Scenes From the Life A journalist completes his Reagan photo album
JR., K. E. GRUBBS
Scenes From the Life A journalist completes his Reagan photo album. BY K. E. GRUBBS JR. Snapshot 1 WE'RE CLOSE TO THE STAGE, MY FATHER AND I, in a large open lot adjacent to Knott's Berry...
...Doug and I glance at each other knowingly...
...He doesn't quite, not at this stage in his career anyway, have the star power that Wayne has...
...The Reagan Doctrine was formed...
...It is self-control, no less and no more...
...Soon after I became the paper's deputy editorial page editor...
...Always, he says, use "the soft sell...
...Reagan had tried to cap his gubernatorial career with Proposition One, a statewide ballot initiative to limit the government's take of the citizens' wealth...
...We know the Departments of Education and Energy will enjoy "the next best thing to eternal life" Reagan used to talk about in The Speech...
...It made its way, I'm told, into official diplomatic pouches and was circulated to embassies around the world...
...He explains why some of the functions of those departments are perfectly legitimate and why it would be challenging to reallocate those functions...
...Reagan exits her car, a man shouts his love...
...International communism, with which he'd dealt firsthand, was on the march, and it was by no means clear that President Lyndon Baines Johnson was up to countering it...
...He does not have to endorse...
...So, too, was Ronald Reagan...
...encounter with Reagan...
...The government can keep the Departments of Education and Energy, I decide...
...It is thus consistent with the Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments, and the Declaration of Independence...
...Now, Reagan himself could be cutting in his remarks, but his tongue¡ªeven when communicating righteous indignation¡ªwas forever honey-tipped...
...It would be the start of my career of almost 40 years in journalism...
...We arrive 48 hours after the selfsame demonstrators had been savagely beaten by miners at the behest of Romania's post-Ceausescu "reform" government...
...Dana will go to work as a speechwriter, largely because he could show on his resume that I had made him an editorial writer after our Wilshire Blvd...
...Gen...
...leads me into the newsroom of the Orange County Register...
...John Wayne speaks...
...It is late May of 1964, and California's Republican primary is near...
...Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Eastern establishment's candidate...
...There should be a special Oscar for him...
...sytaphot- 2 I AM IN COLLEGE NOW, a community college in Huntington Beach, and Ronald Reagan¡ªrestoring hope after the Goldwater debacle¡ªis governor...
...It turns out, we are the president's favorite daily...
...There are, among others, the works of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and an obscure 19th-century French economist named Frederic Bastiat...
...As Mrs...
...When he finishes reading, he gets out of his chair and leads meon those fateful few steps into the newsroom...
...He does...
...But it takes a writer of great artistic capacity¡ªI include Buckley and Reagan, who, we now learn, was a prolific man of letters¡ªto mix incisive observations with gentleness and, yes, love...
...R.C...
...Not long after that I am introduced to R.C...
...Snapsiet.ot 11 I AM INSPECTING THE BOOKSHELVES of a house I've never visited, the modest adobe called Rancho del Cielo high in the coastal range above Santa Barbara...
...He walks me to the desk of Mike Maloney, assistant managing editor, and instructs him to hire me as a cub reporter...
...I do love the wicked wits: Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken, Westbrook Pegler, even Bill Buckley...
...Still, his office is bathed in sunshine, as much emanating from him as from the window, and we feel a bond...
...I think he even accepted the rhetorical proposition, then popular with libertarians, that "taxation is theft...
...I drive to Los Angeles for a luncheon at the old Ambassador Hotel given by Young Americans for Freedom...
...The initiative failed, but set in place the philosophical underpinnings of Howard SCENES FROM THE L IFE Jarvis's successful¡ªand more controversial¡ªProposition 13...
...One of my editorials is an open letter to P. W. Botha, the last white president of South Africa, urging an end to apartheid...
...A woman just behind my father trills, "I just love that man...
...If you must plumb Ronald Reagan's history-changing life for an X factor, it is right here, never demagogued by the man himself, but always radiant...
...I correct myself: There was something Jacksonian about the Reagan Revolution...
...It is neither license nor anarchy...
...I now was editing the community college's student newspaper, and Gov...
...Reagan, who had been influenced by those same writers...
...Liberty is a gift from God, not a political grant from government...
...Liberal bias, nothing new, has been with us for at least four decades, and Ronald Reagan had studied his adversaries...
...Like a father explaining the rules of baseball, he tells us why that wouldn't exactly work...
...to be shrill or mean-spirited...
...Ronald Reagan's successor...
...I need to learn about petty tyrannies...
...It is Pulitzer-winning Allen Drury's novel about the elite media's attempts to beat down the national ascension of a conservative governor from the Santa Barbara area...
...I am glad to have been present at the creation, when the words came together like music...
...Doug will go to work on Marty Anderson's domestic policy staff at the White House, leaving (in philosophical frustration) during the first term to become a journalist...
...Barry Goldwater, whose book The Conscience of a Conservative had flipped an intellectual switch when I picked it up in my high school library, was facing New York Gov...
...Days later I am interviewing Arpad Goncz, the heroic president of Hungary, who tells me Ronald Reagan should get the lion's share of credit for the fall of communism...
...now Freedom Communications, Inc...
...Jack would brief CIA Director Bill Casey and U.N...
...There is applause...
...A title leaps out: Capable of Honor...
...Another actor is introduced, one I'd remembered from the old General Electric Theater from television...
...snapshot 12 I AM IN MY BASEMENT OFFICE, back in a D. C. suburb, and I finish reading a book...
...At least Doug would leave with the satisfaction that he helped torpedo the Law of the Seas Treaty, agodawful dreadnought of global government launched by Carter...
...John Wayne makes us feel why we needed to stand and fight at a political Alamo...
...If we could only provide support for such movements, Jack reasoned, we would soon witness the breakup of the Soviet imperium...
...A Westerner who never lost his reverence for the office, he nonetheless connected with the American refusal to stand on propriety...
...What followed was the supply-side revolution...
...I have two words for him: "Thank you...
...Reagan, still the movie star in his white sport coat, advises the young activists never 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2004 K. E. GRUBBS JR...
...My first reaction is long-faced: Americans do lose their sense of occasion...
...Up and down the state the other student editors are outraged, calling for protests, planning marches on Sacramento, acting like¡ªwell, like the young Ronald Reagan when he organized a student strike back at Eureka College...
...office, where the former governor, now contemplating a run at the White House, is giving us a wide-ranging interview...
...I ponder the proposed hardship and, notwithstanding my family's modest means, I conclude Reagan is right...
...That credo predates Ronald Reagan's political career, but that career begins¡ªaccording to some chroniclers¡ªin a few Orange County precincts where readers are steeped in R.C.'s principles and share them...
...We are traveling with the philosopher-adventurer Jack Wheeler, whose dispatches from similar venues around the world¡ªfrom Nicaragua to Afghanistan¡ªI'd published four years earlier in the Washington Times...
...snapshot 8 SPRING OF 1990, and I am chipping a spraypainted piece of concrete out of the Berlin Wall, the epicenter for global tension all of my adolescent and adult life...
...Others can legitimately claim authorship, Charles Krauthammer for one...
...There, in his book-lined office, I hand him my editorials...
...Savvy administration officials, who could spend weeks, months, years, getting their pet projects on the president's desk, figure that out...
...I edit another one, written principally by Dave Shiflett, that urges President Reagan to avenge the life of Leon Klinghoffer, the wheelchair-bound American thrown overboard by the hijackers of the Achille Lauro...
...It's the morning after Reagan's landslide victory over Jimmy Carter...
...Albert C. Wedemeyer, lionized for his exploits in the Pacific theater and elsewhere, takes the microphone and speaks of the need for strong national security...
...they come to our editorial board...
...The Dukegives a stirring patriotic speech...
...Reagan's advice has stayed with me...
...It is all so clear...
...This is not the old man explaining baseball...
...Congressman-elect Dana Rohrabacher has finished orating¡ªa not incendiary speech, but one infused with encouragement to defy the dictatorship...
...The crowd learns we are American journalists and it parts like the Red Sea...
...K. E. Grubbs Jr...
...is director of the National Journalism Center and editor in chief of TheReporterus...
...My own role seems Zelig-like...
...My old friend from YAF, Ron Kimberling, Reagan's assistant secretary of education and the first executive director of the Reagan Library, helps me push through the knot of admirers and shake the former president's hand...
...I ask him, such were the ideological ethers we were breathing, if it is possible to devise a system of voluntary public finance...
...sywq3shot 6 I HAD DELAYED MY ENTRY into Reagan's Washington, leaving California to publish a small chain of newspapers in New York's Finger Lakes region, going back West, then being invited by the Washington Times to edit its first national edition, a daily whose page dummies were beamed around the country by satellite...
...His editorial pages are evangelistically libertarian (in the old sense of that lovely word...
...HOILES, THE PATRIARCH PUBLISHER of Freedom Newspapers, Inc...
...Reagan believed, with us, that that society was most prosperous which allowed people to keep as much of their rightly earned income as possible...
...Someone asks the president-elect about his promises to dismantle the Departments of Education and Energy, those last hurrahs of Big Government created by the Carter administration...
...Reagan hedges...
...Arizona Sen...
...The Times was founded early in the Reagan presidency because it was thought an auspicious time to start a conservative newspaper in the nation's capital...
...Why such interest in me...
...This is different...
...The master of ceremonies¡ªHarry von Zell, once a sidekick to George Burns and Gracie Allen¡ªwarms up the crowd by telling us we're 30,000 strong...
...It was Jack's thesis that everywhere working people of the world are uniting and throwing off their chains, chains clamped on them by Marxist dictatorships...
...A great shout goes up, "We love Bush...
...The credo that appeared every day on his mastheads, later to be surrendered to political correctness, goes something like this: This newspaper is dedicated to furnishing readers with information so that they can enjoy the blessings of liberty...
...Freedom," our editorial credo said, "is a gift from God, not a political grant from government...
...shryt 4 DANA ROHRABACHER AND I are sitting in Ronald Reagan's Wilshire Blvd...
...The two of us had been pursuing libertarian thinking to its most radical ends and were growing, not only impatient with, but critical of, Ronald Reagan...
...s yivipshot 5 I AM STANDING IN A BALLROOM of the Century Plaza Hotel next to Doug Bandow, a friend who'd been working, like Dana, on Reagan's campaign...
...In retrospect, that figure seems perhaps exaggerated...
...Our editorials land on the president's desk every day...
...I had read the book when it was first published, in the late '60s...
...You should pay for your schooling (even then I distinguished, as Mark Twain did, between schooling and education), especially if you see it as an investment in your future...
...sylvq3shot 7 I AM SHAKING HANDS WITH BURMESE STUDENTS in their jungle encampment, a haven they found following the Rangoon massacre in 1988 and a place still sometimes under siege by the military government's troops...
...Dana, an old friend from YAF, once co-chairman of Youth for Reagan and now a Los Angeles radio reporter, has finagled the interview and invited me along...
...is about to turn 90, and at his birthday party is read a heartfelt letter from Gov...
...He tells Mike to send me to school boards, planning commission meetings, city councils...
...has made it a policy that his newspapers, now stretching across the country, would not endorse politicians for office...
...sywcpshot 3 R.C...
...Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick...
...I was never part of the administration, though I did often find myself in the cavernous corridors of the Old Executive Office Building, a guest of the policy-making speechwriters' shop...
...I remember writing "The Reagan Doctrine" as a headline over an editorial, the first use of the phrase I can remember...
...It is Mary Beth Brown's simple and eloquent Hand of Providence: The Strong and Quiet Faith of Ronald Reagan...
...I write two editorials taking the decidedly minority position...
...Sywtpshot 10 I AM WATCHING THE FORMER PRESIDENT'S CASKET trans ferred from its hearse to a caisson, there to travel up Constitution Avenue to the Capitol...
...I had been in the ballroom the night before, the election having been called even before I could drive up from Orange County, then home again, then back to the hotel¡ªa news conference not to be missed...
...In fact, he does so shortly after reading the editorial on a flight to Illinois...
...The press are assembling, just as they did a few weeks ago when Reagan promised to name a woman to the Supreme Court...
...The crowd, who would prevail in the primary election, knows inchoately that Goldwater's chances in November are grim...
...He was a great American performer too, even after the Hollywood establishment stopped applauding...
...snapshot 9 I FIND MYSELF INVITED TO THE UNOFFICIAL OPENING of the Reagan Library, this because my name somehow worked its way onto the Reagan Alumni Association list...
...In the early '60s, the Hollywood right, never mind John F. Kennedy's notorious flirtation with Tinseltown, is more visible than it would be in, say, the Clinton years...
...It's a newly elected politician talking his way out of his promises...
...He reads them as I study the great libertarian and conservative titles on his shelves, titles I am familiar with having worked in Walter Knott's bookstore...
...We know that because Hugh Sidey reports it in Time magazine...
...I'll take this, Ronald Reagan's legacy...
...Drury, himself a Washington reporter, knew whereof he wrote...
...Days later I am in a bus trying to navigate through mobs of demonstrators in Bucharest's University Square...
...Snapshot 1 WE'RE CLOSE TO THE STAGE, MY FATHER AND I, in a large open lot adjacent to Knott's Berry Farm, the Southern California amusement park founded by the conservative farmer and businessman Walter Knott...
...The philosophy so summarized is the essence of Reaganism, and though R.C.'s editorialists would sometimes express impatience with the governor's and then the president's compromises, we always know he's shaping history according to our very own credo...
...He speaks of the tyrannical growth of government, of our "rendezvous with destiny" (a phrase cribbed, I later learned, from Franklin Roosevelt), of the need for moral courage ("Should Christ have rejected the cross...
...There is something ulterior in R.C.'s mind: As a conventional conservative, I believe local government is best...
...Reagan had stirred things up by calling for tuition to be imposed on the state college and university system...
...But I am unprepared for the electrifying speech that, days later, would run again on TV and become known as The Speech...
...The former president, now in his twilight years, never returns to his beloved aerie, but Young America's Foundation lovingly preserves it as he'd left it...
Vol. 37 • July 2004 • No. 6
