THE RIDDLE OF REAGAN

...Most important of all, he was right in wishing to rectify a situation in which the United States remained— by a deliberate choice arrived at through the mercifully forgotten dogmas of the arms-control theologians— completely defenseless against a missile attack...

...The year was 1979, and Reagan was well launched on his second run for the Republican nomination for president...

...Even setting aside Chappaquiddick (which I and a great many others were not prepared to do), a fascinating irony emerged here that could hardly escape the notice of Democrats like myself who had remained loyal to the anti-Communist interventionism of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy...

...There were two reasons for this...

...Far from trying to justify himself, indeed, he kept on denying that he was doing what he was doing until he would have had to have been an even bigger and more skillful liar than Bill Clinton to continue pretending that he had remained steadfast in his firm commitment never to negotiate with terrorists and never to allow himself to be blackmailed by them...

...My first impulse was to agree reluctantly that what we had in Reagan was indeed an “amiable dunce,” or the “airhead” that one of my friends in the labor movement had assured me he was...

...There was nothing in it about the election per se, but the themes it struck were in harmony, to say the least, with those of Reagan’s campaign...

...not after talking to him several more times over the years...

...Yet it was his attacks on that very policy which had as much as anything else made him a hero to his fellow conservatives...

...First, Reagan obviously had not a clue as to what to say to this particular group, or even what subjects to talk about...

...Then, after Reagan beat out Bush for the nomination, and as his campaign against Carter heated up, I found myself heating up along with it...

...Certainly this is how Reagan looked as compared with most politicians, very few of whom believe in anything very strongly, or at all...

...What was needed was action in line with the president’s promise to change the direction of American policy toward the Soviet Union...

...Not only had he been politically savvy enough to get himself elected president of the Screen Actors Guild...

...I ended my article with the hope that he would recognize how deeply he had been unfaithful to his own principles and that he would return to them again...

...Gorbachev (who for sure did not know what he was doing) saved Reagan from this folly by refusing to budge from his position that the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) be included in the abolitionist package...

...Carter was sending out the subliminal message that the decline of American power in the post-Vietnam period was historically inevitable, that it was childish to resist it, and that our task was to develop the maturity to face and adjust to a development about which there was nothing we could do...

...When Reagan arrived with his wife Nancy, I was immediately struck (as I often have been when seeing even minor movie actors in the flesh) at how extraordinarily good-looking he was and by the jauntiness of his carriage...

...In short, the entire performance ranged from wild irrelevance to baby talk which, if it had not been coming from a personality so obviously lacking in any such intent, we—or I at any rate—might have found insulting...

...There was, too, the invasion of Grenada, whose paltry military significance was dwarfed by the political message it sent that the United States was no longer abiding by the nefarious Brezhnev Doctrine (according to which, once a country went Communist it must remain so forever...

...And can he have understood that it was also undesirable in the sense that, even if it were temporarily implemented, it would have made the Soviet superiority over us in conventional weapons the decisive factor in the balance of power...

...But giving it military teeth, especially in Nicaragua, surely played its own part in the breakup of the Soviet Union’s European empire and in the worldwide collapse of communism...

...In various interviews, furthermore, he let it be thought that he had solved the Reagan riddle...

...This still leaves the “dunce” part of the “amiabledunce” question hanging...

...Never mind that while the voice of Reagan may have BUT IN MY HEART OF HEARTS, THE CONCLUSION I REACHED WAS THAT THIS MAN WAS AN EVEN GREATER PUZZLE THAN I HAD AT FIRST IMAGINED...

...This alone would have undermined their ability to put down the rebellion they had brought upon themselves through the depredations of the Communist system...

...The result was that for the next few years, I kept getting calls and visits from foreign journalists demanding to know what the president was up to whenever he seemed to be deviating from some of the implications of my analysis...

...Instead, then, of bringing up issues like the Soviet military buildup or the hostages in Iran, which he should have known or sensed would be on the minds of people like us, he regaled us with a long account of how a committee of experienced businessmen he had appointed to do a study of government efficiency in California had found out that legal- rather than lettersize files were being used in state offices whose cabinets were too small for them...

...The words were those of Strobe Talbott—then with Time magazine and now Clinton’s undersecretary of state—who clearly accepted at face value what the Soviets were telling him and even seemed to agree with it himself...

...True, as we have seen, Reagan was fully capable of setting his knowledge of communism aside when it suited his political convenience...

...A man gets rich, buys himself a big yacht, and then proudly goes to visit his mother wearing the uniform of a naval captain...

...But my own take on this disheartening turn of events was that it also involved more than the love of commerce...

...As the 10 or so of us present lined up to be introduced, however, it was Nancy who seemed to have a better idea of who we were than he did...

...He did not have to threaten to send troops, let alone send them...

...Then it went on to account for our disappointment, bordering on despair, over the record of his administration up to that point...

...Nevertheless here he was, operating under the same grim imperatives...

...But this exculpatory explanation did not in fact exculpate, since it raised the question of why he had surrounded himself with such people in the first place and why he did not now fire them and bring in others who would be loyal to his stated policies...

...My guess is that Morris’s trouble in completing the book stems from his own inability to decipher the riddle of Reagan—that even (or perhaps especially) after spending so much time observing Reagan, studying him, conversing with him, and thinking about him, Morris has been unable to trace the Jamesian “figure in the carpet” that would make sense of the whole design...

...The ruling passion of the politician being not only to win but to win big, Reagan went so far in his nearly successful quest to sweep all 50 states as to embrace d?tente in all but name during his campaign for reelection (not for nothing did I entitle an article I wrote in 1984 for Foreign Affairs “The Reagan Road to D?tente...

...Admittedly, the merits of an opening to Iran were at least debatable within the geopolitical context of the day...

...Which was more than could have been said even of the most rhetorically ferocious anti-Communists within the Republican party, and still less the more “pragmatic” ones...

...Of these the most significant was Reagan’s response to what had been going on in Poland since the Solidarity union had challenged the Communist party’s monopoly of power there, and the Soviet Union had instructed its local quisling General Jaruzelski to put down this democratic uprising by military means...

...Having gone on about this for what felt like an eternity, he ended with a triumphant grin of pride over the detection and correction of so serious a problem, and held it out as a good example of how getting the private sector involved was the way to compensate for the failings of government bureaucrats...

...I no longer recall exactly what I expected when I arrived at the private club in New York at which R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., the editor of the American Spectator, had arranged a meeting between Reagan and “the intellectuals...

...There was not even any risk involved in seizing this opportunity...

...To be sure, this amiability is not to be confused with warmth or a sympathetic concern for others...

...Never mind that the evidence of Reagan’s actions pointed more toward d?tente than toward “rollback...

...Alternatively, one may, like some of Reagan’s disillusioned supporters on the Right, regard it as a betrayal both of them and of himself that was consummated by his own chosen successor and by the slow slippage of the Republican party back into the hands of the “moderates...

...Consequently I dismissed the bad impression Reagan had made on me, figuring it must be wrong, and I determined to give him the benefit of the doubt...

...The French edition even carried on its cover the tag “Reagan’s bedside book...

...The detail about the dog food was probably one of those “facts” for which Reagan had already become notorious, but as we now know, on the central issue of their economic plight he was right...

...According to Laqueur, not even Lenin, who allegedly predicted that one day we capitalist countries would out of the lust for profits compete to sell the Communists the rope with which to hang us, could ever have imagined that we would rush to give them the money to buy the rope...

...I think this joke throws a necessary dash of cold water on one of the ideas that has confused everyone about Ronald Reagan—the idea that he was a great ideologue or (if that term seems to carry denigratory connotations) a man of unshakable principle...

...True, some of these same Afghan “freedom fighters” are now among the terrorist leaders posing a threat to us and our allies, but that—a grisly example of the law of unintended consequences—is another story...

...Nor is it to deny him the credit that is unquestionably his due for having slammed the brakes on the downward slide of American power in the post- Vietnam period and then pointing the ship of state in the general direction it would have to go in rebuilding that power...

...But the point I am trying to make here is analytic rather than judgmental, and it is that in trying to solve the riddle of Reagan, the best way to start is to recognize the degree to which he was a normal or conventional politician rather than the conservative ideologue that so many people at both ends of the political spectrum imagined he was...

...Most of them had never even met a Communist, and they were sometimes capable of talking about the Soviet Union as though it were a gigantic regulatory agency armed with nuclear weapons (which was the closest they could come to an image of absolute evil...

...One was a mordant observation by the historian Walter Laqueur...

...In the face of all this, the likes of Strobe Talbott still went around echoing Soviet warnings that Reagan was about to plunge the world into a nuclear war...

...If so, he did a lousy job of it...

...To repeat: Former officials of the Soviet Union have themselves given the lie to this interpretation and the charge that goes with it...

...As for Reagan’s main Republican rival, George Bush, he was, I thought, just another “country-club Republican” and as such not much more reliable on foreign policy (which was what I most cared about in those days) than Gerald Ford, a devotee of d?tente, had proved to be...

...Shortly after being appointed, Bevin accompanied Attlee to a summit meeting with Stalin and Truman at Potsdam, and when he returned, he was asked how, in his first foray into the realm of international affairs, he had fared against the much more experienced Soviet delegates...

...I violently opposed this effort and attacked it in print (though no phone call came this time around...

...Norman Podhoretz, editor-at-large of Commentary and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is the author of the forthcoming memoir Ex-Friends (Free Press...

...There he had done what even his enemies regarded as a creditable job, and to their chagrin he then won reelection by a large margin...

...But there were problems with Reagan as well...

...Flattered though I naturally was to be at the receiving end of such attentions by the president of the United States, the arguments he offered were both unresponsive to my criticisms and unconvincing in their own terms...

...or why he tried mightily to pretend both to his friends and his opponents (and in some instances to himself as well) that he was doing no such thing...

...I must confess that my own first impression of Reagan was not so far from Clifford’s...

...In fact, his almost complete indifference to everyone in his life except Nancy is precisely what may have made it so easy for him to be so cheerful all the time...

...I could hardly believe my ears: Was this what he thought we had come to hear...

...The first time, in 1976, he had been defeated in the primaries by Gerald Ford, who in turn was beaten by Jimmy Carter...

...Since his departure from the scene, the Republican party has been dreaming of another Reagan, by which some mean a great winner, others mean a great conservative, and still others mean a great crusader for democracy...

...Well,” she replies, “by you, you’re a captain...

...The standard rationale for such cooperation—known as the “Sonnenfeldt Doctrine”—was that the breakup of the Soviet empire carried with it the risk of military confrontations that (as happened with Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968) could only paralyze us out of the fear that they might escalate into a nuclear war...

...Amazingly, however, right after martial law had been declared in Poland and while it was still in effect, Reagan threw his weight behind the bankers who insisted on rolling over the Polish loans that were just then coming due, and even helped the Poles pay the interest on those loans...

...Rather than being reassured, most of us left wondering whether he had any brains at all...

...But in truth Reagan never consulted me, and I was even more bewildered by some of his actions than were these journalists from abroad...

...In other words, Ronald Reagan was much more of a conventional politician than he was taken to be...

...This article, to which the editors gave the accurate if unwieldy title “The Neo-Conservative Anguish Over Reagan’s Foreign Policy,” began by explaining why I and most of the other formerly leftist intellectuals now identified even by themselves as neoconservatives had been jubilant over Reagan’s election...

...But either he had been inadequately briefed, or he had paid less attention than Nancy to what he had been told, or he lacked the elementary intelligence to imagine what intellectuals like us who had been disaffected by the foreign and military policies being pursued by the Democratic party might be interested in hearing him discuss...

...Furthermore, we also now know, and from sources which had been high up in the Soviet Union itself, that the much-derided plan he would later announce to build a missile defense hastened the demise of communism there...

...But it still convicted him of obliviousness...

...It was therefore in our own interest to join with Moscow in keeping things quiet throughout East Europe...

...After all that, how could Reagan himself have become a convert to nuclear abolitionism...

...Can he have understood that, because it was impossible to abolish the knowledge of how to produce nuclear weapons, this idea was quite simply unviable...

...I said that even though “Reaganomics” was not at that moment going well, it was still too early to tell whether his efforts to reverse the decline of American economic power by bringing “capitalism back to life in America” would succeed...

...But aside from being a unique personality, Ronald Reagan was the product of a set of special circumstances that no longer exist...

...The transparent sincerity of this statement may have absolved him of lying (“To this day,” he would write in his memoirs, “I still believe that the Iran initiative was not an effort to swap arms for hostages...

...it also made good on the promise of the obverse Reagan Doctrine, which committed the United States to the spread of democracy wherever it might prudently be possible to do so...

...The whole world regarded Reagan as a dangerous fanatic, and the Soviets themselves professed to believe that he had reverted to the old idea of “rollback,” which Republicans like John Foster Dulles and Richard Nixon had advocated in opposition to what they denounced as Harry Truman’s “cowardly” policy of containment— until, that is, they actually assumed power under Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952...

...In fact, the only time he actually spoke to me about his foreign policy was in 1982, when he telephoned to defend it against an attack on the direction it was taking that I had, out of sheer desperation, just written for the New York Times Magazine...

...As a professional actor, he might have been expected to be sensitive to audience reaction...

...And let me inaugurate the process by telling a joke, just as Reagan himself always liked to do, except the one I have in mind is Jewish...

...Airhead” or not, Reagan was, so far as I was concerned, making all the right statements, while Carter was making all the wrong ones...

...I presumed that if we had been farmers, he would have concentrated on the problems of agriculture...

...In the circles in which Clifford traveled— where Lippmann’s unfortunate lapse had evidently also been forgotten—this tag quickly made the rounds and penetrated the thick coating of “Teflon” which otherwise prevented sneers and smears from sticking to this president...

...Clark Clifford, one of the Democratic “wise men” who because of a financial scandal would pathetically discredit himself after a very long career of shuttling between public office and a private legal practice, had no such problem with Reagan...

...The other came from no less fervent a supporter of Reagan than George F. Will, who declared in one of his columns that the president was evidently running an administration that loved commerce more than it loathed communism...

...But apart from dropping a tantalizing hint or two—for example, that Reagan was seriously slowed down by the attempt on his life early in his first term—Morris was coy about his work-in-progress...

...This program of rearmament, however, while absolutely necessary, was not a sufficient condition for reversing the decline of American power in the world...

...My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not...

...But Reagan, acknowledging this decline in all spheres—military in relation to the Soviets, economic in relation to Japan, moral in relation to ourselves—was then also insisting that it had come about not through any inexorable historical forces but as the result of bad policies...

...In any case, his only Democratic challenger was Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and Kennedy was entirely out of the question...

...Like Bevin, Reagan knew from his experience as a union president what a Communist was (“I still have the scars on my back that I got from fighting the Communists back in Hollywood,” he once told a member of his cabinet...

...Nothing daunted by the sight of the faces falling all around the table, Reagan moved cheerfully on to other such anecdotes, and was only forced into taking up the crisis that concerned us when the time came for asking him questions...

...What then carried him through was the “amiable” part of his nature, a quality that was reflected and magnified by his relentless optimism about his own life (“Nancy says I never get depressed,” he remarks in his memoirs) and the destiny of the nation he had been chosen to lead...

...spokesman for the General Electric corporation, he had developed by degrees into what might have been described as a “premature” neoconservative...

...In spite of all his mistakes and inconsistencies (and there were many more than the few I have mentioned...

...Hence when Reagan won by a decisive margin, I was elated...

...Probably more than anything else, it was this cheerful outlook, especially as contrasted with the “malaise” that his immediate predecessor had both perceived and deepened, that made Reagan so popular and that then gave him the power to start turning the country around...

...Yet Reagan never started or engaged in any such debate...

...Neither his policies, nor the way he pursued them, nor the virtually Parson Weemsish hagiographical interpretation to which they have been subjected, can serve as a model either for the present or the future...

...Another obstacle to believing that Reagan knew what he was doing was his proposal in negotiating with Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik in 1986 to abolish all nuclear weapons...

...At this very moment SDI still languishes on the drawing board, and we are still naked unto any aggressor—whether it be Iraq or Iran or China or even North Korea—that may, and sooner than we think, develop the capability to fire missiles at us armed with nuclear or chemical or biological warheads...

...We had gone astray by forgetting what it was that had made us great in the first place, and Reagan, who remembered, promised to lead us back to the true path of American greatness...

...They’re just like the Communists...

...Even though the technology was already in place for almost immediate (if imperfect) implementation, the opponents of SDI both within his administration and within the arms-control church as a whole prevailed by making certain that it remained a research project...

...I, on the other hand, was very curious to get a good look at the man in the hope that, given the absence of anyone better, I would be able to root for him with a clear conscience and even at best a whole heart...

...or why he was even willing to reverse course altogether for the sake of victory...

...been that of a “reckless cowboy,” the hands were the hands of Dulles and Nixon...

...Unhappy over his Polish policy, among other surprises and disappointments, but unwilling to interpret these developments as signs of weakness or even hypocrisy in their hero, they took refuge in the theory that the president was being frustrated and subverted by a staff that did not share his convictions...

...Yet it was precisely on this promise that his administration was failing to make good...

...I was then still a registered Democrat, but I was also—to use the terminology of that prehistoric political era—a “hard” anti-Communist and a “hawk” on defense...

...Nor was it only the mere prospect of SDI that brought the Soviets down...

...Never—not from the first occasion on which I met him and spent a few hours in his company before he became president...

...Ernest Bevin, who had been a union leader all his life, and who (like Reagan) had spent a great deal of his energy fighting against Communists trying to take over his movement, became the British foreign minister when the Labor party behind Clement Attlee swept Winston Churchill out of office in 1945...

...But as a measure of how great they were, the turnout was very small, several people having refused to attend for fear of becoming labeled Reagan supporters before they had made up their minds...

...Alas, not enough of them heeded this call to boost the sales as much as my publisher and I had expected, but in other countries Reagan’s blurb was taken to mean that the blueprint for his foreign policy could be discovered in The Present Danger...

...Whatever the reason, he spent most of the evening telling anecdotes about what he had learned as governor of California...

...About his anti-communism, and his understanding of the need for an American military buildup, there could be no doubt...

...and by me, you’re a captain...

...Clearly, however, such efforts were being strenuously pursued, and so was his determination to refurbish and modernize “a badly deteriorated military capability...

...It also raised anew the old question about Reagan’s intelligence: Was he so dumb that he could not even comprehend what his own administration was up to...

...But as I myself approach the age at which he became president, I suffer from similar lapses...

...Never mind that the Soviets were in all likelihood using this line not because they thought it was true but because it was useful as propaganda against the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe that had been decided upon before Reagan took office because they were needed to balance similar Soviet weapons which were being set up on their side of the line...

...Even after observing Reagan’s similarly tepid response to the Polish crisis, the Soviets kept claiming to detect in his still bellicose rhetoric a policy aimed at rolling them back “right to the gates of the Kremlin itself...

...or if we had been businessmen, he would have dwelled on the economy...

...Now, one may, as Dinesh D’Souza does in his lively polemic against Reagan’s critics on both the Left and the Right (Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader), see all this as a virtue...

...But in my heart of hearts, the real conclusion I reached was that this man was an even greater puzzle than I had at first imagined...

...Or one may, in the fashion of Lou Cannon’s President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (which for sheer detail and comprehensiveness is still the closest we have to a definitive biography), conceive of Reagan as inhabiting “a fantasy world where cinematic events competed for attention with reality...

...In the White House Reagan notoriously had trouble remembering the names even of members of his own cabinet, and he became even more notorious for his “gaffes...

...in spite of how little awareness he seemed to have about what his own people were doing in his name...

...Be that as it may, we are still on our own if we wish to grapple with the question that has plagued me since the first time I laid eyes on Reagan and that has continued to bedevil all discussion of the man and his presidency...

...THOUGH AN ACTOR, HE MISREAD HIS AUDIENCE BADLY...

...not after watching him at a distance but with the closest attention during his two terms in the White House...

...In advancing so novel an idea, Reagan was truly original, and he was courageous in bucking the tide of ridicule that greeted it both from politicians and scientists...

...In Africa, the same message was sent by Reagan’s support of Jonas Savimbi’s forces who were struggling to liberate Angola from the Communist clutches of the government there (which had brought in Cuban troops to reinforce its own...

...Then, in his very first run for public office, he had managed to get himself elected governor of one of the largest states in the country...

...Nor, finally, do I agree with those who say that it was Gorbachev and not Reagan who ended the Cold War or, more preposterously, that Reagan actually prolonged it...

...Which brings us to the one issue on which Reagan never deviated or wavered or contradicted himself...

...This necessitated folding the files to fit, thereby wasting tons of space and millions of dollars...

...he, for his part, comfortably and easily shook everyone’s hand without manifesting much interest in or curiosity about what he probably took to be one more group of voters it was his job to win over...

...The Russians may not exactly have been eating dog food, but in the Kremlin it was recognized full well that the Soviet economy was simply not capable of keeping pace with the technological advances Reagan envisaged, and by some estimates this in itself cut at least five years off the lifespan of Communist rule...

...But this is not how he looked as compared with a genuinely principled person, or a truly passionate ideologue...

...Reagan had said that he expected the “evil empire” to break up some day from within, and now, suddenly, he was presented with an enormous opportunity to further and hasten that process...

...But “by” a countryclub Republican, he was an anti-Communist ideologue...

...Though there was so much opposition to this policy in Congress that implementing it led to serious legal trouble for several members of the Reagan administration, it succeeded in the end in two complementary senses...

...He did not even become a Republican until he was past 50...

...But on second thought I decided that this could not possibly be the case...

...Mainly he dwelled upon the dire economic straits in which the Soviet Union was mired—the people over there, he told me, were reduced to eating dog food—and in the end it was this factor that would do them in...

...As for me, having already rejected the idea that he was a dunce, I went on to reject my newer suspicion that he might be the hypocrite or the wimp that some of his erstwhile enthusiasts on the Right now saw in him...

...and in spite of the fact that the Cold War was actually won under Bush—in spite of all this, it was Reagan (with more than a little inadvertent help from Gorbachev) who made it possible for that victory to come so much earlier than he himself, or anyone else, ever dreamed...

...The more I denied any such inside knowledge, the more world-weary skepticism I evoked, and the more I disclaimed either influence or responsibility for what the president was doing, the more it was assumed that I really was calling the shots from behind the scenes...

...but by a captain, you’re no captain...

...But was Reagan, the heir of Goldwater, too far to the right to win a presidential election even if he could get the nomination...

...The riddle, then, remains...

...he had also, though still a liberal Democrat (and one who apparently leaned more to the Left than he would later let on), fought off a Communist effort to take over his union...

...Why are you dressed like that...

...Fine,” said Bevin...

...Having decided that he could not possibly be the airhead or the amiable dunce that so many of his detractors saw in him, I now began wondering whether he was actually something worse...

...For that matter, was he too far to the right for unhappy Democrats like me and my fellow cold warriors—such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Eugene V. Rostow, Paul Nitze, Richard Perle, and Richard Pipes...

...I gave three examples from different parts of the world...

...My purpose in being so negative is not to join in the raucous chorus of liberal contempt for Ronald Reagan...

...Part of my reaction to this incredibly perverse combination of action and inaction was stated in the article through quotations from two other equally shocked commentators...

...Reagan’s platform, by contrast, was so similar to JFK’s that it might have been described (to adapt a phrase from Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential bid) “not as a choice but an echo...

...But with Carter now in serious trouble over the seizure of American hostages in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, not to mention the calamitous state of the economy, the Republicans had a very good shot in 1980...

...Admittedly, he differed from the usual run of Republican politicians in his understanding of communism, and this contributed to the confusion about him...

...The mere enunciation of this commitment by Reagan would in itself have been of great political significance as part of an ideological offensive against the Soviet Union’s counterclaims...

...and not after reading a spate of books about him after he left office, including his own memoirs and a half-dozen biographies and volumes of reminiscences by people who had worked closely with him— never in all that time have I shared in the prevalent view that with Reagan “what you saw was what you got”: a simple man with a few central beliefs to which he undeviatingly stuck through thick and thin...

...I know those Russians...

...It was around this time that many of his old conservative supporters began raising the cry, “Let Reagan be Reagan...

...she asks him, and he explains that as the owner of a yacht, he has now become a captain...

...No such luck...

...On the contrary...

...Did Reagan, then, know what he was doing all along...

...This, after fighting bravely against the abolitionism of the nuclear-freeze movement and resisting so much worldwide pressure against the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe...

...It is this that explains why he could so often compromise and sometimes violate even key elements of his putatively rock-bottom convictions...

...Tyrrell’s purpose in arranging for Reagan to meet with “the intellectuals” was to allay some of these anxieties...

...Either betrayed by his unconscious, or simply forgetting that Walter Lippmann had never been able to live down the column in which he dismissed Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 as “an amiable man . . . who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president,” Clifford fished up the same patronizing adjective in describing Reagan as “an amiable dunce...

...This is why I have been waiting so eagerly for the publication of Edmund Morris’s biography, which was scheduled to come out this fall after 13 years of work but has now been postponed indefinitely...

...All he had to do was to stop helping the Soviets and their Polish surrogates through the various forms of economic aid they had been getting from us and other Western countries...

...But whether or not Morris ever succeeds in doing this job, the time has come for all the Reaganauts who keep praying for a reincarnation of their idealized hero to recognize that Ronald Reagan—whoever or whatever he really was—is gone and that we shall not look upon his like again...

...Partly as a result of what he had learned from that struggle, he had begun rethinking his lifelong political views...

...Unlike Clinton, however, Reagan seemed genuinely bewildered when it was proved to him that he had actually done something he had vowed never to do.“A few months ago,” he confessed, “I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages...

...As it happens, I had just published a little book entitled The Present Danger which carried the subtitle, “Do We Have the Will to Reverse the Decline of American Power...

...Nevertheless, as remorseless critics like Angelo Codevilla have never tired of repeating, even on SDI Reagan seemed unaware of how things were faring in the real world around him...

...Possibly Edmund Morris will one day figure it all out and thereby deliver Reagan’s still grieving followers from the fantasies that haunt their political dreams...

...There was also the decision, delayed longer than it should have been but finally taken, to supply the Afghans fighting against the Soviets who had invaded their country with the weapons they needed to turn that invasion into “their Vietnam...

...From that moment on, they had pursued a course that Dulles, now secretary of state, characterized as “calculated risk” (which in practice, said the French foreign minister at the time, “most often meant that he calculated a great deal and risked nothing...

...But let me at least take a shot at beginning to solve it while waiting for Edmund Morris to do the whole job, if he ever does...

...As good Americans, moreover, they had a very hard time believing that anyone could ever put ideology ahead of making a good deal...

...This is a common phenomenon even among people who once had extraordinary memories, and by all accounts Reagan in his younger days did: In Hollywood, for instance, he was famous for the ease and speed with which he could learn his lines...

...Putting it even more strongly, Teddy Kennedy was running on policies that were almost the polar opposite of those on which JFK had campaigned against Nixon in 1960 (to “get the country moving again” through a tax cut, a military buildup, and a more forceful stand against Communist expansionism...

...But the loudest message of all was Reagan’s steadfast backing of the contra rebellion against the Communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua...

...Indeed, almost unthinkable as it now seems to me, I had voted for Carter precisely on those grounds, thinking (foolishly, as it would turn out) that this graduate of Annapolis might at bottom be tougher on defense, more of a “Scoop” Jackson Democrat, than he seemed...

...Another funny story, this one true, may shed a bit of light here...

...For not only did it put paid to the Brezhnev Doctrine...

...But it was not the lengthy phone call he made to me about my article that did the trick...

...In the process, while his acting career waned and he found new employment as a traveling I COULD HARDLY BELIEVE MY EARS: WAS THIS WHAT HE THOUGHT WE HAD COME TO HEAR...

...As is demonstrated by the testimony of his own children, and by the way he insouciantly turned his back on subordinates who got into legal hot water by carrying out what they had every reason to think were his policies and desires, Reagan was a very cold fish...

...Reagan might once have been a movie star whose main talent consisted in the ability to read lines written for him by others, but even then he had been something more than that...

...And so a reasonable speculation is that, in addition to advancing age (the signs of which were already apparent in my own first meeting with him), the assassination attempt did indeed slow him down even further...

...One of them was his notorious effort to trade arms for the freedom of the American hostages being held in Iran...

...At that point in my life, my own inclination (later modified by a wider acquaintance with politicians than, for better or worse, I had yet experienced) was always to assume that there had to be a core of solid and substantial stuff in any man who achieved big things in the big world, even if the qualities in question were not immediately apparent to the naked eye...

...This was why they—along with their allies in the business community— were such enthusiastic proponents of d?tente and why they maintained so devout a faith in the power of trade to trump Communist conviction...

...What it showed was that Reagan, despite his visionary rhetoric about the disintegration of the “evil empire,” was in reality cooperating tacitly with the Soviet Union to stabilize that empire rather than encouraging its breakup from within...

...of California is to be astonished by the quickness of his mind and how articulate he was: In these respects he reminds one more of John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton than of himself as president...

...After all, some of us were still resisting the label “neoconservative” by which we were becoming known by practically everyone else and still thought of ourselves as liberals or even as social democrats...

...The irony was that the “extreme” conservative Republican Ronald Reagan had by now become closer in his thinking to John F. Kennedy than Kennedy’s younger brother Teddy...

...And to see an old clip of Reagan holding a press conference when he first became governor WHAT CARRIED HIM THROUGH WAS THE “AMIABLE” PART OF HIS NATURE AND HIS RELENTLESS OPTIMISM ABOUT HIS OWN LIFE AND THE NATION...

...Having been chosen for this task by Reagan himself, who admired his biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Morris had evidently been given unusually free access both to the president and to his papers and records...

...and being human, I grew even more enthusiastic about the prospects of his presidency when, after being elected but before assuming office, he issued a statement urging “all Americans” to read my “critically important book...

...Reagan had always explicitly rejected and even derided this rationale as the dishonorable face of d?tente...

...I wanted very much to think so, but several of his actions made this extremely difficult...

...Even then, he made a bad impression by dwelling gratuitously on elementary aspects of the issues that he should have realized we already knew all about...

...and so on...