FOR 30 years, Ronald Reagan's breaking of the federal air traffic controller strike has often been seen as a turning point in United States history, the moment when labor unions began an inexorable decline and when political conservatism came of age.
The columnist George Will celebrated the defeated strike as a sign that years of liberal permissiveness had ended. “In a sense,” he wrote, “the '60s ended in August 1981.”
A kind of myth has arisen — that the Reagan administration had this all planned, that it lured the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or Patco, into a trap so that it could be demolished. But as Joseph A. McCartin writes in his excellent history of the strike, “Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America,” (Oxford University Press), nothing could be further from the truth.
The book says that the Ronald Reagan of early 1981 was no union buster, that he had been reaching out for union support and that, in Patco's case, he agreed to grant concessions more plentiful than any ever granted to a public employee union by an American president. It was Patco's hubris, contends Mr. McCartin, an associate professor of history at Georgetown University, that forced Mr. Reagan's hand and led to the union's subsequent implosion.
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