Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1980moy.001

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                                                                                January 5, 1981

Man of the Year:Ronald Reagan

Out of the Past, Fresh Choices for The Future



Invoking old values, Ronald Reagan must make them work in the
'80s


On an afternoon in early December, Los Angeles was in the 60s
and Ronald Reagan looked like a dream.  He was wearing a
blue-and-green wool jacket, a purple tie, white shirt, white
handkerchief, black pants and black loafers with gold along the
tops.  Who else could dress that way?  He settled back on a
couch in a living room so splurged with color that even the
black seemed exuberant.  A florist must have decorated it.  A
florist must have decorated his voice. He was talking about job
hunting as a kid in his home town of Dixon, Ill., telling an
American success story he has told a hundred times before.  He
seemed genuinely happy to hear it again.  No noise made its way
up to the house on Pacific Palisades, except for the occasional
yip of a dog, and, of course, the eternal sound of
California--the whir of a well-tuned car.  Outside, the Secret
Service patrolled the bougainvillaea on streets with liquid,
Spanish names.  Reagan's face was ruddy, in bloom, growing
younger by the second.

At week's end he would be expected at the convocation of
conservatives for the National Review's 25th anniversary dinner
in the Plaza Hotel in New York City.  Reagan would not show--a
mix-up in his calendar.  RIled, his hosts would sing his praises
over dessert nonetheless.  He was the answer to their prayers,
after all; the essential reason for the elegant, confident glow
of the evening. Editor William F. Buckley Jr. would shine
quietly, modestly.  Others, like Publisher William Rusher, would
exhort the assembled "to stamp out any remaining embers of
liberalism."  A war whoop was in the air- -black tie, to be
sure--but still the unmistakable sound of a faction reprieved,
at last in power, thanks to the boyish man at the other end of
the country, whose time had definitely come.

As for the cause of the celebration, his rise seems astonishing.
 It began in October 1964 when, as co-chairman of California
Citizens for Goldwater, he gave his "A Time for Choosing"
television speech, a speech so tough that Goldwater himself was
skittish about letting it air.  Reagan ended the talk with "You
and I have a rendezvous with destiny," and was at least half
right.  So mesmerizing was his performance, so quick in its
effect, that California businessmen swamped him like groupies,
formed a "Friends of Ronald Reagan" committee, begged him to run
for Governor.  He had to be pushed.  Yet in 1966 the former star
of Juke Girl snatched the governorship of California by a
million votes from incumbent Edmund G. ("Pat") Brown, who must
have thought he was the victim of an accident.  (Reagan also
starred in Accidents Will Happen.)

In fact, there has been a remarkably accidental air about
Reagan's career; it has always borne the quality of something
he could take or leave.  The image of the non-politician running
for office, antilogical as it is, has had its practical
advantages, but it is also authentic.  Because Reagan knows who
he is, he knows what he wants.  After a halfhearted run at Nixon
for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968, he returned
to California for a second term as Governor.  But in 1976, after
an all-out and failed attempt to capture his party's nomination,
he genuinely did not wish to be Gerald Ford's Vice-President.
 When Ford's invitation went to Bob Dole, Reagan loyalists were
crestfallen, reading in that rebuff the end of their man's life
in politics.  Only Reagan took it well, content to settle
forever on his ranch, if it came to that, but also believing (as
few others did) that even at age 65 you can run into luck.

Four years later, his party, now confirmed in its conservatism,
turned to him like a heliotrope.  He was lucky to run against
(Eastern brittle) George Bush for the nomination; he was lucky
to be beaten early in Iowa, before the so-called momentum
against him was real; he was lucky to have Jimmy Carter as his
opponent.  On the night of Nov. 4, 1980, just 16 years after he
had spoken his mind in behalf of a man too far right to be
elected President, the amateur politician who will become 70 in
February watched state after state turn in his direction.

For that, in part, Reagan is TIME's Man of the Year--for having
risen so smoothly and gracefully to the most powerful and
visible position in the world.  He is also the idea of the year,
his triumph being philosophical as well as personal.  He has
revived the Republican Part, and has garnered high initial
hopes, even from many who opposed him, both because of his
personal style and because the U.S. is famished for cheer.  On
Jan. 20 Reagan and the idea he embodies will both emerge from
their respective seclusions with a real opportunity to change
the direction and tone of the nation.

Reagan is also TIME's Man of the Year because he stands at the
end of 1980 looking ahead, while the year behind him smolders
in pyres.  The events of any isolated year can be made to seem
exceptionally grim, but one has to peer hard to find elevating
moments in 1980.  Only Lech Walesa's stark heroism in Poland
sent anything resembling a thrill into the world.  The national
strike he led showed up Communism as a failure--a thing not done
in the Warsaw Pact countries.  Leonid Brezhnev, a different sort
of strongman, had to send troops to Poland's borders, in case
that country, like Czechoslovakia and Hungary before it, should
prove in need of "liberation."

Otherwise, the year was consumed with the old war-and-death
business. Afghanistan enters the year as a prisoner of its
"liberating" neighbor; Iran and Iraq close the year at each
other's throats.  In between, Cambodians are starved out of
existence; terrorists go about murdering 80 or more in Bologna,
and a mere four outside a Paris synagogue.  In Turkey, political
violence kills 2,000; in El Salvador, more than 9,000 die in
that country's torment.  All this on top of natural disasters:
 Mount St. Helens erupts in Washington State; one earthquake in
Algeria kills 3,000; another in Italy takes the same toll.
Human enterprise is tested, and responds with black market
coffins.

In February Americans flinch at an inflation rate of 18% that
drops to a hardly bearable 12.7% as the year ends.  February is
also the month when the U.S. hockey team's victory over the
Soviets ignites national pride.  But in April the U.S. boycotts
the Summer Olympic Games to protest the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan.  In May Cuban refugees flee Castro, and the U.S.
greets them at first with an "open arms" policy, then a state
of emergency in Florida, then a closing of the open arms--the
entire pilgrimage eventually capped off with riots at Eglin Air
Force Base and later at Fort Chaffee.  Vernon Jordan is shot in
May as well.  In June science announces a breakthrough in
recombinant DNA research, raising high hopes of cancer cures
along with specters of genetic engineering and Andromeda
strains.  The prime lending rate at major banks soars to 21.5%
in December, all but ensuring that 1981 will begin with a
recession.

Old orders pass:  Prime Minister Ohira in Japan; the Shah in
Egypt; and Tito, who one thought would live forever.  In the
background, like presiding ghosts, the hostages in Iran serve
as emblems of national impotence; Walter Cronkite's counting of
the days growing weary and meaningless among Milquetoast threats
and a tragic rescue fiasco.  As if to sustain the world's
heartache, the year heads toward Christmas with the killing of
a Beatle.

In 1953 Robert Lowell said the "Republic summons Ike" because
"the mausoleum [was] in her heart."  In 1980 the Republic
summoned Ronald Reagan.  Why?

History rarely moves openly toward its main players.  Usually
a central figure is perceived as evolving only in retrospect,
and that could well happen four years from now, when the country
may acknowledge that Ronald Reagan was the only man who could
possibly have pulled the U.S. out of its doldrums.  For now, in
prospect, that certainly cannot be said.  Reagan is an
experiment, as chance.  For all the happy feelings his good
nature generates, the cool fact of American life is that most
of the country is still from Missouri, and much is yet to be
proved.

In this light it may be useful to remember first that Reagan's
ten- point popular victory was not assured until the final days
of the campaign.  As deeply soured on the Carter Administration
as most of the electorate was, it also withheld its approval of
the competition until the last minute.  Quietly, privately and
perhaps a little grimly, most Americans has probably decided
that Carter had had it as early as 18 months before November.
 Their main reason was the economy, but there was Carter
himself, a man who also started out riding the country's high
hopes (a TIME Man of the Year in 1976), and who was perhaps most
bitterly resented for shrinking those hopes down to the size of
a presidency characterized by small people, small talk and small
matters.  He made Americans feel two things they are not used
to feeling, and will not abide.  He made them feel puny and he
made them feel insecure.

That Reagan beat such a man is a feat of circumstances as much
as a personal strength.  Right-wingers like to crow that the
country veered sharply to the right when it turned to Reagan,
but the probable truth of the matter is that most of the country
had simply stepped firmly to the right of center.  As
conservatives sensed, the country had been an incubative
conservative since the late '60s. Only Nixon's muck-up could
have delayed their eventual birth and triumph.  Sick and tired
of the vast, clogged federal machine; sick and tired of being
broke; fed up with useless programs, crime, waste, guilt; not
to mention shame in the eyes of the world--derision from our
enemies, dismay from our allies--fed up with all that, and to
put a fine point on it, fed with Jimmy Carter; what else would
a nation do but hang a right?

The fascinating thing is how determined a swing it was.
Reagan's pollster Richard Wirthlin found that voters, even at
the end of the campaign, believed that Reagan was more likely
to start an unnecessary war than Carter, and that Carter was
much more sensitive to the poor and the elderly.  Still, the
right prevailed.  The New Deal was out of steam; in the long run
it ensured its own obsolescence by giving the workingman the
wherewithal to turn Republican.  Even so, his paycheck was
inadequate.  Everything seemed inadequate.  The country had to
move on, but it was not moving anywhere.  Enter Reagan (with
jubilation and a mandate).

That mandate is specific:  To control inflation, to reduce
unnecessary governmental interference in private lives and in
business, to reassert America's prominence in the world.  That
is all there is to it, and that is plenty.  The mandate does not
necessarily include far-right his lists, censorship,the absence
of gun control, prayer in schools and a constitutional amendment
banning abortion. These things are significant if problematical,
but they do not represent majority wishes.  Nor does the Reagan
mandate suggest approval of a national pulpit for Jerry
Falwell's lethal sweet talk or of the National Conservative
Political Action Committee (NCPAC), whose liberal-hunting
leaders have been jumping up and down like Froggie the Gremlin
since Nov. 4.  The majority voted for Reagan because he appeared
to be a reasonable man, and a reasonable presidency is what the
country expects.  Still, it is not only the anticipation of
Reagan's reasonableness that has hopes high at the moment.
Pennsylvania's Republican Governor Richard Thornburgh explains
the Reagan election in terms of ideas:  "The status of the
individual in society, fiscal integrity, the idea of true
federalism, the idea of Government closer to the people, the
idea of the toughness of the American fiber, which means a firm
line with criminals at home and with our adversaries abroad, the
principles which put together the real genesis of the Reagan
victory.  Those principles are now a majority view."

That is true enough, but Republicanism is also changing.  During
all the years the Democrats were in power, their party developed
a kind of character, one that reached a pinnacle of form in John
Kennedy-- that is, the character of the interesting party, the
party of real intellectual movement, the party of the mind.
Conversely, the G.O.P. was the party of the pocketbook, the
pinstripe and the snort. Goodbye to all that.  The G.O.P. is now
by far the more interesting of the two parties.  And much of the
anticipation of the Reagan presidency has to do with the fact
that people recognize that an idea is taking shape.

The man at the center of this idea appears smaller than he is.
 At 6 ft. 1 in., 185 lbs., his body is tight, as tight as it can
be on a large frame, though there is no sign of pulling or
strain.  It is the body of an actor, of someone used to being
scrutinized from all angles, so it has all but willed as tidy
and organized an appearance as possible.  His size also seems
an emblem of his modesty.  Lyndon Johnson used to enter a room
and rape it.  Reagan seems to be in a continual state of
receding, a posture that makes strangers lean toward him.  In
a contest for the same audience, he would draw better than
Johnson.

The voice goes perfectly with the body.  No President since
Kennedy has had a voice at once so distinctive and beguiling.
 It too recedes at the right moments, turning mellow at points
of intensity.  When it wishes to be most persuasive, it hovers
barely above a whisper so as to win you over by intimacy, if not
by substance.  This is style, but not sham.  Reagan believes
everything he says, no matter how often he has said it, or if
he has said it in the same words every time.  He likes his
voice, treats it like a guest.  He makes you part of the
hospitality.

It was the voice that carried him out of Dixon and away from
the Depression, the voice that more than any single attribute
got him where he is.  On that smokey blue December afternoon in
Pacific Palisades he was telling the old story again--about his
job hunting in 1932, about heading for Chicago, where "a very
kind woman" at NBC told him to start out in the sticks.  So he
drove around to radio station WOC in Davenport, Iowa, where he
made his pitch to the program director, Peter MacArthur, and
arthritic old Scotsman who hobbled on two canes.  Reagan, of
course, had that voice, and he had played football for Eureka
College.  But MacArthur said that he had just hired someone
else, and Reagan stomped off muttering, "How the hell do you get
to be a sports announcer if you can't get a station?" The
delivery is perfect--plaintive, sore.  Something wonderful is
bound to happen.

"I walked down the hall to the operator, and fortunately the
elevator wasn't at that floor.  And while I was waiting, I heard
this thumping down the hall and this Scotch burr very profanely
saying (in a Reagan Scotch burr), 'Wait up, ya big so and so.'"
 And what did MacArthur say?  SOmething about sports, of course.
 And what did MacArthur ask? "Do you think you could tel me
about a football game and make me see it?"  And could Ronald
Reagan do that then and there?  On the folk tale goes, fresh as
a daisy, full of old hope and heartbeats.

In the pinch, Reagan fell back on describing a game he had
played in for Eureka.  "So when the light went on I said, 'Here
we are going into the fourth quarter on a cold November
afternoon, the long blue shadows settling over the field, the
wind whipping in through the end of the stadium'--hell, we
didn't have a stadium at Eureka, we had grandstands--and I took
it up to the point in which there were 20 seconds to go and we
scored the winning touchdown.  As a blocking guard, I was
supposed to get the first man in the secondary to spring out
back loose, and I didn't get him.  I missed him.  And I've
never known to this day how Bud Cole got by and scored that
touchdown.  But in the rebroadcast I nailed the guy on defense.
 I took him down with a magnificent block."

Cheers and laughter.  WHo would not hire this man?  Humility,
a sense of proportion, gentle humor. Bless the elevator
operator; bless the crippled Scotsman.  Who would doubt that
even now, from time to time, the Governor dreams of the fancy
footwork of the ever elusive Bud Cole?

Of course, the anecdote gives everything and nothing.  In the
movies, The Story of Ronald Reagan might be built of such stuff,
like the "story" of Jim Thorpe, but not a life; the life has to
be discovered elsewhere.  At least the facts pile up neatly:
born Feb. 6, 1911, Tampico, Ill.; son of John Edward and Nelle
Wilson Reagan; younger brother of Neil Reagan, now a retired
advertising executive in California.  After Tampico the Reagans
move around for a while and then to Dixon, a back-porch and
lemonade town on the Rock River. Father is a sometime shoe
salesman and a sometime  alcoholic. Mother, a Scottish
Protestant; father, Irish Catholic.  Ronald takes the faith of
his mother.

At high school in Dixon, "Dutch" plays football.  his eyes are
weak; he is undersized for his age; still he plays the line.
He also joins the basketball team, takes part in track meets,
is elected president of the student body.  Along the way, he
works as a lifeguard at a local river and rescues 77 people, a
record of sorts, preserved in notches on a log.  He is Midwest
perfect, down to the requisite transgression.  Mellow on
homemade wine one night, he mounts a traffic stand and bellows
"Twinkle, twinkle, little star."  On to Eureka, where he wins
letters in football, track and swimming, and joins the dramatics
club.  (Here the repeated good lines:  "Nature was trying to
tell me something.  Namely, my hear is a ham loaf.") He pays his
way through school, his family so poor they move into a
single-bedroom apartment with an electric plate.  Neighbors
carry supper over to them on trays.  At Eureka, he is again
elected Student-body president.  In a regional drama
competition, his performance as a shepherd wins honors.  The
idea of working in radio occurs to him as a halfway measure
between acting and respectability. He lights out for Chicago,
and the rest is folklore.

The element missing in such accounts is what it feels like to
be Ronald Reagan.  His autobiography, Where's the Rest of Me?
takes its title from the most memorable line he ever delivered
as an actor, when his legs were amputated in King's Row.  As his
presidency goes on, that title is bound to turn on him, as Why
Not the Best? turned on Jimmy Carter, though with Reagan the
question will be less accusative than mystifying.  That
self-diminution, the trustworthiness, the aura of the towhead,
the voice--all comprise a figure one takes to the heart.  But
where is he in this process? What clobbers him?  He offers no
signs now.  Back in Dixon he did offer something, however small.

He wrote a poem in high school and called if "Life," as all
high school poems must be called.  It went as follows:

I wonder what it's all about, and why We suffer so, when little
things go wrong? We make our life a struggle, When life should
be a song.

Our troubles break and drench us. Like spray on the cleaving
prow Of some trim Gloucester schooner. As it dips in a graceful
bow...

But why does sorrow drench us When our fellow passes on? He's
just exchanged life's dreary dirge For an eternal life of
song...

Millions have gone before us, And millions will come behind, So
why do we curse and fight At a fate both wise and kind?

We hang onto a jaded life A life full of sorrow and pain. A life
that warps and breaks us, And we try to run through it again.

The poem is odd, baleful--not an unusual tone for a teen-ager
generally, but neither is it what we would expect of the peppy,
clean-cut teen-ager that was young Dutch Reagan.  Examined under
a sad light, "Life" is the poem of a boy who either wants to
drown or is at least considering the possibility.  The first
stanza is cherry enough, but it really belongs to another poem.
 The sense of advocated surrender in the final stanza is
unmistakable.  Not that Reagan would be unusual in having
contemplated death as a say out of adolescence, but one does not
think of his early life as having been touched with "sorrow and
pain."  Of course, the poem might simply have been the product
of a bad moment.  But even a momentary touch of desperation is
interesting in such a man.

Usually, Reagan's assessments of his childhood are entirely
wistful, but there was a hint to something else when he was
asked recently if he ever saw his father in himself as a parent.
 His answer:  "Yes, and maybe sometimes too much so.  I don't
know how to describe it because neither of my parents ever had
anything in the line of a formal education, and yet there was
a freedom to make decisions, and sometimes I find that maybe I
go too far in that."  That freedom to make decisions fits well
with Reagan's political philosophy, but his answer leaves out
a negative element of his own performance as a parent.  A
parent's philosophy of freedom leaves the parent free as well.

The main characteristics that Reagan displays--good humor,
modesty, patience--are the attributes of fatherhood at its best.
 And from all appearances Reagan would seem to have been the
compassionate father, the father to turn to in times of grief
and disarray; the father of rich stories and silly jokes.
Instead, his relationship with all four children--Maureen and
Mike, his children with Jane Wyman, and Patti and Ron, his
children with Nancy--seems to be that of deliberately created
distances.  The physical distances, the fact that the children
lived with Wyman after she divorced him, so in their case some
of the distancing was circumstantial.  As for Patti and ROn,
Reagan admits that he did not spend much time with them but
blames his life as a celebrity and not his own desires.  He
tells dolefully of taking Patti to the opening of Disneyland and
being beset by autograph hounds, spoiling a normal, happy family
excursion.

Given that other celebrities manage to spend time with their
children, Reagan's explanation does not make much since.
Still, there is no doubt that it makes sense to him.  THe regret
he expresses about not having been more attentive to the
children is sincere, if low level.  Now, the children grown,
they all seem much closer than before, which is interesting, as
it suggests that Reagan, who bears much of the aspect of an
adorable child himself, simply gets along better with grownups.
 The unceremonious wedding of young Ron a few weeks after the
election offers a public sign that some vestiges of the old
distances remain.

Yet in the odd child-parent pattern of the Reagan family, ROn's
decision to marry suddenly with barely a last-minute word to
his folks is perfectly traditional.  It is widely known that
Ron's parents have not managed to see a single ballet
performance of their son, who is clearly very good, having been
selected to the Joffrey second company, and is their son
nonetheless.  Ron talks of his parents with much affection.  But
these absences are strange and go back a ways.  Son Mike was a
successful motorboat racer; Reagan did not see a single race.
 Mike, a star quarterback at Judson School in Scottsdale, Ariz.,
was named Player of the Year in 1964.  Reagan saw not a game.

The family tradition that he was upholding by such omissions is
that his own father rarely managed to see him and Brother Neil
play football.  Neil Reagan notes the fact today, conceding that
his father's lack of interest was odd, but consistent with the
ideal of "independence" among the Reagans.  Yet it takes an act
of will not to watch one's children in a moment important to
their self-esteem.  One almost has to actively deny the desire
to show pride and affection; no child could mistake the
effort--unless, of course, the pride and affection were purely
superficial.  The great puzzlement about Ronald Reagan, in fact,
is exactly how much of him lies hidden.  He has lived a charmed
life on the surface--many people do--but it is disconcerting,
to say the least, to unravel Reagan like H.G. Wells' invisible
man, only to discover that when you get the bandages off, the
center is not to be seen.

Still, after listening to Reagan, it would be impossible to
conclude that he did not love his children.  It would be easier
to conclude that he did not know how to love his children, when
they were children, just as it is possible to assume that his
father did not know how to love him.  There is an abiding
compassion in Reagan for his father, for his father's
drinking--the "sickness," as his mother explained it.  THe story
is now famous of his finding his father passed out on the front
porch and bearing him inside.  Nor is there any sign that
Reagan's father was anything but a man of high natural
instincts, like the son who inherited his looks, capable of
fierce rage at racial or religious bigotry.  But neither are
there signs of real father-to-son love.  And the fact that
Reagan's father was an alcoholic, albeit "periodic," as Reagan
is quick to explain, must have alloyed young Ronald's feelings
for his father as much with dread as with sympathy.

One thing the children of alcoholics often have in common is an
uncommon sense of control--control of themselves and control of
their world, which they know from harsh experience can turn
perilous at the click of a door latch.  Not that Jack Reagan was
known to be a mean drunk; but brutal or not, all alcoholics
create states of alarm in their children.  They learn a kind of
easygoing formality early on, like the Secret Service, and they
are often acutely alert to danger, for the very reason that the
parent's binges are periodic.  That receding look and sound of
Reagan may be the hallmarks of such control.  One cannot retain
anger in the presence of such a man, and thus in a sense he
makes fathers of us all.

In fact, Reagan seems ever to place himself in the position of
being adopted.  He has, in a sense, been adopted by a plethora
of fathers over the years, wealthy patrons and protectors who
recognized a hope for the country's future in their favorite
son.  Yet Reagan is also a genuine loner.  His ranch is a true
retreat for him, the independence he was taught to prize (see
following story).  Solitude and self- reliance, the two
essential American virtues that Emerson named, are found in him
naturally.  On the ranch he can be free--not "on" to audiences.
 The only odd thing in the picture is that such a loner would
choose to give his life to lines of work that demand continuous
performance.

The combination of showmanship and privacy is unusual, but the
combination of that sense of control with genuine good nature
is extraordinary.  Conventionally, a serve sense of control is
used to harness rage or malice; Reagan seems incapable of
either.  The effect of that combination, however, is not
entirely sanguine.  Twenty-five years ago, Neil dreamed up an
elaborate and touching Christmas present for his kid brother.
 He found an impoverished family with a father who was a drunk
and out of work, and Neil took the wife and child on a shopping
spree.  The parallels to the Reagans' own childhood are evident,
and whatever moved Neil to emphasize the parallels remains
obscure.  But the gift was one of immense ingenuity and
generosity--because the shopping spree was given in Ronald's
name.  Yet when it was presented to Reagan, along with a poem
Neil wrote for the occasion, Ronald reacted by saying, "Gee,
that's keen." It is difficult to know if he was moved or not,
but he certainly did not wish to give the impression
(satisfaction) of having been moved.

When campaign Manager John Sears was determined to get Mike
Deaver, one of the closest friends of both the Reagans, out of
the 1980 organization, Reagan let it happen.  He said he did not
like it, but he went along anyway, choosing pragmatism over
loyalty.  There are other examples of cool calculation that seem
out of place in what is patently a good heart.  The feeling one
takes from a conversation with Reagan--and it is very quiet and
faint--is that his geniality is equal to his fears.  What,
specifically, he is afraid of is a secret, as it is with most
successful people.  But there is no secret about his ability to
do a kind of stylistic judo on a potential threat. The voice
softens to music; the eyes grow helpless, worried.

TIME:  "You were quoted as having said that you had read Norman
Podhoretz's The Present Danger and thought it was a very
important book.  Is that accurate?  Did you admire that book
when it came out?"

REAGAN:  "I read it.  [Backs off at once; eyes are shy with
surprise; sounds as if he's being accused of something, or as
if he is about to be tested.]  I don't recall ever having
anything to say about it. [Hesitates, but seeing no traps,
relaxes slightly.]  But I did read it [some firmness now] and
do believe that it makes a great deal of sense [confidence
restored]."

None of this is to suggest that Reagan resembles a haunted or
threatened man.  In a lifetime one does not encounter half a
dozen people so authentically at ease with themselves.  Reagan
is a natural; he knows it.  His intuitions are always in tune,
and he trusts his own feelings.  All his political opinions have
been born of feelings--the passionate antagonism toward Big
Government resulting from his boyhood observations of Dixon and
his own experiences with the progressive income tax once he
returned from the military; his staunch anti-Communism from his
days with the Screen Actors Guild in the late 1940s, when he
packed a pistol for self- protection.  He will read up on a
subject once it has initially been proved on his pulses, but he
does not take him main ideas from printed words.  In that
process of intellection he is classically American--the natural
man whose intelligence lies not in book learning but in right
instincts.  Reagan regularly reads conservative journals of
opinion and his share of newspapers and magazines and
contemporary books about politics, but no author seems to have
been especially influential in his life.  Yet he is able, by
employing a kind of trick of memory, to dredge up whole passages
of things he read as far back as 40 years ago.  LIke many
politicians, he probably uses reading the way one might use
friends.  Instead of his going to books, they come to him.

This sense of his integrity, of his thoroughgoing self-knowledge
is a major asset.  When he was making Dark Victory (yes, he was
there, well behind Bette Davis, George Brent and Humphrey
Bogart), the director (Edmund Goulding) bawled him out for
playing a scene too simply and sincerely.  "He didn't get what
he wanted, whatever the hell that was," Reagan recalls, "and I
ended up not delivering the line the way my instinct told me it
should be delivered.  It was bad."

Now, considerably freer to follow his instincts, his lines are
delivered with consistent effect--simply and sincerely.  At the
close of the Carter television debate he posed several
semi-rhetorical questions that are now said to have sealed his
victory:  "Are you better off than you were four years ago?  Is
it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores?"  And so
forth.  There is first the brilliance of the baby talk--"to go
and buy things in the stores." But the real power in those
questions came from the delivery, which if managed by a less
sensitive speaker could have produced something strident, or
assured, or worse, argumentative.  Instead, Reagan's pitch
trembled between helplessness and fellow feeling; it was to
himself that he was talking; he who could not go and buy things
in the stores.  The U.S. was in a sad mess, not an infuriating
one. Only a calm though suffering voice could rescue it.

Where more hard-nosed politicians will talk ceaselessly about
polling techniques or some son of a bitch in a rebellious
precinct, Reagan will talk about the art of public speaking.
Even though he is a virtuoso, he works at that art, primarily
because he is a politician only of the essentials, and knows,
as his admired Franklin Roosevelt knew, that to reach and please
the public is to put first things first.  One sign of his
amazing success as a speaker is that his plentiful gaffes are
not only forgiven; even better, they are forgotten.  Speaking
in Columbus last summer, he deliberately made an error,
substituting the word depression for recession in order to
reinforce a point.  The alteration set off a small squall of
technical retractions by one of his economics advisers, Alan
Greenspan, but the point was reinforced.  His sense of timing
is almost always a thing of beauty.  After the "depression"
error, instead of dropping the matter, he traded on it:  "If he
[Carter] wants a definition, I'll give him one.  [Audience is
on the alert, for something punchy, perhaps funny.]  Recession
[split-second pause] is when your neighbor loses his job.
Depression [same pause; audience grows eager] is when you lose
yours.  [Chuckles and titters; audience wonders if there will
be a third part to the definition.] And recovery [audience gears
itself for a laugh] is when Jimmy Carter loses his [kaboom]."

The opposition's book on Reagan (by now a public document) is
that he is always underestimated.  That too is a mark of the
natural man--the fox taken for a fool who winds up taking the
taker.  Yet there is no Volpone slyness in Reagan.  If he has
been underestimated, it may be that he gives every sign of
underestimating himself--not as a tactic, but honestly.  So
wholly without self-puffery is he that he places the burden of
judging him entirely on others, and since he is wholly without
self-puffery, the judgment is almost always favorable.  he
simply appeals to people, and despite his years, there is
hardly anyone of any age who would not feel protective of him,
would not wish him to succeed, would not forget the mistakes,
who would not corral him in the hall and give him a job.  Again
this is not a tactic.  It may well be his soul.

Does this mean, then, that his soul is not his own?  The
question is urgent in the minds of those who fear that the
Reagan presidency will be shaped and conducted by the God-toting
religicos or the fever- swamp conservatives who exult in the
hopes that they are at last. The answer to that question is no,
but it ought not necessarily put the worriers at ease.  Reagan's
soul is his own, yet what sort of soul is it?  For those who
have observed Reagan lo these many years, the answer is clearly
and consistently a most conservative soul, notwithstanding the
formulaic chitchat about his having once been a hemophiliac
liberal, which is simply a device for implying that policies
aside, his heart is still with the people.  A more precise
question is:  What sort of mind has Reagan?  How intelligent is
he? But with "natural" men, intelligence is not so readily
definable.

For the moment, what we can see in Reagan is a vision of
America, of America's future, at once so simple and deep as to
incur every emotion from elation to terror.  It is a little like
the vision of the Hudson River school of painting--the brooding
serenity of turquoise skies, patriarchal clouds and trees, very
still, doll-like people (white and red), infinite promise,
potential self-deception and, above all, perfect
containment--the individual and the land, man and God locked in
a snakeless Eden.  James Fenimore Cooper wrote a novel,
Satanstoe, about such a place, an ideal America in which
everyone ruled his own vast estate, his own civilization.
Whether or not Reagan sees Rancho del Cielo or Pacific Palisades
as Satanstoe, his dream of the New World is as old as Cooper's.

At the center of that dream is the word freedom; it is a key
word with Reagan, and it is the word at the center of all
American dreams, from the beautiful to the murderous.  Reagan's
version seems to center largely on the question of free
enterprise:  "[Americans] have always known that excessive
bureaucracy is the enemy of excellence and compassion."  True.
 Therefore, freedom must be the ally of excellence and
compassion.  SOmetimes.  SInce Reagan's way of understanding
things is personal, he puts it thus:  He dug a pond on his own
property, and now if he wants to stock that pond with fish, he
has to get a fishing license to catch his own fish.  Bingo.  If
the vision of boundless freedom were to consist solely of being
able to fish one's own ponds, who would have trouble siding with
Reagan's idea?

But there is no particular trick in making a buffoon of federal
regulations.  Things grow more problematical when one tries to
extend such reasonable complaints to a general political
philosophy, and talk--as Reagan does talk--of putting "the
Federal Government back in the business of doing the things the
Constitution says are its prime functions:  to keep internal
order, to protect us in our national security from outside
aggression and to provide a stable currency for our commerce and
trade."  Very well.  But such a definition omits the "general
welfare" clause.  And in practical terms, Reagan undoubtedly
does not intend to dismantle the N.I.R.B., Social Security,
unemployment insurance and other such encroachments on pure
freedom that are here to stay.  So, what does he mean?

However vague and simplified Reagan's idea of freedom may be,
it touches a central chord in American thought, a chord that
will sound when people start to fear that the future is over,
as they did during the Carter Administration.  The fact that
Reagan speaks for the virtues of both the past and the future
is reassuring, if safe, but the fact that his definition of
freedom is essentially Western is more to the point.  When
Reagan speaks of freedom, he is speaking of freedom west of the
Rockies.  That is where he found his own best AMerica; that is
where he continues to find his personal and philosophical
solace; that is where he wishes for the country at large--a
California dream, an endless prospect of gold and greenery and
don't fence me in.

That California has come to embody such a vision of
boundlessness is a little strange, since the dream of California
is as much the dream of disappointment as of hope--the dream of
arriving at virgin territory, of messing it up, and having gone
as far as one can go, of having nowhere to turn but back.  As
Kevin Starr pointed out in his Americans and the California
Dream, California has always stood for something mystical in
American life; it has not suffered the tragic historical burdens
of the East and South, and it has seemed determined to make
itself as much a folk tale as a habitat.  But just as it has
always insisted on its eternal newness and promise, it has also
represented the dead end of the New World, the end of
exploration, recalling all the mistakes of every past
civilization. One reason that Balboa (Keats mistakenly wrote
Cortes) might have stood "silent upon a peak in Darien" is that
he realized there was no place else on earth to travel to.  Or
as a Walt Whitman character said in "Facing West from
California's Shores":  "Where is what I started for so long ago?
 And why is it yet unfound?"

Reagan does not ask that question, nor does he stand silent upon
a peak in Pacific Palisades and brood about paradise lost.  His
California dream remains unsullied.  America is still the land
of perpetual opportunity, and every man gloriously for himself.
Economics fits into this vision neatly, since California
happened to provide a fine justification for capitalism by
producing gold from the earth like a health food.  If there were
a California Ocean school of painting, it would consist of
avocados in the foreground and a range of office buildings
behind.  Perhaps that is Reagan's interior skyline.

Theoretically such a vision should produce the government that
Reagan has promised, the kind that governs least.  If corporate
America is part of nature--of the nature of the country, the
nature of man--then it must be free to grow to its fullest
capacity, like an individual.. Tax cuts, reduced federal
interference and other prods to Big Business (including the
corporate character of the Cabinet appointments) are simply ways
of making pioneers of businessmen, of restoring some of the old
make-a-buck fire.  Yet the character of the Reagan
Administration will not depend wholly on his political vision,
which in any case will be modified by wary liberal Democrats in
Congress, by the normal exigencies of the modern presidency and
by his own ability to compromise.  Rather the Reagan years are
as likely to be shaped by the temperament and intelligence of
the head man, and that is precisely why those years are so
difficult to envisage.

If one were to take all of Reagan's qualities--the detachment,
the self-knowledge, the great voice and good looks--and project
them into the White House, he would have a first-class B-movie
presidency. That is no insult.  The best B movies, while not
artistically exquisite, are often the ones that move us most
because they move us directly, through straightforward
characters, simple moral conflicts and idealized talk.  Reagan
once called himself "the Errol Flynn of B movies," which was
astute (except that Errol Flynn was also the Errol Flynn of B
movies)."  The President who remains above the fray yet is also
capable of stirring the people is the kind of President of
whose life B movies are made.  After several years of The Deer
Hunter and All the President's Men, perhaps The Ronald Reagan
Story is just what the country ordered.

The trouble, however, since we are watching our lives and not
a movie, is that in reality a detached presidency puts decisions
in the hands of everyone else.  No harm is done when the issues
are trivial but as the piecemeal nature of the Cabinet
appointments has demonstrated, relying so totally on advisers
is a dangerous game. The prospect grows considerably more
troublesome when it comes to making major decisions.  And there
will be plenty of those as soon as Reagan takes office--all
complicated and many urgent.

For starters, he faces an economic situation growing more
frightening by the moment.  Almost at once he will have to
decide what to cut in this year's budget and where to attack the
one for fiscal 1982, which is about to be submitted by Carter.
 These decisions will affect his proposed tax cuts and his plans
to increase money for defense.  They will also bear on whether
or not he will have to cut real social welfare programs, not the
"fat" he is accustomed to citing.  On top of these, he faces
rising unemployment, monstrous interest rates and U.S.
industries (like cars) that are running on square wheels.  And
there are difficulties that are his, which he may not see.
What happens to a black teen-ager in Harlem or Watts in a free
enterprise system that leaves him free to go to hell?

In foreign affairs, everything in sight seems an emergency, from
the hostages to the Polish frontier.  Whatever happens in
Poland, Reagan will not be overeager to negotiate an
arms-control pact with the Soviets.  What sort of agreement,
then, will eventually be sought? Regarding the Third World,
Reagan and his people have talked as if Soviet mischief making
were the main problem, and also have come out strongly against
organized terrorism, suggesting that the U.S. will send supplies
to countries under siege by guerrillas.  How does that position
affect Latin America today, especially El Salvador skidding
crazily toward a possible civil war?  Given Third World
realities, it is all very well to support anti-Communist regimes
without too much worry about how democratic they are, but what
if they are so discredited with their own people that they
cannot survive?  For cogent reasons, Reagan and his aides seem
willing to downplay the human rights issue somewhat, but how
will they deal with it in the context of Soviet Jews and other
dissidents?

In the Middle East, how will he continue to placate both
Israelis and Arabs?  How will he reassure the allies of the
U.S.'s renewed commitment?  These are not the kinds of problems
to be handled by subordinates.  They require determination but
also sophistication. THey are to be handled by a President who
studies, considers and knows what he wants.

In the broadest terms Reagan does know what he wants out of the
next four years.  But as those terms address specifics, that
broad vision may prove inept.  Intellectually, emotionally,
Reagan lives in the past.  That is where the broad vision comes
from; the past is his future.  But is it also the country's?
Helen Lawton, a current resident of Dixon, Ill., and a loyal
Reaganite, observed of her man: "Right now, in some ways, I
think he'd love to go back to the good old days.  In those days
he didn't even realize he was poor because so many others were
poor to.  He wants the good life, not in terms of material
things, but so that kids can have good times and strong family
relationships.  Yes, I think he would like to go back to how it
used to be, but it's going to be difficult."  That puts it
mildly.

"All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when
certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be
clarified."  So said Franklin Roosevelt, who was in a good
position to know.  The limits of freedom, our oldest idea, must
be clarified now.  Meanwhile the country is patently more
hopeful about its future than it has been in a long while, much
longer than the past four years; and to be fair to Jimmy Carter
he was surely as much a casualty of the malaise he identified
as he was its superintendent. When young man Reagan went West
for the first time, the future clearly looked like the ranch or
like Pacific Palisades, or perhaps both:  the genteel and
frontier traditions bound together by good manners and pluck.
 But when he turns eastward this month, the New World will be
more complex, more shadowy and more terrifying for all its
magnificent possibility.

By Roger Rosenblatt.  Reported by Laurence I. Barrett with
Reagan