Protective Feelings Toward Reagan

The usually admirable and insightful Ellen Goodman accounts for President Reagan’s current bumbling on the basis of a Favorite Grandfather Theory. “It’s like watching,” she says, “a favorite grandfather losing his powers in public.” Despite its kindly generosity, this formulation strikes me as dangerous; it assigns to the aging process what belongs to character.

In the first place, aging may define a deteriorative experience with which all of us must eventually come to terms. But it neither inherently nor universally entails the effects of attentiveness, intellectual clarity, or sense of responsibility that Goodman perceives in the President.

It is easy to recall a long list of public figures from Oliver Wendell Holmes through Barry Goldwater to Claude Pepper who, at ages beyond Reagan’s, commanded respect for their vigor and vision even when one sharply disagreed with their positions.

Far more important, Reagan has changed far less as a public personality than has our view of him. It appealed to our yen for luxurious ease to see him knock off on a weekend from White House duties to go horseback riding. His simplicities beguiled us when the one-time actor chose to play the White Knight, out to destroy the Evil Empire without a single American hair-do’s getting mussed. We enjoyed his endless stories, almost always of sports heroes or war heroes or heroes who defied his favorite villain, government.

Even Californians took delight in his fairy tales about how his derring-do as governor turned the state into an earthly paradise. What we forgot was that, having run on a platform of no tax increases, Reagan spurred three of them during his eight years in Sacramento.

Most of all, we forgot that Reagan has consistently found his way through the corridors of power by seldom knowing what was going on. In 1962, probably the last time that he made a statement under oath, he told a federal grand jury, looking into the actions of the Screen Actors Guild under his presidency, “And all of this, including the opinions of myself, is vague at the Guild on everything that took place for all those years all the way back, including whether I was present or not.”

No. In a time of constitutional crisis, of storm clouds gathering over the Persian Gulf and Korea, of losses in overseas friends and in American prestige everywhere in the world, of an economy that lacks substance and has now turned us into the world’s largest debtor, and of profoundly lamed educational and criminal justice systems, we are not merely witnesses to a favorite grandfather surprised by time. Under the harsh duress of our circumstances, we have unwillingly grown more aware of the style and nature of the President who still has 18 months to serve as our head of state.

EDWARD JOSEPH SHOBEN JR.

Beverly Hills