On Ronald Reagan

To the question “Was he a great president?,” one has to answer in the affirmative, for he was maybe the best damn president the Screen Actors Guild ever had. When made to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Reagan made it plain that un-American activities can come in more than one shape, size, and guise: “As a citizen, I would hesitate to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology. However, if it is proven that an organization is an agent of foreign power, or in any way not a legitimate political party—and I think the government is capable of proving that—then that is another matter….But at the same time I never want to see our country become urged, by either fear or resentment of this group, that we ever compromise with any of our democratic principles through that fear or resentment.”

It was under the auspices of the SAG presidency that he met his second wife, who was concerned because HUAC had been Red-hunting a different Nancy Davis, and they were meaning blacklist. She got acquainted with Ronnie to make sure they didn’t snag the wrong Nancy Davis. By the time they were married and Reagan became president of a much larger constituency altogether, Nancy had long since converted Ronnie to her Republican way of thinking. As governor of California, he had gone after campus protestors and welfare recipients, and as president he did more of the same, and much more beyond that, even having the gall to fire striking air-traffic controllers--forgetting, apparently, that he had once been head of perhaps the most extortionate union of them all. It’s not a symptom of Alzheimer’s, necessarily; it could be insanity, or just severe delusions, or the kind of sheer absence of self-awareness that politicians everywhere are prone to.

Which is what has always made his nickname, “the Great Communicator,” such a gas. The Berlin Wall, like Sir Hillary’s mountain, was there, and someone had to tell Mr. Gorbachev to tear it down. It might as well have been the president. He was self-aware enough, at least, and humble enough, to concede that “I wasn’t a great communicator, but I communicated great things.”

And yet, two of his most distinguished—by which I mean undistinguished—moments as Great Communicator came as the result of the presence of microphones, that principle instrument of all mass communications, great or otherwise. In 1984, prior to his own weekly radio broadcast, testing one-two, Reagan improvised a doozy of a sound-check: “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” And it was in 1980 (in a debate held at the high school I would (just barely) graduate from a decade and a half later, moderated by the publisher of the paper I would write sports stories for while attending that high school) that Reagan interrupted the moderator, a man named Mr. Green, by testily declaring, “I paid for this microphone, Mr. Breen.” The statement was a mistake on at least two or three different levels, but Reagan would always be convinced that it helped win him the presidency, so maybe, to him, it wasn’t really a mistake at all.

Then you see a movie like The Killers, from 1964: Reagan hunting down Lee Marvin, all throughout the same California of which he would soon become governor. He looks just as impassive and reserved as he would look as president two decades later, with the same sculpted black hair, the same sturdy physique, except the milieu couldn’t possibly be more different. Those of us young enough to travel to this movie backwards through time—that is, a great many of us—know that this actor is a man who would later be let off the legal hook largely because everyone believed it was perfectly plausible that as president he was capable of being blissfully oblivious to his own administration selling weapons to Iran right under his nose. Now we’re expected to buy him in the role of a savvy villain, capable of outsmarting Lee Marvin for two-and-a-half reels of a Sam Spiegel caper? One way of phrasing this would be to say that it "strains credibility"; another would be to say that it's simply "incredible." But saying it the second way could be a serious miscommunication, and miscommunication has consequences.