Arms Policy Sets Reagan Apart : Ike, Nixon Saw Peril of Runaway Defense Spending

History 103: Final Exam. Name the year the following presidential campaign took place: The challenger accused the incumbent of excessive caution and drift in foreign policy, of a failure to seize opportunities to sock it to the Soviets, of a lack of aggressiveness in the Cold War. He also charged that the incumbent was maintaining a burdensome level of taxes that stifled the growth of the private sector. At the same time, he promised that as President he would shed the cautious, penny-pinching defense policy of the incumbent, restore America’s military strength, establish superiority, and use it to make the Soviets behave, or else.

The challenger assured the voters that the unbalanced budget that would result from more defense spending and lower taxes would quickly disappear because the tax cut would stimulate investment and spending, and by lowering taxes we would actually raise revenue as the economy outgrew the deficit.

In short, if the challenger won, firmness and resolve would replace hesitancy and doubt as the nation got moving again toward a new dawn. He spoke directly to American pride. He assured Americans they could do anything they set their minds to, that nothing was beyond them, that unbridled optimism was the appropriate political philosophy.

The correct answer is 1960, when the challenger was John F. Kennedy; the correct answer is also 1980, when the challenger was Ronald Reagan.

Except on social welfare policies, where there were some differences between them, the hero of the liberal Democrats in 1960 and the hero of the conservative Republicans in 1980 were as alike as peas in a pod.

For a real contrast with Reagan, we must go to the other two Republicans elected to the presidency since World War II--Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon.

In Ike’s mind, what distinguished Republicans from Democrats was fiscal responsibility and sound management. He refused to lower taxes until he had balanced the budget. And although he made little progress on reducing the national debt, he did balance the budget in three of his eight years and did not add to the red ink. This was one of his proudest boasts.

Eisenhower had an almost mystical faith in a sound dollar and a prudent government, and a horror of high interest rates, inflation and budget deficits. Ike thought the Democratic philosophy of “tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect” to be the work of the devil. I can’t imagine what he would say about the Reagan philosophy--borrow and borrow, spend and spend, elect and elect.

Many of us believe that because Ike insisted on the fiscal principles of old-fashioned Republicanism, the 1950s were the best decade of this century.

Nixon was not as wedded to the sound dollar and a balanced budget as Ike had been, but in comparison with Reagan on this question, Nixon was a genuine conservative. Through impoundment, a device he invented and used with great effectiveness, Nixon kept within sight of a balanced budget. Reagan, of course, has run up deficits that only seven years ago were absolutely unimaginable.

In part, Reagan’s deficit is due to entitlements and cost-of-living adjustments, or COLAs, which were forced on Nixon by a Democratic Congress in the early ‘70s. But far more important has been Reagan’s military policy, and it is in this area that he has broken most sharply with traditional Republican policy.

Eisenhower’s views on defense spending were based on his military philosophy, which was retaliation. Ike figured that so long as the Soviets feared we might retaliate with nuclear weapons, they would be deterred from adventurism. To be able to threaten retaliation, it was not necessary to have overwhelming superiority. “One bomb,” he once told me, “would be enough, so long as it went off over Moscow.” Eisenhower, therefore, was willing to settle for a relatively small defense establishment. His great fear was that the Soviets would force us into an arms race that would eventually bankrupt America. In his first year in office, he reduced defense spending from $50 billion per year to $40 billion and held it there to the end of his second term.

Nixon, too, was willing to settle for sufficiency. The arsenals of the two sides had built up considerably between 1961 and 1969; Nixon’s military philosophy, reflecting this growth, was to accept the MAD (mutually assured destruction) policy. He initiated detente and signed the first arms-control agreement. So, like Ike, Nixon was able to bring down and hold down defense spending.

Reagan’s approach has been to go for a defensive system that both Ike and Nixon scorned as unworkable, unnecessary, far too expensive and provocative. He started the most expensive weapons system in history, made it the centerpiece of his Administration, meanwhile giving to the Pentagon whatever it demanded. In 1957, Eisenhower warned that “some day there is going to be a man sitting in my present chair who has not been raised in the military services and who will have little understanding of where slashes in their estimates can be made with little or no damage.” If that happened “while we still have the state of tension that now exists in the world, I shudder to think of what could happen in this country.”

With Reagan, the day has come as he launches the biggest arms race in history with his Strategic Defense Initiative.

There are many other differences between Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan. Ike and Dick, for example, were good stewards who guarded our national inheritance carefully; it never occurred to either man to sell government assets as a way to appear to hold down the deficit. Another example is the escalation in the level and type of scandals. In Ike’s day, the worst the Democrats could charge was that Sherman Adams, the President’s chief of staff, had accepted a coat and some other small presents from a New England businessman, for whom he had made a telephone call to the Justice Department, asking only for information on a pending case involving the businessman. That was it for scandal under Ike, who served eight full years.

The Nixon Administration, of course, set the record for scandal, but it should be noted that none of Nixon’s people was ever accused of stealing money from the public treasury, or otherwise enriching themselves through their proximity to power. In Reagan’s case, not only has there been wholesale violation of both the intent and the letter of the law by the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House staff involved in the Iran-Contra affair, but apparent wholesale private enrichment by cronies and supporters of the President. In this last, incidentally, Reagan does have a Republican precedent; it was Warren Harding who once pleaded, “Protect me from my friends.”

Eisenhower’s presidency (and Gerald Ford’s) are proof that corruption and Republicanism are not synonymous, just as Reagan’s Administration is proof that a sound fiscal policy and Republicanism are not synonymous.