June 15, 2004, 8:40 a.m.
Talkin’ Reagan

You may well be Reaganed out, and I don't blame you. But we Reagan junkies never tire of talking about the man, thinking about the man — so bear with us. Please bear with me, in this instance.

I hope you have your current issue of NR by now. It is devoted, of course, to the 40th president, who was devoted to our magazine. He read it from its inception, and was schooled by it. He even served on its board of directors. One newspaper headline — concerning RR and NR — read, "A Man and His Magazine."

We have, in our memorial issue, about 20 articles by persons who knew him well, or have a special understanding of him, or both. It is an issue I relish, quite apart from my editorial role in it. It is an issue I would devour if I were just Joe Subscriber (which I have been).

I'm afraid that I myself have a piece in that issue, but I'd like to go on a bit here, with your indulgence. This won't be a traditional Impromptus — no bullet points. I'll just talk for a while (but when do I not?).

I am floating back to the world of 1980. As regular readers know, I grew up in a left-wing environment, and Ronald Reagan's name was mud. Actually, it was sometimes "Ray-gun," which was a real thigh-slapper in this era. (So was "Reaganomics" — before the president's economic program took off. Reagan delighted in saying, "You can tell our program is working, because they don't call it 'Reaganomics' anymore!")

Reagan was, in my milieu, a warmonger, a bigot, an ignoramus — you know, a conservative. He was just a "movie actor," everyone said, a shallow figure with glib charm who somehow conned the public into electing him.

I loved how they called him a "movie actor" — as though he'd stepped right off the Warner Bros. lot into the Oval Office! No two terms as governor of California (a state that, Reagan used to say, would be "the eighth largest economy in the world if it were a separate nation"). No leadership of the SAG. No leadership of an important political movement. Etc.

In a similar way, Republicans used to scoff at Truman as a haberdasher.

I was quite sad to see Jimmy Carter go. (I should say that I was a sophomore in high school at this time.) Dear, sweet, moral, striving President Carter. He and his wife read from the Bible to each other — in Spanish. How could you vote against that! And he cared so very, very much about human rights. He said so (all the time).

After the election, Mrs. Carter explained Reagan's success: "He makes us comfortable with our prejudices." Yeah, that was it.

I remember extremely well the day he was sworn in (release of the hostages aside). He wanted the West Lawn of the Capitol, rather than the traditional East, for the grander view. I thought that was typical: Mr. Stagecraft. And he made the dignitaries wear very, very fancy dress — some congressmen refused to attend, as I recall, because of it. And he gave a simpleminded speech about how government was the problem, not the solution ("simpleminded" according to the prevailing beliefs around me).

The turning point for me came on March 30, 1981 — the day Reagan was shot, along with three others. I followed every moment of that drama, for days — every repeat. Reagan handled the situation with such courage and grace. From then on, you couldn't tell me that he was just an empty B actor. I wouldn't believe it. I wouldn't accept the caricature. I might not have been ready to agree with him, but the knock on Reagan no longer impressed me, if it ever did (totally).

I would say — I remember saying — "I hope that, if a bullet ripped through your chest, you'd handle it with half as much grace" — friendly, ingratiating stuff like that.

Because I respected Reagan — liked him — I was willing to listen to him, and listen I did. I listened to all his critics, too. I read everything. Today, I am a professional journalist — a political journalist, no less (in addition to some other things) — but I don't think I'll ever be as attuned to the news as I was then, during Reagan's presidency (especially the first term). I swear, sometimes I think I know more about the Reagan presidency than I do about the Clinton presidency, or W.'s.

I inhaled every book I could get my hands on. I remember a volume by Larry Leamer called Make-Believe, I think. Even hostile books somehow made me more admiring of Reagan — more defensive about him.

A little memory has swum into mind: I think of August 1981, when he fired the PATCO strikers ("I didn't fire them, they quit!" Reagan would explain — because the air-traffic controllers had pledged not to strike). We were on vacation. A family friend of ours said, "At last someone has stood up to labor!" I was half-amazed: "stand up to labor"? But labor wasn't to be stood up to; Big Business was!

I was most quickly convinced on the subject of Communism. I was, if I may, a natural anti-Communist. Jimmy Carter had proclaimed, ad nauseam, that he was for human rights. His had been a — no, the — human-rights presidency. But what about the millions behind the Iron Curtain (and in China and elsewhere)? Didn't they deserve human rights as much as Chileans, Filipinos, and South Africans? (Those were the approved countries for protest and angst when I was coming of age: Chile, the Philippines, and South Africa.)

So too, I opened my eyes to free-market economics (although you were supposed to call it "trickle-down"). I didn't care a great deal about theory; I cared about what worked. I was struck by the arguments of Charles Murray, author of Losing Ground (and, later, of so much else). He didn't care about saving a dime of federal money. All he cared about was what benefited the poor. For the first time in American life, we had generational poverty — sons and daughters as poor as their fathers and mothers; grandsons and granddaughters as poor as their grandfathers and grandmothers. The welfare system, it seemed clear, had a lot to answer for. Ted Kennedy's rhetoric struck me as limp — even desperate.

And how about abortion? I simply could not believe — I don't think I ever could — that abortion was merely a matter of a woman's sovereignty over her own body. I believed in a woman's sovereignty over her own body — but, in the case of a pregnancy, wasn't there another body, another life, that perhaps had rights independent of the mother's? The feminists had a slogan: "A fetus in a woman's womb has no more standing than a hamburger in her stomach." That slogan was repulsive to me.

I remember the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college. I was a camp counselor in Elgin, Ill. Read the Chicago Tribune. There was a haunting case that summer: A man had smothered his infant when the child was 45 minutes old, or something. The babe had been born handicapped. The father was being charged with manslaughter. And yet, the child could have been aborted with no penalty.

As the rap song would say, made you go "hmmm."

Another vignette: Three women to whom I was close were huddled together, oohing and aahing over a sonogram image. (One of the women was pregnant.) As I passed, I chirped, "Don't forget: That's just a meaningless blob of protoplasm." Oh, gosh, were they mad. Livid! (I should have mentioned that all three were proudly "pro-choice.")

(By the way, that's a Gerald R. Ford phrase: "Betty and I are proudly pro-choice!")

Okay, I'm in college now — not now, sadly, but in these autobiographical meanderings. Reagan was hated with an intensity that I am powerless to describe to you. Communist rulers were unquestionably better liked. The late Mao was a special favorite (along with "Fidel," of course, and Comandante Ortega — and Ho). Many pro-Mao posters were around; nothing was pro-Reagan.

I could tell you any number of stories. I'll pick a few.

I had a class in American diplomatic history. On the last day of class — this was '83, probably — the professor — a distinguished historian — noted that the boys at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had moved the big hand of the clock closer to midnight. (Remember how they'd do that?) This professor said that, sorry as he was to deliver the news, he doubted that we'd live into real adulthood — because Reagan's rejection of détente, and general bellicosity, would get the world blown up.

I'm sure that, even now — Cold War over — he has nothing but contempt for Reagan.

Another story — somewhat sweet. I had a class in rhetoric. As an exercise, we were to write a speech on some topic of the day. We had been made to read Mario Cuomo's speech to the 1984 Democratic convention — of course. That had been held up as a fine specimen of rhetoric, besides which, the professor no doubt thought that it breathed truth. For my exercise, I wrote a speech to be delivered by Reagan, rebutting Cuomo's.

Cuomo had said, for example, that Reagan couldn't hear the cries of the poor from the veranda of his ranch. I took pains to point out that Reagan's upbringing had been extremely modest. I also argued that the poor, more than the rich, benefited from economic recovery (which Reagan had wrought). The rich did pretty well no matter what the unemployment rate, no matter what inflation — no matter what "the misery index." Economic recovery was largely a gift to the poor, not to the rich.

Etc., etc.

The TA (teaching assistant), bless her heart, awarded my speech an A, despite noting on it — and I quote — that "such eloquence doesn't become him [Reagan]." She did not mean "become," of course — she meant that Reagan would be incapable of a fine or persuasive speech (which was, needless to say, bonkers).

But then I crossed the line. Later in the semester, Bishop Tutu won the Nobel prize, I believe, and Tutumania was everywhere. For another exercise, I wrote a speech taking issue with some of the things the good bishop was saying about the Reagan administration and the United States.

That was too much for her. The TA gave me a B, I believe, and, in a note, gave me a tongue-lashing for committing such heresy. I thought — knew — she had graded ideologically. So I took the speech, and the grade, to the professor himself, and he promptly overruled the TA, saying that she had acted (and graded) inappropriately, and apologizing to me.

Whew!

Another memory: The kids at school chanted, day after day, "Reagan, Bush, you can't hide, we charge you with genocide!" By that they meant that the administration had succeeded in slowing the rate of growth of social-welfare spending.

I ask a question: Would I have become a Reagan conservative if I hadn't liked and admired Reagan, the man, so much? I think so — but it probably would have taken longer. As everyone has remarked, he had multiple sterling qualities, including humor. I'll give you a couple of examples from my storehouse.

People wanted Reagan to be embarrassed at having been a B actor, but he wasn't embarrassed at all — he was proud of having been in the movies, on whatever level. (He dubbed himself "the Errol Flynn of the Bs.") Reagan thought he'd done rather well, especially for an ordinary boy from Dixon, Ill. He was supposed to have been particularly embarrassed by Bedtime for Bonzo, in which he starred alongside a chimp. Once, while he was president, someone gave him a still from the movie to sign. The still showed Reagan and Bonzo. The president signed, "I'm the one with the watch."

Speaking of Bonzo: I remember Rep. Bella Abzug denouncing Reagan's "Bonzo-Rambo foreign policy." Bonzo-Rambo foreign policy. Pretty clever, huh? That was the way the Left talked, in those days. They haven't gotten any better.

A little more humor from Reagan. Some TV reporter — possibly Andrea Mitchell — yelled after Reagan, with huge frustration, "But Mr. President, do you think you bear no responsibility for the federal budget deficit?" Reagan had just concluded some outdoor event and was walking back into the White House. He stopped, turned around, cocked his head, and said, "Well, I was once a Democrat."

And it was highly important to me, personally, that Reagan had been a Democrat. The Gipper used to say, "I didn't leave the Democratic party, the Democratic party left me." That wasn't entirely true. Reagan had moved, all on his own, significantly rightward. But it was partly true.

It was also important to me that Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett, et al. had been Democrats, but that's another — though very much related — essay (or Impromptus).

By the end of college, I was a firm Reaganite. At least one classmate teasingly called me "Gip," short for Gipper (which had, of course, been the nickname of George Gipp, whom Reagan had played in Knute Rockne, All American). I lived and died with Reagan. Sometimes, remember, the press conferences were a little shaky. And we would just cringe — or maybe despair — every time he made some flub. But he managed to come through okay.

And it is all but forgotten now how upset conservatives were with him in those days. It seems to me that they — that we — spent most of the eight years mad at him: because he could be the Great Compromiser, in addition to the Great Communicator. He was always cutting some deal, shading into gray. There was a famous quip of the time: "This wouldn't be happening if Ronald Reagan were president." Ha, ha.

The Gipper was not my first president. Jimmy Carter was — the first president whom I really followed, whom I was really cognizant of. But Reagan made me. He shaped me, stamped me. I will bear that stamp always. He was responsible for my becoming what I am today, politically — along with Bill Buckley and National Review, and Norman Podhoretz and Commentary.

And as I say in my NR essay, the best thing Reagan did for me, possibly, was give me something to call myself: I am a Reaganite.

It can be very hard to answer when someone asks, "What are you, politically?" The word "conservative" is subject to a thousand interpretations — you don't want to get into that, believe me! You don't want to launch into a long lecture about the Scottish Enlightenment, and the strange odyssey of the word "liberal," and the advent of Frank Meyer and his "fusionism." So, if you want to give a quick answer — and it's true — you can say, "I'm a Reaganite."

And people know what you mean. They may consider him a mainstream conservative, or a right-wing conservative, or a progressive conservative. They may consider him a Neanderthal. But, whatever they think, they pretty much know what you mean.

Reagan had a view of America's place in the world, and of the place of government in America, and of what our society, our republic, should be. I share that view.

In the last ten years, Establishment hatred of Reagan has cooled. That hatred is trained on George W. Bush now. Even some who reviled him during his presidency concede that Reagan was the right man at the right time. Could it be that they — "they" — will say the same of W., decades hence? I think so. Reagan was an indispensable president; and W. may just prove to have been one, too.

I'll shut up now, because people like me can go on about Reagan (and themselves, of course) forever. A couple of days after Reagan died, a (younger) friend of mine asked me to explain Reagan, to describe his impact on me — asked me, basically, "What was all the fuss about?" I found it impossible to reply. The subject is just too big, too important — too wonderful, in a way! But we can let it all out in dribs and drabs, and I've provided a few of those today.

See you.

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