Think Again  Think Again: Ronald Reagan  The Gipper wasn't the
warhound his conservative followers would have you think.
"Ronald Reagan Was the Ultimate Hawk."  Not so much. These days,
virtually every time someone on the American right bashes
President Barack Obama for kowtowing to dictators or failing to
shout that we're at war, they light a votive candle to Ronald
Reagan. Former presidential candidate John McCain has called his
own foreign-policy views "a 21st-century policy interpretation
of the Reagan Doctrine." His running mate Sarah Palin invokes
the Gipper so frequently that some now speculate that she might
launch her 2012 presidential bid in his hometown. As Dick Cheney
put it a few years back, speaking for his fellow conservatives,
"We are all Reaganites now."  No, actually, you're not. Today's
conservatives have conjured a mythic Reagan who never
compromised with America's enemies and never shrank from a
fight. But the real Reagan did both those things, often. In
fact, they were a big part of his