“When did America love a former president this way? When?” You
know Ronald Reagan’s triumph is sealed for good when someone like
Mike Wallace (on “Larry King”) is asking such questions, with utter
admiration for the man he and all the rest of the media and
educated elites used to scorn with such regularity.
Something very odd has happened. It’s been in the works for
several years, and now the president’s death has brought it into
huge focus.
It explains first of all the tremendous sadness with which
people are reacting to news of his passing. Normally, when a
93-year-old Alzheimer’s victim who ceased being himself years ago
dies, the immediate reaction is relief that he has finally gone on
to his just reward. With Reagan there’s some of that, yes, but it
hardly begins to mitigate the overriding hurt. Perhaps collectively
there’s a sense of guilt that no one could do much of anything to
help him over the last decade. A great amount of pent-up emotion is
being released. Everyone knows he deserved so much better (though
thank God for his wife), and that he’s the last man who would have
ever settled for helplessness.
And maybe he wasn’t entirely helpless. The thing to remember is
who he was going into his Alzheimer’s phase. During this period of
earthly exile, when he was still with us but beyond reach, he began
to take on a mythical character, the sort once reserved for a
medieval ruler mysteriously snatched from his disbelieving
subjects.
His star has been soaring ever since, sweeping many a liberal
along in its wake. In a way they never could while he was in his
prime, America’s not so loyal oppositionists began to take him
seriously and to respect his principles and even understand his
policies. Qualities they once belittled they started to appreciate.
Like other Americans they know we’ll not see his like again.
That prospect appeared to affect President Bush’s presentation
Sunday above Omaha Beach, as if he were bearing the burden of not
being Ronald Reagan. But he’s not the only one. Since Saturday
afternoon, the Great Communicators in the media have been all over
the place trying to match the real McCoy. Let’s just say they did
not get their start at WHO-Des Moines. ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas said
Reagan would “lay” in state on at the Capitol. Lou Cannon had to
correct her that he’s not Reagan’s “official” biographer. Jeff
Greenfield dismissed Reagan’s anti-tax views as the product of his
personal outrage at having to pay 70 percent of his high earnings
to government. The incorrigible Haynes Johnson, thinking he was
being polite, at that, called Reagan our “Sun King” and a wonderful
“ceremonial president.” (What Hall of Mirrors has he been living
in?) And he had to agree with Mikhail Gorbachev, who’d said that
Reagan had “contributed” to ending the Cold War. Cokie Roberts, who
was positively adoring of Reagan, claimed Reagan was getting
nowhere with Congress until the attempt on his life — all of two
months into his first term. Everyone seems to be falling for the
blarney that Reagan and Tip O’Neill were great pals. Anyone recall
a single kind thing O’Neill ever said about Reagan?
Expect the chatter to go on ad infinitum, by little people
grasping at a giant of untold dimensions. What’s most telling is
that everyone is now wanting to tell their own Reagan stories (and
I’ll plead guilty in a moment). Reagan is beloved because people
were truly fond of him. A whole generation has grown up of
youngsters who like him as easily as earlier generations venerated
Lincoln or Washington. Charisma, presence, personality, affability,
modesty, decency — he exuded them all.
I saw him twice. The first time in August 1974, in Santa
Barbara, my home town, before he moved to the area. It was his
final year as governor but the first time he officially opened the
town’s annual Old Spanish Days fiesta. I’d grown up watching his
predecessor, Pat Brown, doing the honors. But Reagan was another
matter — the town’s ferocious lefties would have made life
impossible for him. So he stayed away, until that August evening,
when he stood on the steps of the Old Mission, in a white cowboy
shirt, and wowed an audience of several thousand sitting on the
lawn below. What impressed me most is how he impressed the
out-of-towner I was with that night. Later she and I were married.
Reagan had been our political introduction.
After we moved to Washington in 1985, the first major dinner my
wife and I attended was the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s
annual bash at the Washington Hilton. The keynote speaker was
President Reagan. His appearance electrified the room. Suddenly
everyone felt better about being alive. Group psychology is an
enduring mystery, but the only other time I’d felt something
comparable was when we saw the Pope in Chicago in 1979. Whatever it
was Reagan had it.
He said our best days are ahead of us. But how can that be, if
he won’t be there too?
