E-Mail This Article to a Friend Considering Reagan The 40th president’s place in history

UPON BECOMING president, Ronald Wilson Reagan supplanted John Wilkes Booth as the most influential actor in American history. Reagan, who died last week at the age of 93, was in the spotlight long before most readers of this newspaper were born.

Elected the nation’s oldest chief executive, he was a contemporary of the youngest, John Fitzgerald Kennedy — dead now for almost 41 years. Reagan (already in Hollywood) and Kennedy (the son of a famous businessman) both entered public consciousness in 1940: Ronnie playing football coach George "the Gipper" Gipp in the film Knute Rockne All American — prophetically titled Modern Hero in Great Britain; Jack publishing Why England Slept — a study of Britain’s hesitancy to confront Hitler. Mass culture and class were mutual obsessions of these unlikely generational bookends. Iconic of their respective West and East Coast tribes, both were cool and stylish personalities, engagingly on to themselves and the aphrodisiac of their own artifice. Each in his own way played the aristocrat for an audience consumed by middle-class desires and aspirations.

Kennedy — one of four murdered presidents — lives in history as a question mark, his promise violently unfulfilled, his reputation, to borrow a phrase Robert Lowell used in another context, "an oasis ... of lost connections." Like four other predecessors, Reagan survived attempted assassination. His election was a marker, an undeniable turning point. Like Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, McKinley, and Franklin Roosevelt, he arrived in Washington the embodiment of forces that would dominate Congress, elect governors, sway state legislators, and define America for the rest of the world. We live in the age of Reagan. Even if (as this newspaper hopes) John Forbes Kerry wins the White House this November, the reactionary grip Reagan’s legacy has on American politics will not be removed, only loosened.

Actor, Hollywood union chief, corporate spokesman for General Electric, television pitchman for Borax (a still-extant but no-longer-swanky cleaning product), Reagan — always engaged in his own happy-go-lucky and self-serving way with the issues of the day — turned political pro in the early 1960s. By the aggressively consensus-oriented standards of his time, he was one or two steps removed from being a right-wing nut. His philosophy: Big Business is good. Communism is evil. Government is, if not evil, at least sinister. Taxes are unspeakable. Republicans are God’s people. Democrats, if also not evil, are at best misguided, at worst dupes of the godless reds. (Hear any echoes here?)

Reagan joined the 1964 presidential campaign of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, another ruggedly handsome talent who was the most presentable right-winger of that time. Goldwater, of course, was defeated by that peacenik Lyndon Johnson, who quite plausibly suggested that Barry G. might trigger a nuclear war, but who went on to visit the Vietnam War upon us. The treason of Richard Nixon’s Watergate followed. Along the way, Kennedy and his brother Robert were murdered, as were Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. An unsuccessful assassin crippled George Wallace. Even the amiable Gerald Ford was twice the target of a would-be presidential shooter. A born-again Southern governor named Jimmy Carter was elected in hopes that he would heal the nation. When it turned out that the electorate had mistaken sanctimony for piety, he was replaced with the more amiable and less exacting Ronald Reagan, who had by then won his training wheels as governor of California — an office now held by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Kennedy in-law. History converges in ominous ways.

While JFK (the first iteration, that is) was elected narrowly in a wellspring of cautious optimism, RR was elected decisively to soothe a depressed nation and ease our collective anxiety. He was, in a very real sense, our Prozac president.

But Reagan treated the symptoms, not the cause. He didn’t cure, he disguised. The rich got richer, the poor lost hope, and the middle class was squeezed. The AIDS epidemic was too long ignored. Numerous right-wingers were named to the federal judiciary. The environment was put at the disposal of business. And those were just the highlights. George Herbert Walker Bush and his son, George W., institutionalized those trends. That was Reagan’s legacy. And that is national policy today.

Reagan was right about one thing: Communism was evil. It is a weakness still among some on the left that they fail sufficiently to appreciate and recognize what the record shows: that Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their acolytes did more damage than even Hitler. But Reagan had a big lie of his own. Although what was then known as the Soviet Union was disintegrating under the weight of its own failures — intellectual, moral, and material — Reagan and his acolytes followed a policy of increased confrontation on the bet that it would accelerate Soviet decline. The gamble paid. We won. A myth was born.

Our current president, who shares Reagan’s habit of mind (he may be smart, but he’s ignorant) has adopted the big lie for his own purposes. Iraq, was we know, was the nation. And weapons of mass destruction were the threat. War followed. And while it’s not nuclear, that is grim satisfaction.

Bush’s big Iraq lie has its roots in what we now call the Iran-contra scandal (see "Storybook President," News & Features). History has judged that sorry episode from which Reagan never recovered — at least while still in office — as more treacherous, and possibly treasonous, than Watergate. We’re confident that that, too, will be time’s verdict on Bush’s Iraq war.

Bush personifies Reaganism run not only rampant but also amok. The mainstream conglomerate press, which fills our airwaves and news pages with fond, good-old-days remembrances of the Gipper, doesn’t have the mettle to note that the scion of Reagan’s legacy opposes stem-cell research — something that might someday lead to sound treatment for the Alzheimer’s that clouded and compromised the last year’s of Reagan’s life.

Irony is all too often a sad handmaiden of democracy.

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