1980
Ronald Reagan
BY ROGER ROSENBLATT
Jan. 2, 1981
On an afternoon in early December, Los Angeles was in the 60s and Ronald
Reagan looked like a dream. He was wearing a blue-and-green wool jacket, a
purple tie, white shirt, white handkerchief, black pants and black loafers with
gold along the tops. Who else could dress that way? He settled back on a couch
in a living room so splurged with color that even the black seemed exuberant. A
florist must have decorated it. A florist must have decorated his voice. He was
talking about job hunting as a kid in his home town of Dixon, Ill., telling an
American success story he has told a hundred times before. He seemed genuinely
happy to hear it again. No noise made its way up to the house on Pacific
Palisades, except for the occasional yip of a dog, and, of course, the eternal
sound of California—the whir of a well-tuned car. Outside, the Secret Service
patrolled the bougainvillaea on streets with liquid, Spanish names. Reagan's
face was ruddy, in bloom, growing younger by the second.
At week's end he would be expected at the convocation of conservatives for
the National Review's 25th anniversary dinner in the Plaza Hotel in New York
City. Reagan would not show—a mix-up in his calendar. Riled, his hosts would
sing his praises over dessert nonetheless. He was the answer to their prayers,
after all; the essential reason for the elegant, confident glow of the evening.
Editor William F. Buckley Jr. would shine quietly, modestly. Others, like
Publisher William Rusher, would exhort the assembled "to stamp out any
remaining embers of liberalism." A war whoop was in the air—black tie, to be
sure—but still the unmistakable sound of a faction reprieved, at last in
power, thanks to the boyish man at the other end of the country, whose time had
definitely come.
As for the cause of the celebration, his rise seems astonishing. It began
in October 1964 when, as co-chairman of California Citizens for Goldwater, he
gave his "A Time for Choosing" television speech, a speech so tough that
Goldwater himself was skittish about letting it air. Reagan ended the talk with
"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny," and was at least half right. So
mesmerizing was his performance, so quick in its effect, that California
businessmen swamped him like groupies, formed a "Friends of Ronald Reagan"
committee, begged him to run for Governor. He had to be pushed. Yet in 1966 the
former star of Juke Girl snatched the governorship of California by a million
votes from incumbent Edmund G. ("Pat") Brown, who must have thought he was the
victim of an accident. (Reagan also starred in Accidents Will Happen.)
In fact, there has been a remarkably accidental air about Reagan's career;
it has always borne the quality of something he could take or leave. The image
of the non-politician running for office, antilogical as it is, has had its
practical advantages, but it is also authentic. Because Reagan knows who he is,
he knows what he wants. After a halfhearted run at Nixon for the Republican
presidential nomination in 1968, he returned to California for a second term as
Governor. But in 1976, after an all-out and failed attempt to capture his
party's nomination, he genuinely did not wish to be Gerald Ford's
Vice-President. When Ford's invitation went to Bob Dole, Reagan loyalists were
crestfallen, reading in that rebuff the end of their man's life in politics.
Only Reagan took it well, content to settle forever on his ranch, if it came to
that, but also believing (as few others did) that even at age 65 you can run
into luck.
Four years later, his party, now confirmed in its conservatism, turned to
him like a heliotrope. He was lucky to run against (Eastern brittle) George
Bush for the nomination; he was lucky to be beaten early in Iowa, before the
so-called momentum against him was real; he was lucky to have Jimmy Carter as
his opponent. On the night of Nov. 4, 1980, just 16 years after he had spoken
his mind in behalf of a man too far right to be elected President, the amateur
politician who will become 70 in February watched state after state turn in his
direction.
For that, in part, Reagan is TIME's Man of the Year—for having risen so
smoothly and gracefully to the most powerful and visible position in the world.
He is also the idea of the year, his triumph being philosophical as well as
personal. He has revived the Republican Part, and has garnered high initial
hopes, even from many who opposed him, both because of his personal style and
because the U.S. is famished for cheer. On Jan. 20 Reagan and the idea he
embodies will both emerge from their respective seclusions with a real
opportunity to change the direction and tone of the nation.
Reagan is also TIME's Man of the Year because he stands at the end of 1980
looking ahead, while the year behind him smolders in pyres. The events of any
isolated year can be made to seem exceptionally grim, but one has to peer hard
to find elevating moments in 1980. Only Lech Walesa's stark heroism in Poland
sent anything resembling a thrill into the world. The national strike he led
showed up Communism as a failure—a thing not done in the Warsaw Pact
countries. Leonid Brezhnev, a different sort of strongman, had to send troops
to Poland's borders, in case that country, like Czechoslovakia and Hungary
before it, should prove in need of "liberation."
Otherwise, the year was consumed with the old war-and-death business.
Afghanistan enters the year as a prisoner of its "liberating" neighbor; Iran
and Iraq close the year at each other's throats. In between, Cambodians are
starved out of existence; terrorists go about murdering 80 or more in Bologna,
and a mere four outside a Paris synagogue. In Turkey, political violence kills
2,000; in El Salvador, more than 9,000 die in that country's torment. All this
on top of natural disasters: Mount St. Helens erupts in Washington State; one
earthquake in Algeria kills 3,000; another in Italy takes the same toll. Human
enterprise is tested, and responds with black market coffins.
In February Americans flinch at an inflation rate of 18% that drops to a
hardly bearable 12.7% as the year ends. February is also the month when the
U.S. hockey team's victory over the Soviets ignites national pride. But in
April the U.S. boycotts the Summer Olympic Games to protest the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan. In May Cuban refugees flee Castro, and the U.S. greets them at
first with an "open arms" policy, then a state of emergency in Florida, then a
closing of the open arms—the entire pilgrimage eventually capped off with
riots at Eglin Air Force Base and later at Fort Chaffee. Vernon Jordan is shot
in May as well. In June science announces a breakthrough in recombinant DNA
research, raising high hopes of cancer cures along with specters of genetic
engineering and Andromeda strains. The prime lending rate at major banks soars
to 21.5% in December, all but ensuring that 1981 will begin with a recession.
Old orders pass: Prime Minister Ohira in Japan; the Shah in Egypt; and
Tito, who one thought would live forever. In the background, like presiding
ghosts, the hostages in Iran serve as emblems of national impotence; Walter
Cronkite's counting of the days growing weary and meaningless among Milquetoast
threats and a tragic rescue fiasco. As if to sustain the world's heartache, the
year heads toward Christmas with the killing of a Beatle.
In 1953 Robert Lowell said the "Republic summons Ike" because "the
mausoleum [was] in her heart." In 1980 the Republic summoned Ronald Reagan.
Why?
History rarely moves openly toward its main players. Usually a central
figure is perceived as evolving only in retrospect, and that could well happen
four years from now, when the country may acknowledge that Ronald Reagan was
the only man who could possibly have pulled the U.S. out of its doldrums. For
now, in prospect, that certainly cannot be said. Reagan is an experiment, as
chance. For all the happy feelings his good nature generates, the cool fact of
American life is that most of the country is still from Missouri, and much is
yet to be proved.
In this light it may be useful to remember first that Reagan's ten-point
popular victory was not assured until the final days of the campaign. As deeply
soured on the Carter Administration as most of the electorate was, it also
withheld its approval of the competition until the last minute. Quietly,
privately and perhaps a little grimly, most Americans has probably decided that
Carter had had it as early as 18 months before November. Their main reason was
the economy, but there was Carter himself, a man who also started out riding
the country's high hopes (a TIME Man of the Year in 1976), and who was perhaps
most bitterly resented for shrinking those hopes down to the size of a
presidency characterized by small people, small talk and small matters. He made
Americans feel two things they are not used to feeling, and will not abide. He
made them feel puny and he made them feel insecure.
That Reagan beat such a man is a feat of circumstances as much as a
personal strength. Right-wingers like to crow that the country veered sharply
to the right when it turned to Reagan, but the probable truth of the matter is
that most of the country had simply stepped firmly to the right of center. As
conservatives sensed, the country had been an incubative conservative since the
late '60s. Only Nixon's muck-up could have delayed their eventual birth and
triumph. Sick and tired of the vast, clogged federal machine; sick and tired of
being broke; fed up with useless programs, crime, waste, guilt; not to mention
shame in the eyes of the world—derision from our enemies, dismay from our
allies—fed up with all that, and to put a fine point on it, fed with Jimmy
Carter; what else would a nation do but hang a right?
The fascinating thing is how determined a swing it was. Reagan's pollster
Richard Wirthlin found that voters, even at the end of the campaign, believed
that Reagan was more likely to start an unnecessary war than Carter, and that
Carter was much more sensitive to the poor and the elderly. Still, the right
prevailed. The New Deal was out of steam; in the long run it ensured its own
obsolescence by giving the workingman the wherewithal to turn Republican. Even
so, his paycheck was inadequate. Everything seemed inadequate. The country had
to move on, but it was not moving anywhere. Enter Reagan (with jubilation and a
mandate).
That mandate is specific: To control inflation, to reduce unnecessary
governmental interference in private lives and in business, to reassert
America's prominence in the world. That is all there is to it, and that is
plenty. The mandate does not necessarily include far-right his lists,
censorship,the absence of gun control, prayer in schools and a constitutional
amendment banning abortion. These things are significant if problematical, but
they do not represent majority wishes. Nor does the Reagan mandate suggest
approval of a national pulpit for Jerry Falwell's lethal sweet talk or of the
National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), whose liberal-hunting
leaders have been jumping up and down like Froggie the Gremlin since Nov. 4.
The majority voted for Reagan because he appeared to be a reasonable man, and a
reasonable presidency is what the country expects. Still, it is not only the
anticipation of Reagan's reasonableness that has hopes high at the moment.
Pennsylvania's Republican Governor Richard Thornburgh explains the Reagan
election in terms of ideas: "The status of the individual in society, fiscal
integrity, the idea of true federalism, the idea of Government closer to the
people, the idea of the toughness of the American fiber, which means a firm
line with criminals at home and with our adversaries abroad, the principles
which put together the real genesis of the Reagan victory. Those principles are
now a majority view."
That is true enough, but Republicanism is also changing. During all the
years the Democrats were in power, their party developed a kind of character,
one that reached a pinnacle of form in John Kennedy—that is, the character of
the interesting party, the party of real intellectual movement, the party of
the mind. Conversely, the G.O.P. was the party of the pocketbook, the pinstripe
and the snort. Goodbye to all that. The G.O.P. is now by far the more
interesting of the two parties. And much of the anticipation of the Reagan
presidency has to do with the fact that people recognize that an idea is taking
shape.
The man at the center of this idea appears smaller than he is. At 6 ft. 1
in., 185 lbs., his body is tight, as tight as it can be on a large frame,
though there is no sign of pulling or strain. It is the body of an actor, of
someone used to being scrutinized from all angles, so it has all but willed as
tidy and organized an appearance as possible. His size also seems an emblem of
his modesty. Lyndon Johnson used to enter a room and rape it. Reagan seems to
be in a continual state of receding, a posture that makes strangers lean toward
him. In a contest for the same audience, he would draw better than Johnson.
The voice goes perfectly with the body. No President since Kennedy has had
a voice at once so distinctive and beguiling. It too recedes at the right
moments, turning mellow at points of intensity. When it wishes to be most
persuasive, it hovers barely above a whisper so as to win you over by intimacy,
if not by substance. This is style, but not sham. Reagan believes everything he
says, no matter how often he has said it, or if he has said it in the same
words every time. He likes his voice, treats it like a guest. He makes you part
of the hospitality.
It was the voice that carried him out of Dixon and away from the
Depression, the voice that more than any single attribute got him where he is.
On that smokey blue December afternoon in Pacific Palisades he was telling the
old story again—about his job hunting in 1932, about heading for Chicago,
where "a very kind woman" at NBC told him to start out in the sticks. So he
drove around to radio station WOC in Davenport, Iowa, where he made his pitch
to the program director, Peter MacArthur, and arthritic old Scotsman who
hobbled on two canes. Reagan, of course, had that voice, and he had played
football for Eureka College. But MacArthur said that he had just hired someone
else, and Reagan stomped off muttering, "How the hell do you get to be a sports
announcer if you can't get a station?" The delivery is perfect—plaintive,
sore. Something wonderful is bound to happen.
"I walked down the hall to the operator, and fortunately the elevator
wasn't at that floor. And while I was waiting, I heard this thumping down the
hall and this Scotch burr very profanely saying (in a Reagan Scotch burr),
`Wait up, ya big so and so.'" And what did MacArthur say? Something about
sports, of course. And what did MacArthur ask? "Do you think you could tell me
about a football game and make me see it?" And could Ronald Reagan do that then
and there? On the folk tale goes, fresh as a daisy, full of old hope and
heartbeats.
In the pinch, Reagan fell back on describing a game he had played in for
Eureka. "So when the light went on I said, `Here we are going into the fourth
quarter on a cold November afternoon, the long blue shadows settling over the
field, the wind whipping in through the end of the stadium'—hell, we didn't
have a stadium at Eureka, we had grandstands—and I took it up to the point in
which there were 20 seconds to go and we scored the winning touchdown. As a
blocking guard, I was supposed to get the first man in the secondary to spring
out back loose, and I didn't get him. I missed him. And I've never known to
this day how Bud Cole got by and scored that touchdown. But in the rebroadcast
I nailed the guy on defense. I took him down with a magnificent block."
Cheers and laughter. Who would not hire this man? Humility, a sense of
proportion, gentle humor. Bless the elevator operator; bless the crippled
Scotsman. Who would doubt that even now, from time to time, the Governor dreams
of the fancy footwork of the ever elusive Bud Cole?
Of course, the anecdote gives everything and nothing. In the movies, The
Story of Ronald Reagan might be built of such stuff, like the "story" of Jim
Thorpe, but not a life; the life has to be discovered elsewhere. At least the
facts pile up neatly: born Feb. 6, 1911, Tampico, Ill.; son of John Edward and
Nelle Wilson Reagan; younger brother of Neil Reagan, now a retired advertising
executive in California. After Tampico the Reagans move around for a while and
then to Dixon, a back-porch and lemonade town on the Rock River. Father is a
sometime shoe salesman and a sometime alcoholic. Mother, a Scottish Protestant;
father, Irish Catholic. Ronald takes the faith of his mother.
At high school in Dixon, "Dutch" plays football. his eyes are weak; he is
undersized for his age; still he plays the line. He also joins the basketball
team, takes part in track meets, is elected president of the student body.
Along the way, he works as a lifeguard at a local river and rescues 77 people,
a record of sorts, preserved in notches on a log. He is Midwest perfect, down
to the requisite transgression. Mellow on homemade wine one night, he mounts a
traffic stand and bellows "Twinkle, twinkle, little star." On to Eureka, where
he wins letters in football, track and swimming, and joins the dramatics club.
(Here the repeated good lines: "Nature was trying to tell me something. Namely,
my hear is a ham loaf.") He pays his way through school, his family so poor
they move into a single-bedroom apartment with an electric plate. Neighbors
carry supper over to them on trays. At Eureka, he is again elected Student-body
president. In a regional drama competition, his performance as a shepherd wins
honors. The idea of working in radio occurs to him as a halfway measure between
acting and respectability. He lights out for Chicago, and the rest is folklore.
The element missing in such accounts is what it feels like to be Ronald
Reagan. His autobiography, Where's the Rest of Me? takes its title from the
most memorable line he ever delivered as an actor, when his legs were amputated
in King's Row. As his presidency goes on, that title is bound to turn on him,
as Why Not the Best? turned on Jimmy Carter, though with Reagan the question
will be less accusative than mystifying. That self-diminution, the
trustworthiness, the aura of the towhead, the voice—all comprise a figure one
takes to the heart. But where is he in this process? What clobbers him? He
offers no signs now. Back in Dixon he did offer something, however small.
He wrote a poem in high school and called if "Life," as all high school
poems must be called. It went as follows:
I wonder what it's all about, and why We suffer so, when little things go
wrong? We make our life a struggle, When life should be a song.
Our troubles break and drench us. Like spray on the cleaving prow Of some
trim Gloucester schooner. As it dips in a graceful bow...
But why does sorrow drench us When our fellow passes on? He's just
exchanged life's dreary dirge For an eternal life of song...
Millions have gone before us, And millions will come behind, So why do we
curse and fight At a fate both wise and kind?
We hang onto a jaded life A life full of sorrow and pain. A life that
warps and breaks us, And we try to run through it again.
The poem is odd, baleful—not an unusual tone for a teenager generally,
but neither is it what we would expect of the peppy, clean-cut teenager that
was young Dutch Reagan. Examined under a sad light, "Life" is the poem of a boy
who either wants to drown or is at least considering the possibility. The first
stanza is cherry enough, but it really belongs to another poem. The sense of
advocated surrender in the final stanza is unmistakable. Not that Reagan would
be unusual in having contemplated death as a say out of adolescence, but one
does not think of his early life as having been touched with "sorrow and pain."
Of course, the poem might simply have been the product of a bad moment. But
even a momentary touch of desperation is interesting in such a man.
Usually, Reagan's assessments of his childhood are entirely wistful, but
there was a hint to something else when he was asked recently if he ever saw
his father in himself as a parent. His answer: "Yes, and maybe sometimes too
much so. I don't know how to describe it because neither of my parents ever had
anything in the line of a formal education, and yet there was a freedom to make
decisions, and sometimes I find that maybe I go too far in that." That freedom
to make decisions fits well with Reagan's political philosophy, but his answer
leaves out a negative element of his own performance as a parent. A parent's
philosophy of freedom leaves the parent free as well.
The main characteristics that Reagan displays—good humor, modesty,
patience—are the attributes of fatherhood at its best. And from all
appearances Reagan would seem to have been the compassionate father, the father
to turn to in times of grief and disarray; the father of rich stories and silly
jokes. Instead, his relationship with all four children—Maureen and Mike, his
children with Jane Wyman, and Patti and Ron, his children with Nancy—seems to
be that of deliberately created distances. The physical distances, the fact
that the children lived with Wyman after she divorced him, so in their case
some of the distancing was circumstantial. As for Patti and Ron, Reagan admits
that he did not spend much time with them but blames his life as a celebrity
and not his own desires. He tells dolefully of taking Patti to the opening of
Disneyland and being beset by autograph hounds, spoiling a normal, happy family
excursion.
Given that other celebrities manage to spend time with their children,
Reagan's explanation does not make much since. Still, there is no doubt that it
makes sense to him. The regret he expresses about not having been more
attentive to the children is sincere, if low level. Now, the children grown,
they all seem much closer than before, which is interesting, as it suggests
that Reagan, who bears much of the aspect of an adorable child himself, simply
gets along better with grownups. The unceremonious wedding of young Ron a few
weeks after the election offers a public sign that some vestiges of the old
distances remain.
Yet in the odd child-parent pattern of the Reagan family, Ron's decision
to marry suddenly with barely a last-minute word to his folks is perfectly
traditional. It is widely known that Ron's parents have not managed to see a
single ballet performance of their son, who is clearly very good, having been
selected to the Joffrey second company, and is their son nonetheless. Ron talks
of his parents with much affection. But these absences are strange and go back
a ways. Son Mike was a successful motorboat racer; Reagan did not see a single
race. Mike, a star quarterback at Judson School in Scottsdale, Ariz., was named
Player of the Year in 1964. Reagan saw not a game.
The family tradition that he was upholding by such omissions is that his
own father rarely managed to see him and Brother Neil play football. Neil
Reagan notes the fact today, conceding that his father's lack of interest was
odd, but consistent with the ideal of "independence" among the Reagans. Yet it
takes an act of will not to watch one's children in a moment important to their
self-esteem. One almost has to actively deny the desire to show pride and
affection; no child could mistake the effort—unless, of course, the pride and
affection were purely superficial. The great puzzlement about Ronald Reagan, in
fact, is exactly how much of him lies hidden. He has lived a charmed life on
the surface—many people do—but it is disconcerting, to say the least, to
unravel Reagan like H.G. Wells' invisible man, only to discover that when you
get the bandages off, the center is not to be seen.
Still, after listening to Reagan, it would be impossible to conclude that
he did not love his children. It would be easier to conclude that he did not
know how to love his children, when they were children, just as it is possible
to assume that his father did not know how to love him. There is an abiding
compassion in Reagan for his father, for his father's drinking—the "sickness,"
as his mother explained it. The story is now famous of his finding his father
passed out on the front porch and bearing him inside. Nor is there any sign
that Reagan's father was anything but a man of high natural instincts, like the
son who inherited his looks, capable of fierce rage at racial or religious
bigotry. But neither are there signs of real father-to-son love. And the fact
that Reagan's father was an alcoholic, albeit "periodic," as Reagan is quick to
explain, must have alloyed young Ronald's feelings for his father as much with
dread as with sympathy.
One thing the children of alcoholics often have in common is an uncommon
sense of control—control of themselves and control of their world, which they
know from harsh experience can turn perilous at the click of a door latch. Not
that Jack Reagan was known to be a mean drunk; but brutal or not, all
alcoholics create states of alarm in their children. They learn a kind of
easygoing formality early on, like the Secret Service, and they are often
acutely alert to danger, for the very reason that the parent's binges are
periodic. That receding look and sound of Reagan may be the hallmarks of such
control. One cannot retain anger in the presence of such a man, and thus in a
sense he makes fathers of us all.
In fact, Reagan seems ever to place himself in the position of being
adopted. He has, in a sense, been adopted by a plethora of fathers over the
years, wealthy patrons and protectors who recognized a hope for the country's
future in their favorite son. Yet Reagan is also a genuine loner. His ranch is
a true retreat for him, the independence he was taught to prize (see following
story). Solitude and self-reliance, the two essential American virtues that
Emerson named, are found in him naturally. On the ranch he can be free—not
"on" to audiences. The only odd thing in the picture is that such a loner would
choose to give his life to lines of work that demand continuous performance.
The combination of showmanship and privacy is unusual, but the combination
of that sense of control with genuine good nature is extraordinary.
Conventionally, a serve sense of control is used to harness rage or malice;
Reagan seems incapable of either. The effect of that combination, however, is
not entirely sanguine. Twenty-five years ago, Neil dreamed up an elaborate and
touching Christmas present for his kid brother. He found an impoverished family
with a father who was a drunk and out of work, and Neil took the wife and child
on a shopping spree. The parallels to the Reagans' own childhood are evident,
and whatever moved Neil to emphasize the parallels remains obscure. But the
gift was one of immense ingenuity and generosity—because the shopping spree
was given in Ronald's name. Yet when it was presented to Reagan, along with a
poem Neil wrote for the occasion, Ronald reacted by saying, "Gee, that's keen."
It is difficult to know if he was moved or not, but he certainly did not wish
to give the impression (satisfaction) of having been moved.
When campaign Manager John Sears was determined to get Mike Deaver, one of
the closest friends of both the Reagans, out of the 1980 organization, Reagan
let it happen. He said he did not like it, but he went along anyway, choosing
pragmatism over loyalty. There are other examples of cool calculation that seem
out of place in what is patently a good heart. The feeling one takes from a
conversation with Reagan—and it is very quiet and faint—is that his geniality
is equal to his fears. What, specifically, he is afraid of is a secret, as it
is with most successful people. But there is no secret about his ability to do
a kind of stylistic judo on a potential threat. The voice softens to music; the
eyes grow helpless, worried.
TIME: "You were quoted as having said that you had read Norman Podhoretz's
The Present Danger and thought it was a very important book. Is that accurate?
Did you admire that book when it came out?"
REAGAN: "I read it. [Backs off at once; eyes are shy with surprise; sounds
as if he's being accused of something, or as if he is about to be tested.] I
don't recall ever having anything to say about it. [Hesitates, but seeing no
traps, relaxes slightly.] But I did read it [some firmness now] and do believe
that it makes a great deal of sense [confidence restored]."
None of this is to suggest that Reagan resembles a haunted or threatened
man. In a lifetime one does not encounter half a dozen people so authentically
at ease with themselves. Reagan is a natural; he knows it. His intuitions are
always in tune, and he trusts his own feelings. All his political opinions have
been born of feelings—the passionate antagonism toward Big Government
resulting from his boyhood observations of Dixon and his own experiences with
the progressive income tax once he returned from the military; his staunch
anti-Communism from his days with the Screen Actors Guild in the late 1940s,
when he packed a pistol for self-protection. He will read up on a subject once
it has initially been proved on his pulses, but he does not take him main ideas
from printed words. In that process of intellection he is classically
American—the natural man whose intelligence lies not in book learning but in
right instincts. Reagan regularly reads conservative journals of opinion and
his share of newspapers and magazines and contemporary books about politics,
but no author seems to have been especially influential in his life. Yet he is
able, by employing a kind of trick of memory, to dredge up whole passages of
things he read as far back as 40 years ago. LIke many politicians, he probably
uses reading the way one might use friends. Instead of his going to books, they
come to him.
This sense of his integrity, of his thoroughgoing self-knowledge is a
major asset. When he was making Dark Victory (yes, he was there, well behind
Bette Davis, George Brent and Humphrey Bogart), the director (Edmund Goulding)
bawled him out for playing a scene too simply and sincerely. "He didn't get
what he wanted, whatever the hell that was," Reagan recalls, "and I ended up
not delivering the line the way my instinct told me it should be delivered. It
was bad."
Now, considerably freer to follow his instincts, his lines are delivered
with consistent effect—simply and sincerely. At the close of the Carter
television debate he posed several semi-rhetorical questions that are now said
to have sealed his victory: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?
Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores?" And so forth. There
is first the brilliance of the baby talk—"to go and buy things in the stores."
But the real power in those questions came from the delivery, which if managed
by a less sensitive speaker could have produced something strident, or assured,
or worse, argumentative. Instead, Reagan's pitch trembled between helplessness
and fellow feeling; it was to himself that he was talking; he who could not go
and buy things in the stores. The U.S. was in a sad mess, not an infuriating
one. Only a calm though suffering voice could rescue it.
Where more hard-nosed politicians will talk ceaselessly about polling
techniques or some son of a bitch in a rebellious precinct, Reagan will talk
about the art of public speaking. Even though he is a virtuoso, he works at
that art, primarily because he is a politician only of the essentials, and
knows, as his admired Franklin Roosevelt knew, that to reach and please the
public is to put first things first. One sign of his amazing success as a
speaker is that his plentiful gaffes are not only forgiven; even better, they
are forgotten. Speaking in Columbus last summer, he deliberately made an error,
substituting the word depression for recession in order to reinforce a point.
The alteration set off a small squall of technical retractions by one of his
economics advisers, Alan Greenspan, but the point was reinforced. His sense of
timing is almost always a thing of beauty. After the "depression" error,
instead of dropping the matter, he traded on it: "If he [Carter] wants a
definition, I'll give him one. [Audience is on the alert, for something punchy,
perhaps funny.] Recession [split-second pause] is when your neighbor loses his
job. Depression [same pause; audience grows eager] is when you lose yours.
[Chuckles and titters; audience wonders if there will be a third part to the
definition.] And recovery [audience gears itself for a laugh] is when Jimmy
Carter loses his [kaboom]."
The opposition's book on Reagan (by now a public document) is that he is
always underestimated. That too is a mark of the natural man—the fox taken for
a fool who winds up taking the taker. Yet there is no Volpone slyness in
Reagan. If he has been underestimated, it may be that he gives every sign of
underestimating himself—not as a tactic, but honestly. So wholly without
self-puffery is he that he places the burden of judging him entirely on others,
and since he is wholly without self-puffery, the judgment is almost always
favorable. He simply appeals to people, and despite his years, there is hardly
anyone of any age who would not feel protective of him, would not wish him to
succeed, would not forget the mistakes, who would not corral him in the hall
and give him a job. Again this is not a tactic. It may well be his soul.
Does this mean, then, that his soul is not his own? The question is urgent
in the minds of those who fear that the Reagan presidency will be shaped and
conducted by the God-toting religicos or the fever-swamp conservatives who
exult in the hopes that they are at last. The answer to that question is no,
but it ought not necessarily put the worriers at ease. Reagan's soul is his
own, yet what sort of soul is it? For those who have observed Reagan lo these
many years, the answer is clearly and consistently a most conservative soul,
notwithstanding the formulaic chitchat about his having once been a hemophiliac
liberal, which is simply a device for implying that policies aside, his heart
is still with the people. A more precise question is: What sort of mind has
Reagan? How intelligent is he? But with "natural" men, intelligence is not so
readily definable.
For the moment, what we can see in Reagan is a vision of America, of
America's future, at once so simple and deep as to incur every emotion from
elation to terror. It is a little like the vision of the Hudson River school of
painting—the brooding serenity of turquoise skies, patriarchal clouds and
trees, very still, doll-like people (white and red), infinite promise,
potential self-deception and, above all, perfect containment—the individual
and the land, man and God locked in a snakeless Eden. James Fenimore Cooper
wrote a novel, Satanstoe, about such a place, an ideal America in which
everyone ruled his own vast estate, his own civilization. Whether or not Reagan
sees Rancho del Cielo or Pacific Palisades as Satanstoe, his dream of the New
World is as old as Cooper's.
At the center of that dream is the word freedom; it is a key word with
Reagan, and it is the word at the center of all American dreams, from the
beautiful to the murderous. Reagan's version seems to center largely on the
question of free enterprise: "[Americans] have always known that excessive
bureaucracy is the enemy of excellence and compassion." True. Therefore,
freedom must be the ally of excellence and compassion. Sometimes. SInce
Reagan's way of understanding things is personal, he puts it thus: He dug a
pond on his own property, and now if he wants to stock that pond with fish, he
has to get a fishing license to catch his own fish. Bingo. If the vision of
boundless freedom were to consist solely of being able to fish one's own ponds,
who would have trouble siding with Reagan's idea?
But there is no particular trick in making a buffoon of federal
regulations. Things grow more problematical when one tries to extend such
reasonable complaints to a general political philosophy, and talk—as Reagan
does talk—of putting "the Federal Government back in the business of doing the
things the Constitution says are its prime functions: to keep internal order,
to protect us in our national security from outside aggression and to provide a
stable currency for our commerce and trade." Very well. But such a definition
omits the "general welfare" clause. And in practical terms, Reagan undoubtedly
does not intend to dismantle the N.I.R.B., Social Security, unemployment
insurance and other such encroachments on pure freedom that are here to stay.
So, what does he mean?
However vague and simplified Reagan's idea of freedom may be, it touches a
central chord in American thought, a chord that will sound when people start to
fear that the future is over, as they did during the Carter Administration. The
fact that Reagan speaks for the virtues of both the past and the future is
reassuring, if safe, but the fact that his definition of freedom is essentially
Western is more to the point. When Reagan speaks of freedom, he is speaking of
freedom west of the Rockies. That is where he found his own best America; that
is where he continues to find his personal and philosophical solace; that is
where he wishes for the country at large—a California dream, an endless
prospect of gold and greenery and don't fence me in.
That California has come to embody such a vision of boundlessness is a
little strange, since the dream of California is as much the dream of
disappointment as of hope—the dream of arriving at virgin territory, of
messing it up, and having gone as far as one can go, of having nowhere to turn
but back. As Kevin Starr pointed out in his Americans and the California Dream,
California has always stood for something mystical in American life; it has not
suffered the tragic historical burdens of the East and South, and it has seemed
determined to make itself as much a folk tale as a habitat. But just as it has
always insisted on its eternal newness and promise, it has also represented the
dead end of the New World, the end of exploration, recalling all the mistakes
of every past civilization. One reason that Balboa (Keats mistakenly wrote
Cortes) might have stood "silent upon a peak in Darien" is that he realized
there was no place else on earth to travel to. Or as a Walt Whitman character
said in "Facing West from California's Shores": "Where is what I started for so
long ago? And why is it yet unfound?"
Reagan does not ask that question, nor does he stand silent upon a peak in
Pacific Palisades and brood about paradise lost. His California dream remains
unsullied. America is still the land of perpetual opportunity, and every man
gloriously for himself. Economics fits into this vision neatly, since
California happened to provide a fine justification for capitalism by producing
gold from the earth like a health food. If there were a California Ocean school
of painting, it would consist of avocados in the foreground and a range of
office buildings behind. Perhaps that is Reagan's interior skyline.
Theoretically such a vision should produce the government that Reagan has
promised, the kind that governs least. If corporate America is part of
nature—of the nature of the country, the nature of man—then it must be free
to grow to its fullest capacity, like an individual..Tax cuts, reduced federal
interference and other prods to Big Business (including the corporate character
of the Cabinet appointments) are simply ways of making pioneers of businessmen,
of restoring some of the old make-a-buck fire. Yet the character of the Reagan
Administration will not depend wholly on his political vision, which in any
case will be modified by wary liberal Democrats in Congress, by the normal
exigencies of the modern presidency and by his own ability to compromise.
Rather the Reagan years are as likely to be shaped by the temperament and
intelligence of the head man, and that is precisely why those years are so
difficult to envisage.
If one were to take all of Reagan's qualities—the detachment, the
self-knowledge, the great voice and good looks—and project them into the White
House, he would have a first-class B-movie presidency. That is no insult. The
best B movies, while not artistically exquisite, are often the ones that move
us most because they move us directly, through straightforward characters,
simple moral conflicts and idealized talk. Reagan once called himself "the
Errol Flynn of B movies," which was astute (except that Errol Flynn was also
the Errol Flynn of B movies)." The President who remains above the fray yet is
also capable of stirring the people is the kind of President of whose life B
movies are made. After several years of The Deer Hunter and All the President's
Men, perhaps The Ronald Reagan Story is just what the country ordered.
The trouble, however, since we are watching our lives and not a movie, is
that in reality a detached presidency puts decisions in the hands of everyone
else. No harm is done when the issues are trivial but as the piecemeal nature
of the Cabinet appointments has demonstrated, relying so totally on advisers is
a dangerous game. The prospect grows considerably more troublesome when it
comes to making major decisions. And there will be plenty of those as soon as
Reagan takes office—all complicated and many urgent.
For starters, he faces an economic situation growing more frightening by
the moment. Almost at once he will have to decide what to cut in this year's
budget and where to attack the one for fiscal 1982, which is about to be
submitted by Carter. These decisions will affect his proposed tax cuts and his
plans to increase money for defense. They will also bear on whether or not he
will have to cut real social welfare programs, not the "fat" he is accustomed
to citing. On top of these, he faces rising unemployment, monstrous interest
rates and U.S. industries (like cars) that are running on square wheels. And
there are difficulties that are his, which he may not see. What happens to a
black teenager in Harlem or Watts in a free enterprise system that leaves him
free to go to hell?
In foreign affairs, everything in sight seems an emergency, from the
hostages to the Polish frontier. Whatever happens in Poland, Reagan will not be
overeager to negotiate an arms-control pact with the Soviets. What sort of
agreement, then, will eventually be sought? Regarding the Third World, Reagan
and his people have talked as if Soviet mischief making were the main problem,
and also have come out strongly against organized terrorism, suggesting that
the U.S. will send supplies to countries under siege by guerrillas. How does
that position affect Latin America today, especially El Salvador skidding
crazily toward a possible civil war? Given Third World realities, it is all
very well to support anti-Communist regimes without too much worry about how
democratic they are, but what if they are so discredited with their own people
that they cannot survive? For cogent reasons, Reagan and his aides seem willing
to downplay the human rights issue somewhat, but how will they deal with it in
the context of Soviet Jews and other dissidents?
In the Middle East, how will he continue to placate both Israelis and
Arabs? How will he reassure the allies of the U.S.'s renewed commitment? These
are not the kinds of problems to be handled by subordinates. They require
determination but also sophistication. THey are to be handled by a President
who studies, considers and knows what he wants.
In the broadest terms Reagan does know what he wants out of the next four
years. But as those terms address specifics, that broad vision may prove inept.
Intellectually, emotionally, Reagan lives in the past. That is where the broad
vision comes from; the past is his future. But is it also the country's? Helen
Lawton, a current resident of Dixon, Ill., and a loyal Reaganite, observed of
her man: "Right now, in some ways, I think he'd love to go back to the good old
days. In those days he didn't even realize he was poor because so many others
were poor to. He wants the good life, not in terms of material things, but so
that kids can have good times and strong family relationships. Yes, I think he
would like to go back to how it used to be, but it's going to be difficult."
That puts it mildly.
"All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain
historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified." So said Franklin
Roosevelt, who was in a good position to know. The limits of freedom, our
oldest idea, must be clarified now. Meanwhile the country is patently more
hopeful about its future than it has been in a long while, much longer than the
past four years; and to be fair to Jimmy Carter he was surely as much a
casualty of the malaise he identified as he was its superintendent. When young
man Reagan went West for the first time, the future clearly looked like the
ranch or like Pacific Palisades, or perhaps both: the genteel and frontier
traditions bound together by good manners and pluck. But when he turns eastward
this month, the New World will be more complex, more shadowy and more
terrifying for all its magnificent possibility.
—Reported by Laurence I. Barrett with Reagan
COVERS GALLERY: Click here to see the cover image from 1980
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