WHEN BIG MEETS SMALL:

Too Big a Man for the Small Screen (EDMUND MORRIS, 11/09/03, NY Times)

The sweetness, silvery voice and deceptively gentle manner of Ronald Reagan used to remind me of the soft fur that enwraps stored phosphorus. He seemed so easy to bruise that your instinct was to protect him from anything sharp, in way of questions, criticisms, legal process or just plain discourtesy. But beneath the softness was solid metal: a moral and political philosophy of considerable mass, formed over half a century, and (like phosphorus) capable of bursting into sudden flame.

At such times -- when he reacted, say, to the Soviet Union's shooting down of Korean Air Flight 007, or when Mikhail Gorbachev pushed him a millimeter too far at the Reykjavik summit meeting of October 1986 -- it was plain that he needed neither protection nor guidance. Ronald Reagan (as we can see if we watch documentary footage of him in political action when he was younger) could very well take care of himself, and anybody in the room besides. [...]

Behind the soft exterior, I repeat, was hard metal, and not all of him was nice. But more of him was nice than is normal in men that powerful. Even in ruminations like the above, and in the very funny stories he told (many of them politically incorrect), there was never any hint of malice. Well, maybe there was, when he leveled his wit against the one thing he really did hate: totalitarianism. Aides cringed at plenary sessions with Mr. Gorbachev as Mr. Reagan chucklingly told (again and again and again) jokes that ridiculed everything the Soviet leader stood for. It was insensitive, it was moral, and it was magnificent.

What he did, he did out of conviction, not caring how his actions might be perceived, then or now.

Perhaps some measure of the loyalty of Reaganauts is as easy to explain as this: they (we) recognized someone who hated communism as much or more than we did, and, unlike most of us, was determined to do something about it. At the end of the day, something similar may work to bind many of us to George W. Bush, who so obviously hates terror with an intensity and a determination to do something about it that his rivals do not share.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 9, 2003 8:08 AM