The Reagan era in U.S. history (1980 - 1992)

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Pierre Salinger & a 1980 Taboo
By Robert Parry, Consortium News, 23 January 1998. ABC News’ longtime Paris bureau chief Pierre Salinger has concluded that the Reagan-Bush campaign did sabotage President Carter’s Iran-hostage talks in 1980—that the so-called October Surprise allegations are true.
Ronald Reagan—Terrorist? Statement on the Situation in Afghanistan
27 December 1981. Reagan: 2 years ago today, massive Soviet military forces invaded the sovereign country of Afghanistan and began an attempt to subjugate one of the most fiercely independent peoples of the world.
Proclamation 5034—Afghanistan Day, 1983
By the President of the United States of America, 21 March 1983. The valiant and courageous Afghan freedom fighters [the Taliban] persevere in standing up against the brutal power of the Soviet invasion and occupation.
The triumph of politics
By David Stockman, 27 August 1996. The magnitude of the fiscal wreckage and the severity of the economic dangers that resulted from the Reagan Revolution’s abortive effort to rectify inherited economic conditions, its basic assumptions and fiscal architecture first introduced the folly that now envelops our economic governance.
Reagan & Guatemala’s death files
By Robert Parry, Consortium News, 27 May 1999. After four years of Jimmy Carter’s human rights nagging, Central America’s anticommunist hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems. Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes that engaged in bloody counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist enemies.

The Iran-Contra scandal

‘Like I wasn’t President at all’
By Robert Parry, Consortium News, 26 May 1999. In 1992, less than four years after leaving the White House, Ronald Reagan claimed to have forgotten virtually every fact about the Iran-contra scandal. Reagan’s diary demonstrated that Reagan was intimately involved with the Iran-contra operations and fully aware that some of his actions violated the law.
Reagan and reality
By Rich Winkel, 11 April 1989. A brief summary of Robert Parry's Foreign Policy article, Untold Story,, followed by excerpts from a followup letter from the next issue, written by several US congressmen. The congressional investigation into the Iran/Contra affair uncovered a domestic side to the Reagan administration’s efforts to circumvent the law in pursuing its foreign policy aims.