Human Events - Influence On Ronald Reagan

Influence On Ronald Reagan

Human Events was former President Ronald Reagan's "favorite reading for years," writes biographer Richard Reeves. A loyal subscriber since 1961, Reagan said it “helped me stop being a liberal Democrat,” calling it "must reading for conservatives who want to know what is really going on in Washington, D.C." During the 1980 presidential campaign, Democrats released a document entitled "Ronald Reagan, Extremist Collaborator—An Exposé," in which, according to biographer Lee Edwards, "mong the proofs of Reagan's extremism was that he read the conservative weekly Human Events." After being elected President, Reagan would occasionally write or call Winter or Ryskind.

"Human Events, however, was no favorite of the new men around Reagan," writes Reeves. "Baker and Darman, and Deaver too, did their best each week to keep it out of the reading material they gave the President." "When he discovered White House aides were blocking its delivery, President Reagan arranged for multiple copies to be sent to the White House residence every weekend," writes Edwards, who adds that Reagan took care "marking and clipping articles and passing them along to his assistants."

Just before his 1982 tax hike, Reagan met with what he called "some of my old friends from Human Events" (he mentioned Ryskind and Stan Evans), who warned him about "disloyal" White House staff (in particular James Baker) who favored making a deal on taxes with the Democratic Congress. (Reagan subsequently made such a deal, in which for each $1 in higher taxes Congress promised $3 in spending cuts; Reagan delivered the tax hike, but Congress reneged, actually increasing spending.)

At the 1986 Reykjavík Summit, Reagan told Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that he could not give up the Strategic Defense Initiative because "'...the people who were the most outspoken critics of the Soviet Union over the years’—he mentioned his favorite paper, Human Events," according to Reeves, "‘They’re kicking my brains out’."