Reagan's America
Wills, Garry
G arry Wills is a lot like the Ronald Reagan he portrays in this interesting hatchet job. He says Reagan is a con man who believes his own con. "It is clear, from early on, what Reagan's desire...
...And he says that in politics the role of consultants in managing candidates and winning elections is vastly overrated...
...Despite reporters making fun of it in print, "Reagan has continued to tell the bomb pilot story with great emotion, and obvious belief, in many contexts," Wills adds...
...But Wills points out that the two Mark Twain novels are "chronicles of superstition, racism, and crime," not stories of pleasant childhood...
...Or later he notes that Alexander Haig, on his first day as secretary of state on January 20, 1980, tried to get Reagan to sign a memo that would have made Haig all-powerful in foreign policy...
...One of Wills's ironies is insightful...
...Wills poses as a stickler for correct facts and details...
...But if you believe your own scam, I guess you can...
...Reagan's birthplace, Tampico, Illinois, had four doctors in 1911, the year Reagan was born, not zero as Cannon told it, Wills says...
...But his book is relentlessly negative, as if Reagan has never had an achievement in his life except to fool himself and nearly everyone else...
...He's aiming to hurt, showing that Reagan relied on a single right-wing nut (which Bell, in truth, isn't) for policy speeches...
...I give Wills credit for three good insights, but no more...
...There's a final way in which Wills mimics Reagan...
...Like Reagan, Wills is inclined to misspeak...
...Wills doesn't...
...Ordinarily, I'd say Wills can't have it both ways...
...Wills quotes Beatty as saying that Reagan must have gotten the story from some movie...
...Now, I'm not just talking about lying or making a real error...
...In his zeal to discredit Reagan's economic policies, Wills goes after Jeffrey Bell, an influential supply-sider who was a speechwriter and policy adviser in the 1976 campaign...
...Most everything he writes is breathtakingly superficial, non-serious, beside the point, or irrelevant, but always interesting...
...Well, Wills isn't much good on facts either...
...I didn't want to tinker around with Social Security...
...In Cycles of American History, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...as a Treasury agent, it gets obsessive...
...The April 1944 issue of Reader's Digest had a brief item under the headline "That's the Spirit...
...Still, he devotes a chapter to the work of two clinical psychologists in Reagan's campaign for governor of California in 1966...
...Regardless, he writes as if he's dented Reagan badly...
...ills, a columnist and professor at Northwestern University, emulates the Reagan character in his book in at least three other ways...
...He also found that the movie wasn't the only source of the story...
...The speech was written by Charles Hobbs, now a Reagan White House aide, and John McLaughery, according to Bell...
...specialist in England, who may have concocted it out of wholecloth...
...Reagan worked on the screen for one government bureau, just as his father and brother had worked for other bureaus in Illinois," he writes...
...He correctly attributes to Bell a speech by Reagan calling for a transfer of $90 billion in federal programs to the states...
...At another point, Wills says of Reagan: "This enemy of the planned society cannot move in his daily life without fixed schedules...
...What Reagan had in mind, I suppose, was just what you'd think...
...He even jabs at Lou Cannon of the Washington Post, a rival Reagan biographer, for making a small error...
...Titre never worked at the Wall Street Journal...
...There must be socialists somewhere with cluttered desks, too...
...Wills, for example, says that President Ford "could not be renominated...
...About half of the inflation's drop was the product of recession, another third coming from the adventitious easing of oil and other import prices, and 20 percent from a change in accounting practices (another example of the kind of magic the Reagan administration practiced with numbers...
...I don't think so...
...You've got to believe your own con to think it matters that Reagan tossed off a cliche to summarize a reasonably happy, though not totally idyllic, upbringing...
...Wills writes that in the 1970s several editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal became enthusiasts for supply-side economics...
...We'll ride this thing down together.' " Nelson tracked down the reporter to whom the story was attributed...
...Reagan, said Wayne, was "misinforming the people...
...Wills also has a pretty good description of Nancy Reagan's discipline as a political wife...
...He grew up in fairly happy circumstances in the rural Middle West...
...The promise had been pain-free deliverance from stagflation," he writes...
...Wills simply misspoke...
...This is not a telling point...
...My guess is that Wills isn't even faintly aware of the thinness of his case...
...It told of the wounded airman, terror-stricken and pinned in the plane...
...Maybe Wills does...
...But the same evidence he lays out could be used to argue that Reagan has the intellectual candlepower and integrity to rise above his family background...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 43...
...Some will, some will know better...
...That description seems innocent enough to me...
...I'll say he couldn't, because he'd never been nominated in the first place...
...In 1976, Jeane Kirkpatrick attacked the "new class" of "symbol specialists" who were injecting politics with moralistic dreams...
...Had that happened, his budding political career would have been short-circuited, Wills says ruefully...
...He kisses it off as an adventure "undertaken to `save' the American states to our south—yet it violated the treaty of the Organization of American States and the Rio Pact, as well as the UN Charter and the United States Constitution...
...Wills depicts the economic recovery, now in its fifth year with no end in sight, as almost non-existent...
...Like other supply-siders such as Jack Kemp, he's against tampering with Social Security...
...He misspoke...
...The American invasion of Grenada in 1983 was no less a disgrace...
...He told it to Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton, to REAGAN'S AMERICA: INNOCENTS AT HOME Garry Wills/Doubleday/$19.95 Fred Barnes 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 name two, when he invited them to the White House for a screening of their movie, Reds...
...Wills is so eager to kill that he can't resist making contradictory accusations about Reagan...
...But so what...
...Imagine that...
...He's dressed up some cynical theories about Reagan in fancy intellectual clothes...
...Does that disqualify Ted from attacking business...
...The tendencies Kirkpatrick deplored in her 1976 book were victories in the presidency she came to serve in 1981," he writes...
...Just slips of the tongue, small stuff not meant to harm...
...And Reagan didn't have it so great growing' up, since his father was a boozer who dragged the family all over central Illinois...
...She practices a severe economy of expression that makes three or four compositions of the features cover all necessary social tasks—the smile of delighted surprise at the top of the airplane stairs, the concerned gaze at redeemable druggies, and—most of all—the upward stare at her husband...
...He lists them as Robert Bartley, Jude Wanniski, and Norman Ture...
...Should Reagan's talk about the Welfare Queen and abuse of food stamps be dismissed as hypocritical or phony because of his family's connections with the federal government...
...That reporter said he heard it from an Air Force p.r...
...I'm not exactly sure what Wills is getting at, but clearly he thinks it's something awfully significant...
...That's G for government...
...For himself, Wills does a slight twist on this...
...Otherwise, why would he make such a big deal out of the fact that Reagan once described his youth in Illinois as "one of those rare Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer idylls...
...But Bell didn't write the Social Security speech...
...Of course, he meant Bartley, Wanniski, and Paul Craig Roberts...
...He believes his own scam...
...Or is Reagan such a dope that he has no ironic sense...
...So maybe the story is false...
...Still, Reagan may have continued telling it in good faith, having read it in Reader's Digest...
...I could go on with examples of misspeaking, but I won't...
...Reagan was the first candidate to be engineered by professionals at that arcane calling," says Wills...
...Lars-Erik Nelson, the Washington bureau chief of the New York Daily News and a syndicated columnist, discovered this after researching the story in 1983 and 1984...
...But chapter after chapter on the subject is excessive...
...He includes in his book a long quote from no less a Reagan sympathizer than John Wayne, who favored the Panama Canal treaty that Reagan noisily opposed...
...Anyone who believes that's a fair or sufficient summary of the Grenada invasion must wonder why Reagan hasn't been impeached...
...After hearing Reagan deliver this story, with quivering voice, in Racine, Wisconsin, in the 1980 campaign, reporters noticed that, if the two men died together, no one could have reported their last words or actions," writes Wills...
...Wills merely misspoke...
...Nelson's research on the subject is well known...
...I heard him tell it in Lynchburg, Virginia, during the 1980 campaign, and it had a powerful effect on the audience...
...Again, it is interesting—so many musings and theories...
...Wills plainly thinks he's put together an intellectually hefty case on Reagan, but there's sadly little heft here at all...
...Wills says that Reagan came close to being indicted in 1962 for making a sweetheart deal with Music Corporation of America while he was head of the Screen Actors Guild...
...I'd be far more charitable toward him if he'd been more that way toward Reagan...
...Or why would Wills put such emphasis on the contrast between Reagan's persistent criticism of government's role in society and the fact that government helped Reagan's hometown prosper and gave his father and brother jobs during the Depression...
...The reality had been a quick easing of inflation by the "old-time religion" remedy of deep recession, followed by a sluggish move away from stagnation...
...This is not my point of view against your point of view...
...This first speech cost Reagan the New Hampshire primary, Wills says, and I won't argue the point, though it's arguable...
...The item ended: "The last man to jump heard the remaining crewman, a gunner, say, `Take it easy, kid...
...It is clear, from early on, what Reagan's desire would be: he pretended there was no pretense," Wills writes...
...Wills's mistake here isn't misspeaking...
...He settles for the cheap and incomplete version...
...True, it was in a 1944 movie, Wing and a Prayer, starring Dana Andrews as the courageous pilot...
...The best you can say is that this reflects inattention to detail...
...Wills never considers the possibility that Reagan might have come by the story honestly...
...In the 1930s, whatever their earlier or later differences, all the Reagan men were G-men...
...His childhood wasn't as idyllic as advertised...
...To comfort the young man, the pilot stays aboard and they die together as the plane crashes...
...Teddy Kennedy's father was a tycoon...
...The guy who thinks this is important believes his own scam...
...But he was nominated as the Republican presidential candidate in 1976...
...These are facts...
...Or so Wills explains...
...And when Wills drones on about Reagan's starring in four films Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...Writers of screeds usually aren't...
...Only he finds the young belly gunner badly wounded and stuck in the jagged metal of the plane...
...It's a small irony that I'm glad to know about...
...gives a full account of the origin of the story and Reagan's retelling of it...
...Perhaps...
...Again in his haste to skewer, Wills gives a highly incomplete account of a story about a B-17 pilot that Reagan has frequently told...
...He concedes that Reagan is an adept public performer who honed his skills in radio, movies, TV, and on the General Electric promotional circuit...
...The bomber is hit during an air raid, and the pilot tells the crew to bail out...
...I fought the speech," Bell says...
...Then, he blithely blames Bell for writing another speech that advocated making Social Security voluntary...
...Reagan, he says, has come to believe in legendary versions of both his own past achievements and the nation's history, upbeat versions that the public buys while knowing better...
...What of it...
...As for Reagan, he's quite the opposite of Wills in attention to detail and careful use of facts...
...When he had to, he could will his own innocence...
...Or has he blotted the family link to government out of his mind...
...The story is vintage Reagan...
...In each case, the point is silly...
...He delivers no less distorted versions of the past and expects the reader to accept them...
...Wills has got Reagan cold on this one...
...Wills meant January 20, 1981...
...A m I being too tough on this book...
Vol. 20 • April 1987 • No. 4
