The pundits who on Sunday claimed a place for Ronald Reagan in the pantheon of great US presidents spoke truer than many of them seemed to realize when they said he had restored America's self-confidence and made the country what it is today.
As he boasted at the time: "It's morning in America." He won two landslide elections off the back of that boast, despite the vast federal deficit and being terror-bombed out of Lebanon, despite the self-deluding gaffes and much skulduggery, including support for what we now call Islamist terrorism.
YUSHA
So Reagan's greatness is a bold claim, but a fair one.
The former Hollywood actor turned 40th president did indeed become the symbol of America's final victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Side by side with then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, he also led the right-wing reaction to the settlement bequeathed to the boys who stormed the D-day beaches by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and in Britain the 1945 Clement Attlee Labour government. From being the solution, the state became the problem.
Much of the confusion inherent in current US policy -- from Kyoto to Baghdad -- stems from that flawed insight. As such, Reagan has a lot to answer for at the bar of history, as much at home as abroad. You do not find poverty anywhere else in the first world quite like you can find in America in the big city slums or the black districts of mid-size towns. You can find it in the former USSR, of course, but that too is a charge for which Reaganomics must bear some blame.
Yet Sunday's emotional response to the 93-year-old president's passing was not all fake sentimentality or cynicism. Reagan was a happy warrior whose easy-going "Aw, shucks" style could make people smile who never voted for him. "Wake me up in an emergency," he used to say, "even if I'm in a Cabinet meeting."
He watched a lot of old movies and went to bed early. But it was always a mistake to underestimate him. When I arrived in Washington during his 1984 re-election campaign, the Democratic challenger, Walter Mondale, thought he could make an issue of Reagan's age, 73 at the time. Then Reagan used one of their TV debates to promise not to make an issue of young Mondale's (56). The whole country laughed and Ron was back for four more years.
In 1988 there was half-serious talk of changing the Constitution to allow him four more. You had to be there to understand his hold on the American people. But right-wing US Republicans do not export well.
Among the uptight elites of Europe, Reagan was always "that cowboy." Even Thatcher -- who owed him for his support in the Falklands -- had her doubts, voiced only occasionally in public over the deficit or the 1983 invasion on Grenada.
Reagan knew that the appeal of individualism, both noble and selfish, would defeat the Soviet fox. Armed with "evil empire" rhetoric -- which he believed -- and a checkbook, he outspent it.
Missile defense tests were fiddled, then as now, but worked. All this was combined within a bundle of contradictions. Though a believer in Armageddon, Reagan himself was not particularly religious, but his influential wife, Nancy, had an astrologer. He was a divorcee, and personally tolerant. And his own family was a dysfunctional prototype of the Osbournes.
The first Reagan press conferences I attended required a correction box so cringe-making in next day's Washington Post ("The president misspoke on the following points ... ") that I assumed the old boy would have to resign. But it didn't matter.
On the big occasion, the Challenger disaster or D-day 1984, he could touch people's hearts. His letter revealing his Alzheimer's condition ("I am one of millions of Americans ... ") is a model of grace. Foreigners often fail to grasp that an American president is head of state as well as head of government. "He's much better at being the Queen than he is at being Mrs. Thatcher," I used to explain, condescendingly, on my visits to Britain. She was so busy, so formidable; he was, well, laid-back.
He made it seem so easy. I was wrong about that too. The old actor was just acting.
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