. Someone will stand on these steps again and say what the government is for. The country is still answering.