I never did much care for Ronald Reagan, who, when he was governor, tear-gassed the Berkeley campus so poison was everywhere in the air, so that my wife, when she was just trying to walk to class, got it, too.
She says that when she moved to L.A., she practically got PTSD, since the smog smelled like the tear gas and police helicopters filled the skies.
When he became president, Reagan was merely speaking lines, as from his acting days, rather than any real self-considered truths.
He was scripted, though he certainly also had an actorly way of getting off some really good one-liners: “I forgot to duck,” as he said to Nancy, trying to disarm the serious situation after he was shot in Washington, D.C.
I didn’t much care for many of his policies. Still — I am certainly among those moderate Americans who, comparing him to the current standard-bearer of a Republican Party whose platform he wouldn’t recognize, misses the hell out of Ronald Reagan. He was in retrospect an ordinary — in the good sense — self-made American.
He was many other things, including a lousy dad, a will-of-the-wisp politically who went from Hollywood union organizer to corporatist conservative seemingly almost solely on the basis of working for General Electric, who sponsored his TV show in the mid-1950s. But a little bit of nostalgia for his relative normality is understandable, these crazy electoral days.
My friendly acquaintance Max Boot, the Washington Post columnist I got to know when our student newspaper, The Daily Californian at UC Berkeley, honored him as our Alumnus of the Year a little while back, was a huge fan of Ronald Reagan when he was young.
Max, who describes himself as the only conservative political columnist the Daily Cal has ever had, had many good reasons to be a Reagan stan. His Jewish family had escaped Communist tyranny in the Soviet Union when he was a boy, and Reagan helped — “Tear down this wall!” — hasten the Soviet empire’s demise.
As Max writes in his new, massively researched, 800-page biography, “Reagan: His Life and Legend,” when the president died, “What most people remembered, more than any policy achievement or failure, was Reagan’s good nature, his sense of humor and humility, his optimism, and, of course, his incomparable ability to communicate.”
A genius, he was not. He quotes former British Foreign Secretary Peter Carrington on Margaret Thatcher after a meeting with Reagan: “She came out and she turned to me, and, pointing at her head, she said, ‘Peter, there’s nothing there.’”
Still, we don’t ask our presidents to be geniuses. If Reagan was mostly an actor — preparing for one international meeting, he asked for instructions on how to play “the scene” — he played his part well. But his failure to utter the word “AIDS” until deep into the epidemic, his cluelessness on Iran-Contra, his dramatic failures on civil rights, were deeply troubling.
Everyone interested in the story of Ronald Reagan should read this book, the most comprehensive life we’ll ever have of him. But they should also heed Max’s warning that Reagan paved the way for Donald Trump. He quotes Sen. Lindsey Graham, who described Trump as “a cross between Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan and P.T. Barnum.” Max writes: “Reagan’s legacy included, after all, not only empowering the Christian Right and a growing white backlash against minority empowerment but also economic policies that helped hollow out the middle class, thereby creating the conditions for Trump’s populist movement.” The kicker: “Of course, once in office, Trump’s policies favored the well-off as much as Reagan’s had.”
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. [email protected]
