Posted on 04/01/2003 8:30:52 AM PST by Coleus
Yesterday was the 22nd anniversary of the shooting of Ronald Reagan by a love-crazed nut named John Hinkley, but I saw no mention of it in the papers; the war has eclipsed mention of many past events
Yet Hinkley‘s inability to kill the nation‘s 40th president was perhaps the most significant failure if not in the history of the United States then certainly since 1933 when Joseph Zangara took a potshot at Franklin D. Roosevelt but fatally wounded Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak instead.
Zangara’s miss put the United States on the road to semi-socialism that it continues to travel to this day and assured that the nation would enter World War II with all of its subsequent ramifications, including the spread of democratic governments through much of the world.
It is hard to imagine what the world would have been like had John Nance Garner become president in Roosevelt’s stead.
But it is not hard to imagine what it would be like had Hinckley been a better shot. George H. W. Bush is a nice man, a decent and honorable man, but he would not have been, as he proved later, a conservative president or a strong president. Better than Jimmy Carter, yes, but not a president who would have changed the world.
Ronald Reagan was such a president. Because he survived Hinkley’s bullet the United States entered a 20-year period of almost unbroken economic growth. Even more important, his refusal to accept the Nixonian (Kissingerian?) philosophy of detente and mutual assured destruction (MAD) led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the freeing of its vassal nations behind the Iron Curtain.
More specifically, that collapse was brought about by Reagan’s decision over world-wide objections to develop and build a nuclear shield--the Strategic Defense Initiative--to protect this country from the possibility of missile attack primarily by the Soviet.
That decision which the Soviet did not have the resources, economic, scientific or technical, to counter ended the Cold War with the United States the clear victor and the world’s single super power.
More than that, the results of the scientific research and testing needed to develop the nuclear shield, resulted in the development of high tech weapons and equipment now being used in the war against Iraq that rendered obsolete those used a mere decade ago in the Gulf War. Never in world history has battle field technology moved ahead so rapidly.
In addition, though scoffers said it could not be done, the first SDI installations are now being put in place in Alaska and in a very few years it will be virtually impossible for any rogue nation such as North Korea to launch a sneak missile attack against the American mainland.
Reagan entered the White House determined to reduce the size of government and the burden of government on the American people and to end the spread of world communism. He failed to reduce the size and growth of government but he was successful in reducing the tax burden and Soviet communism as a threat to world peace no longer exists. And two out of three isn’t all bad.
Meanwhile John Hinckley, whose bullets permanently crippled Press Secretary Jim Brady and wounded two others, continues to languish in St. Elizabeth’s, the federal nut house in Washington D.C. that once housed the poet Ezra Pound.
With luck he will die there knowing that his monumental failure to inflict his particular brand of evil on his country changed the world for the better for the foreseeable future.
Very well put.
Michael
Imporant Note:It may be true that the NK fanatics could hope that their missile might penetrate SDI--but if they can't be sure of it, and they have very few nukes to begin with, even they wouldn't be fool enough to try it.
If Hinkley (curse his name) had been a better shot, we might be fooling around playing diplomatic footsie with some damned Soviet successor to Gorbachev.
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