David Frum: Dutch – Spine of Steel Wrapped in Geniality

The National Post ^ | June 7, 2004 | David Frum

[quidnunc]

Ronald Reagan loved to tell jokes and he especially loved to tell jokes about his old age. In his 1984 debate against former senator, former vice-president Walter Mondale, Mr. Reagan answered a question about his own fitness for office with a mock-pious outburst: "I will not exploit for political advantage my opponent's youth and inexperience!"

If there is a Heaven, Mr. Reagan is probably already vexing his old hero Harry Truman by boasting of surpassing the latter's longevity: Mr. Reagan died Saturday at his home in Bel-Air, Calif., aged 93.

Few American presidents have been as consistently underestimated as Ronald Reagan. The veteran Washington fixer Clark Clifford famously dismissed him as an "amiable dunce." Saturday Night Live mocked the supposedly disengaged president in a sketch that had him — absurdly improbably — barking orders to his Swiss banker in German while calculating the interest due on the proceeds of his Iranian arms sales down to the final centime. Mr. Reagan himself joined in the drollery: "They say hard work never killed anyone. But I say, why take a chance?"

Since his departure from office, however, Mr. Reagan's reputation has risen more rapidly than any president's since Truman's. His faith that Marxist socialism and Soviet communism would, as he prophesied in 1983, swiftly be consigned to the "dustbin of history" was vindicated within a year of his departure from office. His certainty that free markets not only enrich human beings but liberate and empower them has been proven true from Silicon Valley to Samarkand. Even his bitterest opponents had to acknowledge that he rescued from despair and self-doubt a nation demoralized by foreign policy humiliations and economic weakness — and did it by the sheer force of his graceful, cheerful, smiling optimism and generosity of spirit.

Mr. Reagan's geniality disarmed his critics. Sam Donaldson, an ABC television journalist who delighted in baiting President Reagan, once complained that Mr. Reagan would give a man who had lost his job literally the shirt off his back — and would then sit at his desk in his undershirt and sign away the man's unemployment benefits. Mr. Donaldson was baffled that anybody could simultaneously doubt the welfare state and yet be personally kindly — even though Mr. Donaldson must have known dozens, if not hundreds, of politicians who combined enthusiastic support for big government with personal cruelty and malice. When spending his own money, Mr. Reagan was one of the world's softest touches, sending out hundreds of small gifts to the many people who wrote to tell him of their troubles. But with the public's money, he exercised greater vigilance, because it wasn't his to give away.

Mr. Reagan's geniality was wrapped around a spine of steel. There was much he didn't much care about, and on those issues he was always prepared to compromise — as he did when he signed a big increase in excise taxes in 1982. But on the things that mattered to him — income taxes, national defence, the appointment of conservative judges — his opponents and even his aides could push him and prod him, threaten him and curse him, wave vicious news stories and ominous polls at him, and Mr. Reagan would yield not a single inch. Another of Mr. Reagan's favourite jokes described the young psychiatrist who joined the staff of an institute for the criminally insane. At the end of his first morning, he was so upset by the horrific crimes his patients had described to him that he could barely touch his lunch. Yet he noticed that the senior staff psychiatrist, who handled the most appalling cases of them all, was eating heartily. He asked: "Doctor, how can you eat after a morning like that?" "Simple," came the reply. "I never listen."

It's a joke that would have provoked mirthless laughter from Mr. Reagan's opponents. Never listening was exactly what they accused him of — that is, when they weren't accusing him of living in a Hollywood dream world. They ridiculed him for repeating as real, things he'd seen in the movies, such as the story of the bomber commander who won a posthumous Medal of Honor for crashing with a wounded crewman. But Mr. Reagan wasn't dreaming: He understood the fallibility of the human mind.

-snip-

[Wally_Kalbacken]

I think the accurate quote is "I will not exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and relative inexperience."

That's the way I recall it - and it was like do many other things that Reagan did, it showed the way to using humor to mask a harder, harsher criticism. The laughter that ensued from that remark lasted for nearly a minute. Ronnie had just bitch slapped Wally Mondale into oblivion (on the way to cementing it with a 484 electoral vote victory) - but he did in a way that left a smile on every face at that debate. Mondale himself laughed heartily and in doing so - conveyed the message that he knew he was toast.

[headsonpikes]

bump.

[texgal]

Good article about a man who will be remembered kindly. I see so many parallels between Presidents Reagan and Bush.

Ronald Reagan was there for us when we really were in need of him. I hope he knows how much he was honored and respected by so many freedom loving Americans and others throughout the world.

God Bless Ronald Reagan, a truly great American and a downright decent human being.

[dvwjr]

Yep. Once Reagan got that line off, everyone in the audience there and across the nation laughed, and the election contest was over.


dvwjr