Do we like them?

Do we like Ronald Reagan?

Our score: 5 out of 10. Real good (a 1978 stand for gay teachers, an arms treaty) sits next to real stains (the AIDS response, a 1971 tape, apartheid sanctions, Iran-Contra).

Reagan is the Hollywood actor who became governor of California and then the 40th US president, serving 1981 to 1989. Congress later authorised a gold medal for him and Nancy Reagan. Nothing new has turned up on him lately, so this is a verdict on the record, and the record is a tangle.

The best thing on his file for this crowd: in 1978 he opposed the Briggs Initiative, a California ballot measure that would have barred gay men and lesbians from working in schools. He wrote an op-ed against it, standing with Harvey Milk, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, and voters defeated it that November. For a conservative Republican of that era, that took some nerve.

Then came the plague. In October 1982 his press secretary Larry Speakes joked about AIDS at a White House briefing, with reporters laughing along, and recordings of it resurfaced decades later. That was Speakes, not Reagan, but activists have long called his administration slow to respond. Defenders dispute why, so where you land depends on whether you read it as neglect or as a cautious bureaucracy.

In a 1971 phone call with Richard Nixon, released in 2019, then-governor Reagan was recorded describing African UN delegates as “those monkeys from those African countries”. The Reagan Foundation said that if he said it, he shouldn't have, and that he would be the first to apologise. It was a private remark, not a policy, but it is on tape and it is ugly.

On policy, he vetoed the 1986 sanctions bill aimed at apartheid South Africa, saying punitive sanctions were not the best course. Congress overrode him in a rare rebuke. His environmental record also drew a direct challenge in 1982 from ten leading environmental groups, so the planet column is thin at best.

Iran-Contra was his big scandal. The Tower Commission faulted a lax management style, and in March 1987 he was reported admitting a blunder in the Iran arms dealings, taking responsibility for it and promising to put his house in order. An admission isn't a pass on its own, but it counts for something that he owned it publicly.