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Get Four
|  | JUNE 8, 2004
By Roger Franklin The Simple Truth About Ronald Reagan It took a while, but I finally realized the Gipper was a lot smarter than the folks who derided him. Folks like me It was Christmas six years ago when Ronald Reagan, who died on Saturday at the age of 93, became an unexpected addition to our family, thanks to my son, who was then 11. As every parent knows, kids that age can have strange ideas about what the well-equipped adult really needs, so when Squirt handed me a little box with a mysterious present clunking heavily inside, I expected a clock or cast-iron sock rack or some such equally useless thing. What emerged instead was a small bust of the 40th President of the U.S., whose forever-frozen smile gazed up from the wreckage of ribbon and gift wrap with more than a dash of mockery. A statue of Reagan! A joke, right? His mother must have put the boy up to it. But no, she was just as genuinely bemused. What could he have been thinking to mark Christmas with this grinning, empty-headed lump, seven inches of cast-bronze conservative kitsch? NO TREE HUGGER. Now, Reagan and I went back quite a ways, that much was true, and Squirt had heard his name many times. It was Reagan who first drew me to the States, when he was running against Jimmy Carter in 1980, and the Australian paper I worked for at the time wanted news stories and features on the conventions and political carnivals of an American election year. They were duly sent back to Sydney, none very flattering. That Reagan was a twit went without saying, but I said it anyway, and with some vitriol. For example, there was the moron's blunder at the Detroit convention, where he said trees were worse polluters than cars. What a dolt not to know the difference between carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. How stupid would Americans be to elect him? But of course they did, and for the next eight years, most of what I wrote, including a whole book on corruption and fraud in the Reagan-era Pentagon, chronicled how the sunny fool in the White House was getting it all wrong. Nuclear missiles in Europe, that warmonger! Homeless armies on the streets -- didn't he care? And what about this racist imperialism he was unleashing on Central America? Charismatic Sandinistas savaged by Gringo spooks and mercenaries. El Salvador a killing field. Little Grenada ground under a cowboy heel. And Star Wars -- how sad was that? It couldn't work, it wouldn't work, and yet Reagan was determined to build the bloody thing. The only unknown, or so it seemed, was whether the U.S. would go broke before mushroom clouds replaced cities with pools of black glass, which is what Reagan and his nuke-slinging buddies evidently wanted. "EVIL EMPIRE." So why had my son bought me this bust? His explanation surprised me, and the gist of it went like this: "Gee, I thought you liked him. You like everything he did." Turns out, the kid was smarter than his old man, and he really had been paying attention when I'd answered those questions about why Russia wasn't the Soviet Union anymore, and what about this vanished Berlin Wall that they were talking about on TV? My son must have been listening, too, when his American mother reminisced about how, when she was his age, her family stocked the basement with tinned goods and a chamber pot to see them through the storm of nuclear fallout. Those threats were gone because the Soviet Union was gone -- and it was Ronald Reagan who made it so. My son will never have to master the duck-and-cover, and for that his mother and I are grateful. Who can doubt that it was Reagan's final push that toppled the Soviet Union onto history's scrapheap? He might not have known clean air from car exhaust, but he knew evil when he saw it -- and that was what he called it: The Evil Empire. Yes, all the Noam Chomsky quoters scoffed at the First Simpleton's ignorance of the need for nuance, but the Soviet system was evil.
BW MALL
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