Postscript June 28, 2004 Issue
The Unknowable
Ronald Reagan’s amazing, mysterious life.
By Edmund Morris
There
they lie in their guttered drawers, projecting from the rosewood desk I
had specially made for them: four yards of cards, each eight inches
wide, five inches tall, most of them with his initials handwritten,
headline style, in the top left-hand corner, from “rr’s birth zodiac—feb. 6, 1911” to “rr dies of pneumonia—june 5, 2004.”
In between these two extremes, some eighteen thousand cards document
whatever I was able to find out about thirty-four thousand of Ronald
Reagan’s days. Which leaves sixteen thousand days unaccounted for. Lost
leaves. “The leavings of a life,” as D. H. Lawrence might say.
I
once planned to show Reagan this card file, just to see him react as
drawer after drawer rolled out yard by yard, green tabs demarcating his
years, yellow tabs his careers, blue tabs his triumphs and
disappointments. He could have looked down, as it were, on the
topography of his biography, and seen the shoe salesman’s son moving
from town to town across northern Illinois, in the teens of the last
century; the adolescent achieving some sort of stability at Dixon High
School in 1924; the Eureka College student and summer lifeguard through
1933; then, successively—each divider spaced farther from the next, as
he grew in worldly importance—the Des Moines sportscaster and ardent New
Dealer; the Hollywood film star; the cavalry officer and Air Corps
adjutant; the postwar union leader and anti-Communist; the television
host and corporate spokesman for General Electric; the governor of
California, 1967-75; the twice-defeated, ultimately successful candidate
for his party’s Presidential nomination; and, last, the septuagenarian
statesman, so prodigiously carded that the nine tabs “1981” through
“1989” stand isolated like stumps in snow.He never visited my study, however, and on reflection I am glad he did not, because he might have been disturbed to see how far he had come in nearly eighty years, and how few more cards he was likely to generate after leaving the White House. Besides, I would have had to keep my forearm over a file more than a foot long, practically bristling with tabs descriptive of “rr the man.” Now that the man is no more, and subject to the soft focus of sentimental recall, a riffle through some of these tabs might help restore his image in all its color and complexity.
The first
subsection deals with Ronald Reagan’s body. In 1988, at seventy-seven
years of age, the President stood six feet one and weighed a hundred and
ninety pounds, none of it flab. He boasted that any punch aimed at his
abdomen would be jarringly repulsed. After a lifetime of working out
with wheels and bars, he had broadened his chest to a formidably walled
cavern forty-four inches in circumference. He was a natural athlete,
with a peculiarly graceful Algonquin gait that brought him into rooms
almost soundlessly. No matter how fast he moved (that big body could
turn on a dime), he was always balanced.
One
recalls how elegantly he choreographed Mikhail Gorbachev up the steps at
the 1985 Geneva summit: an arabesque of dark blue flowing around
awkward gray. Reagan loved to swim, ride, and foxtrot. (Doris Day
remembers him as “the only man I ever knew who really liked to dance.”)
Eleven weeks after nearly dying in the assassination attempt of 1981, he
climbed onto the springboard at the Camp David swimming pool and threw a
perfect half pike before anybody could protest.Gorbachev once remarked on Reagan’s “balance” to me in an interview. But he used the Russian word ravnovesie in its wider sense, of psychological equilibrium. The President’s poised body and smooth yet inexorable motion telegraphed a larger force that came of a lifetime of no self-doubt (except for two years of despair in 1948-49, after Jane Wyman, his first wife, left him for boring her). Reagan redux did not care whom he bored, as long as nobody tried to stop him. His famous anecdotes, recounted with a speed and economy that were the verbal equivalent of balance, were persuasive on the first, and even the fourth, telling. But when you heard them for the fourteenth, or the fortieth, time, always with exactly the same inflections and chuckles and glances, you realized that he was a bore in the sense that a combine harvester is boring: its only purpose is to bear down upon and thresh whatever grain lies in its path. Reagan used homilies to harvest people.
He was always meticulously dressed in tailored suits and handmade shoes and boots. But he was neither a dandy nor a spendthrift. In 1976, he still stepped out in a pair of high-cut, big-tongued alligator pumps that predated the Cold War: “Do you realize what I paid for these thirty years ago?” His personal taste never advanced beyond the first affectations of the nouveau riche. Hence the Corum twenty-dollar-face wristwatch, the Countess Mara ties, the Glen checks too large or too pale, and a weekend tartan blazer that was, in Bertie Wooster’s phrase, “rather sudden, till you got used to it.” Yet Reagan avoided vulgarity, because he sported such things without self-consciousness. And he wore the plainer suits that rotated through his wardrobe just as unpretentiously. No man ever looked better in navy blue, or black tie.
On a card inscribed “alcohol”—his father’s cross—appears the comment of an old Hollywood friend: “Ronnie never had a booze problem, but once every coupla years, he wasn’t averse to a lot of drink. Its only effect was to make him more genial.” His face would flush after a mere half glass of Pinot Noir, giving rise to repeated rumors that he used rouge.
Actually, Reagan never required makeup, even when he was a movie actor. He didn’t sweat under hot lights: he basked in them. A young photographer who did a cover portrait of him in 1984 for Fortune told me, “When I walked into the Oval Office, I thought my career was made. He was just back from a long campaign swing, and looked terrible, all drained and lined. I hit him with every harsh spot I had, and etched out those wrinkles, figuring I’d do what Richard Avedon did to Dottie Parker. Know what? When my contacts came back from the darkroom, the old bastard looked like a million bucks. Taught me a real lesson. Ronald Reagan wasn’t just born for the camera. There’s something about him that film likes.”
Several
of my cards itemize the President’s deafness. People who sat to his
right imagined that they were privileged. In fact, he heard nothing on
that side, having blown an eardrum during a shoot-out scene in one of
his old movies. His left ear was not much better, so he relied
increasingly on hearing aids, although their distortion pained him. One
learned not to sneeze in his presence. When the room was crowded and
voice levels rose, he would furtively switch off his sound box. I could
tell from a slight frown in his gaze that he was lip-reading.
The
quietness that insulated him was accentuated by severe myopia. As a
boy, “Dutch” Reagan assumed that nature was a blur. Not until he put on
his mother’s spectacles, around the age of thirteen, did he perceive the
world in all its sharp-edged intricacy. He did not find it
disorienting, as somebody who had been blind from birth might. Perhaps
his later, Rothko-like preference for large, luminous policy blocks (as
opposed to, say, Bill Clinton’s fly’s-eye view of government as a
multifacetted montage, endlessly adjustable) derived from his unfocussed
childhood.Or perhaps the novelist Ray Bradbury, who also grew up four-eyed in small-town Illinois, has a more informed theory. “I often wonder whether or not you become myopic for a physical reason of not wanting to face the world,” Bradbury says in an oral history. Like Dutch, he competed with a popular, extrovert elder brother by “making happy things for myself and creating new images of the world for myself.” Reagan was not introverted, yet from infancy he had the same kind of “happy” self-centeredness that Bradbury speaks of, the same need to inhabit an imaginative construct in which outside reality was refracted, or reordered, to his liking. “I was completely surrounded by a wall of light,” Reagan wrote of his first venture onto a movie set. It was clear that the sensation was agreeable.
More so, one is tempted to say, than sex, where self-centeredness is definitely not appreciated by other parties. I never accumulated much documentation on Reagan’s libido, since he was of that generation which kept such matters private. However, I did card a series of mostly repetitive observations by former girlfriends. The consensus is that although “Ronnie” was virile and attractive in a tanned-ranchman sort of way, his advances were unexciting. “Too nice, too easily pushed off,” one old torch singer said, “and too damn philosophical about it afterward. He didn’t have that, uh, slight menace that gives a girl a thrill.” A group of women who knew him socially as President blamed his tepid sex appeal on a lack of “focus”—the word recurs—“as though we didn’t interest him as individuals.”
Reagan needed eight regular hours of sleep—“nine if I can get it.” His longtime aide Michael Deaver was amazed to find him beneath a pile of bedclothes at nine o’clock on the morning of his first Inauguration. Although he sometimes had to recite Robert Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” to conquer insomnia, his sleep was cataleptic. Nancy Reagan was not with him the night a hurricane hit the White House in 1985, so he slumbered right through, and was puzzled to find both doors of their bedroom suite blown open the next morning. Rumors of the President nodding off during meetings were unfounded: he never napped during the day. But this did not stop him joking that his Cabinet chair should be labelled “Reagan Slept Here.”
I have eight
cards devoted to that beautiful voice, a melodious baritone husked with
silky higher frequencies. It was what encouraged Max Arnow, the casting
director of Warner Bros., to award Reagan a screen contract, in 1937.
His film début, in “Love Is on the Air,” called for him to spend plenty
of time soliloquizing into microphones. Fan-mail enthusiasm was
immediate and strong (“Dear Ronnie, I am in love with your voice, it is
so soothing”; “Dear Mr. Reagan, you have the most wonderful voice in
pictures”). In those days, the voice was lighter and faster: his labial
dexterity was such that he had to train himself to speak more slowly,
lest his mouth wreathe on camera, like Mister Ed’s. In later years, his
voice acquired more weight and an enchanting hesitancy that disguised
the banality of his conversation.
Ronald
Reagan is inaccurately remembered as a warm man, and I think the voice
(which he lubricated with hot lemon water) had much to do with it. One
would have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt to find a President as
able to convey by auditory means alone such reassurance that better
times were coming and the nation’s security was guaranteed. Merely by
breathing, “My fellow-Americans,” he made his listener trust him.All the other rhetorical arts—rhythm, gesture, timing, comedy, pathos—were at his instant command. Gerald Ford, just after accepting the G.O.P. Presidential nomination in 1976, made the mistake of inviting Reagan to say “a few words” to the delegates, and stood gray-faced as they came to the evident conclusion that they had chosen the wrong man. Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush could not emulate Reagan’s kindly chuckle (always deployed when he was cornered) or his ability to tear up at the right moment. Yet, for all their emotional awkwardness, one cannot imagine either of them ignoring their first grandchild, as Reagan did for two years, or walking away from the brain-damaged James Brady with nothing more than a cheerful “Hi, Jim.”
Children respond to sincerity rather than to smoothness, and, having watched all the above Presidents address young audiences, I can report that Reagan was distinctly the least successful. He talked just as he did to adults, which is to say, with an eye contact that took in the whole room rather than its individual parts, with a delivery precisely directed to the farthest television camera, and with benign indifference to whether any child understood him, as long as the applause was general.
The
second subsection of my biographical file—about two hundred and forty
cards—deals with Ronald Reagan’s character, and begins with “advisability.”
The President had a trusting credulity that was part of his charm: if a
proposal was put to him with enough conviction, he not only registered
it but recorded it in his memory, which was both photographic and
phonographic. He was not, however, malleable; those who sought to advise
him had to come from an approved ideological quarter. “I want to get
expertise from people in various fields,” he wrote in 1985, “but I
haven’t changed my views since I’ve been here.”
The
most famous example of Reagan’s advisability was his acceptance of
Edward Teller’s concept of the Strategic Defense Initiative, in
September of 1982. Dr. Teller represented all that the President admired
in a scientist, being distinguished, individualistic, sonorously spoken
(Max Arnow would have loved the Hungarian consonants), and short on
academic circumspection. For half an hour, Teller deployed X-ray lasers
all over the Oval Office, reducing hundreds of incoming Soviet missiles
to radioactive chaff, while Reagan, gazing up ecstatically, saw a
crystal shield covering the Last Best Hope of Man. He saw it so whole
and perfect that Gorbachev, three years later, was powerless to convince
him that the S.D.I. would militarize space. Nor could Gorbachev accept
that Reagan was serious in wanting him to build a space shield, too,
with American technology if necessary. Mutually assured destruction was a
threat any Slav could understand. Mutually assured protection was a notion so pea-brained one could only slam down one’s pencil and stare at the “dinosaur”—Gorbachev’s word—who proposed it.But Reagan stared back, during the longest silence that Secretary of State Shultz had ever experienced at a negotiating table. It was ten minutes past noon, Swiss time, on November 20, 1985: the key moment in forty years of Cold War brinkmanship. “I regret you cannot see it our way,” Gorbachev said at last, confounded as much by the President’s power of belief as by his lack of hostility.
A beaming bonhomie was one of the most attractive things about Ronald Reagan. No matter how troubled he might be by a throbbing prostate, or by intelligence that a Libyan hit squad was after him, he eschewed angst and aggression. I have only two records of his becoming physically violent: once in 1943, when a Hollywood drunk made an anti-Semitic remark to his face, and again in 1973, when Michael Deaver criticized his loyalty toward the disgraced Spiro Agnew. Even then, Reagan contented himself with throwing a heavy bunch of keys at Deaver’s breastbone. He had moral reasons to despise Jack Warner and Armand Hammer and Ferdinand Marcos, but couldn’t summon up the necessary malice. His glow, though, was oddly neutral. A man who professes to like everybody is by definition a man who cares for nobody in particular.
No fewer than twenty-nine of my cards document Reagan’s detachment. He was at once the most remote and the most accessible of men. Although he revelled in the constant flesh-pressing of the Presidency, and ate up flattery with a spoon, he needed regular spells of “personal time.” Glance through the Oval Office peephole and you would see him happily writing in longhand, always with his tie straight and jacket on, ensconced in an egglike solitude that the curvature of the lens only emphasized.
Adored by so many, he was a man with no real friends. This was not due to any inherent misanthropy. Young Dutch had been as gregarious as any normal football-playing boy at Eureka College. In Des Moines, where he worked as a sportscaster from 1933 to 1937, he ran with a crowd from Drake University, sang barbershop quartet with them, and encouraged his fellow-minstrels to follow him to Los Angeles when he signed his screen contract: “Don’t worry about money, I’ll support you till you find work.” For a year or two, the quartet remained inseparable, but after Reagan married Jane Wyman, in January of 1940, his career burgeoned, and he moved into a different social sphere.
He grew increasingly political during the war, as an Air Corps adjutant in daily touch with Washington, and by 1947, when he assumed the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild, he had become so obsessed with trade unionism and anti-Communism as to lose interest in casual chat. When Wyman divorced him the following year, she cited politics as her co-respondent.
Until he remarried, in 1952, earnest, bespectacled Ronnie was said to be “best friends” with William Holden, and after that with Robert Taylor. But neither man was more than a barbecue buddy. Hundreds of political supporters and associates claimed to be close to him when he was governor of California and thousands during his Presidency. Former Senator Paul Laxalt spoke for all of them when he said, “I guess I know Ronald Reagan as well as anybody. Of course, we never talk about anything personal.”
Sooner or later, every would-be intimate (including his four children, Maureen, Michael, Patti, and Ron) discovered that the only human being Reagan truly cared about (after his mother died) was Nancy. For Laxalt, disillusionment came when the President called to thank him for his campaign help in 1984, only to pause in midsentence and audibly turn over a page of typescript. For William F. Buckley, Jr., it was when Reagan showed polite relief at his inability to accept an offer of hospitality. For Michael Reagan, it was the high-school graduation day his father greeted him with “My name is Ronald Reagan. What’s yours?”
Patti Davis, Reagan’s younger daughter, writes in her 1992 autobiography:
Often, I’d come into a room and he’d look up from his notecards as though he wasn’t sure who I was. Ron would race up to him, small and brimming with a child’s enthusiasm, and I’d see the same bewildered look in my father’s eyes, like he had to remind himself who Ron was. . . . I sometimes felt like reminding him that Maureen was his daughter, too, not just someone with similar political philosophies.Reagan’s scrupulously kept Presidential diary is remarkable for a near-total lack of interest in people as individuals. In all its half million or so words, I did not find any affectionate remark about his children. He conscientiously names every visitor to the Oval Office, having a printed schedule to refer to, but in conversation he tended to rely on pronouns. Nor did he pay much attention to faces. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Ambassador,” he greeted Denis Healey, the former Defense Minister of Great Britain, while the real British Ambassador stood by. “But I’ve already met him,” his Excellency complained, “eleven times.”
Nancy Reagan conceded that there were “parts of Ronnie” that he kept to himself. I discovered, interviewing her, that she had little clue to how his mind worked—how he memorized scripts, pondered decisions, intuited political opportunities. He trusted her superior judgment of people but hardly ever asked her political advice; he did not even consult her about running for the Presidency. His locker-room side (which could be jovially obscene) was foreign to her, as was the Practical Christian and the imaginative dreamer who wanders through some unpublished short stories he wrote in college.
I
hesitate to blaspheme against one of the most celebrated amours in
White House history, but the way Reagan advertised his uxoriousness—the
fulsome toasts and tributes, the hand-holding, the on-camera
kisses—always struck me as excessive. There was something guilty about
his superimposition of an enormous valentine card, all ribbons and
bluebirds, over the stark black-and-white of his divorce decree from
Jane Wyman. Possibly he was embarrassed by the many similarities between
his two wives. Both had been wide-eyed, street-smart, scorchingly
ambitious starlets, abandoned by their fathers in infancy, convinced of
the world’s treachery, drawn to Reagan as a haven of goodness and
strength, then frustrated to the point of despair by his reluctance to
propose.
The difference with Nancy was that her
ambition concerned only him: she wanted nothing for herself except the
satisfaction of making him powerful. She had taken him on, moreover,
when his acting career was in rapid decline, and when his brilliant
future as a politician could hardly have been predicted. Yet she never
flinched in her steely belief that he would recover and prevail. Even
when he was forced to do variety in Vegas for money, early in 1954, she
was there every night at a front table, giving him the luminous “look”
that bolstered his self-respect.Within a few months, Ronald Reagan was professionally reborn, as the host of “General Electric Theatre.” He became a star of the corporate lecture circuit, honing his oratory into “The Speech,” a statement of the free-market conservative principles that would sustain him ideologically for the rest of his life. Nancy’s stepfather, Dr. Loyal Davis, one of the most rock-ribbed reactionaries in the American Medical Association, has often been blamed for her husband’s swing to the right. But the truth is that Reagan lost his New Deal liberalism immediately after the Second World War, when he was targeted by Communist-controlled crafts unions as a lackey of studio management. He was a conservative Democrat long before he remarried.
By the early nineteen-sixties, he was a confirmed Eisenhower Republican, rich, well connected, and a political force strong enough to be courted by Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater. The more widely he travelled as campaigner and corporate spokesman, the more joyously he returned to his showplace house in Pacific Palisades, red-draped, mother-dominated, thrumming with appliances supplied free by his parent company. It was a kind of womb, to which he became almost pathologically attached. This ode to a shag rug was written by Reagan in 1961:
Across from where I sit . . . I can see certain paths pressed into the pile of the carpet . . . paths leading to a chair (big footprints), to a piano (feminine nine-year-old-size prints), to a corner handy for hiding (very small prints) and of course narrow side paths (middle-size prints) . . . to her chair. To me, these middle-size prints act as guy wires and girders holding all the rest together. I am glad that the carpet sweeper can never erase them.Much as he embraced domesticity, however, he relied on Nancy to relieve him of its petty nuisances, such as school and servant problems, and finding a home for his mentally ailing mother while he was out of town. She made her own and Jane Wyman’s children understand that although Dad was available for certain carefully scheduled hours of face time, in the pool or on horseback, he was not to be burdened with emotional demands. He had more important things than mere fatherhood on his mind: the governorship of California, for a start.
In grateful compensation, Reagan refused to believe any unsettling news about his wife—her parsimony, her pill dependencies, her violent disciplining of Patti, her middle-aged infatuation with Frank Sinatra. “I want you to go away and think carefully about what you have just said,” he reproved a gubernatorial aide, who worried that Nancy’s verbal abuse of staffers might become a news story. “My Nancy doesn’t behave like that.”
There is no doubt that she loved him for better and for worse, as her care of him in his last years has shown. Neither was there any equivocation in his love for her, as far as it went. But my impression is that it stopped at the frontier of his own comfort. One can read right through “I Love You, Ronnie,” the volume of love letters published by Nancy in 2000, without finding a single perceptive remark about her. The countless references to “Mommie” in the Presidential diaries are expressed almost entirely in terms of personal need. During her rare absences from the White House, his complaints of being “lonely” and “lonesome” echo with foghorn-like regularity. And this: “Why am I so scared always when she leaves? . . . I do an awful lot of praying until she returns.” It never occurs to him that she might be lonely, too, or bereaved or frightened, that she has any identity other than—by extension—his own.
Well, if love is the satisfaction of mutual needs, they got what they wanted. I stood behind them in church on May 10, 1992, just before Alzheimer’s began to separate him from her. They held the same hymnbook with their outer arms, while the inner ones circled in an embrace, and their voices blended as they sang “Blest Be the Tie That Binds.”
Ronald
Reagan’s air of gentleness was such that few people noticed, or could
believe they were noticing, that he had little private empathy with
them. In November of 1988, a delegation of Bangladeshis visited the Oval
Office to tell him about the catastrophic effects of the Burhi Ganga
floods. After a few minutes, their spokesman stopped, disconcerted by
the President’s dreamy smile. “You know,” Reagan said, “I used to work
as a lifeguard at Lowell Park beach, on the Rock River in Illinois, and
when it rained upstate you wouldn’t believe the trees and trash, and so
forth, that used to come down.”
Yet he could be
movingly sincere when he was required to emote in public. To question
his identity with “the boys of Pointe du Hoc,” or the nameless dead of
Bergen-Belsen, would be to misunderstand his essentially thespian
nature. Actors are not like you or me: their real world, where they
really feel, is onstage.Reagan in any case was more than just an actor. He was a statesman, unaccustomed to encountering any will stronger than his own, and his detachment was a necessary armor against the emotional demands that responsibility attaches to power. All leaders have to sheathe themselves, or they cannot function. André Malraux’s first impression of Charles de Gaulle is equally applicable to Ronald Reagan:
[One felt] a remoteness, all the more curious because it appeared not only between himself and his interlocutor but between what he said and what he was. . . . He established with the person he was talking to a very powerful contact, which seemed inexplicable when one had left him. A contact above all due to a feeling of having come up against a total personality.Was Reagan familiar with de Gaulle’s leadership maxim, “Il faut cultiver le mystère”? Probably not, but he didn’t have to be: the mystery was already there. I have a whole sheaf of “enigma” cards, wherein various interviewees speculate on how much the President knew, or didn’t know, about what they were trying to tell him. If he was as disengaged as he often seemed, doodling absent-mindedly during long presentations, how did he, time and again, manage to pose exactly the kind of simple hypothesis that showed the presenter to be confused? Was he sending a subtle message, when the doodle curved into the hindquarters of a horse?
Which brings me to the cards I most enjoyed compiling—those that caught Reagan’s humor. Most of his very funny stories (told with a verbal economy and cadence that would tax any prose stylist) were mentally prerecorded and played back at will. As a young actor in the Warner Bros. commissary, he used to sit at the “fast” Jewish table in order to study, and eventually compete with, the shtick of such motormouths as George Burns, Jack Benny, and the Epstein brothers. Although not naturally a wit, he was capable of dry riposte, as in the crack about Archbishop Desmond Tutu that George H. W. Bush repeated the other day at the Washington National Cathedral, convulsing the congregation.
En route back to Washington on Air Force One, Reagan twinklingly joined his aides in the main cabin. “Well,” he said, “that’s the first time I’ve flown to New York in formal attire to be told I was a piece of shit.”
Reagan’s most
regrettable characteristic in later years was his incuriosity,
compounded, as it was, by a refusal to be budged from any shibboleth
that suited him. He had been quite the opposite as a young man, avid to
learn what he could about world affairs. He passionately espoused the
New Deal, and by 1938 he had swung so far toward the idealistic left
that he tried to join the Hollywood Communist Party. He was quickly
rejected, on the shrewd ground that he was not Party material (too
garrulous, too patriotic). During the Second World War, he became
addicted to the Reader’s Digest—so much so that he seemed to
memorize every issue as soon as it hit the stands. Reagan has been
rightly mocked for the condensed, packaged quality this gave to his
thought, but at least until he left the employ of General Electric, in
1962, he was able to talk interestingly about subjects other than
politics. From then on, all his considerable intelligence focussed on
conservative doctrine, and his general knowledge atrophied.
As
a result, he relied more and more on memories of past reading, and
began to commit the gaffes that would bedevil all his political
campaigns. By the time he became President, his ignorance had attained a
kind of comic poignancy. He thought “Camus” rhymed with “famous” and
that trees caused acid rain. He had never heard of “Our Town,” “The
Magic Mountain,” “Carmen,” or “Blow-Up.” The names Goethe, Guevara,
Disraeli, Knopf, Schumann, Fellini, Hockney, Piaf, and Prospero rang no
bell. When I mentioned the Suez Canal, he shook his head sorrowfully and
told me that it had been a mistake to give it back to the Panamanians.His mind, if not protean, could nevertheless be described as Procrustean, in the scientist Frederick Turner’s definition:
[Such an intelligence] reduces the information it gets from the outside world to its own categories, and accepts reality’s answers only if they directly address its own set of questions. . . . It insists on certainty and unambiguity, and so is at war with the probabilistic and indeterminate nature of the most primitive and archaic components of the universe.As anyone can see who consults Ronald Reagan’s disciplined, dogged manuscripts, he needed to impose order on chaos. He did not like to be surprised, or hustled; he liked punctuality, symmetry, sureness. Every item on his schedule was crossed off upon completion, with a triumphant arrow pointing down to the next. When travelling, he packed his own clothes, synchronizing them with his itinerary, so that each change would suit the time, occasion, and climate stops on tour. He even tried to reorder nature at Rancho del Cielo, his mountain retreat above Santa Barbara, pruning every thicket of brush, every dead madrona branch, until the skyline was as sharp as a sketch by Grant Wood.
Two sets of cards tabbed “rr: paradox” and “rr: passivity”
might be combined in my drawer, were they not already alphabetical
neighbors. It is indeed paradoxical that this most passive of Presidents
should have been so active in bringing about the collapse of Soviet
Communism. Ronald Reagan was not an initiator; he never called a meeting
or drafted a new policy or hired or fired, unless somebody suggested
it. He raised no objection when his first chief of staff and his
Treasury Secretary swapped jobs. Even his angriest phone call to a
foreign leader (Israel’s Menachem Begin, during Israel’s invasion of
Lebanon in 1982) had to be prompted by Michael Deaver. Happy and
fulfilled inside his Oval O—“I’ve got the biggest theatre in the world,
right here,” he said, grinning at me—he paid no attention to noises off:
the furious arguments of Alexander Haig and Caspar Weinberger, David
Stockman’s whines and Donald Regan’s roars, the whisperings of Oliver
North and John Poindexter. Even when truly disturbing sounds invaded his
tranquillity—the blowing up of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, the
outcry of Jews over the Bitburg affair, the explosion of the
Challenger—he seemed oddly equable, although in each case he performed a
moving ceremony of grief.
One sound, however,
did shake his complacency. It was the pop-popping of John Hinckley,
Jr.,’s .22-calibre pistol outside the Washington Hilton Hotel on March
30, 1981. Since Reagan nearly died in that attack, so early in his
Presidency, we can credit the sincerity of his written vow: “Whatever
happens now I owe my life to God and will try to serve him in every way I
can.”Nothing afterward, not even the debacle of Iran-Contra, deflected him from what he was convinced was his double mission: at home, to restore the American entrepreneurial spirit after fifty years of federal paternalism; abroad, to display such a resolute contempt for Marxism-Leninism that it would follow Nazism onto “the ash-heap of history.” Both conceits were perceived as laughably naïve in 1981, at least in those Chardonnay-fragrant areas of Manhattan and Marin County where political issues are always described as “complex.” Three years later, the first dream came true in a landslide reëlection, amid such a blizzard of red-white-and-blue as had not been seen across America since V-J Day. And after five years more—sadly, a little too late for Reagan to see it as President—the “evil empire” began to self-destruct, just as he had said it would.
History already shows that Reagan’s political instincts were astute and his sense of the future prophetic. The Berlin Wall, which he so memorably described as “ugly as the idea behind it,” is reduced to a few chips in museums. Teen-agers stroll hand in hand where guard dogs used to run. Cybercafés beep and brew in downtown Moscow and Beijing. Free-enterprise capitalism is now the norm of most economies, and free speech floods the Internet.
We became so positive a society under Ronald Reagan that we forget how low our national morale had sunk before he raised his right hand on January 20, 1981, and, by plain force of character, reinvested the Presidency with authority and dignity. In recent years, we have seen the office belittled again, but that is the way with democracy and its cycles: big men are followed by small; power gives way to dereliction. The Republic survives, and for as long as it survives I think Reagan will be remembered, with Truman and Jackson, as one of the great populist Presidents, an instinctual leader who, in body and mind, represented the better temper of his times.
In one of my last interviews with him, I tried out my theory that he “thought with his hips,” as follows:
Q: Mr. President, do you realize that you had Einstein all figured out at age eighteen?My Relativitätstheorie had understandably not impressed him, but I felt I’d at least touched on a subject that penetrated his shy pride. Long after the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, when he could not understand the simplest question or recognize photographs of himself as President, he would still show visitors a watercolor of Lowell Park beach on the wall of his office. “I was . . . uh, a lifeguard . . . there . . . uh . . . I saved seventy-seven lives!” Then words would fail him, and he would gaze at the picture with his glossy head cocked, looking out beyond the swimming line to where the river ran strong. ♦
A: Huh?
Q: There you were, a summer lifeguard on the Rock River, swaying every day in your high chair on the diving raft. Somebody starts to drown in midstream. You throw down your glasses—everything’s a blur—you dive into the moving water—you swim, not to where the drowning person is, but where he’ll be by the time you intersect his trajectory. You think that you’re moving in a straight line. But actually you’re describing a parabola, because the river’s got you too. Your curve becomes his curve; you grab him, swing him around, and start heading back in reverse, not toward the diving platform but upstream, so that by the time you get to shallow water you’ll be back where you started. During all this action, you’re in a state of flux: no fixed point of reference, no sense of gravity. Everything’s relative. . . .
A (Uninterested, interrupting): Yeah, that river sure ran strong. Out there beyond the swimming line.
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