Mike, the allegations you discuss here aren’t really the ones Reagan faced publicly— or at least, not how the allegations were framed publicly. Not to mention the fact that Reagan himself was always presented as having at best a vague notion of what rogue members of his administration were up to. Whether that’s right or wrong, he never faced scandal directly the way Clinton did.

This doesn’t pass judgment on Clinton’s strategy, but that strategy was a norm-breaker. Maybe Reagan would have pursued the same strategy if some “smoking gun” showed him giving a direct order to cover up the Iran-contra affair, or if it had happened earlier in his Presidency. We’ll never know. But Clinton actually did it — when the conventional wisdom suggested that a President caught in a scandal like that would be toast, Clinton and his team swam upstream and showed that their instincts about the will of the people were more accurate than the rest of D.C.’s pundits’ and politicians’.