By this time in the movie, the strains of the concluding theme are beginning to rise from the painted hills in the background, and the tall, square-jawed stranger, dusty Stetson pulled low over steely eyes, has begun striding toward his faithful horse tethered to the hitching post.
The shooting over, his never-empty, never-miss six-guns are back cooling in their holsters now. And there is a look of mellowness and satisfaction about him. The town saved, the dead all buried, the time has come for him to move on and leave things in the trusted and capable hands of the admiring and surprisingly mature protege.
Gazing wistfully, the rancher`s daughter, young, beautiful and clearly infatuated, sadly acknowledges her hero`s imminent exit with the appearance of a perfect tear on her perfect cheek. Then, as if suddenly struck with the realization that simply having known him, however briefly, is blessing enough, she braces herself on the steady arm of the newly anointed town guardian and smiles a brave farewell.
So long, Ron, pardner, and thanks from all of America.
Sometime on Jan. 20, Ronald Wilson Reagan will go out on the White House lawn, where he will smile, wave, say something inaudible in the noise and mount his presidential helicopter for the last time. Then he will ride off to the West whence he came, dropping the curtain on the 40th presidency of the United States, certain to be remembered as one of the most extraordinary and successful in this nation`s history.
The story of Ronald Reagan, the only professional actor ever to hold the world`s most important elected office, is-appropriately enough-the stuff from which movies are made. Not the fictionalized version of reality so common in today`s movies, but pure fiction set in the reality of history, like that of Reagan`s favorite-some say only-author, the late Louis L`Amour, the most prolific teller of Western adventure tales ever.
L`Amour`s heroes were invariably the reluctant kind-tall and strong, humble and honest, the straightest-shooting, hardest-riding, longest-suffering, most bare-knuckled, mother- and country-loving, simple, God-fearing men that words could create. And, always, they rode into and ultimately out of the worst kind of hell without losing face, grace, virtue or womenfolk.
As an actor in the movies, Ronald Reagan seldom if ever got those kind of roles, landing instead as the babysitter of chimps, a loser in love or the trusty sidekick of the leading man. His political birth as president of the Screen Actors Guild, the years as spokesman for General Electric and later for conservatism, even his two terms as governor of California gave few clues to his readiness for the big part. Untested, poorly read and, at 69, the oldest president ever elected, he figured to be an unlikely hero, political or otherwise.
After voting for himself for president in 1980 in the Los Angeles suburb of Pacific Palisades, he emerged with the ever-present Nancy on his arm to a gaggle of microphones, lights and cameras. The reporters were most interested in how the Reagans were feeling on this election day.
”I can`t answer till I get on my mark,” he said, grinning and looking down. Sure enough, there on the blacktop were strips of gray plastic tape, marked ”R.R.” and ”N.R.” And not until he reached the spot did he answer, ”We feel fine, and it`s good to be home.”
In the years to come, he would seldom miss either mark or cue. And he came to cast perhaps as large a shadow over the landscape as any political leader of the century, possibly excepting Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Ronald Reagan, the supporting actor, became in politics the John Wayne of presidents. And as in most great performances, he defined the role perfectly. As the nation`s spiritual and moral leader, he grew almost instantly to epic if mythical proportions, the embodiment of the best of American tradition, bright and shiny beyond all reason and miraculously resistant to the tarnish and taint most other politicians cannot escape.
In the process, he effected a revolution of yet undetermined proportions and consequences, a revolution driven by twin, long-burning passions to defeat communism and reverse the four-decade-old federal government trend toward more burdensome taxation.
His presidency marked the end of a decade of psychological malaise for the country brought on by the failure of the Vietnam War. It abruptly thwarted for the eight years he was in office, and for perhaps many years to come, the role of the federal government as an instrument for the transfer of wealth from rich to poor. And, perhaps most important, it ushered in a dramatic new era in the crucial relationship between East and West.
But just as in the movies, when the hero rode into Washington back in January, 1981, trouble was brewing.
The federal government was reeling from eight years of scandal and incompetency at the highest levels. Inflation had robbed the nation`s savings. The economy was being held hostage by 20 percent interest rates.
Confrontation and conflict raged in many corners of the world, including our own backyard of Central America. With few exceptions, an unstable and rambunctious Soviet Union leadership was poised to exploit any advantage.
Throughout the Middle East and in some of Europe`s greatest cities, gangs of international killers and robbers had run amok, blowing up airports, highjacking planes and attacking U.S. diplomatic and military targets.
Worst of all, the fabled American spirit had been cornered and treed by the dreaded Ayatollah Khomeini, whose followers had overrun the U.S. Embassy in Iran and taken U.S. citizens prisoner and who were spitting daily in Uncle Sam`s face for all the world to see.
Onto this stage, Reagan strode, talking tough and saying all the right things.
On the first day of Reagan`s presidency, Khomeini set the hostages free without the new president ever lifting a hand. Was it a symbolic salute to a power yet unseen or, more likely, an act of contempt for outgoing President Jimmy Carter, whose every move to free the hostages had been futile?
Whichever did not seem to matter to the nation`s air controllers, who decided to test Reagan early with a nationwide strike. Without batting an eye, he fired them all and kept the planes flying with a minimum of disruption.
But air controllers and ayatollahs were hardly more than flies to swat compared with the nation`s real enemies, which had been locked in Reagan`s sights for years and years. He had come to vanquish two far more insidious and lethal adversaries-the tax-and-spend policies of the United States Congress, and the Soviet Union, the world`s biggest and most persistent bully.
To the Soviets, he laid down a clear challenge to any kind of shootout it might have in mind. To make sure he had the ammunition, he sent new Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger out on the longest and most expensive military shopping spree in the nation`s history.
And to Congress, he sent the bill-$1.8 trillion over the next eight years. In the same motion, he brandished the fresh public mandate of his crushing election victory over Carter (489 to 49 in electoral voters) and forced the Congress to swallow a $750 billion tax cut, also the largest in history.
To Reagan`s way of thinking, nobody deserved such harsh treatment any more than the big spenders on Capitol Hill, at whom he had aimed the brunt of his campaign rhetoric and over whose flayed hides he had marched into the White House. The power of Democrats in Congress, who along with Carter had to share the blame for 20 percent interest rates, double-digit inflation and a deep psychological depression of America`s entrepreneurial spirit, had been decimated in the Reagan landslide.
For most of his first term, Congress mostly just rolled over and trembled under the guns of his revolution, which were aimed at the size and scope of the federal government. With little resistance, Reagan reversed what he viewed as a 25-year-old scheme by liberals, labor unions and Washington politicians to rob the rich and give to the poor, destroying democracy and capitalism in the process.
His new federalism drastically cut back federal revenue sharing with states and cities for education, housing and other social welfare programs. And he substituted a ”trickle down” theory based around supply-side economics-the idea that lower taxes would produce more business activity, more jobs and, ultimately, more tax dollars at less onerous tax rates.
The tax idea, although producing a record run of national prosperity and economic growth, has yet to succeed, if you consider a $150-billion-plus federal deficit as a sign of failure. But the political revolution that accompanied it has reshaped American politics, probably beyond even Reagan`s hopes or dreams.
During his first term in the White House, Reagan won every major struggle with the legislative leaders on Capitol Hill, changing dramatically and perhaps permanently the activist role of the federal government in such areas as public housing, public education and the social welfare.
By the end of his first term, both major political parties had been realigned. The liberals in the Republican Party vanished, and its moderates were driven into hiding. In the Democratic Party, the conservatives were so outgunned that their followers deserted in droves to follow Reagan, leaving the party to rival bands of liberals and moderates unable to coalesce into a viable national competitor.
When they did come together in an effort to oust Reagan in 1984, he whipped them worse than he had four years earlier.
Meanwhile, he took over the nation`s court system and remade it in his own image, assuring that the revolution will outlive the revolutionary. Fifty percent of all federal judges are Reagan appointees: 291 at the district level and 89 on the appeals courts.
Although he lost a major public struggle to appoint conservative Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, three of its appointees, including the chief justice, now bear his stamp. And those justices who do not are old and certain to be replaced during the administration of George Bush, his handpicked successor.
While proving himself nearly invincible at home, Reagan was also proving to the world`s outlaws that he was quick on the trigger.
He sent U.S. jets into the skies to chase down terrorist highjackers. To the troubled Middle East, he sent the U.S. Marines on a bold if futile peacekeeping mission in Beirut. At the slightest provocation-word of an airstrip being built by Communist Cuban adventurers-he drew on the tiny Caribbean nation of Granada, dispatching U.S. forces there in October, 1983, on a controversial ”rescue mission” in which they routed a handful of Cuban troops and airport builders.
Three years later, in a dramatic show of resolve and air power, U.S. bombers strafed Tripoli at midnight in an obvious and deliberate effort to kill Libyan troublemaker Moammar Gadhafi. They missed Gadhafi but killed his adopted daughter, an infant.
Reagan was publicly sympathetic but privately unbowed. No range war rages without casualties. The innocent sometimes die for the greater good. In the movies and in real life, even the hero does not go completely unscathed.
Two months after taking office, outside a Washington hotel, a deranged young man tormented by his infatuation for-ironically-a young Hollywood star ambushed President Reagan and his party.
His press secretary was permanently paralyzed by the gunman`s bullet, and Reagan himself fell to a serious chest wound. But he showed true grit, losing neither consciousness nor his sense of humor. To attending physicians, Reagan joked that he hoped all the surgeons were Republicans. And he assured Americans he was okay and would be back in the saddle in no time. Which he was, even more aggressive and effective than before.
Of all his weapons, none was more effective or at the ready than his natural combination of sincerity and eloquence. If the townsfolk needed soothing, they could get it from a smiling and humble grandfather, gentle and and understanding. If straight talk was called for, they could get that, too, with the strength and conviction of a man who, in public at least, took no uncertain steps.
The secret, always, was in the imposing presence of the on-camera image:
the ramrod straight military bearing; the hair that never grayed, the puffed- up-chest, sucked-in-tummy; the here-I-am, come-and-get-me style of a road warrior half his age. Ronald Reagan, the President, was Rooster Cogburn, the Marshal, with the reins in his teeth, guns in either hand-only sober, gentle and graceful. Perfectly groomed, perfectly uniformed and perfectly scripted.
”He is one of the few political leaders I have ever met whose public speeches revealed more than his private conversations,” says Gerald Ford, one of his predecessors.
What these speeches by Reagan revealed, consistently, was a righteous man-fair, honest and well-intentioned.
Commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Normandy invasion at Omaha Beach in 1984, he looked straight into the eyes of the decendants of soldiers who died there and made a speech the equal of any Hollywood ever produced.
”When these troops swept across the French countryside and into the forests of Belgium and Luxembourg, they came not to take, but to return what had been wrongly seized,” he said. ”When our forces marched into Germany, they came not to prey on a brave and defeated people, but to nuture the seeds of democracy among those who yearned to be free again.”
Damn right, Ron. Amen. Let`s get `em, boys.
His unswerving dedication to mission-couched brilliantly in patrotic exhortation, perfectly timed and perfectly delivered-saw him through every crisis, even when being punched hard by the bad guys.
In October, 1983, radical terrorists launched a suicide bomber into the U.S. compound in Beirut, killing 241 U.S. servicemen. In May, 1987, 37 crew members of the U.S. frigate Stark, on patrol duty in the Persian Gulf, were killed by an attacking Iraqi jet fighter. And in July, 1988, a U.S. warship, under siege in the same area, mistakenly shot down an Iranian airliner and killed all 290 civilians aboard.
Reagan was also floored repeatedly during his eight years by members of his own posse, some of whom turned out to be outlaws of sorts themselves. Many top aides were indicted or driven from office for scandalous behavior, including two of his closest compadres, media whiz Michael Deaver and Atty. Gen. Edward Meese.
Nearly half a dozen top deputies, including some of the most important men in the White House, bit the dust during his second term as a result of the Iran-contra scandal, one of the worst foreign policy debacles of U.S. history. Even the leader himself was caught apparently asleep with his boots off while out-of-control national security assistants traded U.S. arms to the Iranians for U.S. hostages and diverted proceeds to covertly fund an illegal U.S. war effort in Nicaragua.
Critics claimed that, as president, Reagan slept through other things as well. For example, they argued that he simply refused to acknowledge the ugly underbelly of the country, as blind to the reality of racism, poverty and class conflict as he was to the misdeeds of his pals.
But through it all, Ronald Reagan walked upright and undaunted, slipping all the punches, chin out, eyes dead ahead on freedom, peace and prosperity-the end goals that justify the means.
Except for a red face here and a red nose there, after successful cancer surgery, his movie profile emerged intact, with cheeks rosy, every dark hair still in place, a geriatric medical miracle who after eight years in the lead looked as young and strong as when he assumed it.
As it turned out, his narrowest escape was not eluding the death bullet of young John Hinckley, but in survival of the endless duel of wits and weapons with the leaders of the Soviet Union, which will probably be recorded as both his greatest struggle and his greatest victory.
In the beginning, Reagan faced a Soviet Union led by men of his own generation, old men driven by fear and the memory of Adolf Hitler`s rape of Mother Russia.
It was their Soviet Union, the country of Josef Stalin, that Reagan had come to detest. These were the fearsome, expansive and duplicitous Russians, who had stirred every pot, fouled every brew, pointed their intimidating guns at Europe and lied through their teeth for half of Ronald Reagan`s lifetime.
Calling their regime the ”Evil Empire” after the villains in George Lucas` movie ”Star Wars,” Reagan waved his swords and rattled his cannons at them. And they went to their graves fearing his intentions, dead not from U.S. bullets but from time, worry and the Russian winters.
Three Russian leaders died while Reagan was president, and in their wake came a new and younger leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, a slicker galoot by far who proved a bolder and more wily adversary. At the Iceland summit in 1986, the President walked right into a Gorbachev trap. Almost lost his guns and his political skin. But he got away and ultimately lived to be cat to Gorbachev`s mouse, a smart mouse indeed who decided not to fight at all.
No one can be sure why, but Reagan`s ability to rally Americans and their allies abroad in support of a militarily strong America cannot be undervalued as a factor. His persistence in support of a space-based shield against nuclear missiles, bizarre enough to be called Star Wars after Lucas` movie, proved to be his most important diplomatic initiative.
Under Gorbachev, the troublesome gang abruptly stopped its rustling, raiding and mischief making. Its fearsome, disciplined Red Army met an embarrassing defeat in Afghanistan, manhandled by a ragtag bunch of guerrillas armed with Reagan`s sophisticated U.S. weaponry, most of it smuggled to them with uncharacteristic U.S. guile and efficiency.
Under Reagan, U.S. support for rebels against communist regimes anywhere and everywhere became more than the rhetorical crutch it had been since Lyndon Johnson`s time. Although this tenet of the Reagan doctrine failed as often as it succeeded, that in itself was major progress.
No longer the unchallenged scourge of the territory, the Soviet bully seems not only vanquished but on the road to rehabilitation.
In a fitting conclusion to this masterful plot, the two leaders, waving flags of peace, met for a final time on a sunny day in December beneath the shadow of the Statue of Liberty in the heart of world capitalism.
Dramatically, Gorbachev threw down his guns, at least some of the most threatening ones, and talked of peace and of tearing down fences. Such a transformation instantly made him the first Russian ever to be trusted by Reagan, the man who vowed never to trust a Russian. And so magnanimous was Reagan in his victory that he even let Gorbachev claim it.
”Watch our smiles,” Reagan said, directly to the camera.
As usual, he was right on the mark, right on cue.
And now, more popular than any president ever, with three-fourths of the American people approving of the way he did the job, he is riding away into the sunset of his life.
If it all had been just a movie, they would give Ronald Reagan the Oscar.
