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MOUNTAIN VIEWS: REAGAN LEGACY YET TO BE WRITTEN

By John Hanchette

OLEAN -- Former president Ronald Reagan died shortly after deadline for the previous issue of this newspaper, but the nation's 40th president, as was his fashion, dominated the news all week long and was still dominating it as a new deadline approached.

Even in death, the old movie actor still had a way of forging memorable images. I'm writing this shortly after his National Cathedral memorial service, following the somber removal of his casket from the Capitol rotunda in Washington. The images were searing, and extremely interesting in the historic sense.

In the huge, beautiful cathedral -- started in Teddy Roosevelt's presidency and finished only recently in Bush the Elder's -- former presidents and world leaders, many from Reagan's era, sat together for the Great Communicator's final bow in a city he often bad-mouthed, but upon which he left an indelible mark.

The juxtapositions provided interesting protocol, or lack of it.

The former presidents and their wives sat in chronological sequence of terms in the White House, starting from outside pew seat to center aisle, second pew to front. Thus, Gerald and Betty Ford sat next to Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, who sat next to George the Elder and Barbara Bush.

Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, who immediately preceded Dubya and Laura Bush in the White House, thus got to sit at the far end of the front pew. Clinton, jawing with Hillary as usual, looked rather smug about it. Some viewers thought this order of seating privilege somewhat strange -- with Republicans who had been close to Reagan placed behind an Arkansas upstart who campaigned essentially on undoing economic damage he claimed Reagan had started and Bush the Elder had intensified.

There were whispered amenities and ample craning and nodding before the casket came in -- Gerald Ford reaching behind Jimmy Carter's neck to shake hands with Bush the Elder, Colin Powell's wife leaning over a pew back to kiss Barbara Bush.

Perhaps the most ironic seating occurred about three pews behind the presidents, where Great Britain's famous Iron Lady, former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, sat under an immense black mourning hat, wedged between former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and Brian Mulroney, the leader of Canada during much of Reagan's two terms in the 1980s. Prince Charles sat at the end of that aisle near Mulroney.

Thatcher, quite ill herself but insistent on being present, had made a tribute tape while still relatively healthy in case she passed on before her great friend Reagan, and it was played as a eulogy.

In it -- in her stern and slicing tones -- Thatcher reminded one and all that Reagan's greatest achievement was bringing down the Soviet Union's "Evil Empire" and winning the Cold War, mainly by publicly pressuring, outmaneuvering and intimidating Gorbachev, the fellow sitting next to her.

"He freed the slaves of communism," Thatcher said of Reagan. At the Geneva Summit, she remembered, Reagan leaned directly into Gorby's face and said with a pleasant smile, "Let me tell you why it is we distrust you."

Gorbachev, a courageous man himself and now thoroughly westernized, seemed to take it all in stride, keeping a neutral face and looking somewhat like an obedient student.

Reagan's victory over Carter in 1980 was the first of several presidential campaigns I had the privilege of covering -- a lifelong goal for me as a reporter. It seems incredible, of course, that my students now at St. Bonaventure University were not even born then.

That age gap didn't seem to matter to the thousands of young people who joined the amazingly long lines of Americans snaking through the switchback barricades through five-hour waits as they shuffled ever nearer the Capitol rotunda last Thursday to pay respects to the popular president. Reagan's casket rested on a catafalque that once supported the remains of another president placed in the same spot for citizen tribute: Abraham Lincoln.

The casual TV viewer may have drawn the idea Reagan was universally popular during his eight years in office. He was very popular with Americans -- for restoring national optimism, for giving conservatives a voice, for winning the Cold War, for pushing through broad tax cuts, for strengthening the military, for providing a sense of national purpose and for surviving an assassination attempt with great grace and humor.

But he was routinely and widely derided for some of the same things, too. Deficits grew huge under his "cut taxes, spend now, worry later" fiscal attitude. Critics complained of his "cowboy" approach to foreign relations. Many believe he built the template for the unilateral attitude that has Bush the Younger and America currently mired in Iraq. In the 1980-88 war between Iraq and Iran, Reagan's administrations tilted toward Iraq because Iran had taken American citizens and diplomats hostage, and Saddam Hussein was provided secret support and intelligence assistance -- a mistake that apparently convinced him in 1990 he could invade Kuwait without causing anyone in Washington to utter a peep.

Political opponents painted Reagan as just plain dumb and forgetful -- a failed movie actor sleepwalking through just one more great role he had landed through luck and faking it.

But he wasn't dumb and he wasn't pretending. He could be very tough. He could be gracious and inspiring. My colleague and friend Richard Benedetto, now a prominent political columnist, recalled in print Reagan's appearance at a big tent party on the mall below the Capitol 22 years ago to celebrate the launch of USA Today. Nervous employees were unsure of what the president -- a politician who didn't much admire newspaper coverage -- would say. Yet Reagan described the fledgling paper as a "glimmer of hope on the horizon in a world where too often the avid pursuit of the truth is discouraged or suppressed."

The remarks sustained us for months in the tough job of making a new national newspaper viable.

"He came off in person exactly like he came off on TV," writes Benedetto for USA Today. "Likable and larger than life, yet elusive."

That's how I remember him, too, in covering him in and out of the White House. Even today, his voice on TV can stop me dead in my tracks whatever I'm doing, and he can be uttering something very wise or totally idiotic, but I'll smile and start to agree in my mind before analyzing what I'm hearing.

Former reporting partner Chuck Raasch recalled in a Gannett News Service column last week that his oldest son, then a toddler, would routinely ignore the TV as just so much white noise no matter what was on it -- until Reagan came on. Then the 3-year-old would listen and watch intently. That seems to me a pretty good analogy of the national attitude, too.

Maybe it was all those years in front of the movie cameras, but the man was riveting. He could will you to pay attention, whether you were watching the tube or standing in front of him.

And he was quick mentally. A favorite memory is his response during a 1980 campaign debate with incumbent Jimmy Carter, at a time when Iranian extremists were still holding Americans hostage in Tehran. The moderator or someone asked Reagan -- painted by much of the print press at the time as a forgetful dope when it came to foreign affairs -- to name the president of Iran.

I still think Reagan actually knew the name, but he grinned and shot back something like "Well, I don't know his name, but let me tell you, if I become president, he's going to know mine." The same was true for all of us.


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John Hanchette, a professor of journalism at St. Bonaventure University, is a former editor of the Niagara Gazette and a Pulitzer Prize-winning national correspondent. He was a founding editor of USA Today and was recently named by Gannett as one of the Top 10 reporters of the past 25 years. He can be contacted via e-mail at Hanchette6@aol.com.

Niagara Falls Reporter www.niagarafallsreporter.com June 15 2004