Lockwood said the dangers to Reagan’s administration were particularly strong in light of the Watergate scandal, a highly controversial political cover-up that forced the resignation of Reagan’s predecessor in the Oval Office, Richard Nixon.

“There was a sense for a time that the Reagan presidency could be in jeopardy. This was only a few years after Watergate,” Lockwood said.

In the end however, conversations about the most recent political scandal made Reagan’s flaws seem small in comparison.

“President Reagan had made mistakes, but he was no Nixon, not even close,” Lockwood said.

A POLITICAL ANOMALY

Carrying 49 of 50 states in the 1984 presidential election, Reagan was a well-liked president in almost every corner of the country. Harvard, however, proved to be an exception.

“Harvard was one of the few places in the country where Ronald Reagan wasn’t popular,” Lockwood said. “There was a lot of opposition to President Reagan from the time he entered office to the time he left.”

The Iran-Contra affair only added to Harvard students’ widespread dissatisfaction with Reagan.

When the news of the scandal broke, liberal students reacted with astonishment.

“Among the people that were more left-oriented, it was kind of shocking,” said Mitchell A. Orenstein ’89, a former Crimson editor. Orenstein recalled that liberal students were concerned that the clandestine affair might escalate to a proxy war in Latin America, presumably under the guise of “fighting communism.”

Conservatives’ response to the scandal was tempered by their relatively small numbers on campus. “Republicans would’ve been a lot more sympathetic [to Reagan], but they were heavily, heavily outnumbered on campus,” Lockwood said.

Harvard Republicans did not place much emphasis on the Iran-Contra issue and chose to focus on United States’ relationship with the Contras, according to Kris W. Kobach ’88, president of the Harvard Republicans Club when the scandal came to light.

Even on a campus where Reagan was overwhelmingly unpopular, the Iran-Contra affair failed to attract significant attention among the student body. “When it became clear that [Reagan] had no personal knowledge of the affair, the scandal moved from outrage to the back burner,” Kobach said.

“I don’t remember that there was any great reaction on campus to the story,” said Kalb. “There were certainly a number of questions asked in class at the Kennedy School, but they were asked in a way that suggested more curiosity and interest than anger.”

Many Harvard students were mobilized by issues such as the South African apartheid, but the Iran-Contra affair did not elicit a similar response.