Feeling Proud Again

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Ueberroth's team devised an aggressive financial plan for the Games and stuck to it. It rejected the idea of large-scale new construction; that had been the downfall of past Olympic planners. Ueberroth and Wolper extracted nearly three times more money from television ($225 million) than had ever been bid before. Coaxing and bullying, the committee got 30 American corporations to pay record fees of more than $150 million for the rights to sponsor the Games. When President Reagan proposed coming early to Los Angeles to meet with the U.S. athletes, Ueberroth said no. Too political, he thought.

THE EMOTIONAL VIBRATION

It was Ueberroth's idea to run the Olympic torch across the nation, through hundreds of cities, by night and day. The idea provoked considerable derision. But it was a public relations masterstroke, a pageant in harmony with an emotional need vibrating at that moment in the American character. Ueberroth felt the vibration. The torch, slowly making its zigzag way across the land, became one of the unforgettable images of 1984.

It was a year of imagery. It was a year of ceremonies, of formal remembrances. Some of the rites played a kind of sacramental role in the nation's imagination, conferring a healing reassurance. In June the President flew to France to walk the beaches on the 40th anniversary of the Normandy invasion. The world remembered the American role as a part of the force that, at great sacrifice, crushed the Nazi armies.

On Memorial Day, the President installed an Unknown Soldier from the Viet Nam War in Arlington National Cemetery, beside the Unknowns from World War I, World War II and the Korean War. In November the stark black granite slashes that form the Viet Nam Memorial near the edge of the Mall in Washington got a more traditional companion piece: a statue of three American soldiers holding their weapons in various attitudes of exhaustion. The memorial is now the most visited monument in the capital. These ceremonies at last served to convey legitimacy on those who fought the war, if not upon the war itself, and thereby accomplished a healing that helped enable Americans to feel good about themselves again.

There were other symptoms and ceremonies of healing. The Fourth of July was the most spectacular celebration since the Bicentennial. The Statue of Liberty, swaddled in scaffolding, began a $30 million, two-year overall refurbishment, which has come to be regarded, sometimes almost subliminally, as a symbol of a larger national renovation.

Ronald Reagan, who has done much to embody the new American self-confidence, took his November landslide as a mandate, a massive validation of his work. Reagan won in part because Walter Mondale, whatever the merits of his case, was utterly out of sync with the electorate. Mondale, by 17 years the younger candidate, sounded like the past talking--the old politics of the New Deal and Great Society. It was not that Americans disapproved of the goals (justice, compassion for the poor); many simply felt that the old Democratic ways of reaching those goals no longer worked.