Last Act

by Craig Shirley

  These men performed in parades and funerals and guarded the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, even staying at their post through hurricane Isabel. They were not allowed to scratch, sneeze, smile, twitch, itch, drool, or pose for a camera. Never. They were not allowed to swat away mosquitoes or horse flies or fidget in any way. Their job was to march and stand at attention and only draw attention to the uniform and the service and the duty and not to themselves.24 General Jackman used to sneak over the fence around Arlington in the early hours to inspect the lone soldier marching in the dark. He was never disappointed.25 These soldiers did have a sense of humor though. When performing funerals, they said their unofficial motto was “The Last to Let You Down.”26

  Even as Wednesday night wore on into Thursday morning, which then wore into the wee hours of Friday morning, more and more people joined the back of the seemingly endless line hoping they could whisper a final good-bye and prayer for the Gipper. Former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev entered the cool round room with no fanfare and he, too, silently paid his respects, and then he, too, gently placed his hand on the American flag on top of Reagan’s coffin, as if to touch his former adversary and later good friend one last time. He looked very sad and moved with a slower gait. Backing away from the coffin, Gorbachev dipped his head. He was alone as his wife Raisa had died five years earlier.

  Fred Ryan recalled they’d met in Moscow after Reagan was out of power, and as he walked through the doorway he attempted to embrace Gorbachev, who balked—it was bad luck in Russian culture to greet someone in an entryway. Reagan stepped inside the room and they embraced.27

  Ironically, both men ended up unpopular in Russia, especially Gorbachev. But in some parts of the former Soviet Union—especially in the Baltics—Reagan had achieved a mythic status. So, too, in the Warsaw Pact countries like Poland and Hungary where there were memorial services going on for Reagan, candles being lit, and prayers offered. It was astonishing when one considered that just a few years earlier organized religion and the practice of religion had been suppressed, and now out in the open, because of Ronald Reagan, people were praying for Ronald Reagan.

  When asked, the people standing in the line on the Mall had their own reasons for coming, but all had in some manner been touched by Reagan. A speech, a joke, his presidency, his confidence, his manliness, his integrity, his humor, his handsomeness, his humility, his place in history, somehow this man infused millions with their own special memories of him. Of all the presidents who had passed, it could only be said of Kennedy, FDR, Lincoln, and Washington that each American had his or her own reason for and way of cherishing the president at the time of his passing.

  Wordlessly, funeral aides moved down the line over Wednesday, Thursday, and early Friday morning looking for VIPs or at least identifiable Reaganites and silently took them out of line and moved them to the head of the procession in the Rotunda. Quietly in line was Sandra Day O’Connor, Reagan’s first appointment to the Supreme Court. Same with Bob Dole, who also waited patiently.

  There was no announced dress code for the procession into the Rotunda, and it was understandable that because of the oppressive heat many were in casual wear, but there were also plenty of men and women in dark suits and dark dresses, attired as they would be for any other funeral. Young boys were in blazers and young girls in dresses. And there were plenty of men and women in uniform. Some might have been tempted to jump into the fountains in front of the Capitol to cool off but none did.

  On and on through Wednesday night and into Thursday night, American citizens came, and they came, and they came in the hot and humid day and in the hot and humid evening. Some had no plans whatsoever to go to Washington, thinking they’d be content to watch the proceedings on television. But then something came over them. Someone called. Or they called someone and they simply said, “Let’s go to Washington—before it is too late.”

  No one needed to elaborate the whos and the whys. They simply got in their cars or trucks or minivans and drove to Washington, some never having been there before. Others took buses and planes and trains, but they came by the thousands first, then by the tens of thousands, then by the hundreds of thousands. It was nothing short of remarkable. During the 1980 campaign Reagan had often said, “We have to move ahead. But we can’t leave anyone behind.”28 Now it seemed that no one wanted to be left behind in the streams of humanity making their way toward a shining city on a hill.

  The high and mighty also spoke out.

  A Senate resolution was passed unanimously, though two senators were missing. A House resolution was also passed unanimously, though dozens of Democrats chose not to vote. “Ronald Wilson Reagan—father, husband, actor and dedicated public servant—restored the pride, optimism and strength of the United States and earned the deep respect and affection of his fellow citizens.”29 Senator Ted Kennedy went even further. Of Reagan, the old liberal from Massachusetts said,

  He brought a special grace to the White House and the country in everything he did. We often disagreed on specific issues, but he had an undeniably unique capacity to inspire and move the Nation. On foreign policy, he will be honored as the President who won the cold war. It was more than the fact that he was a superb communicator. Some attributed at least part of his success to the fact that he had been an actor. But his deepest convictions were matters of heart and mind and spirit, and on them, he was no actor at all.30

  Hundreds of other members of Congress also read statements on the floor of the House or the Senate, and they were later published in a book entitled Ronald Reagan: Late a President of the United States. Memorial Tributes Delivered in Congress. The book was more than three hundred pages long and cost one million dollars to be published.31 From the most passionate conservative to the most dispassionate liberal, many paid tribute to the Gipper. Some chronic Reagan haters in Congress like Debbie Wasserman Schultz and John Lewis and Jim Moran chose not to include any praise of Reagan in the book, but they were in the minority. Truth be told, in their own party Wasserman Schultz and Moran were extremely unpopular and were known to have turnstiles in their Capitol Hill offices through which many staff members departed.

  On the other hand, people like Nancy Pelosi had deeply poignant tributes to Reagan. No rancor, no politics, just a statement infused with “dignity” and “passionate” and “freedom” and “eloquence” and “grace” and “humor.”32 It was utterly moving.

  John Boehner inserted not one but two statements of unvarnished praise for Reagan, including announcing that in his home district the “Ronald Reagan’s Voice of Freedom Park” was so named in the Gipper’s honor.33

  The debate over his place in history continued without end and even increased as more and more people turned out to show their respect and affection for Reagan. Sean Wilentz, a pleasant, liberal professor from Princeton, bluntly said that Reagan “was not a great president. He was master at projecting a mood; he could certainly rally the country. He would have made a great king, a great constitutional monarch, but we do not have that form of government.”34 Wilentz had been a passionate defender of Bill Clinton during his impeachment and testified before Congress defending the not–fanatically married Arkansan.

  The place of various presidents in history along with their ranking was on the lips and keyboards of many. Most, like Wilentz, would not even consider Reagan in the top ranks alongside Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and George Washington. Most rated Lincoln a greater president than Washington even though the first president had been on the national stage for a quarter of a century while the man from Springfield, Illinois, was on the national stage for all of six years. Calvin Coolidge was the butt of many jokes told by liberal historians even though the economy grew and many progressive social causes were addressed, including his support for universal suffrage. Still, H. L. Mencken said of Coolidge, “There were no
thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.”35

  Coincidentally, a group of historians gathered in Washington to compare and contrast American presidents during the week of the Reagan funeral. When the subject of Woodrow Wilson came up, the American historians rated him highly, his hardwired racism notwithstanding. But the Australians said he was a “flop, largely because of his rigid and eventually counterproductive idealism.” The American academics rated John Kennedy high but said Reagan had “achieved no such status overseas. His brand of radical conservatism . . . has achieved little success . . .”

  American liberal historian Robert Dallek also slammed Reagan’s legacy as being one of attacking government and separating the economic classes and casting poor people into permanent servitude. “Much of the country, including most of those who are physically, economically or otherwise disadvantaged, deeply resented and still resent his insistence that government is the problem, not the solution.”36

  Some liberal historians were typically blinded to the facts by their own ideology. In contrast, in 1951, Hannah Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism, and in it she audaciously compared Stalin and Hitler and their respective countries. The Left in America went nuts even in the face of the fact that communism and National Socialism were both forms of collectivism. Some American liberals could never accept that Hitler was a leftist.

  Reaganites were incessantly accused of doing their utmost to push back against the assault on his legacy by liberal historians, but under the constant barrage, who could blame them? Gorbachev had a different and better appreciation for Reagan’s legacy than did the liberal historians, saying that he wanted to go down in history as a “peacemaker.”37

  A singular and remarkable liberal historian John Patrick Diggins was in many ways the unofficial chronicler of the American Left in the twentieth century, having written numerous and important books about American liberalism. Of Reagan and Mrs. Reagan, Diggins reminded Americans of Michelangelo, who wrote, “Death and love are the two wings that bear the good man to heaven.”38 He later noted that up to the time of Reagan’s passing nearly all the books written about the fortieth president had been harsh and even cruel, few giving him credit or the benefit of the doubt. Their titles were revealing: Our Long National Daydream and Sleepwalking Through History and others denigrating the man and his time in office.

  Another historian of the Left, the much-esteemed John Lewis Gaddis, had also gone through his own evolution of thinking. Gaddis was one of the best chroniclers of the Cold War and in an earlier time had given Reagan short shrift, but by the time of Reagan’s passing he had come to the conclusion that Reagan was a giant of history, calling him one of the “saboteurs of the status quo.”39

  The liberal columnists continued their criticism. Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert, notably in the New York Times, on the day of the Reagan funeral tastelessly savaged Reagan again. Krugman, not satisfied with the facts, made up his own in challenging that Reaganomics worked or that jobs were created in the eight years Reagan was in office. “For much of the Reagan era, the economy suffered from very high unemployment. There was, in short, nothing magical about the Reagan economy.”40

  That was true, of course, if you considered the eradication of the double-digit inflation of the 1970s to be an unremarkable achievement. Or if you thought the same of the drop in real interest rates from more than 20 percent to below 7 percent,41 or the real cut in federal spending and the cuts in government regulations, or that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics almost eighteen million jobs were created during the 1980s.42 Also, the Bureau did not count the self-employed and the 1980s saw an explosion of entrepreneurship.

  But it was Diggins who had the most interesting take on the Reagan legacy—he beat the neocons about the head and shoulders. “Not only did the neocons oppose Mr. Reagan’s efforts at rapprochement, they also argued against engaging in personal diplomacy with Soviet leaders. Advisers like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld . . .” Diggins said the neocons clung to the notion that the Soviet Union was a thing of permanence, the Berlin Wall was a permanent fixture in our lives, and the Cold War was unending. He concluded, writing, “But many neocons came to hate Mr. Reagan . . . Mr. Reagan gave us an enlightened foreign policy that achieved most of its diplomatic objectives peacefully and succeeded in firmly uniting our allies.” In contrast, he said the foreign policy of George W. Bush and its architects like Rumsfeld had “lost its way and undermined valued friendships throughout the world.”43

  The neocons, of course, feared their loss of prestige more than anything else, and if the West actually transcended the Soviets they would be proven wrong and they would lose their status.

  For many, even by 2004, the Cold War had almost faded into obscurity, seen as a relic of the past. The end of history so to speak. The terrors of the Soviets had nearly been forgotten. But not by everybody. A columnist John Kass wrote of his own father’s experiences in the “old world” though it wasn’t so long ago. “They repeatedly tried to kill him . . . They shot up the village and stole food from starving people at gunpoint and killed those who disagreed with them, including teachers, and used their politics as cover to settle disputes by gutting those they stole from.”44 Kass, too, ripped the Washington establishment and Jimmy Carter. “But,” Kass wrote,

  . . . then came Reagan. He didn’t care about satisfying the establishment by waxing on about shades of grey. He understood that there was good and evil in the world and that we weren’t evil. The Soviets were evil because they squashed the individual in the name of the collective. Big central governments everywhere are determined to maintain themselves at the cost of the individual. This is the nature, the danger, of bureaucracies. Reagan understood this. He rebuilt the military, confronted the communists and broke them. This outraged the hand-wringers and the shades-of-grey crowd. It enrages them still, which is why they’re so eager to diminish him, to peel him, even in death. And what happened in the world? They call it freedom. They call it the American Century. They don’t call it the Soviet Century. Thank you, President Reagan.45

  At the same time the leading neocon organization, the Council on Foreign Relations, was going through its own internal civil war over a report on Saudi Arabia and whether the royal dictatorship was helping or hurting in the war on terror. A leading member of the neocon group, Mallory Factor, was embroiled in the squabble, working with Bush White House aides to slow roll any criticism of the Bush White House. On the other hand, the draft report was written by former Clinton aides who were now advising John Kerry. Factor defended the Bush White House, saying they only wanted “factual changes” made in the report.46 The bottom line was the truism that truth was always the first casualty in war and politics.

  Still, the head of CFR Richard Haass agreed with Diggins on the Cold War. “Reagan’s words mattered. He questioned the basic legitimacy of communism and the Soviet empire. When he called it an evil empire, this reverberated.”47

  Reagan the old Cold Warrior once recalled his last summit meeting with Gorbachev and addressing the press in Red Square, a sight unimaginable only a few months earlier. Later, he said, “Imagine the president of the United States and the general secretary of the Soviet Union walking together in Red Square, talking about a growing personal friendship . . . Quite possibly we are beginning to take down the barriers of the postwar era.”48

  All this debate and discussion was leading inevitably to a closer examination of Bush and Reagan and more sophisticated observers and commentators were coming rapidly to the conclusion there were more differences between the two presidents than there were similarities. Reagan never trusted government—or at least rarely did—whereas Bush was very much like his father in celebrating the bureaucracy. Bush, when running for president in 2000, never proposed the cutting or
elimination of one federal program, a contrast to Reagan, who in 1980 made cutting and eliminating agencies such as the Department of Energy and the Department of Education a centerpiece of his message. Indeed, his closing remarks of the 1980 debate were to “take government off the backs of the great people of this country . . .”49

  Bush saw himself as not a Reagan Republican but a Bush Republican, though Tom Brokaw of NBC said most in the party saw themselves as Reagan Republicans.50 In his mind, he was not trying to pattern his presidency after Reagan but understandably wanted to leave his own mark. Reagan, for his part, never called himself a “compassionate conservative.” The way they both entered Washington was dramatically different. Reagan was assuming the presidency of a broken country. Bush was assuming the presidency as the leader of a divided country. Reagan had won in a popular and electoral landslide in 1980. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 but won the Electoral College 271–266.51 Even as Bush was trying to distinguish himself his aides were bending over backward to compare the two presidents.

  During the week of the Reagan memorial, dozens of unofficial dinners, receptions, and get-togethers materialized; most were unplanned and not listed in any schedule or newspaper. Some of the former Reagan speechwriters gathered to reacquaint and for some polite conversation with other veterans of the Reagan years. They met in the old Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. They’d often worked together, been competitive with one another, and admired one another.

  In the history of Ronald Reagan it had been overlooked that he himself was a very fine writer, as evidenced by his thousands of letters, columns, speeches, and radio commentaries. Presidents tend to attract like-minded people. FDR was interested in quick solutions and politics, so many of the men around him saw things in that fashion. JFK was intellectually curious and he attracted men who also cherished reason and knowledge. Richard Nixon attracted insecure and paranoid men like Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and John Dean because they, too, saw enemies where they should have seen potential converts.