Area Studies

New York Times op-ed contributors Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert have recently done a couple of hack job articles on Ronald Reagan that probably knowingly eject the proper context in order to imply he was a racist. The only thing I can say for the times is that they allowed a bit of reality and context to be injected into the debate by Lou Cannon, author of five books on President Reagan:

The core of this myth is the claim that Mr. Reagan scored a political masterstroke when he spoke on Aug. 3, 1980, at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi. At the fair, Mr. Reagan told a cheering and mostly white audience, “I believe in states’ rights” and that as president he would do all he could to “restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them.”

He had been talking this way for two decades as part of his pitch that the federal government had become too powerful. What was different this day was not Mr. Reagan’s words but where he said them: Nearby Philadelphia, Miss., was notorious for the murders in 1964 of three civil-rights workers, killed in cold blood with police complicity.

[. . .]

The mythology of Neshoba is wrong in two distinct ways. First, Ronald Reagan was not a racist. Second, his Neshoba speech was not an effective symbolic appeal to white voters. Instead, it was a political misstep that cost him support.

[. . .]

Far from being a masterstroke… The Neshoba appearance hurt Mr. Reagan with these voters in the target states of Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania without bolstering his standing among conservative Southern whites.(emphasis added)

Mr. Cannon backs up his assertion with several examples going back into the 1930s demonstrating that if Reagan was a racist, he was the only one I’ve heard of the support the equal treatment of black (and Jews) for nearly five decades before his 1980 speech in Mississippi.

Krugman and Herbert are a best willfully ignorant and irresponsible, at worst liars.