Like most successful politicians,
Ronald Reagan was something of an
enigma. True, he was never so universally beloved
a figure as conservative
eulogists would have us believe. During Reagan's
second term, in fact, his
approval ratings were consistently lower than
Bill Clinton's even after the
Lewinsky fiasco. The Iran-Contra scandal ("mistakes
were made") took
care of that. But he never generated much personal
vitriol either.
Even to rivals, Reagan was hard to
dislike. Democratic majority leader
Tip O'Neill found his ignorance of public policy
flabbergasting, but
privately they got along fine. He opened his
1980 campaign in Philadelphia,
Miss., site of notorious racist murders during
the Civil Rights era, with a
speech calculated to make him the White Man's
candidate. Yet he harbored
no personal bigotry. As president, he ignored
the AIDS epidemic, yet like
most actors, had gay friends.
Reagan played the role of president
like the dad in a Fifties sitcom: an
affable, optimistic fellow with a twinkle in
his eye, and old-fashioned
Midwestern rectitude. He seemed a throwback to
a simpler America that
really never existed. When Reagan put on cowboy
garb, he rode horses,
not golf carts. He dyed his hair, yet was considered
manly.
Reagan spent World War II making
B movies and chasing starlets in
Hollywood, something for which many contemporaries
resented even John Wayne.
Yet when he ran for president in 1980, Vietnam
was behind us, and so was the
stigma of avoiding military service--at least
for Republicans. A little
misty-eyed flag-waving went a long way.
A serene fantasist, Reagan often
confused movies with reality. He told
scripted tales about pilots declaiming patriotically
as shot-up bombers
careened toward the sea. He once falsely claimed
to have been among American
soldiers who liberated German death camps in
1945, a life-changing horror to
them, a self-aggrandizing fable to "The Great
Communicator."
Yet for all his charm, Reagan's biographers
found him opaque and
passionless. His children thought him distant
and disengaged. He once
famously introduced himself to his own son, whom
he didn't recognize,
at the lad's high school graduation. Yet he was
uxorious to a fault, a great
lover of his second wife Nancy--she of the $5000
gowns and White House
astrologer, a grasping woman, ennobled by love.
Insofar as Reagan was religious,
his was a rich man's God. If he flirted
with creationism and "End Times" humbug, it was
partly the melodrama that
pleased him, partly political opportunism, and
partly indifference. Reagan
attended religious services sporadically; handsome,
healthy, and lucky, he
appeared to approve of God insofar as God approved
of him.
By 1984, the Alzhiemer's disease
that killed him was, in retrospect,
already apparent. Although he won a landslide
victory, Reagan was barely
coherent in debates with Democrat Walter Mondale.
In his book "Firewall,"
Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh
wrote that while the
president wasn't blameless in the illegal, madcap
scheme to sell missiles to
Iranian hostage-takers and pass the profits to
the Nicaraguan junta, he was
convinced that Reagan had forgotten everything
he'd ever known about it.
So how did he retain popularity?
Three reasons: A TV professional, his
onscreen persona hypnotized millions. My parents
became lukewarm Reagan
Democrats. A union member, my mother could never
believe that a regular
fellow like Reagan would do damage to her interests.
Second, the same
tycoon-funded, conservative commentariat that
now seeks to enshrine this
amiable second-rater on Mt. Rushmore was just
then emerging into prominence.
Mostly, however, Reagan stayed popular
because he never enacted many of
his Big Ideas, either in domestic or foreign
policy. There was no "Reagan
Revolution." He took office vowing to slash the
bureaucracy. But federal
spending actually grew by almost 25 percent during
his two terms; the
federal civilian work force increased from 2.8
to 3 million.(It shrunk to
2.68 million under Clinton.)
Basically, Reagan created a Keynesian
economic boom through debt-financed
government make-work schemes--mainly superfluous
nuclear weapons, redundant
ICBMs, and make-believe missile shields. The
national debt tripled on his watch,
even though the Democratic Congress never once
spent quite as much as the
White House requested.
Vowing to slash entitlements--Medicare,
Medicaid and Social Security--Reagan
never seriously tried. Indeed his 1983 Social
Security commission saved the
program for the forseeable future. Only now is
President Bush using workers'
payroll taxes to fund millionaires' income tax
cuts.
Likewise in foreign policy, Reagan
was mostly talk. He briefly took sides
in a Lebanese civil war in 1982, but hastily
withdrew after terrorists killed
241 Marines. He then invaded Grenada, a Carribean
island not much bigger
than Disneyland. What credit he deserves for
the Berlin Wall coming down in
1989, isn’t so much for Reagan's saber-rattling
as his 1987 nuclear weapons
treaty with Mikhail Gorbachev, strengthening
the reformist leader's hand by
easing Stalinist paranoia about U.S intentions--a
masterstroke for which
conservative ideologues give him no credit.