123 Saying Good-bye to the President

I watched with interest the almost wall-to-wall coverage of the Reagan events this Monday on Fox cable news. That’s because I was a Democrat during Reagan’s presidency and pretty much believed everything we were told in the media about that dumb cowboy-actor who didn’t know how to negotiate with Russians and wanted to give tax breaks to his rich friends.

I was very moved by the interview with his son Michael who, with tears streaming down his cheeks, told about deciding that his dad wasn’t going to hug him and tell him he loved him, so one day he took the initiative, hugged his father and said, “Dad, I love you.” From then on, both men did it--but someone had to be first. Michael said that even when dementia had stolen his father’s ability to say his name or recognize him as family, he remembered that Michael was the man who hugged, and would stretch out his arms when he saw him.

From all the problems President Reagan had with his children, I suspect he probably wasn’t the world’s greatest parent. He and Nancy seemed so devoted to each other that they shut out the kids, Ron and Patty. Likewise, they failed in honoring their parents and tried to pretend the parents didn’t matter. And Nancy, good caregiver that she was, especially during his final disease, never seemed to give his two children from his first marriage, Maureen and Michael, even a kind look.

His enemies are out in full force now, especially on the internet. Even those assigned to do a puff piece for the regular media, like Martin Kasindorf of USAToday for Monday June 7 got tangled up in a web of words, as he could only find positive things to say by quoting the Republican faithful, and even then slipping in snide remarks like “echoing his paid speeches for GE. . .,” “wringing emotion from public symbols.”

I don’t know who Tacitus is, but he pretty well sums it up in his closing paragraph about what Reagan meant to him, from the time he watched the first inauguration on his dad’s shoulders, to the funeral:

“So many hate Ronald Reagan, and in coming days and weeks, you will see them out in full force: unable or unwilling to deride a dying man, they will assault a dead one. They will do so by bleating about the gap between rhetoric and reality (Reagan was human); they will do so by denouncing starkness of moral vision and the inadequacy of simple truths (Reagan was common); they will do so by advancing a mechanistic, deterministic thesis of history in which inevitability is the iron law and heroes are mere spectacle (Reagan was irrelevant). Remember this -- and it is all you need to know about them -- these men and their prejudices would have left those hundreds of millions, and their children, and their grandchildren, in chains. Ronald Reagan did not. Ronald Reagan dreamed heroic dreams.” Tacitus. http://www.tacitus.org/story/2004/6/5/161120/5684