fridays at five: richard reeves

 

By Joan Zandell

It was standing room only at St. Ann’s Church in Bridgehampton this past Friday afternoon at 5 p.m. Despite the rain, author Richard Reeves brought out the crowd; umbrellas, cell phones and all. Ken Auletta, who was best man at Reeves’ wedding, made the introduction in which he explained that Richard Reeves got his start covering Woodstock for the New York Times. Mr. Auletta went on to say that Mr. Reeves happened to have been his best man at his wedding as well. To which Mr. Reeves responded, “Yes, and we’re both married to the same woman.”

As the last author of the Hampton Library’s Fridays at Five summer writer’s series, Richard Reeves spoke about his most recent book, and the last in a presidential trilogy, President Reagan: Triumph of the Imagination.

“Freedom in America,” said Mr. Reeves, “is to fail and try again. In America you can reinvent yourself. Historians clean up the news. What they write really isn’t true. And yet, presidents are so well documented. For example, Kennedy watched Martin Luther King deliver his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech on TV. No one knows that it took 18 minutes from the moment he decided to meet with him until Martin Luther King arrived at the White House.

“And the decisions that presidents make……in the moment that they make those decisions, they have no idea what sort of lasting impact they will have. John F. Kennedy had no idea when he signed the coup in Vietnam, that it would impact the world for the next 20 years.

“Reagan really was not at all what he presented himself to be. I found out that almost all of the conventional wisdom that I had read and heard about Ronald Reagan was not true at all. Beginning with the fact that he was always said to be passive. The man ran for president three times. Won on his third try. And in 1976 he committed the most aggressive act that an American politician can make, and that is that he ran against a sitting president of his own party. He ran against Gerald Ford and damn near beat him. The vote in that convention was 1,187 for President Ford, 1,070 for Ronald Reagan. Passive people don’t do that.

“When I got to know him better I discovered the reason he called his staff “the fellows” was that he didn’t know their names. They were all interchangeable to him. He ran through everyone he needed to run through, and he treated everyone the same, like they were the hired help. It’s true he was disengaged. He didn’t read the papers.

“Reagan had a little, teeny agenda; the military, national pride, reducing taxes and confronting communism. He thought the President’s job was to lead the nation. He truly understood what very few Presidents have understood, that no one remembers whether Lincoln balanced the budget, they remember what he said.

“He imagined results and made them happen. The Soviets needed a clear US policy. Reagan had one. We win. They lose. He dumbed down America, translating issues into emotions. Reagan was able to make people feel. The merging of fact and fiction established under Reagan has become the American diet; he merged entertainment and fact. He did absolutely nothing to improve healthcare, AIDS, the national debt, and he invented the borrow and spend Republicans. During his last two years in office, the discovery of Iran Contra, his persistent lying about what happened and his pretending not to remember ruined his credibility. As a result, the liberals and the press were against him.

“Mine is the first book to document the Gorbachev and Reagan dialogues. To his credit, Reagan knew that Communism would fall of its own weight. And as fate would have it, he gets a Soviet leader who agrees with him. When Reagan talked to him about the emigration of Soviet Jews, Gorbachov said, ‘Ron, you’ve got your own problems with the Mexicans.’ To which Reagan responded, ‘There’s a big difference between getting out and getting in.’

“On Dec. 8, 1987, Reagan brought Gorbachev to Washington, DC. He truly believed that if he had been able to bring him to California where he could see the swimming pools from the air, that Gorbachev would have been converted.

“Compared to Nixon and Kennedy, who were young men who wanted to know everything, and who wanted to control everything, Ronald Reagan was an old man who was conserving his energy. And among the people who spotted this much better than the American press did were the Russians. One of the Russian interpreters at Reykjavik described Reagan as a lion in winter who was lying there asleep most of the time, not paying much attention, and would occasionally open his eyes and see an antelope on the horizon and roll over and close his eyes again. And in a while open them again and now the antelope is twenty, thirty feet away, but still he rolls over and appears to go back to sleep, probably did go back to sleep, and then opens his eyes and the antelope was there, the antelope was eight feet away, and suddenly the lion’s roar fill the sky and the antelope is no more. That’s the way the Russians described him.

“Reagan was an idealist and a romantic. He believed you could actually bring everyone together. He was labeled The Great Communicator by the Democrats who used it as an excuse……meaning they couldn’t do anything because he was magic.”

Richard Reeves is an author and syndicated columnist whose weekly column has appeared in over 100 newspapers around the world. He was Chief Political Correspondent of The New York Times, became the National Editor and Columnist for Esquire and New York Magazine. He was named a “literary lion” by the New York Public Library. He was a panelist for the television show “We Interrupt this Week”, and Chief Correspondent on “Frontline.” He created six films for TV and won an Emmy Award, the Columbia-DuPont Award, and the George Foster Peabody Award. He was the recipient of the Carey McWilliams Award of the American Political Science Association for distinguished contributions to the understanding of American politics. As a Goldman Lecturer on American Civilization and Government at the Library of Congress, his lectures were published by Harvard University Press. Today, Reeves, who has a home in Sag Harbor, is a Visiting Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.