“Politics is just like show business,” he said. “You have a hell of an opening, coast for a while, and then have a hell of a close.” If his first gubernatorial campaign was a hell of an opening, Reagan’s White House years would provide him with ample opportunity for coasting—before he achieved a hell of a close, with Iran-Contra. It’s commonplace for commanders in chief to age visibly from the burdens of the office, but not the Gipper. As Cannon noted, “Reagan may have been the one president in the history of the republic who saw his election as a chance to get some rest.” He could’ve used all that downtime to acquire the knowledge necessary to fulfill his constitutional duties, but his laziness and incuriosity put the kibosh on that. At press conferences early in his presidency, he sounded like an actor who hadn’t bothered to learn his lines. When asked about the placement of U.S. missiles, the best he could ad-lib was “I don’t know but what maybe you haven’t gotten into the area that I’m going to turn over to the secretary of defense.” As the Sound of Music incident suggests, Reagan’s interest in briefing materials might have peaked when he acquired Jimmy Carter’s debate prep. Frustrated by his aversion to reading, cabinet members resorted to bringing him up to speed—or, more accurately, half speed—by showing him videos and cartoons about the subjects at hand. But even these Oval Office versions of Schoolhouse Rock! bored Reagan, who spent briefings doodling. Though a team of psychologists gave him a semblance of sentience when he ran for governor, by the time he became president his semi-informed veneer was wearing thin. The journalist Elizabeth Drew, who covered him during the 1980 campaign, observed, “Reagan’s mind appears to be a grab bag of clippings and ‘facts’ and anecdotes and scraps of ideas.” Embarrassingly, he often appeared stupidest when talking with or about foreign leaders. In a 1979 interview, Reagan told NBC’s Tom Brokaw, “If I become president, other than perhaps Margaret Thatcher I will probably be younger than almost all the heads of state I will have to do business with.” When Brokaw noted that he’d be considerably older than French president Giscard d’Estaing, Reagan replied, “Who?” (After Reagan was elected, Brokaw, demonstrating a gift for understatement, called him “a gravely under-informed president.”) After a half-hour briefing by the Lebanese foreign minister about his nation’s factional conflicts, Reagan’s only contribution was “You know, your nose looks just like Danny Thomas’s.” (The former star of the sitcom Make Room for Daddy might have been the only other person of Lebanese descent he’d ever met.) In a photo op with the Liberian ruler, Samuel K. Doe, Reagan called him “Chairman Moe.” Welcoming the prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, to the White House, he said, “It gives me great pleasure to welcome Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and Mrs. Lee to Singapore.” During a meeting with Pope John Paul II, at least, he didn’t mangle the pontiff’s name; he just fell asleep. Reagan sometimes seemed like Voltaire’s Candide, an innocent in a constant state of wonder about the world around him. He called a 1982 trip to Latin America “real fruitful,” having gleaned this mind-boggling insight: “They’re all individual countries.” Reporting on this tour, Lou Cannon wrote, “Over and over again along the way, he expressed enthusiasm in what he was seeing for the first time, and his aides found it appealing and naive.” A foreign ministry official in Brazil was less enchanted by his wide-eyed ingenuousness. After Reagan suggested that Brazil could be “a bridge” for the U.S. in South America, the official noted, “If you look at a map, you will see that we cannot be detached from the South American continent. We are not a bridge from South America; we are in South America.” It’s possible the Brazilian was still sore after Reagan, raising a glass at a state dinner in BrasÃlia, offered a toast to “the people of Bolivia.” Belatedly recognizing his goof, he tried to explain it away by saying that Bolivia was where he was headed next. His next stop was Colombia; Bolivia wasn’t on his itinerary. But the Brazilians shouldn’t have felt singled out. Reagan’s ignorance spanned the globe. He demonstrated unquestioning devotion to the government of apartheid South Africa, possibly because he rarely asked questions about the place. When he did, the question was rhetorical, as in “Can we abandon this country that has stood beside us in every war we’ve ever fought?” It’s true that South Africa had been steadfast in its support, but not of us: many of its officials had ties to a party that supported the Nazis, and John Vorster, who led the country for thirteen years, had been jailed for cozying up to Hitler. Incredibly, Reagan claimed in a radio address that South Africa was a bastion of racial equality: “[T]hey have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country—the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertaining and so forth were segregated. That has all been eliminated.” This would have been welcome news to Nelson Mandela, had it reached his prison cell. Turning to a country he presumably knew more about because he despised it so much, Reagan said, “I’m no linguist but I have been told that in the Russian language there isn’t even a word for freedom.” Reagan was half right: he was no linguist. The Russian word for freedom is svoboda. Reagan might be best remembered for saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” but many other quotable nuggets emerged from his piehole: “Nuclear war would be the greatest tragedy, I think, ever experienced by mankind in the history of mankind”; “All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk”; and the admirably candid “We are trying to get unemployment to go up, and I think we’re going to succeed.” As the gaffes piled up like banana peels in Bonzo’s dressing room, it was time to call in the man who had disguised Reagan’s obliviousness before: Stu Spencer. Summoned to the White House, the Gipper’s trusty cornerman revealed his agenda to a reporter: “I’m here to see old foot-in-the-mouth.” Reagan’s mythologizers have worked hard to bury this image of him as an object of ridicule, but early in his presidency that’s what he often was. Their preferred narrative—that his White House tenure went from strength to strength—is false. Two years after he first entered the Oval Office, perhaps checking under the desk for nuclear waste, Reagan was struggling. As the economy proved obstinately resistant to the miracle of Reaganomics, his approval rating sank to a woeful 35 percent, barely higher than what most of his films would have notched on Rotten Tomatoes. Reagan’s refusal to take responsibility for his failures frustrated Pat Schroeder, a Democratic congresswoman from Colorado. In August 1983, she took to the floor of the House and coined a political cliché: “Mr. Speaker, after carefully watching Ronald Reagan, he is attempting a great breakthrough in political technology—he has been perfecting the Teflon-coated Presidency.” Her remark proved tragically prescient. Two months later, 241 U.S. military personnel stationed in Beirut as part of Reagan’s confused Lebanon policy died in the bombings of their marine barracks. He changed the subject. In what should have been called Operation Expedient Distraction, he ordered the invasion of the minuscule Caribbean island nation of Grenada, a mission roughly as challenging as the conquest of a Sandals resort. His approval rating soared. As his popularity grew, the press cowered. In On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency, Mark Hertsgaard documents the Fourth Estate’s wariness about roughing up Reagan. “We have been kinder to President Reagan than any president that I can remember since I’ve been at the Post,” said Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Washington Post. His colleague at the paper William Greider theorized that the press, in its obsequiousness to Reagan, was compensating for being blindsided by his election: “It was a sense of ‘My God, they’ve elected this guy who nine months ago we thought was a hopeless clown.’ ” Reagan’s burgeoning status as Teflon Ron owed much to the media’s decision to handle him like a glass unicorn. “I think a lot of the Teflon came because the press was holding back,” his communications director, David Gergen, said. “I don’t think they wanted to go after him that toughly.” “Teflon” became an overused label for politicians, as journalists employed it to describe not only Reagan but every president since. Fearing the damage this practice could inflict on its trademark, in 1985 the manufacturer of Teflon, DuPont, pushed back. “DuPont simply wants users of Teflon to add a little circle with an R inside to denote that Teflon is a registered trademark,” the New York Times reported. “A printed message being sent to reporters all over the capital adds, ‘It is not, alas, a verb or an adjective, not even when applied to the President of the United States!’ ” Despite this stern warning, Teflon® Ron never caught on. Given the press’s reluctance to fact-check Reagan, it’s no surprise that the public gradually stopped caring whether anything he said was, well, factual. In 1983, the New York Times devoted an entire article to this chicken-or-egg mystery, titled, “Reagan Misstatements Getting Less Attention.” “[T]he President continues to make debatable assertions of fact, but news accounts do not deal with them as extensively as they once did,” the Times reported. “In the view of White House officials, the declining news coverage mirrors a decline in interest by the general public.” No one seemed to care when Reagan indulged in one of his favorite vices: attributing fake quotations to Lenin. “Mr. Reagan said at a news conference three weeks ago that ‘just the other day’ he had read an article quoting ‘the Ten Commandments of Nikolai Lenin’ to the effect that Soviet leaders reserved the right to lie and cheat to advance the cause of socialism,” the Times noted. “After the statement, the White House acknowledged that Lenin did not issue ‘Ten Commandments’ as such. Lyndon K. Allin, a deputy White House press secretary, said Mr. Reagan got the reference from a clipping sent by a friend citing 10 different ‘Leninisms.’ ” The Times didn’t point out that Reagan, while arguing that the Soviets reserved the right to lie, was reserving the right to lie about the Soviets. As journalistic oversight shriveled, Reagan’s childlike solutions to the nation’s problems went virtually unchallenged. His decades-old binary oppositions, us versus government and us versus communists, yielded made-for-TV catchphrases. “Government is the problem” and “The Evil Empire” became as ubiquitous as “I pity the fool” and “Watchu talkin’ ’bout, Willis?”VII He added another rhetorical empty calorie in 1984, when his reelection campaign inanely declared that it was “Morning in America.” Speaking to business leaders in 1985, he’d apparently run out of catchphrases of his own and borrowed one from Clint Eastwood: “Go ahead, make my day.” The quote had an interesting provenance: Clint’s cop character, Dirty Harry, had said it while pointing his gun at a Black man. It earned Reagan a thunderous ovation from his largely white audience. But there were bumps on the road to Reagan’s Hollywood ending. His approval rating plunged twenty points after news of the Iran-Contra scandal broke. Wisely, Reagan didn’t try to brand this illegal arms deal as Morning in Nicaragua. He deployed a potent alibi instead: his ignorance. When he swore that he had no idea what had been going on at the White House, right under his nose, millions found the explanation plausible. His numbers ticked back up. After Iran-Contra, some in the media wondered whether their decision to coat Reagan with Teflon® had done the country a disservice. Newsweek’s Robert Parry groused that the press corps “seemed to be a little fearful that if it wrote stories that were perceived as tough on this president, the public would not like them.” The media’s unilateral disarmament during Reagan’s presidency didn’t mean the Ridicule stage of ignorance was over, however. Just as Ronnie the actor had granted a “blanket waiver” only to his own talent agency, the media issued a free pass only to him. Reagan’s ignorance defense during Iran-Contra was the rare instance when he highlighted his obliviousness instead of trying to hide it. Another of his glaring flaws, however—his laziness—became his favorite topic for self-roasting. He owned his sloth and, with his trademark grin ’n’ nod, let the nation know that he was in on the joke. Reagan managed to be both a bumbling sitcom dad and his own laugh track. “It’s true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure why take the chance?” he jested. After four years of Carter, that annoying grind who always did his homework, Americans seemed to enjoy having a president who didn’t even bring his homework home. “I am concerned about what is happening in government,” he said, “and it’s caused me many a sleepless afternoon.” Returning to this seemingly bottomless well of hilarity, he cracked, “When I leave the White House, they will put on my chair in the Cabinet Room ‘Ronald Reagan slept here.’ ” What a kidder! Even with the president napping, doodling, and watching Julie Andrews, the White House was in no danger of becoming rudderless: the ship of state was being guided by the stars. His wife Nancy’s belief in astrology—specifically in a San Francisco–based astrologist named Joan Quigley—filled the leadership vacuum. In his memoir, For the Record, Donald Regan, who served as both Reagan’s chief of staff and treasury secretary, made palpable the trauma of working in an administration under Quigley’s cosmological control. In 1985, arrangements for the crucial first summit between Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in Geneva, couldn’t be solidified until Quigley had done her planetary due diligence. “As usual, Mrs. Reagan insisted on being consulted on the timing of every presidential appearance and action so that she could consult her Friend in San Francisco about the astrological factor,” Regan wrote. “The large number of details involved must have placed a heavy burden on the poor woman, who was called upon not only to choose auspicious moments for meetings between the two most powerful men on our planet, but also to draw up horoscopes that presumably provided clues to the character and probable behavior of Gorbachev.” But Quigley wasn’t the only one pondering the heavens during the Geneva summit. According to Gorbachev, at one point Reagan turned to him and said, in all seriousness, “What would you do if the United States were attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?” This scenario, lifted from the 1951 sci-fi flick The Day the Earth Stood Still, was an obsession of Reagan’s. In an appearance before the National Strategy Forum, in Chicago, he was asked to name “the most important need in international relations.” He replied, “I’ve often wondered, what if all of us in the world discovered that we were threatened by a power from outer space—from another planet. Wouldn’t we all of a sudden find that we didn’t have any differences between us at all—we were all human beings, citizens of the world—and wouldn’t we come together to fight that particular threat?” Got it: The most important need in international relations is an attack from outer space. These extraterrestrial musings were so frequent that, whenever Reagan uncorked one, his national security adviser, Colin Powell, would roll his eyes and say, “Here come the little green men again.”
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