Thanks to one of the guest bloggers over at the League, I came across this 1989 article on the Reagan administration’s handling of Ferdinand Marcos’ exit. As Reagan’s 100th birthday has prompted all sorts of reflections on his career, so it might be worth reviewing how it was that the U.S. came to accept the removal of Ferdinand Marcos from power in 1986. What we find is that Reagan was very slow to react to Marcos’ election fraud and intimidation, and this came three years after Marcos’ forces had assassinated the leader of the opposition, and even then he very grudgingly accepted that Marcos could no longer remain in power. The push to get Marcos to leave filtered up through the administration from lower-level officials, the principals were among the last to accept that Marcos was finished, and Reagan was the very last to accept it.

The article includes many useful reminders that Reagan absolutely did not do the things administration critics have been calling on Obama to do in Egypt and elsewhere. Here is one example:

In January 1984, the State Department recommended that economic leverage be exerted on Marcos to reform his regime. Reagan conceded to modest pressure, but asserted that to throw Marcos ”to the wolves” would confront America with ”a Communist power in the Pacific.”

This one is even more relevant:

In Washington, a State Department task force fed Reagan massive evidence of Marcos’s electoral abuses. But the President preferred his own sources. Nancy gave him information she was receiving by telephone from Imelda. Donald T. Regan, his chief of staff, and William Casey pressed him to stick with Marcos.

Nor was Reagan keen on hearing Lugar, who returned to Washington on Feb. 11. Lugar candidly told Reagan that Marcos was ”cooking the results.” Reagan referred to a television segment he had seen of Aquino’s campaigners destroying ballots (it later turned out they were Marcos workers). Lugar persisted, relating his own accounts of Marcos’s misconduct. Reagan disregarded him, observing at a news conference that evening that fraud was ”occurring on both sides.”

In the end, Reagan very reluctantly agreed to push Marcos out:

Finally, Reagan seemed to be resigned to dropping Marcos, though he insisted the Philippine leader must be ”approached carefully” and ”asked rather than told” to depart. He declined to telephone him personally or send him a private message. But as the session closed, Reagan had acquiesced to deposing his ”old friend.”

Still, he and his staff were haunted by the prospect that Marcos might attack the rebels and slaughter civilians – on world television. Reagan approved an Administration statement warning Marcos that he ”would cause untold damage to the relationship between our two governments” if he used force. But he kept secret his decision to tell Marcos to leave in the hope that he might go voluntarily and so be spared the embarrassment of being removed under American pressure.

In other words, Reagan’s approach to removing Marcos was extremely cautious and slow, and this was in a country with a credible, relatively united opposition backed by the Catholic Church and familiar with a specifically American model of government. Even here, Reagan’s anticommunism led him to resist change in the Philippines until the Marcos regime had reached the breaking point. After Marcos was gone, Reagan wasn’t in any hurry to embrace Aquino:

Not until April, two months after her victory, did he personally congratulate her by telephone. He refused to grant Aquino the full honor of a state visit on her trip to Washington late in 1986. Had not Shultz dissuaded him, he might have called on Marcos during a stop in Honolulu.

I don’t point all of this out to criticize Reagan. His caution and concerns were appropriate, even if the fear of a Communist Philippines was wildly overblown, and he was right not to be publicly pushing for Marcos’ departure ahead of time. Put another way, even though he had less reason to worry, the U.S. had less at stake, and there was a straightforward political transition available in the election of Aquino, Reagan was more cautious about change in the Philippines than even Obama has been regarding change in Egypt. If Obama has largely been a realist in his response to Egypt, Reagan was even more so in a similar situation.