Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [106]
Reagan clearly enjoyed the role of president, but he was disparaged for sometimes seeming less than engaged with his presidential duties and for providing minimal supervision of his staff. That hands-off approach paid dividends in his first term, when he succeeded in his effort to avoid becoming mired in the details of governing. But it contributed to near catastrophe in his second, when the most difficult crisis of his presidency—the Iran-contra scandal—severely tested his reputation for integrity. Even then, Reagan never faced a serious threat of removal from office. The American public would not have stood for it: most people had come to genuinely like the man, even if they didn’t always support his decisions or policies.
By the time he left office in January 1989, Reagan had the highest approval rating of any departing president since Harry Truman. In November 1988, his vice president, George H. W. Bush, was elected president, a clear sign that the country wanted to keep the Reagan legacy alive.
History has come to regard Ronald Reagan fondly. A survey by C-SPAN of historians that was released in 2009 ranked Reagan as the tenth most successful president out of the forty-two men who had held the office to that point. He was rated the eighth most successful president in international relations and the seventh most successful in “performance within the context of the times.” And Reagan is widely credited with reinvigorating the conservative movement at a particularly perilous moment in its history; many of today’s most prominent Republicans consider him their party’s most inspiring and transformational figure of the past several decades.
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NOT ALL OF the president’s advisors fared as well. Mike Deaver, who did more to shape the public’s perception of Reagan than any other aide, left the White House in 1985 and was later convicted of lying to Congress and to a grand jury investigating his lobbying practices. Ultimately, Deaver became involved in several philanthropic organizations and regained his stature as a powerful Washington insider; he died in 2007. Ed Meese remained presidential counselor until 1985, when he became attorney general. Several months before the end of Reagan’s second term, however, Meese resigned after a lengthy but inconclusive investigation by an independent counsel (he was never charged with a crime). Meese has since become one of the country’s most influential advocates for conservative causes. Jim Baker, widely admired as an excellent chief of staff, became secretary of the Treasury during Reagan’s second term. He then served as secretary of state in the presidential administration of his good friend George H. W. Bush.
Within months of the assassination attempt, National Security Advisor Richard Allen became ensnared in an investigation into whether he improperly accepted a $1,000 honorarium from a Japanese journalist who interviewed Nancy Reagan shortly after the inauguration. In fact, Allen had simply intercepted the payment, turned it over to a secretary to forward to White House lawyers, and forgotten about it. (The cash was rediscovered later in a White House safe, prompting an FBI investigation.) Although cleared of wrongdoing by the White House and Justice Department, Allen resigned anyway, saying that his relationship with Reagan had been sabotaged by other White House aides for unrelated reasons. Allen, who had used a personal tape recorder to document what happened in the Situation Room that day, recently decided to turn his tapes over to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
Alexander Haig’s tenure in the Reagan administration remained stormy; after a number of other clashes with White House aides, he left the administration in June 1982. In 1988, he ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination. For the rest of his life—he died in February 2010—he was most often remembered as the official who, on the day of the assassination