Op-Ed: Who ate Reagan's brain and why does it matter today?

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As recently as last Monday presidential candidate Mitt Romney, seeking to gain some ground against Mike Huckabee in the Iowa caucuses, hurled the worst insult one Republican can throw at another but telling the Arkansas Governor: "You're no Reagan." Since Reagan remains such a powerful force in Republican ideology today, that ideology (and how he came by it) is still relevant.

Ronald Reagan started his political life as a liberal Democrat, a strong supporter of FDR and the New Deal. However by 1952 he had jumped ship and was now supporting the candidacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower and by the 1960's he had become a Nixon supporter.

Despite Reagan's support for his presidency Nixon who, if he was nothing else, was a keen judge of character and intellect, never had any respect for the actor's intelligence or understanding of political ideas:

President Nixon: What's your evaluation of Reagan after meeting him several times now.

Kissinger: Well, I think he's a--actually I think he's a pretty decent guy.

President Nixon: Oh, decent, no question, but his brains

Kissinger: Well, his brains, are negligible. I--

President Nixon: He's really pretty shallow, Henry.

Kissinger: He's shallow. He’s got no...he's an actor. He--When he gets a line he does it very well. He said, "Hell, people are remembered not for what they do, but for what they say. Can't you find a few good lines?" [Chuckles.] That's really an actor's approach to foreign policy--to substantive....

President Nixon: Back to Reagan though. It shows you how a man of limited mental capacity simply doesn't know what the Christ is going on in the foreign area.

Never much of a deep thinker, Reagan was something of a political chameleon, taking on the color of whatever environment he happened to be in. When he was surrounded by Liberal Democrats he was a Liberal Democrat but when he went to work as a pitchman for General Electric he was plunged into a deeply conservative enviroment and soon took on the coloring of that world.

The biggest influence on an impressionable Reagan was Lemuel Boulware GE's vice president and labor strategist. Boulware believed that it was the company's job to convert its employees into apostles of GE's deeply conservative ideology, spreading the message to others and thereby helping the company win grass roots voters. These voters would, in turn elect lawmakers that would help pass business friendly legislation. To help facilitate this goal GE had an extensive "education" (or perhaps brainwashing) program designed to produce a "great communicator."

And GE needed a communicator to provide cover for some of their shadier dealings. At the time GE's pricing system, especially for the heavy equipment it sold to cities and utilities, was under investigation by a Senate committee and federal grand juries in Philadelphia looking into charges that GE used illegal price-fixing, charges that could land several high-ranking GE executives in jail. Convictions in these cases would have also opened GE up to costly civil suits.

Once Reagan went into politics neither he, nor GE thought it wise to let any knowledge of his connections to the company leak out.

Fortunately for history the story has begun to leak out anyway. A collection of formerly unpublished papers and GE corporate documents has come to light as well as several interviews with GE employees who had been silent until now. Historians are also comparing this information previously published reports and oral histories that have taken on new meaning.

It is a significant fact of American politics that while Hollywood is generally considered Liberal, most of the well known actors who have gone into politics have been Conservative Republicans. Many have speculated that this is because the corporate interest that are at the core of the Republican party and whose shady hands are on the helm, prefer to do their work out of the light of public scrutiny, behind the facade of a biddable actor who does not think much but can be relied on to say his lines with professional skill.

Ronald Reagan heads up the list but other notables include Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sonny Bono, Fred Grandy, George Murphy, and Fred Thompson. One thing all these actors turned politicians have in common is that they could be relied on to support the corporate agenda. Not surprisingly all had their political campaigns heavily financed from corporate coffers.

Many observers beside Richard Nixon, including many former staff members and politicians considered Reagan an amiable dunce and it is now believed that the Alzheimer Disease that was to later claim his mind, had made its onset in the last years of his presidency but even to the end of his term of office the old theatrical warhorse could still be relied upon to hit his mark and deliver his lines in a convincing manner and perhaps that was all his corporate handlers needed him to do.

All this ancient history is significant today as we head into the elections because we are still being serenaded by the siren song that Ronald Reagan learned from Lemuel Boulware and the corporate gurus back at GE. Republican politicians are still singing hosannas to the joys of an unregulated marked, reduced taxes (especially on the rich) and "Free Trade" theology.

L. Frank Baum's famous "Wizard of Oz" is considered by many to be a political parable with the various characters and locations loaded down with symbolism. In this view the Emerald City is Washington DC and the sneaky wizard himself, who hides behind a curtain pulling the strings and speaking through a theatrical special effect is, in reality, the corporate movers and shakers who fear the light of public scrutiny.

And just like Dorothy, the American voter needs to learn to ignore the order to "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." Like her we must pull down the curtain and look at what is hiding behind it.