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Reagan took office after a long, depressive streak of American history that began with the assassination of John Kennedy and proceeded through the riots and other assassinations of the 1960s, the Viet Nam War, Watergate, Nixon's resignation, the Arab oil embargo, the Iranian hostage crisis. Jimmy Carter was apparently overwhelmed by the presidency. The Club of Rome's Spenglerian predictions about the earth's shrinking resources shadowed the '70s, and Carter at last announced that there was a malaise in the land. The drift was bleak: things would get worse and worse and never get better again. Reagan's immediate predecessors were smudged by a darkness of failure and were all unhorsed by events they lost control of. Reagan's psychic weather is bright sunshine, and so far he has managed to keep the world from bucking him loose. It may be that his principal accomplishment has been to restore the prestige and plausibility of his office.
During the 1984 campaign, Reagan's best receptions came on college campuses. A White House survey for May showed that 82% of registered voters age 24 and under approved of Reagan. Says Presidential Pollster Richard Wirthlin: "This is an age cohort that has known only two Presidents." The binary vision of the young: in their memories, Carter meant failure, Reagan means success.
Reagan cultivates the young. They have become a principal theme of his old age, the promise of a legacy. Such are his ambitions. Just as Franklin Roosevelt's ideas set the style that would dominate the next four decades of American politics, Reagan--a zealous admirer of F.D.R.'s when young--wants the younger generation to complete the Reagan Revolution.
Ronald Reagan took to acting when he was in high school and later as a student at Eureka College in central Illinois. He discovered what it meant to "be together" with an audience, to stand on a stage and capture the people. Acting, when it achieves the right harmonics between performer and audience, is a work of almost intimate leadership. The actor enters into the minds of others and leads them through the drama, making them laugh or cry, making them feel exactly what he wants them to feel. It is a powerful and primitive transaction, a manipulation, but at its deepest level a form of tribal communion.
The "Great Communicator" has come to communicate with the American people on a tribal level, a fascinating feat considering that the U.S. embraces so many different competing tribes.
Sleight of hand: Reagan is the first complete television President. The implications of that mastery are unsettling. Says Political Scientist James David Barber of Duke University: "Television news is very heavy on feelings. There is always a temptation to reduce the question to sentiment. Reagan's criterion of validity is theatrical rather than empirical."