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Posted on 01/23/2005 9:54:10 PM PST by Former Military Chick

As I look back on Ronald Reagan's life, I see that the most amazing part was, like a true professional--a great quarterback or a great musician--he made it look easy.

I had only a few encounters with Reagan, but each was like a tiny encapsulation of the man. Like perfectly written scenes, each incident illustrates the whole story and repeats it.

In 1973, I was teaching at the University of California at Santa Cruz, a major center of left-wing thought, a place where there was only one political viewpoint allowed--and that was Tom Hayden's. I got into a major fight with a college official who, while posing as a liberal, was clearly a big-time racist and anti-Semite. I quit over an anti-Semitic gesture he made toward me.

Through my father, a member of the Nixon cabinet at the time, I wrote to Reagan about this academic's public displays of racism. He wrote back a letter that said (in pertinent part and paraphrased), "I am disgusted but not surprised. This is the state of academics today...all hypocrisy and pretense."

It seemed like an amazingly candid letter then--and now. The man said what he felt.

About six years later, I was a speaker at a Republican Women's Club in Pacific Palisades. Former governor Reagan was also on the podium. I gave a speech that was extremely well received. Reagan came up to me in the parking lot of the Riviera Country Club and asked if I wanted to work on his presidential campaign. I thanked him and said I did not care to. In fact, I thought Bush was the man, even in 1979. (This was Bush the father.)

Reagan nodded politely, and the subject never came up again. But when he was President, a friend suggested me for a White House job. Word came back that Reagan remembered I was for Bush in '79 and did not want anyone working for him who had not been for him from the get-go. (How that squared with having Bush as veep was easy to see: He had to have someone who had been in the primaries on the ticket--but he didn't have to like his friends.)

A short time after that, I wrote a piece for Jim Bellows' Los Angeles Herald Examiner, praising Reagan for his foreign policy and defense initiatives. It was called "A President Who Keeps His Promises." The day it appeared, Reagan called me from Air Force One to thank me. We talked casually for about 10 minutes.

Like the Hollywood guy he was, he knew he had to cultivate his friends in the press to have good press. This was not guile; this was just how the world worked. Reagan grew up in a very tough business--the motion-picture industry. He saw a level of caginess and cunning in operation every day that few Americans ever see. He thrived on it.

More than that, he thrived in it--and also seemed to be above it. "Down these mean streets a man must walk who is not himself mean," wrote Raymond Chandler about Marlowe, the perfect private eye.

That was Reagan. He walked down the streets of Screen Actors Guild politics when it was at its most bitter--when there were real Reds in it--and emerged as its boss. He maneuvered through a Hollywood largely run on the union side by friends of Stalin and cleaned up his part of it at SAG--without in any way taking away the rights of people he disagreed with.

Married to Jane Wyman, an extreme left-winger, he danced away from her to Nancy Davis and left Wyman and her pals in the ashcan of Hollywood political history.

With his own acting career limping, he moved over to TV as host of the General Electric Theater, hooked himself up with the conservative politics of GE and his father-in-law, did a number of national tours at the podium and, presto, as if just by wishing for it, emerged as governor of California.

He did it while saying what he believed, never apologizing to the powers-that-be in the intellectual world and while clinging to the voice of the one guy he knew--every American.

Reagan had seen how negotiations between parties in Hollywood worked. He had stood up to the Stalinists in the Screen Actors Guild and learned that if you have the power on your side, and if you stand up for what you want, you eventually get it. When he became President, he knew--because he knew human nature--that totalitarianism was against the human spirit. He knew that despite the naysaying of the chattering classes, America was the future.

While Nixon talked politely to Brezhnev, and Carter ran and hid, Reagan shouted, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." When he said it, it seemed like theater--although very good theater. He said with the same indignant "father talking to neighborhood bully bothering his son" tone that he used to tell Carter, "There you go again..." But in a few years, the wall was down.

The most amazing part, as I look back on it, was he made it look easy. Like Michael Jordan on the boards, like Mark McGwire at bat, like Laurence Olivier on stage, Ronald Reagan made running the nation, standing up to the dictators, giving America back its pride, look as if anyone could do it.

When he took over as commander in chief in January of 1981, America was in trouble. We had endured the torture of Vietnam, the agony of Watergate, hyperinflation, a sluggish economy and an intellectual class that openly said America was finito.

Even Nixon, I knew, believed America might well have seen its time of greatness and be on the downstroke, defeated by its own self-doubt and by what looked like a worldwide flight from individual rights toward the ever bigger and more controlling state.

Into that morass stepped the oldest man ever to assume the Presidency in this century, a man derided for decades as stupid and out of touch, an actor who had never held national federal office. He rode into town, got off his white horse, and said, "Everyone who believes in my old-fashioned idea of America show up at the sheriff's office ready to fight." And almost everyone in town did.

Ronald Reagan, with his simple ideas about how America was the "shining city on the hill," placed here with the oceans on either side by "a special Providence," turned out to be the voice that America and the world wanted to hear. Someone, a Democrat as I recall, said that Reagan only knew one person in the whole world, but that person was every American.

When we look back on his life now, we can get only a vague outline of how he came to know that Everyman and how he came to be able to speak to him and to speak for him.

Born in the Midwest, son of modest circumstances and a misbehaving father (notice how many great men have misbehaving fathers, or maybe all fathers misbehave), college athlete, college thespian, radio announcer, Hollywood actor (not just a B-movie actor as his--now very few--detractors say but a real heavy-duty star), he had to have had some inner light that told him when a story rang true, when it was the legend that Americans wanted to hear and believe.

From Eureka, Illinois, to Beverly Hills, he had heard what the American story was, and he saw that it had happened to him: from nothing to something, just by hard work in a country that was invented to disprove the idea that there were permanent nothings.

When he was President, he slept a good part of the afternoon. He did not read deep books. He liked to reminisce about his studio days. He might well have lied about Iran-Contra. He appeared to like the job and not find it especially stressful.

He did not get hysterical and he acted like a great actor should, making it all look natural, one neighbor talking to another over a very low fence.

But he gave America back its self-confidence. Like the marshal rallying the timid townsfolk in a western, he made a whole nation brave. He believed in the myths of America, and he made them the future. He set the stage for the end of the cold war by standing up to Russia and helping defeat it in Afghanistan, Central America and the Caribbean.

He ended inflation and gave us back hope that our economy would work. He made us believe it was not the end but the beginning for human freedom. These are giant achievements, in their own way like those of Churchill.

On weekends, he went to Santa Barbara to chop wood and ride horses. He rarely wore a necktie. When he developed Alzheimer's, he wrote America a handwritten letter about it, from one neighbor to another. "Here's something to look out for."

Then he entered immortality and left us a vibrant, prosperous America at peace, without the daily fear of nuclear war, more than ever the envy of the world.

The amazing part is, as we look back on it, he made it look easy.

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