THE METHOD PRESIDENT.(Obituary)(Biography)

Nicholas Lemann on the Bush Presidency

Nicholas Lemann talks about the real George W. Bush

Hendrik Hertzberg reviews the Vice-Presidential debate

Philip Gourevitch on following John Kerry into the homestretch

Folder: The 2004 Campaign

What is your strongest memory of Ronald Reagan? Those who loved him have always treasured his arrival at the White House, in 1981, or, as they prefer to call it, dawn. The unconvinced will remember, with a sigh of relief, his departure, in 1989--the last walk to the helicopter, with a white scarf wrapped around his throat. The odd thing is that, whatever our opinion of the man, we talk about him as if we were discussing a movie. This is not to say that Reagan's Presidency was short on policy; indeed, if we follow the rule that states that only those of determined ideological vigor earn the right to have a noun and an adjective named after them, then he emerges as a more gushing fount of ideas than any President since the Second World War. Reaganism, like Thatcherism across the Atlantic, was a triumphal creed of its time, whereas who now speaks of Fordism? Who ever claimed to be a Johnsonite? Reagan knew that an idea was nothing without its front man, and that a front man required big scenes--hence the grim, disappointed headshake to Gorbachev on a cold Reykjavik night, or the TV address that followed the Challenger disaster, with the President's voice enfolding in a single breath, as only he could do, the homely and the galactic. Reagan didn't just hate Communism; he sought concrete expression for his hatred by flying to Europe, standing next to the concrete in question, and exclaiming, "Tear down this wall!" Contemplation of other statesmen tends to focus, all too blurrily, on what kind of people we thought they were. With Reagan, our images stay crisp and particular, and we summon him to mind, like moviegoers, by reciting his best lines: "Where's the rest of me?" "You ain't seen nothing yet."

Of course, we had seen it all before. Those lines come from "Kings Row," starring Ronald Reagan, and "The Jazz Singer." Reagan was, on his own ground, a cultural conservative; whenever he was proposing something new, be it an arms negotiation or a fiscal rethink, he tempered the novelty by couching it in words that reminded people, consolingly, of something they had heard before. And what better vehicle for such audacity than the movies: those instant popular rituals, handed down in the dark, untainted by a smear of the highbrow? "I'd rather be in Philadelphia," he quipped from his hospital bed, after the assassination attempt, and the echo of W. C. Fields--a misquotation, but a common one--went some way toward muffling the shot. Even Reagan's nickname, the Gipper, was a reference not to the original George Gipp, the hard-drinking Notre Dame football hero who died at twenty-five, but to Reagan's blameless incarnation of him in "Knute Rockne--All American" (1940) and to the deathbed scene in which Rockne's team is urged to "win just one for the Gipper." It is a touching spectacle, although Reagan's beaming, bright-cheeked expression is not that of a man at death's door; it is not even that of a man in death's neighborhood but that of a man who has never bothered to open the phone book and find out where death lives.