Detectives in the Shadows by Susanna Lee

Author:Susanna Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

While Carter had the endearing introspectiveness and frankness of a Harry O, he didn’t have the good looks or charm. And he certainly didn’t have the easy assurance of James Garner.42 Television had caused an enormous change in what the public expected from public figures. It was not enough to have good ideas. It was not even enough to communicate in an earnest way with the public. You had to emulate the persona of television but also its pace and stimulation. Schlesinger wrote that politics is ultimately an educational process. And part of that educational process is modeling a certain durability. It wasn’t about having an indestructible body like Spenser, and it wasn’t about toughness of mind and character like Williams and the Op. Rather, it was about maintaining an indestructible persona. Reagan was called the Teflon president because no accusations stuck to him, but he was also coated with an air of televised unreality. America wanted a strong leading man, and it got one in its fortieth president.

Reagan understood that to be a winner, you had to have enemies. You needed someone to beat.43 Reagan wanted to beat, among other things, the advances of the civil rights movement. This enmity was important because it came with a series of precast adversaries. During the 1976 campaign, Reagan railed against “welfare queens” who gamed the system and collected checks. In the same year, addressing a nearly all-white crowd in New Hampshire, he asked audiences to envision standing in line to buy a hamburger while a “strapping young buck” purchased T-bone steak with food stamps. His 1980 campaign endorsement of “states’ rights” at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi—where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964—brought applause from an all-white crowd.

In October of 1982, riding on American resentment of the undeserving poor, Reagan announced his administration’s War on Drugs. At the time of that announcement, less than 2 percent of Americans considered drugs to be the nation’s most important problem.44 But the drug war came with a camera-ready enemy, namely the “new privileged class in America, a class of repeat offenders and career criminals who think they have a right to victimize their fellow citizens with virtual impunity.” One week after he declared the war on drugs, Reagan said in a radio address discussing Health and Human Services that the administration was doing everything it could to “root out cheaters.” The message was clear: those on public assistance were suspicious characters, likely to be cheating the government and, incidentally, spreading the scourge of drugs. Crack cocaine entered the inner cities in 1985, several years after the declaration of the war on drugs, and its destruction was catastrophic. In fact, the crack epidemic was in large part a result of the drug war, since residents of the inner cities, undereducated and without employment opportunities, had already been cast as criminals, undeserving of empathic treatment and intervention. In essence, the war on drugs created the very enemies it assaulted.

Declaring a war on drugs created a perverse sort of hard-boiled fiction.

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