Reagan and the Magic 77

My Father at 100--Ron Reagan's touching new memorial to his father--reminds me of nothing so much of Geoffrey Wolff's unforgettable memoir of his own father, The Duke of Deception. Wolff's is more ambitious and searching work, more polished--Wolff is, after all, a seasoned professional.  But no matter.  Each book is a courageous effort by a likable man to come to terms with the ghost of a much-loved but  notably flawed parent.  Anybody who has ever had or been a flawed parent can relate, and let's stipulate that that takes in most of us.

Ron clearly does like the great iconic celebrity who used to carry him to bed and race him in the swimming pool.  And you'd have to concede that celebrity papa, whatever his vices, was never quite the same emotional train wreck as Wolff's lying, cheating, con artist.   But as others have remarked, Reagan senior did have that hard impenetrable emotional core.  It is Reagan junior's job to try to understand how it came into being, and just how it worked to complicate their lives.  The inquiry takes him back to Dixon, IL, where papa grew up and to Ireland, the home of their ancestors, and to a variety of insights into their common past.

There are a number of well-crafted anecdotes in this highly readable account but I think two define the story, and remarkably, they are borne up on a common structure.  One is the story of how the 11-year-old Reagan came home alone to find his father drunk on the front porch, and single-handedly maneuvered father's helpless body upstairs to bed.  The other is how Reagan as a lifeguard over seven seasons on the Rock River saved the lives of 77 people.  That would be one a week for every week of his service.

The core commonality is perhaps obvious: plucky young loner drags helpless adult to safety.  So as not to be misunderstood, young Ron provides the interpretation.  Of the drunken-papa incident, young Ron says that "Dutch [i.e., his father] did what heroes do.  he manned up, took charge, muscled his pop to bed, and spared his mother's feelings besides."   Of lifeguarding, he waxes more expansive:

Picture yourself at 17.  Give it a second--really take yourself back to the insecure, somewhat awkward, not-nearly-as-adult-as-you-thought self that was the actual 17-year-old you.  Now, imagine yourself sprinting through the night toward the bank of a rushing river.  To make things more interesting, let's toss nearsightedness into the picture.  You've slung aside your glasses--along with your shoes and clothes--as you race to the river's edge. ... Tonight, the rescuer will be you.  Saving him is your summer job. Go.

So in each case Dutch mans up and saves the day.  And actually, there's one more common theme, although it may not be evident so far. That is: in neither episode, did the object of the benefaction show gratitude to the savior.   Or at least, if his father showed gratitude, it has been edited out of the story: grandpa emerges in papa's stories as, at best, an object of a kind of amused contempt.  As to to the swimmers, the point is clearer.  As Dutch appears to have said, and as young Ron is at pains to repeat--of all the lucky 77, only one ever thanked their rescuer. The rest either shrugged it off or tried to tell him how they hadn't really needed the help.

So, revised version: Dutch is the person who mans up and saves the day, even for people who do not want to be saved (there is actually a third such story, a coda,  involving Dutch and a five-year-old in a pool in Sacramento--her father, like so many before him did not appreciate the favor).  But there is a surprising discontinuity with respect to young Ron's treatment of these iconic yarns. That is: of the first--the drunk-on-the-porch story--young Ron does not believe it.

Only it didn't happen that way--it couldn't have happened that way. My father, just turned 11, was small for his age; he'd have stood maybe five feet tall and weighed barely 90 pounds. Jack, nearing 40, probably tipped the scales at 180. Dutch wasn't big or strong enough to drag Jack anywhere...

Young Ron's skepticism seems entirely justified here.  All the moreso because it is of a piece with the book's larger theme.  For young Ron entertains no illusions about his father's more general character. He recognizes him as most people do today: as a fabulist, an illusionist, a master of Irish blarney, the man who never let the facts get in the way of a good story, the man who thought World War II was a movie.  All the more remarkable, then, that Ron thinks the 77-saves story is true.

By hurling  himself into the river to save the lives of drowning strangers, he was not only proving his worth, he was setting the world aright.  How many of his rescues were legitimate (allowing for a handful of young women desperate enough to be saved by such a handsome lifeguard that they got themselves in as bit more trouble than they'd bargained for)?  I'd put the number at ... 77.

bona fide rescues, not just shoulders through the megaphone--over seven seasons at a smalltime river park in Illinois--that guy would have been in Ripley's Believe it or Not.

It's the precision that raises the eyebrows.  If he'd said "five," I suppose I wouldn't have blinked.  If he'd said "a lot," I couldn't have quarreled.  If he'd said "a lot--and some of them were actually drowning," I probably would have joined in the good-natured hilarity. But exactly 77?  It's the numerological sum of the letters in "Christ."  It's the number of branches of learning in Islam. It was Red Grange's number at the University of Illinois and the Chicago Bears.  Maybe we could retire Dutch's lifeguard shirt.

I should clarify my purposes here.  I have no interest in playing "gotcha" with a guy who died seven (sic!) years ago (and I certainly don't doubt that Reagan believed his own story, as he seems to have believed all of his stories).  I don't really want to make trouble for young Ron, who, as I suggest, comes across as an enormously likable man and who in any event wrote a gripping book.   I guess my point is to remark (once again?) on the extraordinary durability of stories, particularly in families, and how much we find ourselves to cling to them, no matter how skeptical and clear-sighted we may seem to be.

Footnote:  another part of the swimming story involves the retrieval of a set of false teeth.  The beneficiary, according to young Ron's account, was a certain Gus Whiffleberg.  As of this writing, Google recognizes no instances of the name "Whiffleberg"--except references to the Reagan story. 

Reagan, Wasserman and the MCA

I didn't watch all of the PBS special on Ronald Reagan this week--as is my custom, I tend to do my TV watching with one hand tied behind my back.  For the most part, what I saw struck me as remarkably fair-minded, with a lot of thanks to the remarkable tact and insight of young (!!!) who evidently loves his dad with a kind of clear-sightedness that perhaps only children can muster.

But did I wonder--did anyone tell the story of what seems to me to have been the great inflection point in Reagan's political career?  I'm thinking of the time when he was President of the Screen Actors Guild and he cut a deal with Lew Wasserman of MCA allowing MCA both to represent actors and to hire actors for movies and TV.  That deal helped to launch MCA onto the Empyrean heights of the Hollywood elite, and Wasserman seems to have remembered who his friends were: by all accounts he was the driving force behind the early episodes of Reagan's life on the public stage.

Allowing Wasserman to run with the fox and hunt with the hounds always struck me as the very definition of double agentry--a monstrous betrayal of the actors he was supposed to be representing.  Yet I admit I am not clear whether the actors thought so.  He did get elected to another term at the head of SAG.  I do infer that Reagan's entanglement with MCA became a political problem of sorts later on, when MCA abandoned its agency business to concentrate on production.   How did Reagan understand his own role (sic)?  I don't know; this seems to be another one of those cases where he disappears behind that Cheshire cat smile.

There's a highly charged account of the whole episode in Dan Moldea's Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob, available on line.   I liked even better the rendering in Connie Bruck's When Hollywood Had a King, one of my all time favorite business books.   I haven't gone back to look at Lou Cannon's biographical stuff and I haven't any idea whether it appears in Ron Reagan's own account, My Father at 100 In any event, while you can't call it exactly "unknown," I've always thought it deserves to be better known.. 

Obama: Says Who?

I have to admit it: I feel more than a little uncomfortable reading (seemingly) kind words about Barack Obama from--ready for it?--Peggy Noonan. Okay, I'm sure she'd be just as uncomfortable to find herself keeping company with me (well he-llo, pretty lady!). But although I still count myself an Obamaphile, I think I still find myself more at home with straightforward critics like Glenn Greenwald or Paul Krugman than I do with the lady who gave us "read my lips" and "a thousand points of light."

It's really not just stuffiness or snobbery. The truth is, I just keep looking for the catch, nervously watching my backside to make sure she doesn't put a knife in it. So needless to say I find myself reassured when I get to the end and find that what she really likes about Barack Obama is how much he reminds her of--ready for it?--Ronald Reagan:

I end with a story told to me by an old Reagan hand who, with another former Reagan administration official, was being given a private tour of the White House by Michelle Obama. This was last summer. Mrs. Obama led the two through the halls, and then they stopped by the Lincoln bedroom. They stood in the doorway, and then took a step inside, but went no deeper. Everything looked the same, but something was different. "We don't allow guests to stay in this room anymore," Mrs. Obama explained. She spoke of it as a place of reverence. They keep it apart, it's not for overnights.

Unspoken, but clearly understood by the Reagan hands, was: This is where he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. A true copy of it is here, on the desk. He signed it: "Abraham Lincoln." The Reagan hands were impressed and moved. It is fitting and right that the Lincoln bedroom be held apart. It always should have been. Good, they thought. Good.

Read that quickly and you'd think that it was Reagan who signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Obama in the same breath as the guy who presided over the Nicaraguan death squads. Oh dear, maybe Greenwald is onto something after all.

The Best? --Notes on Reagan

This would be the third post in a day on the concept of "the best" in political leadership. Previously I wrote about Mussolini and Manmohan Singh. The topic for the moment is closer to home: this time, Ronald Reagan, as limned in Will Bunch's Tear Down this Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future--and let it be said from the outset that it is not my purpose here to make Reagan out to be another Mussolini (or Singh, either, for that matter). But Bunch does help to clarify just what Reagan was, and what not.

For starters, there are a couple of points on which I suppose almost everyone would agree: Reagan near perfect pitch for catching the mood of the electorate, and for articulating a popular visions. In this respect, as many of his friends and his enemies would agree, he belong on the dais with Roosevelt and Churchill (with Hitler also, perhaps, but I shouldn't confuse things).

But the next point about Reagan--often lost in the undebrush--is that he was the consummate pragmatist. He made deals: he made them as governor, and he made them as president. Corrrespondingly, he never really tackled any issue on which he figured he might not gain traction with the voters.

And third--this might be most misunderstood--he completely grasped the disconnect in the mind of the electorate between substance and cosmetics. This last point explains so many important aspects of the Reagan record.

As Bunch so well documents, the iconography remembers Reagan as the avatar of small government when in fact he was nothing of the sort. In terms of actual performance--not cosmetics--on virtually every significant measure, Reagan's economic record is an affront to the free market vision. Government grew bigger on his watch, in terms of inflation adjusted dollars, and also of number of civilian employees (he eked out a tiny win in terms of percentage of GDP, but it was almost invisible). And as so many have notd so often, the budget deficit increased by a factor of (more than) four.

We could make a similar point about "the social agnda"--abortion, gay rights, establishment of religion, that sort of thing. On these issues, Reagan surely talked the talk, but he almost never walked the walk.

Perhaps less well understood, there is the same disconnect on foreign policy. Reagan's record set a modern standard for bellicosity. Yet on closer scrutiny, his record on the ground was pretty tame. A few days ago I suggested, only part flippantly--that Reagan (unlike Obama) deserved a Nobel Peace prize, for his role in ending the Cold War. But not for the reasons his claque likes to spout: not for his aggressive sabre-rattling and his humoungous toys-for-boys military budgets. Rather he deserves it for what he achieved in spite, not because, of his supporters' greatest desires. I wonder, is there a Nobel Prize for making your adversaries look like idiots? Perhaps we can create one, and let the first entry be posthumous.

But supposing you accept this view of the record, you still haven't gone very far in deciding his place as a president. So granted, he won the Cold War. But he did so by a major act of betrayal to his own base--for this he becomes a hero. Or go back to the economic record. As one who favors a smaller government (and who remains grateful to Bill Clinton for working to give us one), I suppose I'd have to say he was a failure. Yet I suppose it is this very failure that would move some on the left to grant him just a trace of forgiveness. On the the social issues, I'd put the point exactly the other way round: on these issues, I am actually delighted that he was so full of hot air, so unwilling to put his money where his mouth was.

All of this leads to a convoluted record at best, although this might be as much as you are going to be able to do with any major political figure. But it still leaves you pining for something more. Specifically--I am going into deep water here--you find yourself thinking about all the issues left on the table in the 80s; all the items on which we could have used some leadership, and didn't get any.

This is, as I suggest, highly uncertain. For when any voter says he wants "leadership," what he means is that he wants a politician who will yank the debate on in his favored direction, no matter what the populace might think. Roosevelt gave us "leadership" into World War II, and thank heavens for that. Bush 43 gave us "leadership," all right, and look where it got us. And, oh yes, Mussolini gave the Italians "leadership," and got them into a mess big enough to make Bush 43 look good.

Indeed, you could probably put together quite a list of politicians who were popular in their own times precisely because they played Dr. Feelgood and did not provide the leadership they might have provided (my own favorite example would be Britain's sometimes-beloved Stanley Baldwin--indeed you might say that Churchill's leadership in 1940 was directed at getting Britain out of the mess that Baldwin's non-leadership had left them in.

As I guess I've made clear, I think Reagan's on-the-ground record is mixed, but on the whole, not nearly as bad as his critics made out. But in terms of what he could have done, oh boy, there is so much more.

Addendum: While putting this together, I ran across a post by Andrew Samwick who develops this last point in just exactly the direction I would like it to go.

Afterthought: In fairness to Bunch, his book taken as a whole is more ambitious than I make it out to be. He appraises the record of the "real" Reagan. But also and perhaps more important, he does a wonderful job of recounting the narrative of the "Reagan reinvention"--the refashioning of the last decade that has transformed him from a somewhat mediocre president into a plaster saint.

You Know What--He Probably Should Have Won It

Jerome Doolittle has a handy compendium of predictable conservative responses to the new Nobelist (h/t, James Fallows), including:

7. No thinking person has taken the Nobel Peace Prize seriously
since Reagan didn’t win one for ending the Cold War.

Cute, but you know what? Reagan probably should have won the prize for ending the Cold War--in company, of course, with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Pope, the price of West Texas Intermediate Crude, all the other forces (human and otherwise) that converged to generate such a happy result.

Not, perhaps, for the reasons usually set forth in the conservative folklore, and specifically not for running an obscene defense budget--a threat which, by all the evidence, Gorbachev never took seriously anyway, because he knew the Americans had no intention of a first strike. Rather, Reagan deserves the prize for something more ambitious and radical--for making it all conceivable, and in particular, for doing a 180 on all his conservative allies who thought he had gone all Alpha Centauri on them and had to scramble (and grind their teeth) for years as they tried to adjust to the new reality.

Recall Will Bunch's Tear Down this Myth: How the Reagan Legacy has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future, where he demonstrates how how both his friends and his enemies misremember Reagan and deploy him for lesson she had/has nothing to do with. And stipulate that nothing in this version requires you to concede that Reagan was anything other than a bumbling old fool; specifically not that Reagan really understood what he was doing; you are permitted to continue recalling that this is the president who thought World War II was a movie. But wouldn't you enjoy savoring how crazy it would make Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perl, whoever, to have their nose rubbed in the fact their hero achieved immortality by his openness to the new world and his willingness to abjure war?

Goodbye to "Morning in America"

I admit I muted out the sound on John McCain’s Wisconsin “victory” speech when he started climbing on Obama, although I do find fragments of what I was trying to get away from here:

I will do everything in my power to make sure the American people are not deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change.

...he said, eloquently, if somewhat emptily. And Obama is a “no more than a holiday from history and failed policies that rely on government intervention in the lives of Americans."

No, no, it’s not that I’m that nuts about Obama. He’s an attractive guy in his way but I think he’s make a deeply flawed president (but so would all the other contenders in the race, so where does that get you). And I recognize that Obama’s a big boy. And that politics ain’t beanbag.

My real point is elsewhere. Meaning: is this really the way McCain wants to start his campaign—on a note of bitterness and rancor?

You guess my answer. Thing is, just in general I think McCain’s biggest enemy in this campaign is his age—not the actuality, but the appearance. He’s got a long, tough slog ahead of him, and only the most daring of generals will make a ground invasion of Moscow. Trust me, by the end of the campaign, he is going to look tired. And tired is what he sounds just now.

But apparently it was no accident. Josh Marshall digs up this McCain gem from 2006 (link):

I'm embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics, I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble. I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party's efforts to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness.

John, John, John—as one who is too much given to snark himself, let me warn you: the voters do not want snark. Oh, they may like it for a day or so. And the folks at The Corner may take it as a regular diet. But most of the voters get tired of that sort of thing. It’s Ronald Reagan you want to imitate, not an unfunny Bob Dole.

John McCain and the O Word

Ask Google Blogs about "John McCain" and "too old," you get 2,837 hits. Even excluding "Chuck Norris," you still get 1,833. So they're talking about it: if I do the arithmetic right, McCain would be 72 next January 20, and 80 at the end of a second term, the oldest president ever.

The current record-holder, Ronald Reagan, took office just a month shy of his 70th birthday., As McCain's age-mate, I am in a good position to remember the runup to the Reagan presidency in 1980. Did people say that Reagan was too old? My recollection is--yeah, but they didn't talk about it nearly as much as they are talking about it with McCain.

What's the difference? I don't think it's a mere two-plus years, 72 to (almost) 70. I think it is, first, that McCain seems old--not "dessicated and enfeebled" old, but "ornery old coot" old. And the showpiece of his resumé is his time in the prison camp. The Vietnam War says "ancient history" to most voters. The prison camp says "brutalization," which is not consonant with "Morning in America."

And that is the flip side. Reagan's signature--what made his enemies so crazy--was his sunny insouciance. Free-associate McCain, you get torture and abuse. Free-associate Ronald Reagan, you get Jane Wyman and Bonzo.

I'm not delighted with the prospect of a McCain presidency, but it's not the age thing--if anything, I suspect he may be more suited to the job after 20 years in the Senate than he would have been as a callow young buck. It's his crankiness that gets me, along with the appearance of being generally ill-informed (even though I suspect he is less ill informed now than he was then). And I really think he means it when he says we should stay in Iraq for 100 years. But here is one consolation: at least neither he nor I will be around to see the end of that one.

Chris Matthews: Plays Well With Others

I confess to a guilty pleasure: I like Chris Matthews. Okay granted, somebody must or he would have lost his MSNBC slot. But it’s not that easy to find people who will confess to it publicly. He’s too brash. He’s too loud. He’s insufficiently respectful.

And of course, he’s way to partisan. Or so they say. Indeed he seems to have achieved the kind of partisan hostility so much desired by the mediocre journalist: everybody hates him. Google “Chris Matthews” and “right-wing hack” and you get 694 hits’; substitute “left-wing hack” and you pick up another 280. Of course Googling is not an exact science; some of these hits are just accidents. But it is almost comically easy to find attacks on him from both ends of the spectrum. “Funny that anyone on the right would hate him,” grumbles a commentator at Democratic Underground, “given that he's just another right-wing hack” (link); cf. (link), (link). “Mathews is a left wing hack of the first order!” grumbles a commentator at the Politico (link); cf. (link).

Of course this kind of thing as an easy way out for anybody who isn’t doing his job right; maybe what they hate you for is not your independence, but your sheer incompetence. As I guess, I'd say I’ve made clear, that I don’t think Matthews is “incompetent.” But I’m not sure “independence” captures the right nuance, either. In Matthews’ case, it is more of a jaunty insouciance—a sense that this, too, shall pass, and that lots of things in life do not matter as much as they seem to matter—together with an old-fashioned love of process.

For many in politics, a love of process is an indifference to substance and so itself a kind of philistinism, if not nihilism. But I think it may be—what I think Matthews appears to convey—is that process itself is a kind of substance. For Matthews, a love of process is, inter alia, a love of conviviality, of good food and good booze in good company, friendship in the Epicurean sense. It’s also a recognition that the process of politics is a craft, and that the able practitioners are much to be admired.

His love of conviviality comes through never more clearly than in his enthusiasm for House Speaker Tip O’Neill and President Ronald Reagan. I have to cut Matthews a bit of slack here: I am one of a seeming handful of people on the planet who never found Reagan personally likable (so far as I can tell, Gore Vidal is the only other). But I have to be won over by Mattews’ account of their affection for each other—who can resist the picture of O’Neill at Reagan’s bedside, reciting the 23d Psalm?

Matthews’ love of craft shows through in his admiration for Reagans’ sometimes Chief of Staff, James A. Baker. Baker is, shall we stipulate, a Republican, but he is hardly everybody’s model of a good Republican. Matthews admires him as the ultimate safe pair of hands, the grownup who we hope is in charge when the kindergarteners start throwing their GI Joes at each other. It explains also, I think, his reserve about Barack Obama. Hillary fans believe Matthews has sold out to Barack, but listen closely and you won’t be so sure. I think Matthews likes Barack’s warm-heartedness, and his optimism, and his ability to connect. But I think he sees him as an untested item, not at all demonstrably ready for the hard work of high office.

I think it is a fair cop on Barack. Sadly, I suspect (and I suspect that Matthews suspects) that maybe nobody else is either. Heaven send us a safe pair of hands: somebody who understands that politics ain't easy; that it takes wisdom, foresight, craftiness, empathy and heaven knows how many other qualities always in short supply. Or as Matthews himself might say: Tip O'Neill, where are you when we need you?

Update: I wrote this before I saw this. Well, can't please 'em all.

Remembering the Ford Administration

They say the job of every (Republican?) president is to make his predecessor look good. The web is awash with commentary this morning on the passing of Gerald Ford; I cheerfully align myself with the “Ford was a decent man” faction—virtually the last American president who could do the job without letting his ego get in the way.

Dissenters from this view cite, as exhibit #1, the fact the Ford White House was the same gang of ruffians who created the current mess—Cheney and Rumsfeld. It’s hard to argue with this but I would like to throw out one idea that I haven’t seen discussed elsewhere. This comes from my friend Gladys, an old-time East Coast GOP pro, who remembers a day when she thought you could be both a Republican and a feminist. Gladys recalls:

I think it is the heart surgery. I remember Cheney from the Ford administration. You could deal with him. He was a hard Wyoming conservative, but you could deal with him. He stood for what he stood for, but that was that. These days he is bitter and angry and dark. He’s had the surgery; he never really came back. He’s an old man and he is near the end and it shows.

It’s worth a thought. And no, not really Gladys. Nobody is named Gladys. But since I am quoting without permission (and paraphrasing from memory, at that)…

Postscript: Two other quickies. One, remember it was the Reagan right who undertook to destroy Ford for ideological impurity. And two, recall the 76 election: Ford v. Carter. On the decency scale, things have changed, not so?