He was a "truly great American," a "towering figure" of our age. And so on and so forth from Margaret Thatcher, Michael Howard, US President George W. Bush and all who scurried to bury former US president Ronald Reagan in an oleaginous ocean of tribute. How deep is that ocean? It's amazing how fast your feet touch rocky bottom.
Reagan, for the moment, has a particular niche in American folklore. He came after poor careworn Jimmy Carter; he was sunshine after rain. He made jokes and read an autocue better than any president before or since. He smiled and aw-shucks'd easily, a man for picket fences and pecan pie, a Frank Capra hero picnicking on the White House lawn. The good times rolled through his eight years of power. And he was that strong guy who "won" the cold war.
Is this enough for towering greatness? Aw shucks! It barely stands straight, let alone tall. There was one hero of Ronnie's two terms, one really strong fellow who held everything together, but his name was Jim Baker, the brilliant political manager and pal of vice president George Bush, who became chief of staff when a crisis of competence threatened everything, when Donald Regan bailed out and the Oval Office turned pear-shaped. James Baker III was, for a while, the best president America never had; and Ronnie, upstairs snoozing or watching TV, was a passenger riding his luck.
There is no point in turning Ronald Reagan into some mythic master now that he's gone. I travelled campaign trails with him and laughed at his jokes. He pressed flesh and political buttons better than most. He was Hollywood on a small-town visit. Maybe, post-Carter, the US psyche did need bathing in such balm for a while. But the reputation that flows from there is hokum squared.
A champion of individual freedom? See how Reagan, the boss of the Screen Actors Guild, kept his head well down when McCarthy started firing poisonous darts. An ideal family man? Only if you like your families dysfunctional (and your Christianity stillborn again). A man of action? When the going got rough in Beirut then (to use the jargon) he cut and ran. A warrior? Only if you reckon invading Grenada was tougher than a friendly soccer match against Iceland. A wizard of detail? He didn't understand the Iran-contra scandal from start to finish: he was a non-plotter who couldn't follow the plot.
Wasn't he, though, a true ideologue of the conservative way? That was a rubbish claim even Thatcher found hard to make with a straight face. Reagan's sunlit years of prosperity were built from the straw of ballooning deficits. Live now, let old George Bush pay later. He believed in tax cuts, but not hard choices. There was no pain to his gain, no structural reform, no reality of change to be battled through. He let others pick up his tabs.
And as for "winning" that last war but two, the cold one before drugs and terrorism -- did Reagan, piling cruise missiles into Europe, dreaming Star Wars satellite dreams of zapping bad hats, truly win anything? Didn't he just watch the Soviet Union self-destruct on his watch? Was Reagan around for the second Prague spring that told the first story of an empire's disintegration? Did he choose the moribund gerontocracy of Leonid Brezhnev?
The plain fact, which nobody discerned, is that everything the West said about unsustainable economic systems and ramshackle bureaucracies was right: the plain fact was that Soviet hegemony couldn't last, and the "cold war" was mostly one of mutual incomprehension. Give Ronnie credit for not dropping the ball near the basket, but don't make him Franklin Roosevelt in the process.
No, the towering lesson of Reagan's tenure was rather different. It was about what the job amounted to and how you needed to do it. Since the Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge disasters decades before, America had expected and wanted more: a Roosevelt to be revered, a Harry Truman to be sustained, an Ike of experience and Kennedy filled with hope, a cute Lyndon Johnson and clever (if tricky) Dicky Nixon. Some of those choices went well and some were lousy, but the hurdle of effort and expertise was set ever higher. Could the system keep on producing?
And then, ambling out of Sacramento as his 70s neared, came Ronnie and Nancy in matching check shirts. Their record may on examination have been scratched and fuzzy, their friends too fat and nest-feathered for comfort. But they talked the talk, seemed to walk the walk, and made the White House manageable again. You didn't need to engage brain if you could hire it for the duration. You didn't need to be bright or brilliant. Aw, shucks! They made George W possible.
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