While commander-in-chief, he commented that submarine-based nuclear missiles once launched could be recalled. They cannot. Of the brutal military in El Salvador, he said, "We are helping the forces that are supporting human rights in El Salvador." (These forces--backed and trained by the US government--massacred 800 civilians in the village of El Mozote in December 1981, and the Reagan administration denied this mass murder happened.) Justifying his constructive engagement policy with the racist government of South Africa, he said, "Can we abandon this country that has stood beside us in every war we've ever fought?" The leaders of the ruling Afrikaners of South Africa had been Nazi sympathizers. He also claimed that segregation had been eliminated in South Africa--when blacks still did not have the right to vote and were banned from certain areas and facilities.
Reagan maintained that real earnings were increasing in the United States when they were decreasing. In 1983, he said, "There is today in the United States as much forest as there was when Washington was at Valley Forge." But the US Forest Service estimated only about 30 percent of forest lands of 1775 still existed 208 years later. He once told the story of a brave WWII bomber commander who stayed behind with an injured subordinate and went down with the plane, noting that this commander was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News checked and found no such event had occurred--except in a 1944 movie. In 1985, Reagan quipped, "I've been told that in the Russian language there isn't even a word for freedom." There is; it's svoboda. In the 1987 book, Reagan's America: Innocents at Home, Gary Wills notes that on two occasions, Reagan told visitors to the White House that when he was in the military he had filmed the Nazi concentration camps. That was false. He had served in Los Angeles, where he had made training films.
Even Reagan's devotees could not avoid the obvious. In Triumph of Politics, David Stockman, Reagan's White House budget director, writes of one meeting with the boss: "What do you do when your president ignores all the palpable, relevant facts and wanders in circles? I could not bear to watch this good and decent man go on in this embarrassing way. I buried my head in my plate."
