Good-Bye to All That

...Although it wasn't fully evident at the time, his fortune was sealed once he overcame two grave crises at the start of his Presidential career...

...To show Reagan a sense of charity which would be wholly inappropriate toward others, it is altogether possible, in his case, that he internalized his feelings to the point that he actually believed he'd been there...

...Ronald Reagan, acknowledging the thin distinction public life often draws between invention and reality, laughed with the natural ease of a former actor...

...The problem was that Reagan had never made any such visits...

...This was done, naturally, without renouncing the aboutto-depart mythic personage, who, said Bush, had " earned a lasting place in our hearts—and in our history...

...To Reagan's way of thinking, that was foul racial politics as practiced by a brassy hustler...

...Good journalists, whatever their ideological bent, share in common a keen sense of curiosity about the world...

...So it is profoundly ironic that Ronald Reagan delivered the finest speech of his long life last year in Moscow—an alien foreign capital that he never truly understood...

...The reason for this may be that Reagan showed so little intellectual interest in anything beyond the airy Disneyesque worlds he had spun for himself...

...The reporter sat in a wing chair a few feet away from the presidential gaze...

...Moreover, freedoms of this kind must be deeply embedded in society, for "a bird on a tether, no matter how long the rope, can always be pulled back...

...How will people know that you aren' t a cardboard character...

...I was once in the Oval Office while Reagan chatted with a reporter whom he had known for a dozen years...

...Nevertheless, Reagan left office still, by and large, beloved by conservatives...

...Minutes after leaving office, as his last official act in Washington, Reagan obligingly sat before the western whitewashed walls of the Capitol to hear his successor, a fellow Republican, renounce the spirit of Reaganism...

...Army cameramen...

...There shall never be another like him...

...And, finally, the intervention in the Persian Gulf was a lie and hustle, spawned to cover up the deep national loss of honor that came about when Reagan agreed to pay just about any price to get the CIA man, John Buckley, back alive...

...Yet however Bush may fare in the lists, it won't be so easy to pin down whether Reagan was a twodimensional figure...

...He long believed that Jackie Robinson could claim the right to play baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers, but he did not believe, 40 years later, that Jesse Jackson could claim the underclass as his constituency...

...The second crisis came several months later—still in his first year—with his firing of striking government air controllers, despite warnings that the transportation system could collapse...

...As a political song-and-dance artist, Reagan mapped a personal value system with its own unique set of coordinates...

...Andrew J. Glass, a frequent New Leader contributor, is head of the Con Newspapers bureau in Washington...

...He doubled the national deficit to more than three trillion dollars, only to blandly blame the Congress for having undone our grandchildren's birthright...

...Reagan nevertheless repeatedly mistook his interlocutor for someone else...

...While Europeans were still vilifying him as a nuclear cowboy, Reagan's magisterial reputation grew within his expanding domestic constituency...

...The first crisis came when Reagan was shot, an event that occurred only a few months into his Presidency—a crucial period when the champagne in the political honeymoon glasses tends to go flat...

...By peppering his doctors with oneliners during a life-threatening procedure, Reagan, as they say, showed he had what it takes...

...Bush disagrees...

...His next overseas trip came to pass more than three decades later when, as governor of California, he was sent by Richard M. Nixon to Taiwan in a government plane to represent the United States at the funeral of Chiang Kai-shek...

...In this business, Jesse, we are all hustlers, " a gracious George Bush once told Jackson in private...

...For there is an underlying ideological meanness to Reaganism—which Bush means to dissolve...

...Throughout it all, Reagan retained an uncanny knack of spurning circumstances that failed to fit his personal scheme of things or inventing circumstances that did...

...In such matters, his mentor was, to add to the irony, Franklin D. Roosevelt—the epitome of American liberalism and a man who was seen during his Presidency as a traitor to his class...

...These days, basic economics, if not pure patriotism, drives the capital's hardy band of sidewalk entrepreneurs to wish George Bush well...

...One senses that George Bush will get no similar free pass...

...After that there was really no stopping him...

...That address, all the more remarkable for its setting, reflected Reagan's innate sense of global symbolism...

...Yet journalists, by and large, lack respect for the40th President, now happily reinstalled within his familiar Californian haunts...

...For him, the homeless people who dwell within the shadows of the White House were simply mental cases, while the mental cases among the ayatollahs who had seized American hostages abroad were accorded autographed bibles—until at long last the game was up and they too were said to be strangers unto him...

...But then again, under his concept of individual "freedom," Reagan managed to set his own rules...

...They did not hold it against him that in eight mostly popular years in office he never seriously strove to reverse national policy on litmus-test items like school prayer or abortion...

...When the error was finally brought to his notice, he said in a mortified voice: "I know why I called you 'Lou.' Because they told me it was going to be Lou...

...the lifesized paper cutouts that bore his image had disappeared from the chilled tourist sites around the White House...

...Bush should be so lucky...

...Given Reagan's innate character, it isn't surprising that foreign travel (excluding, of course, holidays at the haciendas of rich Mexican friends) always bored him...

...Reagan was no exception to the rule...

...His long, futile, personal war against the Sandinistas was, at bottom, a lie and hustle, spawned because he did not want it said in the end that any country, no matter how puny, had fallen under Marxist sway during his watch...

...But will Reagan be remembered all the more fondly because Bush, at that juncture, called on the country to become less "enthralled with material things" and "appreciative of the nobility of work and sacrifice...

...Over the years, for example, several prominent Jewish figures, both Americans and Israelis, came away from intimate meetings in the Oval Office profoundly moved by his heart felt reaction to what he had experienced in visiting the Nazi death camps shortly after World War II...

...Perhaps historians will come to rank Ronald Reagan as a fine leader for having restored the nation's badly dented sense of optimism, and for having pushed matters along with Moscow to the point that Bush, in succeeding him, could speak easily of a "new [American] closeness" with the Soviets...

...On that occasion, the cue cards and choreographed seating plans of his ever-present handlers had undone him...

...Not long after, he was gone...

...In a sense, Reagan created his own dimensions, sometimes seeking to shape "reality," and at other times shutting it out entirely, depending upon the exigencies of the moment...

...The serio-comic stuff with Iran was a lie and a hustle, spawned because the CIA had sent one of its best men to Lebanon, charged him with capturing and punishing the fanatics who killed sleeping Marines in their barracks, only to see him captured and tortured by the people he had pursued...

...Shortly after the War, he spent several weeks in England shooting a movie on location...

...Reagan regularly assailed Democrats as big spenders and high taxers...

...It is, after all, an actor's way...

...Maybe...

...As a military officer assigned to a Hollywoodbased government war propaganda unit, he had, however, edited film footage of Holocaust survivors shot by U.S...

...Those were hardly top agenda items in the Reagan years, a time when high-rolling hedonism palpitated with seemingly effortless ease through the country's political and financial nervous system...

...The key," Reagan said, "is freedom —freedom of thought, freedom of information, freedom of communication...

...Speaking at the State University of Moscow to a fresh generation of would-be Soviet apparatchiks, Reagan suggested that mankind had emerged from the Industrial Revolution, under which the basic precepts of Marxism had been forged, into a new Information Age—in which traditional doctrinaire communism cannot function...

...By breaking the controllers' union, he elicited respect among voters for his tough-guy stance and fear among other government workers that they could suffer the same fate...

...she asked him lightly...

...He also argued that, except for defense, the less the government did, the better forali concerned...