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The White House team in charge of image making, started under Michael Deaver, is almost too skillful at exploiting the media in order to make policy points. Deaver's successor, William Henkel, orchestrates presidential photo opportunities in which the President acts out little dramas on location, playlets of policy. In March, for example, Reagan "dropped by" the State Department to view a collection of Soviet and other East bloc weapons captured from the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The point was made. Reagan overrides the print press and captures the electronic image-making tools. The image, without the mediation of language, feeds directly into the brain. Reagan goes directly into the American bloodstream, the American consciousness.
On the other hand, a President can fool only some of the cameras some of the time. The camera tends to be a truth-telling instrument. Reagan has wonderful theatrical instincts, but he could not feign the qualities of his character that came across when he honored the Challenger crew, for example, or when he and his wife hugged every one of the family members of the 101st Airborne Division soldiers killed last year in the crash in Newfoundland.
Reagan's personal authenticity is one of his greatest strengths, one reason why people tend to trust him even if they utterly disagree with his principles. Better, perhaps, to deal with a man one trusts than to be fooled and manipulated for the best of ends. Reagan is manifestly a man at home in his own skin, in contrast to, say, Richard Nixon, in whom dark civil wars always seemed to be raging.
Reagan may be the dumbest and the smartest President that the U.S. has ever had. He has made a brilliant career out of being underestimated. Critics have rather superciliously thought that an actor coming into politics was somehow getting in over his head, working in deeper professional waters than he should try. To a politician, an actor was a lightweight, which may say something about the limited self-awareness of politicians. If they had thought more carefully or taken Reagan more seriously, they might have recognized that the actor's gift, applied to politics, has profound implications, some of them potentially sinister.
But then Reagan has always been attended by an aura of amiable averageness. The producer Alfred de Liagre said that Reagan on film "always had the manner of an earnest gas-station attendant." Liberal writers have dismissed him as ideologue, cretin and airhead, or worse. They have thought of Chauncey Gardiner, the transcendentally brainless seer in Jerzy Kosinski's novel Being There. Gardiner, in the eloquence of his idiocy, becomes a national oracle. "How humiliating," the columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote of Reagan in 1982, "to think of this unlettered, self-assured bumpkin being our President."
As he has succeeded, Reagan has driven his enemies to ingenuities of denunciation. His sheer serenity, the frictionless certitude of his beliefs, has made him seem a sort of anti-President who has made a virtue of his poolside manner and his ignorance of the world.
But Reagan has turned out like nothing that his critics foretold, not the amiable dunce nor the dim-witted geriatric that they joked about, receding into befuddled twilight.