I've been working through
Politics, Hendrik Hertzberg's nearly forty years of observations and arguments taken from the
New Yorker, with great enthusiasm. Each chapter provides an intimate glimpse into realms of American public life otherwise not available to the common reader. But
The Child Monarch, the chapter containing his review and analysis of Ronald Reagan the man and the President, is strikingly relevant when compared against our current 'Monarch.'
George W. Bush may secretly harbor grand illusions of greatness matched only by his predecessor, Ronald Reagan. But while Bush may never garner the respect and admiration accorded Reagan, Hertzberg's analysis of his personality and intellect as childlike, ignorant, unfocused, incurious, are so strikingly similar to GW that is would be hard not to draw some like-comparisons.
Take for instance this Hertzberg reference to Lou Cannon's President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime:
REAGAN, as portayed in Cannon's book and in his own, is a childlike and sometimes childish man. His head is full of stories. He is unable to think analytically. He is ignorant. He has notions about the way things work, but he doesn't notice when these notions contradict each other. He has difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality. He believes fervently in happy endings. He is passive and fatalistic. He cannot admit error.
Perhaps recognizing how these observations leave vulnerable the legacy of Reagan as an omnipotent, all-understanding figure, Hertzberg prudently points out that Cannon is and has always been viewed as both impartial and a fair witness by Reagan's friends and foes alike. Indeed, much of the criticism and observation come directly from Reagan's inner-circle:
Cannon's book braids a biography of Reagan together with a detailed and lively account of Reagan's presidency. Much of it necessarily about Reagan's advisors and cabinet secretaries, for it was on them that the day-to-day burdens of the presidency actually fell. A good deal of what Cannon shows us about Reagan is seen through their eyes. It's quite a spectacle:
The sad, shared secret of the Reagan White House was that no one in the presidential entourage had confidence in the judgement or capacities of the president.
Pragmatists and conservatives alike treated Reagan as if he were a child monarch in need of constant protection.
Reagan's reliance on metaphor and analogy for understanding made him vulnerable to arguments that were short on facts and long on theatrical gimmicks.
He made sense of foreign policy through his long-developed habit of devising dramatic, all-purpose stories with moralistic messages, forceful plots, and well-developed heroes and villians.
The more Reagan repeated a story, the more he believed it and the more he resisted information that undermined its premises.
His biggest problem was that he didn't know enough about public policy to particpate fully in his presidency - and often didn't realize how much he didn't know.
[I]t was commonplace for Reagan's principal policy advisers to find the president inattentive, unfocused and incurious and to depart from meetings not knowing what, if anything, had been decided.
Ronald Reagan's subordinates often despaired of him because he seemed to inhabit a fantasy world where cinematic events competed for attention with reality.
We could quite fairly substitute George W. Bush for Ronald Reagan in the above examples and not sacrifice a modicum of accuracy. The incuriousity and clear lack of intellect demonstrated by our current president has greatly imperiled our nation. Generations to come will surely pay the price.
Mangled syntax, contradictions, and a penchant of anecdotes with migrating trajectories were as much a part of Reagan's communications strategy as they are with Bush. Though historians will almost universally proclaim Reagan to be one of our greatest presidential orators, many of his own diaries and unscripted monologues reveal a far more tenuous grasp of concise, tactful, and analytical discourse. Hertzberg selects a few choice entries from Reagan's autobiography /American life to demonstrate this:
Many entries combine childish diction with childish thinking, as if this reflection on the flap over the visit to the Waffen SS cemetary at Bitburg, Germany:
I still think we were right. Yes. the German soldiers were the enemy and part of the whole Nazi hate era. But we won and we killed those soldiers. What is wrong with saying, "Let's never be enemies again"? Would Helmut be wrong if he visited Arlington Cemetery on one of his U.S. visits?
And then this follow-up, after Kohl suggested that they balance the Britburg ceremony with a tour of Dachau:
Helmut may very well have solved our problems re the Holocaust.
Some critics have speculated that Reagan's sometimes 'challenged' style of communication may have indicated early signs of dementia stemming from the onset of Alzheimers disease. It might be useful to point out that George Bush has not escaped similar speculation as evidenced here.
In my final comparison of the two, I'll draw on one of Hertzberg's most important observations of Reagan's presidency - the notion that Reagan was lucky:
But Wait. If he was dumb, superstitious, childish, inattentive, passive, narcissistic, and oblivious, how come he won the Cold War and brought peace and liberty to all mankind?
Good question. The answer, in two words, is Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan, always lucky, was never luckier than to find himself president of the United States at just the moment when a Soviet leader decided to lift the pall of fear and lies from his empire, thus permitting the system's accumulated absurdities and contradictions to come into plain view and shake it to pieces.
Like Reagan, Bush too owes his entire presidency to one man - Osama Bin Laden. Absent the attacks on September 11, it might not be a stretch to imagine a flailing Bush presidency sorely lacking the one pillar upon which he has chosen to rest his entire legacy.
While GWB may well dream one day of being remembered in the manner Reagan has, it may be for record budget deficits and congressional reports of abuse of power that first come to historians' minds.