From the outset … Reagan’s opponents treated him as a genial boob. Thus Gerald Ford – a genuine mediocrity, party hack, and veteran D.C. drone who is best remembered, by me anyway, for denying in a debate that Poland was a Soviet satellite – at first responded to Reagan’s 1976 primary challenge by saying that he couldn’t take the ex-actor seriously. Sen. Jacob Javits (R-NY) called Reagan “extreme”; the now-forgotten Sen. Charles Percy (R-IL) predicted that a Reagan nomination would result in “crushing defeat.”Here is my review of Reagan: A Life in Letters.
Sunday, June 02, 2019
His own man …
… A Not-So-Distant Mirror: Remembering Reagan in the Age of Trump. | Frontpage Mag. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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I do not expect objective evaluation of Ronald Reagan. Watergate had inflicted huge losses on the Republican Party, and it looked to be left for dead. Yet he won in 1980. He is less a hero than a solar myth. Anyone with an R next to his name on the ballot can claim the mantle without much contradiction, and any one with a D next to his name can find something in Reagan's record that the Republican of the moment is out of sync with.
ReplyDeleteI think it a measure of him that one heard political types in the 1980s saying "Let Reagan Be Reagan." None ever said what was stopping him. I find it much harder to imagine big names saying "Let Johnson Be Johnson" than to imagine them praying (and fasting and weeping meantime) "Please, O Lord, Let Johnson Be a Bit Less Johnson". And did anyone ever say "Let Nixon Be Nixon?"
My own judgment of Reagan is colored by an account given me, by the guy who first hired me to write for the Inquirer, who had dinner with him before he was elected governor. A very nice person, apparently, who happened also to be a walking encyclopedia of the history of the American presidency.
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