Posted on 06/06/2004 7:49:43 AM PDT by Jakarta ex-pat
"HONEY, I forgot to duck," joked US President Ronald Reagan to his wife, Nancy, after being shot in the chest outside the Washington Hilton on March 30, 1981, the 70th day of his presidency.
Throughout his 93 years, Mr Reagan was never one to duck.
Though the bullet lodged just centimetres from his heart, he recovered to lead America for two terms and leave a legacy the free world will never forget.
His ability to toss out a one-liner after surviving a near-thing assassination attempt was typical of the man most Americans lovingly called "The Gipper", after a 1940 film role.
His capacity to encapsulate a complex situation in a few wise, often witty words won him a following across middle-class and blue-collar America that few of the Washington pundits and almost none of the self-styled sophisticates of New York ever really understood.
The fact is, Mr Reagan often spoke such plain common sense that his many better-educated critics were both dumbfounded and infuriated.
From the start of his political career as president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947, he recognised that Communism was the greatest threat to freedom.
After seeing first-hand the activities of Communist activists in the film industry, his political views shifted from liberal to conservative, never falling victim to the smooth-talking of the dominant Hollywood push.
Though he had supported Democrats such as Harry Truman and campaigned for Richard Nixon's Democrat senate opponent Helen Gahagan Douglas, Democrat presidential candidate General Dwight Eisenhower, he joined Mr Nixon's unsuccessful 1960 presidential campaign and two years later officially changed his party registration to Republican.
His support for the unsuccessful Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964 was key to the launch of his 1966 campaign for California governor, a position he won in a landslide and held in the 1970 poll.
To millions, the folksy former actor, former football broadcaster who relaxed by sawing timber on his ranch embodied the ideal of the American dream more than any other modern president.
As a correspondent, I attended his first inauguration ceremony in 1981 on the Mall in Washington on a very chilly January day. My ticket happened to place me beside the former actress Ginger Rogers, an old Hollywood friend of the Reagans and still glamorous and generous – as we waited for the president to arrive that wintry day she threw her luxurious mink across both our laps and told me we should "snuggle".
She was a most impressive companion, a lot more than just the woman who had danced through a career opposite Fred Astaire, and she was thrilled that the man she called by his earliest nickname "Dutch" had ousted the wishy-washy liberal one-term president Jimmy Carter in a landslide to win the top job in the world.
But Mr Reagan's successes in office were to exceed the most optimistic visions Miss Rogers shared that morning.
Seeking to achieve "peace through strength", he put the Soviet Union on notice that the US would not tolerate its global expansion and began to ramp up military spending to back up his policy.
As California governor in 1971 he had laid down his credo: "Government should do only those things the people cannot do for themselves" and as president he used his negotiating skills to win congressional support for policies which stimulated economic growth, reduced inflation and increased employment.
He slashed taxes and cut government spending. Though his defence budget led to a huge deficit, he was swept back into office on a renewed wave of national self-confidence.
His second term was marked by his overhaul of the income tax code, which generated an unprecedented period of prosperity but it was marred by the revelations that he had authorised secret arms sales to Iran while seeking Iranian help to free hostages held in Tehran.
Some of the cash was used to underwrite a secret war against the Leftist government of Nicaragua which preoccupied much of the US media but failed to dent his popularity with most Americans.
And little wonder. President Reagan's 1987 challenge to Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev delivered at the Berlin Wall: "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall" – was the final challenge of the Cold War era.
Two years later, the East Germans threw open the gates in the brick and barbed wire wall.
The fellow travellers who had sneered when Mr Reagan had dubbed the Soviet regime "the evil empire" were wrong-footed again.
They were to find their prognostications wrong again in 1991 when Mr Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative (dubbed Star Wars) which he had begun in 1983 in an effort to build a shield against intercontinental ballistic missiles involving space-based weapons finally bore fruit.
Sucked into a spending race they could not win by the US plan, Star Wars is credited with leading to the 1981 collapse of the Soviet Union.
Mr Reagan left the presidency at the end of his second term a few weeks short of his 78th birthday.
I met him at a private wedding in California a few years later, shortly before he was diagnosed with the alzheimer's disease with which he lived for the last 10 years. He had left the White House with the highest approval rating ever recorded for any US president – 68 per cent – and we talked about past presidents and his successor, Bill Clinton.
I remember laughing with him about the joke he had made about his age during the 1984 presidential campaign, ("I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience"), and being charmed by the ease with which he included myself and other guests in his circle of conversation.
He was indeed the The Great Communicator, a greater man than any of his pygmy critics could ever imagine, and his legacy lies wherever people still champion freedom and liberty.
good column but? . . .
"Democrat presidential candidate General Dwight Eisenhower" from the aricle.
Is it just my imagination or do I correctly remember Ike as a Republican?
I wish the reporter would have shared what Reagan said about Clinton.
When you see all that rhetorical smoke billowing up from the Democrats, well ladies and gentleman, I'd follow the example of their nominee; don't inhale.
Ronald Reagan ... Republican National Convention, 1992.
He's not smeering.
I probably should have stated this is an Australian commentary.
"Ain't" it the truth!
Common sense and strait forward "black and white" rhetoric works every time!
I'll never forget Mondale's expression after that statement of life experience promotion!
The loss to America and our convictions, through Ronald's passing will be felt much more than the loss experienced through the election of "The come back Kid"!
BTTT
BTTT
I'm not positive about this, but I think REAGAN was a Baseball announcer, not Football.
I like that.
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