Reagan’s Homespun Image Recalled

Just as political rhetoric hit a puerile low in the nation’s capital, Collins Publishers released a book that reminds people of the way Washington ought to be.

“Ronald Reagan: The Wisdom and Humor of the Great Communicator,” patches together favorite quips from the Gipper’s public life.

Unlike most such tomes, this collection contains stuff worth remembering - including the master’s recipe for successful communication. Reagan grew up in a small town where people swapped gossip, spun tales, cracked jokes. He prepared himself for big events by pretending he was gabbing with the guys at the barbershop back in Dixon, Ill.

When medical technicians raced him into surgery at George Washington University Hospital after his 1981 shooting, he quipped: “I hope all of you are Republicans” - putting at ease the men and women who saved his life.

Reagan loved to joke at his own expense - a good indicator of a man’s comfort with himself. That same strength enabled him to draw clear political lines. When he declared the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” the nation’s editorial writers reacted with shock and horror. But he got the last laugh in his Republican convention speech in 1992: “The sky would not fall if an American president told the truth,” he said. “The only thing that would fall was the Berlin Wall.”

He used sharp metaphors, sweetened by personal tenderness. He noted in 1977, “We know that government may be powerful enough to destroy families. We know it is not powerful enough to replace them” - thus compressing volumes of scholarly work into a pithy epigram.

His speeches sound like the work of one author. That’s because they were. Reagan was the best editor ever to inhabit the White House. He could transform a ghostwriter’s draft into a statement from the heart with astounding ease: Add a line here, rewrite a passage there, and bingo! Vintage Reagan!

He let others take credit for his speeches because they needed the glory more than he did and because he never begrudged another person’s success. Sheila Tate, Nancy Reagan’s former press secretary, recalls the first time she met the then-president. “We were sitting around, and he was waxing ecstatic about the greatness of a woman who had hidden Jews from the Germans. I was amazed. With all the great people he meets, and with all the great things he has accomplished, he can be just blown away by the greatness of somebody else - and take such intense joy and pleasure in it.”

The modern president labors under extraordinary constraints. He must talk often and well to the public. He must mind his manners while the cameras roll. He must fret about leaks and hostile coverage. And he must find ways of expressing the hopes and dreams of 260 million people.

Unfortunately, nobody on today’s political scene possesses that kind of maturity. The capital has been seized by type-A baby-boomer student-council presidents who want to save a world they haven’t yet learned to savor. Even the bosses, from Bill Clinton to Newt Gingrich, seem determined to create a sense of urgency that enables them to pose as saviors.

Reagan didn’t hog the spotlight that way. He inspired the nation by praising everyday heroes, such as Lenny Skutnik and Mother Hale. “We are meant to be masters of destiny, not victims of fate,” he declared in his final public speech. “Who among us would trade America’s future for that of any other country in the world? And who could possibly have so little faith in our American people that they would trade our tomorrows for our yesterdays?”

That faith in people undergirded everything in his presidency - including his decision not to let the Secret Service block off the roads around the White House.

Ronald Wilson Reagan closed his career with a three-hankie letter to his quarter-billion friends. “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life,” he scribbled in longhand. “I know that for America, there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”

Probably so, but as America approaches a new century, it would be nice to have more politicos who believed in a politics of joy and not merely a politics of Me.

A new Washington-area bumper sticker captures the yearning: “I miss Ronald Reagan.”

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