Reagan's Defense Research Articles

Speaker Jim Wright: Power, Scandal, and the Birth of Modern Politics by J. Brooks Flippen

Reviewed by: Speaker Jim Wright: Power, Scandal, and the Birth of Modern Politics by J. Brooks Flippen Daniel K. Williams Speaker Jim Wright: Power, Scandal, and the Birth of Modern Politics. By J. Brooks Flippen. Jess and Betty Jo Hay Series. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Pp. vi, 527. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4773-1514-9.) J. Brooks Flippen's definitive biography of James Claude "Jim" Wright Jr., the Texas Democratic congressman who served as Speaker of the House in the late 1980s before he was toppled by Newt Gingrich, offers a detailed, thoroughly researched account of a lost political species: the moderate southern Democrat. For three decades, Wright, an admirer of both Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, served as a bridge between his conservative, increasingly Republican constituents in Fort Worth, Texas, and the national Democratic Party, whose liberal principles of equality and commitment to social welfare Wright continued to champion even after conservative "Boll Weevil" Democrats converted to the party of Ronald Reagan (p. 104). Flippen's book, which is based on extensive archival research and interviews with many of Wright's associates (and with Wright himself before his death in 2015), sheds important light not only on Wright's own achievements but also on the era of centrist liberalism of which Wright and other moderate southern Democrats were a part. Although Wright began his political career in the 1940s with a reputation as a progressive, he quickly learned to moderate his inclinations toward large government social programs and racial integration when they conflicted with the conservative leanings of his constituents. For thirty years, from the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower to that of Reagan, Wright practiced the politics of compromise, using his growing influence in Congress to pass centrist legislation on health care, civil rights, and the environment. His skill at channeling federal money to his district while simultaneously calling for fiscal responsibility warded off conservative challengers at home, and his ability to shepherd Great Society legislation through Congress (albeit at times in watered-down form) pacified northern liberals in his congressional caucus. His record on civil rights was mixed, reflecting the conflict between his liberal inclinations and conservative constituency. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and in general, he supported moderate civil rights legislation, but only after it had been weakened by conservative amendments. On the environment, he was more progressive, but still not [End Page 508] sufficiently opposed to Texas oil interests to earn the support of national environmental activists. By the 1970s, Wright's cultural conservatism was out of step with the liberal wing of his party. He supported the Vietnam War long after it had become unpopular with progressives and took moderately conservative stances on abortion and school prayer. In the 1980s, when Wright had reached the top echelons of congressional Democratic leadership, some liberal Democrats in Congress treated him as an opponent and tried unsuccessfully to block him from becoming Speaker of the House. But if Wright found the Democratic Party's cultural move to the left discomforting, he considered the rightward shift of the Republican Party under Reagan far more objectionable. As Speaker, Wright tried—often unsuccessfully—to block Reagan's cuts to social programs and to counter Reagan's defense spending increases with tax hikes. Even as the parties shifted around him, Wright remained a southern liberal in the mold of the early 1960s: a man who believed in expanded government programs and a strong social safety net coupled with balanced budgets, moderate social conservatism, and a strong defense. At the end of the 1980s, Wright saw this dream collapse. After giving his life to congressional service—and sacrificing his first marriage, his extracurricular activities, and, to a certain extent, his health for the sake of his political career—he had to leave Congress in disgrace because of allegations of financial improprieties that he believed were unfair and politically motivated. Worse, the politics of moderation, civility, and consensus that Wright had pursued for decades disappeared, as did the centrist southern wing of the Democratic Party. Since 1997, Wright's Fort Worth district has been represented in...

Growth opportunities and corporate debt policy: the case of the U.S. defense industry

The U.S. defense industry provides a natural experiment for examining how changes in growth opportunities affect the level and structure of corporate debt. The growth opportunities of defense firms, compared with other firms, increased substantially during the Reagan defense buildup of the early 1980s but then declined significantly with the end of the cold war and associated defense budget cuts in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We examine how the level and structure of corporate debt changed for a sample of 61 defense firms and a benchmark sample of 61 manufacturing firms during 1980–95, a period spanning the changes in growth opportunities. The debt levels of weapons manufacturers, which were most affected by the changes in growth opportunities, increased significantly as their growth opportunities declined. In addition, these firms lengthened the maturity structure of their debt, decreased the ratio of private to public debt, and decreased the use of senior debt as their growth opportunities declined. The results complement other studies that have found cross-sectional relations between proxies for growth opportunities and leverage variables and validate the prominent role played by growth opportunities in the theory of corporate finance.

Conscription, peace‐keeping, and foreign assistance: NATO burden sharing in the post‐cold war era

This article examines burden‐sharing behavior from the mid‐1970s to 1994 using conscription‐adjusted data. Except for the Reagan defense build‐up in the early 1980s, actual defense burdens are not significantly different than average derived defense burdens. There is little sign of the exploitation hypothesis during this flexible‐response era. In the 1990s, peace‐keeping missions perform more like a pure public good and display some evidence of the exploitation of the large ally by the small. NATO foreign assistance abides by the joint product model and does not imply exploitation. Dramatic changes in the 1990s appear to reinforce the tendency towards equitable burden sharing, experienced from the start of the flexible‐response era.

Qu’est-il advenu du complexe militaro-industriel ?

While military force has long been regarded in the American tradition as a threat to liberty, democracy and peace, the notion of a military-industrial complex (MIC) appeared on the scene as late as 1961. It owed much to the power elite thesis offered a few years earlier by C.W. Mills. In the 1970s, however, the much weakened consensus on defense and foreign policy, changes in the international context and the substitution of neoclassical for keynesian paradigms combined to limit the legitimacy and influence of a MIC in which fault lines became apparent. At the time of the Reagan defense build-up, a military reform movement led frontal attacks on 'waste, fraud and mismanagement'. In the last five years, the two components of the MIC have become increasingly dissociated in analyses of the issues involved. The recent period has shown that influence can be derived from a position of relative weakness as well as from one of strength, which certainly bears out the notion that civil-military relations are best approached in institutional rather than in quantitative terms.

Is It A Bad Idea to Study Good Judgment?

Wittgenstein warned in his Philosophical Investigations of the danger of saying too much: Whereof one cannot know, thereof one should not speak. This pithy aphorism came to mind more than once in writing my own article and in assembling the other articles for this symposium. The problems in defining criteria for good political judgment are staggering. To label an act or opinion a manifestation of good judgment is to imply that one knows: (a) the true state of the political world; (b) the values that should guide decision-makers in coping with the world. Neither implication is usually justified. Can we say with confidence that, given the information available to him, Chamberlain was wrong to try to appease Hitler? Or that Churchill was right to oppose appeasement? Can we conclude that the Reagan defense build-up in the early 1980s facilitated, impeded, or had no effect on the emergence of new thinking in Soviet foreign policy? These questions raise controversy, in part, because their answers hinge on complex counterfactual reconstructions of history (cf. Tetlock, McGuire, & Mitchell, 1991). Who knows how events would have unfolded if Churchill had plotted British foreign policy in the late 1930s or if a liberal American president were in charge in the early 1980s? The questions also raise controversy because any political decision ultimately rests on more than educated guesses about counterfactuals. Political decisions require balancing conflicting goals. In this case, there is the risk of rendering oneself vulnerable to a predatory aggressor by appearing too weak, versus the risk of appearing too threatening and thus provoking a war that could have been avoided on mutually acceptable terms. What reason is there to believe that political psychologists have better insights into either counterfactual history or moral philosophy than anyone else? This argument is a powerful one and, to be candid, it nearly persuaded me to abandon this project at its inception. The argument does, however, have a notso-subtle flaw. It presumes that we can somehow prevent scholars from mak

President Reagan's defensive discourse on the Iran‐Contra affair

This essay develops a preliminary synthesis and extension of approaches to defensive discourse articulated by Burke, Ware and Linkugel, and Scott and Lyman. This formulation is applied to President Reagan's discourse on the Iran‐Contra affair. Three phases emerge using different strategies. Reagan's defense is then evaluated. We argue that Reagan's defense developed through three distinct phases and that the final phase, in which he admits making a mistake and takes decisive action to prevent its recurrence, is the most effective.

Constituency Opinion and Congressional Policy Making: The Reagan Defense Buildup

Rrepresentatives' votes on a series of defense budget roll calls in the first year of the Reagan administration's Pentagon buildup are related to constituency opinions on defense spending during the 1980 election campaign. The strong aggregate constituency demand for increased defense spending in 1980 is estimated to have added almost $17 billion (about 10%) to the total fiscal year 1982 Pentagon appropriation. The impact of constituency opinion was largely independent of specific political circumstances: differential responsiveness in districts with partisan turnover, intense districtlevel competition, and strong presidential coattails together accounted for less than $1 billion in additional appropriations, with the remaining $16 billion attributable to across-the-board responsiveness by even the most safely incumbent representatives.

An Early Assessment of Reagan Defense Policy and Programs

(1990). An Early Assessment of Reagan Defense Policy and Programs. Perspectives on Political Science: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 51-56.

Reagan's National Security Legacy

As the Reagan presidency draws to an end, speculation grows as to its legacy in various areas, from domestic economics to international politics. The current study takes as its focus the Reagan legacy in the area of national security policy: specifically, the possible effects of Reagan's defense spending and Soviet policies. Using the global political-economic simulation model GLOBUS, a set of Reagan-like budgeting and foreign policies are formally implemented within the model and the resulting changes in behavior systematically evaluated. Two versions of this scenario are examined. In the first, it is assumed that the Reagan policies represent a permanent shift in the American position, while in the second case these policies are seen as a temporary aberration, remaining in effect only as long as Reagan is in the White House. Beginning with the political effects of these policy changes on Soviet-American relations and the national security of the two superpowers, the study then expands its focus to changes in the budgeting behavior of the United States and the impact on the domestic economy. These changes in American national security policy reverberate strongly throughout the political-economic system, though their effects are neither as uniformly positive as the supporters of these policies would claim nor as consistently negative as the critics profess.

The Reagan Defense Program: An Interim Assessment. Edited by Stephen J. Cimbala (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1986. xxi, 215p. $35.00, cloth; $11.95, paper). - Strategic Nuclear War: What the Superpowers Target and Why. By William C. Martel and Paul L. Savage (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. xx, 249p. $35.00) - The Future of Nuclear Deterrence. By George H. Quester (Lexington,

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