Posted on 06/06/2004 8:00:56 AM PDT by knighthawk
Brought star power to bear and made U.S. believe in itself
Camp Liberty Bell, South Korea, 1983. Ronald Reagan is saddling up after a quick visit to the demilitarized zone, where he has just stared through goggles across the barren border between the two Koreas at a Potemkin village to the north and dismissed it as just another phony Hollywood set.
Reagan expects to board his helicopter for the short return hop to Seoul. But his advance men have prepared a surprise. It turns out that the U.S. Army unit serving as his host is descended from the fabled 7th Cavalry commanded by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, whom Reagan portrayed in "Santa Fe Trail." Instead of motorcading to his chopper, aides suggest that the President walk instead.
Ever the showman, Reagan eagerly agrees. Wearing his 2nd Infantry Division baseball jacket, the commander in chief sets off down the camp's dusty main drag. An Army band quickly falls in behind, striking up Custer's favorite march, "Garryowen."
It's a moment of sublime theatrical magic, and by the time Reagan strolls up to Marine One, his chest is so puffed up, he could pass for one of the floats in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
"Just like in the movies," he tells an aide later, still savoring the memory.
Even to many of his critics, Ronald Wilson Reagan seemed larger than life. He was Franklin D. Roosevelt played by John Wayne — the custodian of old-fashioned virtues and values that had made his America great; and, he was convinced, with a bit more nurturing, he could restore it to what he loved to call "that shining city on a hill."
Reagan had an old-fashioned view of life — even on weekends, he wore a jacket to work, lest he give offense to the dignity of the Oval Office — and a conservative's abiding disdain for Washington. "Government is not the solution to our problem," he said in his first inaugural address. "Government is the problem."
His goal, he often said, was to "drain the swamp" on the Potomac, and his first official act was an executive order imposing a hiring freeze on the federal government. He followed up with historic budget and tax cuts that infuriated Democrats.
Without waiting for history's longer view, the outlines of Reagan's legacy have begun to jell: lower taxes, smaller government and a more muscular defense. Historians and economists are sure to debate endlessly whether the trillion-dollar debt created by his stubborn devotion to supply-side theology mortgaged America's future or revolutionized modern economic theory.
Reagan also likely will be credited for abandoning, in his waning years in office — in part through the prodding of his wife, Nancy — his Cold Warrior dogma in favor of better relations with a Soviet Union that he once denounced as an Evil Empire that someday would end up in history's dustbin.
On that score, he was a prophet. The disintegration Reagan so confidently predicted happened months after he left office in 1989.
But Reagan's enduring achievement almost certainly will turn out to be the revival of America's spirit.
Still nursing a hangover from the debacle of the Vietnam War, the national psyche was further battered in 1979 when the Iranian mullahs took American diplomats and staff hostage for 444 days. President Jimmy Carter's botched rescue attempt, which claimed the lives of U.S. troops, was a haunting glimpse of an American decline and retreat.
Against this backdrop of national self-doubt, Reagan emerged as Dr. Feelgood, cheerfully reassuring skeptics that America was still the greatest nation on Earth, capable of imposing its will in an uncertain world when circumstances required.
From the tiny Caribbean isle of Grenada to the shores of Tripoli, Reagan proved his point with the swift and successful dispatch of U.S. combat power and his defense buildup. His 1984 campaign theme song, "God Bless the U.S.A.," was a powerful metaphor for the psychological sea change he wrought. Suddenly, it seemed, "Proud to be an American" were more than just reelection lyrics. By normal contemporary measurements, Reagan probably would manage only gentleman's C marks. He worked the shortest hours of any predecessor since Calvin Coolidge. He took so many vacations, the West Wing gag went, that he loved to show friends slides of work.
Except for a few core issues in which his faith was rock-solid, he was easily manipulated by the top advisers he called "the boys."
Similarly, it's hard to imagine President Lyndon Johnson meekly acquiescing when his chief of staff and Treasury secretary informed him they'd decided to switch jobs. But when James Baker and Donald Regan hatched that scheme in 1985, Reagan signed off without a whimper.
Critics called him intellectually lazy, and his political allies complained privately about his short attention span and middling grasp of issues.
After he bumbled his way through a disastrous performance in the first debate against Walter Mondale during his 1984 reelection campaign, a member of the GOP Senate leadership complained to a reporter: "This is exactly what we see every time we go down there for a leadership meeting."
Indeed, "they [his staff] haven't told me what I'm doing yet" was a staple response when Reagan was confronted with a substantive question from pesky reporters who privately pegged him the most disengaged President in memory. Even his wife had to bail him out from time to time.
When reporters asked him one day at his ranch about the lack of progress on arms control deals with the Soviets, he went blank. "Doing the best we can," Nancy stage-whispered. "We're doing the best we can," Reagan piped up.
Reagan had a degree in economics, but his inattention to detail prompted some legendary gaffes. As senior aides listened in pained horror, he once explained how nuclear missiles could be recalled from their targets after launch. He referred to the president of Liberia, Samuel Doe, as "Chairman Moe" and greeted his own housing secretary as "Mr. Mayor." At a state dinner in Brazil, he drank a toast to Bolivia.
In one of his ubiquitous Saturday radio addresses to the nation, he called Italy a "worm friend" of the U.S. Retainers denied it to the bitter end, but he was reliably known to nod off in meetings. Even one of his cabinet officers good-naturedly observed that whenever you met with the boss after 6 p.m. in the family quarters, most likely he'd be wearing pajamas.
At a reporters' dinner in 1982, Reagan was so tuned out that Nancy Reagan had to rouse him: "Daddy, Daddy," said the loving wife he called Mommy, "they're talking to you."
Nevertheless, Reagan made it work through the sheer force of his pleasing personality, his actor's sense of a good scene, the great fortune of following Carter's failed presidency and a Rooseveltian flair for communication on a grand scale. There was something about Reagan that connected with people. Even his adversaries confessed to liking the man.
More to the point, they feared him; his personal rapport with the voters was so strong in the glory days of 1981 and 1982 that scores of hostile legislators held their noses and voted for his tax cuts and other pet legislation.
"I don't like what he stands for," a congressman once lamented after voting for Reagan's budget cuts. "But the guy is 10 points more popular in my district than I am. I can't risk voting against him."
His self-deprecating humor also was a powerful asset in solidifying his sway with the voters. Unlike some predecessors, Reagan seldom missed a chance to poke fun at himself.
"Say," he chuckled to senior aides in January of his last year in office, before his diagnosis, "do you know one of the benefits of having Alzheimer's disease? You get to meet new friends every day." It was just a one-liner, a cheerful self-mocking bow to all those critics who chided him for not always being tuned in. But it haunted every staffer who had heard Reagan deliver it after the ex-President was diagnosed with the disease in 1994.
His friends still speculate as to when Reagan first showed symptoms. But there were some signs not long after he had left office. In the fall of 1989, a reporter who had covered all eight years of his presidency was ushered into Reagan's penthouse office suite in Los Angeles' Century City for a courtesy call. Reagan went blank. "Hello," he said, greeting the visitor without a clue to the person's identity.
As his condition worsened, even some of his dearest pals stopped visiting. When it was suggested to one of them that maybe the Old Man needed his friends now more than ever, the longtime confidant snapped: "You don't understand. The Ronald Reagan I know and admire was always larger than life. I can't bear to see him this way anymore. It's just too goddamn hard."
The strength of America's affection for Reagan was such that it seemed to forgive him everything — a mediocre second term, a tin ear about civil rights and social justice, his indifference to the ethical lapses of his underlings, his lip service to the environment, even the blissful ignorance of his wife's machinations to get rid of staffers she didn't like and control his travel schedule.
When the Iran-Contra affair erupted in the fall of 1986, the American people overwhelmingly concluded that their President was lying about what he knew and when he knew it — and continued to like him anyway.
To some of his aides, Reagan forged an unshakable bond with the American people during his convalescence from John Hinckley's assassination attempt in 1981. His pluckiness in the face of death ("Honey, I forgot to duck," he told his wife after being shot) convinced the electorate that they just plain liked the guy, and as a result, the honeymoon never quite ended.
Whatever the alchemy, Reagan left office at age 77 as the most popular President since John F. Kennedy and arguably the most successful since Franklin D. Roosevelt. His homespun style and relentless optimism restored a measure of majesty to the Oval Office, and his conservative appointments to the Supreme Court shaped American life well into the new century.
One old friend liked to observe that whenever Reagan was faced with an especially difficult decision, he'd quietly ask himself what John Wayne would do in a similar circumstance. For a country that reveres its heroes, perhaps not even Duke Wayne could have played the presidency like Dutch Reagan. It was, as a biographer once noted, the Role of a Lifetime.
Editor's note: Thomas M. DeFrank covered Ronald Reagan's presidency from 1981 to 1989.
Ping
The machinations of Iran-Contra-Mena and the trail of bodies left in it's wake...as well as the promotion of the worst president America has ever known...were undoubtedly done without President Reagan's knowledge or permission...
imo
bttt
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