February 8, 2006
The Ongoing Reagan
By William
F. Buckley
We are told that
960 books have been written about Ronald Reagan, which registers
that he continues to be an object of consuming historical curiosity,
95 years after he was born. That emanation confounds liberal critics,
who assessed him many years ago as a bumpkin with oratorical gifts
pandering to American self-esteem.
But Reagan alive prevailed
over that stereotype, and Reagan dead is airborne as never before.
One recent book, "President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination,"
is by Richard Reeves, a skillful historian who got on to an enormously
interesting device in his books on Nixon and Kennedy. He would
take you to opening day of their presidential terms and recount
what his subject did on that day, which of course was an opening
to political, social and personal adventures, ending, in Nixon's
case, arms akimbo, mounting the helicopter to avoid impeachment;
for JFK, it ended in Dallas.
Reagan ended his eight
years snug in the White House, though biographer Reeves judges
him to have been less, in 1989, than the Reagan who took office
in 1981, which is OK by Reeves as, on the whole, he prefers a
diminished Reagan to a Reagan in his prime, who might have succeeded
with his right-wing agenda.
Reeves concedes that
in foreign policy Reagan "succeeded." He did so by "scrapping
containment and detente and making the world believe it when he
rejected the old Cold War strategies in favor of his own, which
he articulated to his first national security adviser, Richard
Allen." Reagan said to Allen, "I know you think I don't
have a strategy for dealing with communism, but I do: We win.
They lose."
Lance Morrow, in a
stunning collection of essays ("Second Drafts of History"),
remembers Reagan in the 1984 campaign for re-election, battling
Walter Mondale. Their first debate, in Louisville, was perilous
because Reagan was off his form and Mondale did well. But "the
voters came to absorb Ronald Reagan in an entirely different and
subjective manner. They internalized him. In later months, Reagan
found his way onto a different plane of the American mind, a mythic
plane. He became not just a politician, not just a president,
but very nearly an American apotheosis. The Gipper as Sun King."
It is this mythogenic
quality of Reagan that continues to attract attention to his memory
and to his reign. "Partly by an accident of timing, partly
by a simple genius of his being, Reagan managed to return to Americans
something extremely precious to them: a sense of their own virtue.
Reagan -- completely American, uncomplicated, forward-looking,
honest, self-deprecating -- became American innocence in a 73-year-old
body."
It was never unanimous,
though of course Reagan won in 49 states, losing to Mondale only
Mondale's home state of Minnesota. This loss recalled a quip by
historian-journalist Raymond Moley, who began his official life
as a confidant of the young president Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
He stayed on the scene for many years after his defection from
the New Deal, always proffering his views on political developments,
sometimes with acid humor. When the pedestrian Estes Kefauver
upset the witty and glamorous Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 presidential
primary in Minnesota, Moley cracked, "Did you ever try to
tell a joke in Minneapolis?" That witticism perfectly applied
to Reagan vs. Mondale in 1984.
The evolving understanding
of Reagan was hugely affected by the publication of his letters.
There was not a trace of sham in those thousands of letters, written
to motley people who had engaged his interest or his concern,
or who had aroused his curiosity. The letters revealed a man whose
concern was always for others, and whose intelligence was literate
and active. His eyes might have closed while the Pope was speaking
to him, but such moments had no historical hangover. No gaucheries
on any scale were traceable to lapses of attention or even of
memory.
One regrets that Reeves,
in his assessment of Reagan, is too resolute in his commitment
as a backbencher on the other side to indulge the buoyancy of
the Reagan years, honestly and industriously though he surveys
them. Morrow, addressing many themes and many people in his book,
never goes overboard, but he senses what it is that moved so many
people to act so decisively on the one occasion -- 1984 -- when
Reagan was standing there waiting for a national plebiscite after
four years in the White House.
Copyright
2006 Universal Press Syndicate
