Nov 17^th

George Will, the reigning conservative intellectual, has a considerable problem with Bill O’Reilly’s book, “Killing Reagan.” Will claims that O’Reilly has used shoddy scholarship to defame Reagan. He points to the many sources that O’Reilly should have interviewed but never did. O’Reilly’s book is not even sold at the Reagan Library.

O’Reilly claims that after the assassination attempt on Reagan’s life he was often seriously incapacitated; some days unable to work at all but on his best days truly brilliant. This assassination attempt occurred, March 30 1981, just a few months into the Reagan Presidency. O’Reilly claims that this accelerated Reagan’s Alzheimer condition. There is no medical evidence to corroborate such a suggestion although there is plenty of evidence for Reagan’s memory lapses.

In spite of his iconic status among the Republican faithful the Reagan Presidency was a disaster. His initial drastic tax cuts led to unemployment of 10.8 percent; he ballooned the national debt which was just 906 billion when he took office to 2.6 trillion when he left office. That’s an increase of 280 percent. This is a fiscal conservative?

Then there was the Iran Contra Affair. This happened in his second term when there was mounting evidence of his incompetency. There were seven hostages held by an affiliate if Iran in Lebanon. Our government arranged to have the Israelis ship certain arms to Iran and we would resupply the Israelis. The Iranians paid a premium for the weapons and the profit on the deal was spent to arm the Nicaraguan contras a right wing group fighting against the Sandinistas. This entire operation was illegal. Reagan initially claimed he knew nothing about it but eventually documents surfaced showing that he did. If he didn’t know about it he was incompetent; if he did know about it he was guilty of a crime.

Many of the incriminating documents were withheld or destroyed. The low level actors in this drama were convicted and sentenced to prison only to be pardoned by G.H.W. Bush when he became President. There is some evidence that Reagan’s principle aides were concerned enough about his competency to consider using the 25^th Amendment to replace him.

Then he had to deal with colon cancer surgery in 1985 when he was 74. That’s not much help for an elderly person’s mental functioning. Couple that with wife Nancy controlling his schedule according to the dictates of her astrologer and you have the recipe for the disaster that was the Reagan Presidency. Maybe George Will should find a different hero.