The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe 813convoys, mined roads, and engaged in various acts
of terrorism. Soviet casualties increased, as did the
cost of the war. Opposition mounted to communist
leaders in the Soviet Union. Soviet generals began
referring to the war in Afghanistan as “our
Vietnam.” In 1989 the Soviets pulled out; in 1996
the Taliban took over Afghanistan and instituted a
radical Islamic state.
Reagan,Support for the Contras (1984)at
http://www.myhistorylab.com
Assessing the Reagan Revolution
Reagan was not an able administrator; the Iran-
Contra affairand financial scandals of his adminis-
tration did not stick to him because he was seldom
close enough to the action to get splattered by it.
Reagan articulated, simply and persuasively, a handful
of concepts—chiefly the “evil” character of Soviet
communism, the need to get government off peo-
ple’s backs—and in so doing created a political cli-
mate conducive to change. Reagan was directly
responsible for neither of the great transformations of
the late twentieth century—the restructuring of
American corporations and the collapse of the Soviet
Union. Yet his actions and, indeed, his failures to act
indisputably influenced them. His decision to
increase military spending and undertake the fantasti-
cally expensive SDI (“Star Wars”) forced Gorbachev
to seek an accommodation with the United States.
Reagan’s tax cuts precipitated unimaginably large
federal deficits, and deregulation unloosed a sordid
pack of predators who preyed on the economy. Yet
the ensuing Darwinian chaos strengthened those
corporations that survived and gave them the mus-
cle to prevail in emerging global markets. “We are
the change,” Reagan declared in his farewell
address. What he had done, exactly, he did not say.
Yet the statement, however roseate, vague, and
self-congratulatory, was not untrue.
The Election of 1988
The issues that had dominated American politics for
over a decade—the Soviet threat, the energy crisis,
stagflation—were gone. The presidential election of
1988 initially lacked focus. The selection of Vice
President George H. W. Bush as the Republican
nomination was a foregone conclusion. Bush, the
son of a Connecticut senator, had attended an elite
private school and Yale. He served as a pilot during
World War II and then settled in Texas, where he
worked in the family’s oil business and became
active in Republican politics. From 1971 to 1973 he
ReadtheDocumentserved as ambassador to the UN and from 1976 to
1977 as director of the CIA. As Republican presi-
dential hopeful, he trumpeted his experience as vice
president; but when the Reagan administration was
tarnished by the Iran-Contra scandal, Bush claimed
that he had been “out of the loop” and thus free of
the scandal.
The Democratic race was far more complicated
but scarcely more inspiring. So many lackluster candi-
dates entered the field that wits called them “the
seven dwarfs.” But eventually Governor Michael
Dukakis of Massachusetts, stressing his record as an
efficient manager, accumulated delegates steadily and
won the nomination.
During the campaign, Bush attacked Dukakis as a
liberal governor who had been soft on crime. Lee
Atwater, campaign manager for Bush, produced and
aired a television advertisement showing prisoners,
many of them black, streaming through a revolving
door. Dukakis’s attempts to shift the focus away from
crime failed. The presidential campaign became, in
effect, a referendum on crime in which Dukakis failed
the toughness test. Bush won 54 percent of the vote
and carried the Electoral College, 426 to 112.George H. W. Bush as President
In 1989 President Bush, having attacked Dukakis for
being soft on crime, named a “drug czar” to coordi-
nate various bureaucracies, increased federal funding
of local police, and spent $2.5 billion to stop the flow
of illegal drugs into the nation. Although the cam-
paign generated plenty of arrests, drugs continued to
pour in: As one dealer or trafficker was arrested,
another took his place.
Bush also worked to shed the tough image he
had cultivated during the campaign. In his inau-
gural address he said that he hoped to “make kinder
the face of the nation and gentler the face of the
world.” He also displayed a more traditional com-
mand of the workings of government and the
details of current events than his predecessor. At the
same time he pleased right-wing Reagan loyalists by
his opposition to abortion and gun control, and by
calling for a constitutional amendment prohibiting
the burning of the American flag. His standing in
the polls soared.The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe
One important reason for this was the flood of good
news from abroad. The reforms instituted in the Soviet
Union by Gorbachev led to demands from its Eastern