Ronald Reagan, with the perfect timing that distinguishes the gifted actor, passed away June 5, a day short of sixty years after D-Day and twenty years after he initiated the new round of World War Two Veteran worship, leaving Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw to pick up the strands later.  Dying this weekend, Reagan will receive today all the newspaper Sunday coverage that would be considered appropriate by his acolytes.  Credit where it’s due; Reagan knew exits well.

 

It was something Richard Nixon never got right.  Within two weeks after his death, Jackie Kennedy died, and Nixon was subsumed in the Kennedy adulation yet again.

 

Even Gore Vidal, Reagan’s ideological opposite in so many ways except class snobbery and regional xenophobia - albeit far, far different regions - never had any trouble saying that Reagan was a good actor, far better than anyone gave him credit for.  He recalled Reagan studying Eisenhower give a speech, learning and absorbing.  Reagan has been called, like the current President Bush, an incurious idiot, but even his detractors and enemies – he had some – never doubted that Reagan loved the United States above all things and that whatever the reality of his deeds and competence, he took America’s hand and made sure it saw itself as he saw it and in public appealed always to Lincoln’s better angels of our nature.  He may have said an evil thing or two about other politicians in this nation, but I cannot recall any burning put down, or mean remark.  I don’t think that was an act, I think he was both naturally polite and a great politician.

 

Only Bill Clinton was a better one, and Clinton owed a lot of his act, in turn, to having studied Reagan as much as Kennedy, who was never anywhere near as successful.  Clinton was also a far better Great Communicator, a title I never understood applied to Reagan.  I listened to Reagan kissing the Challenger Astronauts goodbye and it’s a maudlin, unoriginal, inappropriate little speech that left me – and I’m a sap of the first water, sentimental, and not restrained about weeping at need – clear eyed and disappointed.

 

Reagan never touched me; which is to say, Peggy Noonan never touched me, because Reagan couldn’t speak off the cuff, well or otherwise, and Noonan has such palpable ‘daddy’ issues it’s uncomfortable to hear the speeches she wrote for him, or her estimations of him. 

 

What the current common wisdom is - given that his subordinates have essentially admitted the Democrats’ complaints of twenty years ago and said ‘yes, yes, he WAS an ignorant and shallow man’ – what it now says is that ‘yeah, but he had a simple vision of Soviet defeat and he did it.’  He did it by outspending them and bankrupting them, barely stopping short of doing the same to ourselves.  This conflicts with consistent testimony from former Soviet and current Russian officials that Reagan arguably speeded up the collapse of the Soviet Union by a year or two at most.  Even the American conservatives, who kept up the Great Scare for forty years, are hard put, confronted with the open evidence before them, to argue that the threat wasn’t exaggerated. 

 

The great Soviet military machine was a straw dog, at war with itself and dependent upon a technology sector that was small and incompetent and incapable of the feats and victories of which our conservatives had always suggested they were.   Their ships took each other under tow religiously.  Their subs were so noisy they could be heard half way around the world.  Their Army got walloped in Afghanistan, a war that was not their Vietnam but their desolate and obscure Mexican state on the border.

 

Their air defense let a German teenager fly unnoticed to a landing in Red Square.  The excitement this caused detracted attention from their submarine disasters, and the pathetic performance of their tanks in various mid-East wars, and the fact that their black economy outperformed their state regulated one.

 

But Reagan alone defeated them, that modern day citadel of Evil, that intimidating military industrial complex that could not compete.  So we are now told.

 

This image of the lone cowboy who rode into town and forced it to do good, as if Gary Cooper had indeed organized the town and arrested rather than murdered his nemesis in High Noon, is given much play by the right wing.  Tom Clancy, a hugely successful author who never served in the military, dedicated a later book to Ronald Wilson Reagan: the Man Who Won the War.  This Bonaparte image is double edged to those who know history.  But under Reagan ‘history’ was an annoyance and could be rewritten at will.  After years of declining educational values, it was unlikely he’d be called upon it by the electorate of small men looking for role models, women looking for Daddy, and lampreys seeking to exploit both.

 

But Reagan was mentally disturbed, possibly because his Alzheimer’s started early in his administration.   Reagan told stories from war movies as if they were true, no matter how implausible.  Confronted with his lies/delusions, he denied, then joked.  He never admitted he knew the difference.

 

Here’s a speech excerpt from 1982, given in Berlin to American military personnel:

It goes back to a war when a B - 17 bomber was flying back across the channel badly shot up by anti-aircraft fire. The ball turret that hung beneath the belly of the plane had taken a hit, was jammed. They couldn't get the ball turret gunner out while they were flying, and he was wounded. And out over the channel the plane started to lose altitude. The skipper ordered bail-out, and as the men started to leave the plane, the boy in the ball turret knew he was being left to go down with the plane. The last man to leave the plane saw the captain sit down on the floor and take his hand, and he said, ``Never mind son, we'll ride it down together.''

The Congressional Medal of Honor, posthumously awarded. That citation that I read when I was serving in that same war stuck with me for many years and came back to me just a few years ago when the Soviet Union gave its highest honor, a gold medal, to a man, a Spaniard living in Moscow. But they don't give citations. They don't tell you why; they just give the medal. So, I did some digging to find out why he was their highest honoree. Well, he had spent 8 years in Cuba before going to Moscow. And before that he had spent 23 years in Mexico in prison. He was the man who buried a pickaxe in the head of -- Leon Trotsky's head. They gave their highest honor for murder. We gave our highest honor to a man who had sacrificed his life to comfort a boy who had to die.

It’s a brilliant story, one Reagan told several times including to the Medal of Honor Society; it just isn’t true.  It’s from a movie and a Reader’s Digest propaganda tale during the war.  Reagan never saw a commendation, although he could clearly ‘remember’ it, because it never existed.

It’s hardly the only example.  Garry Wills, in Reagan’s America, points out that Reagan went out of his way to suggest he had somehow been as one with America’s fighting forces during WWII, when in fact he didn’t serve outside making movies, just like his friend John Wayne, and in later years Sly Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and other action heroes who became associated with the military they never served, often to the surprise of their fans.  If a lie, it was a serious, disturbed one akin to those claiming medals they never won, or service they never saw.  If confusion, well……..

Reagan also, after great bombast, invaded Lebanon to demonstrate something or other.  Kidnappings of Americans increased, two hundred Marines were killed in their barracks, the U.S.S. Iowa shelled something or other, and we pulled out.  The seeds of al-Quada were there and in Afghanistan, a nation whose more fanatical Islamists Reagan armed generously to fight the Soviets for which we will pay through the coming years.  It was an example of the Country Club Tough Guy mentality that distinguished Reagan and his descendents, the neo-cons who, with few exceptions, called upon their universal avoidance of military service themselves to construct the Iraq War and aftermath.  Full of threats and bombast and hairy-chested virility for domestic purpose, they chicken out under pressure and never fight a war there is a chance of losing.  Grenada.  Panama.  Iraq.

Reagan’s administration was far more corrupt than any that followed.  This might be explained by Reagan’s Attorney General caught saying he didn’t know a $15k interest free loan to himself was a thing of value, and that it was coincidence that the lender and his family went on government payroll right after.  But then, Edwin Meese thought Dickens was showing that Bob Cratchett had a good deal and should stop bitching about Scrooge.   Ten shillings a week was a lot, back then, said Meese.  He doesn’t mention Tiny Tim.

Other Reagan officials saw catsup as a vegetable on school menus.

Nancy Reagan has said on camera that she had to bring in outsiders to convince the President that he had paid weapons to Iran to get the hostages home despite his having said the opposite and condemning all who would suggest it.  In a bizarre concession speech, Reagan says he still believes he did nothing wrong but the facts suggest otherwise.  He never admits lying, or not understanding, or anything.  We are left to conclude that his brain loses to his heart, he can’t process facts by himself.  That’s rather terrifying.

But America not only didn’t condemn Reagan much, it continued to love him up to his death.  He told great stories about ourselves, and made us think better of ourselves, and perhaps inspired us to do good things.  Just like an inspirational movie.

The problem is, our movies are often based upon falsehoods and fictions, and dangerous ones at that. 

A few years ago, an official and approved biography came out in which the author invented himself as a contemporary of Reagan’s to tell the tale.  Edmund Morris was widely condemned, but as a biographer he had problems with his subject.  Reagan had no friends throughout his life who made the journey with him.  Even his brother was distant.  This isn’t unusual in alcoholic families where violence was a part.  Morris’ decision provided that link.

But the charge that important matters got shorted is another issue.  Two pages to Presidential elections, disarmament treaties.  But the problem was Reagan, who had little to say at all about these things.  Reagan, according to Vidal, was a famously boring man who had the knack of long involved stories to cover it up…..sorta.  He wasn’t a deep thinker or much for the median depths either.  He was the very definition of the shallow man, who not only didn’t understand his mistakes but his achievements as well.

His huge national debt (Cheney says Reagan taught us that deficits don’t matter, which had been the Democratic point since FDR and just as wrong in their mouths), our bloated and self-congratulatory military, our worship of the image rather than the fact, these are not the exclusive legacies of Ronald Wilson Reagan.  But they’re part of it.