BOOKS

America as Disneyland

Ferdinand Mount

REAGAN'S AMERICA: INNOCENTS AT HOME by Garry Wills

Heinemann, £14.95

It is a nice old fantasy (perhaps The Spectator has had a competition on these lines) to invent a biography of some great man written by a specialist in one of his avocations: Hitler by Roger Fry, Edward Heath by the author of The Cruel Sea; Theodore Roosevelt by the author of Man- Eaters of Kumaon. For long stretches, the present work appears to fit this bill, being apparently written by the editor of Cahiers du Cinema or Sight and Sound.

Veterans of presidential lives who are looking for the lowdown on the Arkansas primary of 1956 have to wade through a lot of stuff about the 'eidetic stability' of Hollywood stars, 'Gregg Toland's dazzling deep-focus shots' and the `farineuse' quali- ty that 'Roland Barthes emphasises in his famous essay on Garbo's face'. Governor Nelson Rockefeller's face may have had a farineuse quality too, but we did not talk about it. Garry Wills has the obsessive quality of all film buffs, that odd inability to imagine that some people might actually be bored stiff by old movies. He devotes a whole page to the plot of Vertigo, two pages to the plot of Taxi Driver, neither of them films in which Ronald Reagan appeared. The plot of the latter is sup- posed to parallel the fantasies of John Hinckley, the loner who sought love and immortality by shooting Reagan. What about all the loners who took pot shots at, say, Queen Victoria without ever having been to the movies?

All this celluloid cerebration is piled up to support the following thesis: Ronald Reagan started life as an amiable but boneheaded radio sportscaster with a silver tongue; he then became a successful film actor (at one time he was earning more money than Rita Hayworth and only a little less than Errol Flynn) with a gift for underplaying light-comedy roles. He also has a gift for telling anecdotes which are often artfully embroidered or entirely in- vented. The skills he polished and the public familiarity he enjoyed in these earlier occupations have helped to make him the first president since Eisenhower to look like completing a second term. Not merely did he develop an unparalleled rapport with the American public, which he continues to cultivate carefully to this day, notably through his weekly radio broadcasts; he also matured an uncanny talent for feeding their fantasies — which are legion, for Americans are uniquely reluctant to contemplate reality. 'We have seen the future and it is Disneyland'. Wills argues that like the movie Star Wars, or ET or Superman, Reagan's version of Amer- ica's past combines 'an infantile regressive- ness of story with the utmost sophistication of special effects'. Ronald Reagan has to believe his own stories because 'only a believer could make Reagan's fictive past credible to others'.

Professor Wills is himself, most of the time, a charming and engaging performer. As a renegade conservative, he has a former insider's view of the American Right, and there is plenty in this book to explain and justify the thumping success it has had in the United States. But its principal selling-point to those whose plea- sure in giggling at the President's gaffes and prat-falls over the past seven years has been marred only by his irritatingly dur- able popularity is that the book wraps Reagan and the millions of hicks who persist in voting for him in one shared puerile fantasy, one long heavy-petting session in an eternal drive-in movie (this sort of imagery is catching).

But will all this quite do? Are the American people alone in their addiction to myth and anecdote? Is Mr Reagan unique among politicians in his cavalier attitude to the truth? Take the now famous story of 'win this one for the Gipper'. The origin of this is that Reagan played the part of the football star George Gipp in a 1940 film about the legendary coach Knut Rock- ne, who was notorious for using any old yarn to enthuse a losing team. He once invented a gee-up telegram from his own `critically ill' son, Billy Rockne, who was in fact dancing around, fit as a flea, to welcome the victorious team on their return. The real Gipp was a self- destructive tearaway who drank himself to death by the age of 25. It was only eight years later that Rockne told the story of the deathbed request from the now legen- dary hero to a Notre Dame team facing its big game. Reagan certainly believed the literal truth of the story and, speaking at Notre Dame in 1981 in a speech he wrote himself, defended its use both in the film and in real life: Now it's only a game. And maybe to hear it now afterwards — and this is what we feared might sound maudlin and not the way it was intended — but is there anything wrong with young people having an experience, feeling something so deeply, thinking of someone else to the point that they can give so completely of themselves?

Well, it is maudlin, dash it, but no more maudlin or manipulative or deceitful than the use that Winston Churchill and Eddie Marsh made of Rupert Brooke's death during the First World War. Indeed, I should estimate that the real Brooke was about as far removed from his mythical image as the real Gipp. Mr Reagan's folksy anecdotes seem to me to have no more and no less truth value than Neil Kinnock's anecdotes about a chap he ran into in a Rhondda miners' lodge, an old socialist who remembered Nye etc, etc.

I do not mean to imply that Professor Wills has a grudge against his subject. On the contrary, he tells us over and over that Mr Reagan is 'ineffaceably nice' and 'end- lessly likeable', and he describes brilliantly the President's remarkable inner self- assurance: 'Reagan is not like most of us, plagued by little vanities — by jokes about his age, or his being an actor, or the statistics he misquotes.'

Yet beyond these qualities, what stands out of the facts of Reagan's life are his tenacity and reliability. As a lifeguard on the Rock River for six years from the age of 17, he made 77 rescues (all fully accre- dited). He worked at least 12 hours a day, seven days a week all through the summer holidays. In Hollywood, he was doggedly active in the Screen Actors Guild for a quarter of a century. As a mobile road- show presenter for General Electric after his screen career had begun to fade, his workload was remorselessly gruelling; he was never late, never grumpy, never drunk, the perfect company man. Professor Wills gives full credit to this paragon when he turned to politics too. The book brings out the skills with which Reagan, in the 1960s when the Republican Party was torn apart by vicious internal strife which makes Mr Heath's views on Mrs Thatcher sound positively fraternal, adopted the Eleventh Commandment: `Thou shalt speak no ill of any other Republican.'

Yet Wills maintains that, apart from this native shrewdness, this discreet eye for the main chance, Ronald Reagan is a bumbling dope who is quite unaware of the contra- dictions and hypocrisies in his statements and beliefs. As a President of the Screen Actors Guild who declared himself 'a rabid union man', he would talk wistfully of abolishing the closed shop, he instructed his members to cross picket lines, and liked to have cosy relations with the studio moguls. Wills thinks all this ludicrously unfitting in a union leader. To us it merely looks more like the trade unionism of Eric Hammond rather than of Arthur Scargill.

Reagan, we are told, is also blissfully unconscious of the contradiction between capitalism and individualism, for successful capitalism depends on social co-operation and teamwork. But whoever said it didn't? Nobody ever said that free enterprise entailed the freedom to disobey air traffic control. 'There is nothing less conservative than capitalism, so itchy for the new', Wills goes on to argue. 'Capitalism is an instrument for change, for expansion, driven toward ever new resources, pro- ducts, markets. It reorders life drastically.' How can Reagan honestly claim to be defending conservative values when he is also such a believer in unshackling businessmen?

Here too Wills's kindergarten dichoto- mies look a bit shaky under closer inspec- tion. He himself concedes that 'we are now ruled by the oldest written constitution governing in any nation'. To be loyal to the Founding Fathers is to be loyal to princi- ples of liberty and openness and hence to possibilities of change (it is all spelled out in Burke). This is undoubtedly conservat- ism, but of a kind quite distinct from the Continental immobilism or black reaction that Wills seems to have in mind.

It is, I think, the metaphor of America- as-Disneyland which has lured Wills too deep into these muddied waters. I am the last person to complain about efforts to understand the way politicians use myth and metaphor to persuade and illuminate mass audiences. In the personal campaign- ing of American politics, it is all the more essential for office-seekers to define them- selves by quasi-theatrical means. But Reagan is so transparently theatrical that we need waste little time on this side of him. Paradoxically, the best political biography of Reagan might be one which scarcely mentioned the fact that he once acted in movies.

The interesting question — which Pro- fessor Wills never quite gets at — is how far Reagan does persuade his audience and how far he merely accommodates himself to their desires. His 'sunshine' or 'California' economies certainly offer a soft option, a painless way to become rich without paying taxes. Wills rightly derides the fatuousness of Reagan's pretence that his tax cuts would pay for themselves through higher growth and that it was only the Congress which was being irresponsible in refusing to make the necessary cuts in public expenditure. It was, after all, Reagan himself who was committed not to touch social security and to increase defence spending.

Reaganomics came unstuck on contact with the real world, just as similar efforts in Britain came unstuck in the 1960s and 1970s. But that does not make Macmillan, Maudling and Heath Disneylanders; they were merely mistaken. Reagan's clandes- tine efforts to bargain for the release of the hostages foundered on the unpleasant real- ity of Iran.

But there are equally important areas in which Reagan's policies have been highly realistic and have left America better equipped to cope with the future: his refusal to prop up declining industries in the 'Rust Belt', his deregulation of sectors hamstrung by Federal bureaucracy, his tax reforms. A less popular, less artful Presi- dent, such as Jimmy Carter, might not have got away with any of these.

On which side of the line does Reagan's East-West policy fall? Garry Wills is much excited by the fantasies of a nuclear-free world which carried the President away at Reykjavik. But once again we should look at the facts rather than the movie. Reagan will leave behind a strongly armed United States which has faced down the threat of the SS-20s in Europe and which now confronts a USSR that seems in recessive mood in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The treaty on medium-range missiles is not a good treaty, but it is not a calamity. The danger is now of signing a much worse and much more significant one on long-range missiles.

All the same, rather than thinking in terms of Mr Reagan having been converted from an 'evil-empire' view of the USSR to an unshakable trust in Mr Gorbachev, we should look first at the profoundly pacific mood of Western public opinion. Mr Reagan has had to manage that reality as best he can. Posterity may think more kindly of his management than his present critics, including this reviewer.

Above all, he has gone some way to- wards restoring America's good humour. The United States has responded less violently and impetuously to affronts and indignities under Reagan than under most of his predecessors. If indeed Gorbachev's initiatives do suggest that the Soviet Union may be drifting towards membership of the civilised world, then Mr Reagan's part in leaving room for him should be noted.

`Not much between the ears', is re- ported, not inaccurately, as being Mrs Thatcher's view of the President. In the sense of mastery of detail, recall of statis- tics and ability to analyse them, intelleptual appetite and dialectical stamina; the ver- dict is apt. But if you are talking about feel, instinct, empathy, timing, then you must acknowledge an old pro whose understand- ing of the American people is unlikely to be surpassed. Not a great president cer- tainly, but not an overcooked ham either.