Aren’t we mature enough as a democracy to memorialize our leaders with clear eyes? While the nation mourns one of its most popular presidents, it must be truthful in assessing his leadership. The very resolve being celebrated on op-ed pages across the country also led Reagan to ignore and sometimes sanction the brutality being committed in the name of fighting the "evil empire."
Throughout his presidency, Reagan made nice with dictators—no matter how nefarious—as long as they parroted his opposition to communism. As soon as he entered the White House, his administration tried to normalize relations with Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile, who was responsible for a bloody coup that overthrew a democratically elected (but socialist) government. The Reaganites also cozied up to the fascistic and anti-Semitic junta of Argentina, which tortured, slaughtered and disappeared its political opponents. And don’t forget Reagan’s attempt to woo Saddam Hussein, even after it was known that Hussein had used chemical weapons. (Reagan assigned this task to Donald Rumsfeld.)

Reagan may have pushed for democracy and human rights in the Soviet bloc, but he cared little for these values elsewhere. He dramatically urged the destruction of the Berlin Wall and supported the Solidarity movement in Poland. But he sent money and assistance to regimes that repressed and murdered their people. While visiting Ferdinand Marcos, the Filipino dictator, Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, toasted Marcos' "adherence to democratic principles." People lost their freedom or died because Reagan and his lieutenants could not see beyond their ideological blinders and cut deals with miscreants who shared their anti-Moscow mantra. Not only did Reagan embolden torturers and murders, but the CIA—following his order to support the contra rebels in Nicaragua (who were trying to oust the socialist Sandinistas)—worked with suspected drug traffickers. Who said so? Not conspiracy-theory nuts, but the inspector general of the CIA. Years after the contra war, the agency’s IG produced two reports that conceded the CIA had enlisted the assistance of alleged drug runners. At the same time Nancy Reagan was preaching “Just Say No” to drugs.
He preached about peace,justice equality and yet Reagan was AWOL on one of the important battles for freedom and democracy in the 1980s: South Africa. He defended the racist apartheid government there and claimed—as wrongly as could be—that South Africa had "eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country." And when Republicans and Democrats joined together in Congress to impose economic sanctions on the government of South Africa, Reagan vetoed the measure. In response to that veto, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a leader of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, said, "Apartheid will be dismantled, and its victims will remember those who helped to destroy this evil system. And President Reagan will be judged harshly by history."
Nevertheless,Reagan always denied that he was racist in any form or fashion like he did in the book,"an american life" where he said:

"The myth about myself that has always bothered me most is that I am a bigot who somehow surreptitiously condones racial prejudice. . . . For some reason, this myth stuck to me . . . Whatever the reasons for the myth that I'm a racist, I blow my top every time I hear it." (An American Life, 401-2)

Yet his words and actions as both Governor of California and president of the united states speak differently. In in 1980 he began his campaign in Philadelphia (Miss.) Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in one of the 1960s' ugliest cases of racist violence. It was a ringing declaration of his support for "states' rights" — a code word for resistance to black advances clearly understood by white Southern voters.
Then there was Reagan's attempt, once he reached the White House in 1981, to reverse a long-standing policy of denying tax-exempt status to private schools that practice racial discrimination and grant an exemption to Bob Jones University, despite its racist ban on interracial dating. Two years later the U.S. Supreme Court in a resounding 8-to-1 decision ruled that Reagan was dead wrong and reinstated the IRS's power to deny BJU's exemption.
Republican leaders and their apologists tend to go into a frenzy of denial when members of the liberal media cabal bring up these inconvenient facts. It's that lack of candor, of course, that presents the biggest obstacle in conservative politicis today and ensures that conservatives are continually branded as racist,christo facsists fiends. This is seen in the results of the last elections and the way the public views the Republican party and the conservative movement. Things need to change,progress needs to be made and old myths need to be undone in order to move ahead!