THE PRESIDENCY by HUGH SIDEY: We Are Off on a Special Adventure

The Presidency

A few days before the election, Cartoonist Garry Trudeau extracted from his vivid imagination a huge cross section of Ronald Reagan's brain, in which he placed the intrepid television reporter Roland Hedley Jr. With microphone and camera, Hedley Jr. searched for behavioral patterns in the cortex and the cerebellum with its maze of neurons and their dendritic spines.

Some editors detected a certain prejudice against Reagan, and they threw the cartoon out or put it on the editorial page. Trudeau was guilty as charged, a practitioner of marvelous bias and political deviltry. But...

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