Among the most ungenerous and uninformed obituary comments about
President Reagan is one for which I must raise my cup to Thomas Cronin,
the McHugh Professor of American Institutions at Colorado College.
With sneering rhetoric, he is quoted in the
New York Times obituary as saying that Americans evaluate the greatness of a president on "criteria that are over and above popularity and
re-election," criteria that, in Mr. Cronin's opinion, President Reagan obviously did not fulfill.
In the Times, Mr. Cronin credits President Reagan with enhancing national security by successfully negotiating the 1987
I.N.F. (Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces) treaty, but asks: "Did he expand opportunities for all Americans regardless of race, gender or
income bracket? It's my view Reagan has not enlarged the equity factor nor the educational opportunities for most Americans."
Moreover, he says, the Reagan presidency lacked moral leadership, an essential
factor of greatness. "He was too late, too little and too lame when it came to human-rights abuses at home and abroad," Mr. Cronin
writes. "He was not willing to be a leader."
Mr. Cronin is one of the mainstream American historians who, when not trying to write Mr. Reagan out of history, ignores his spectacular
achievement: one that undoubtedly saved millions and millions of lives;
an achievement even Russian leaders recognized was Mr. Reagan's and only Mr. Reagan's: His policies ended the Cold War without a hot war.
Also ignored by Mr. Cronin is the fact that Mr. Reagan inherited from the calamitous Carter administration a recession
that Reagan policies turned around in two years. As Martin Anderson noted in his book
Revolution, Mr. Reagan presided over the longest economic expansion in American history; an expansion that helped create 16 million new jobs.
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