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The actor in old age is not King Lear. His poise and vigor are astonishing. If one were to look satirically at Reagan, it would be to see him not as a doddering old man but as a weird presidential version of one of the "action figures" with which children of the '80s play: G.I. Joe, Captain America, He-Man. Saturday-morning TV dialogue emanates from the Oval Office: "Quick, Cap, there's not a moment to lose! The evil Gaddafi is attacking our fleet inside the 'line of death'!"
Lincoln, the story says, wanted to send his generals a case of Ulysses Grant's whisky if drinking it would make them fight like Grant. If Reagan is afflicted by senility, some of the world's leaders might try a case of it. Whether Reagan will ultimately be judged a great President remains to be seen, but he has shown himself to be one of the strongest leaders of the 20th century.
Reagan's success results in part from his impressive basic consistency. He organized a clear set of goals. He kept his serious agenda relatively short and easy to understand: lower taxes, lower domestic spending, a bigger defense machine and a tougher foreign policy. "This is a man who is 75 years old," says White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan. "He has thought through most of his philosophy. He has tested it in three campaigns on a national scale now. The things he believes in, he believes in deeply, and he is not about to change."
Reagan, in his heart, remains an outsider. It is a conceit that irritates some of his critics, especially those who believe in the power of government to affect lives for the better. Here is Reagan, still getting away with a campaign gambit, divorcing himself from any governmental action, even his own, that seems unpopular. He has an eerie gift for distancing himself from failures, for behaving, in a bizarre and cagey act of dissociation, as if what he had just done had nothing much to do with him, as if it had just vanished into the air, passed into nonexistence.
There has always been a certain legerdemain, if not hypocrisy, in Reagan's professed personal values. He preaches productivity and rugged individualism, but has always been something less than a workaholic. He preaches the sanctity of family, but is the only President to have been divorced. His relations with his children seem to have been distant and somewhat troubled. He allies himself with religious Fundamentalists for political advantage, but rarely goes to church. Such inconsistencies are human enough. They point a little, however, toward a window onto the uglier side of Reaganism, if not Reagan, the side where some old American meannesses dwell--religious hatreds, fanaticism, intolerance.
Yet Reagan's successes, both objective and subjective, outweigh his failures. He has presided over one of the longest economic recoveries in recent history, now in its 43rd month, which has been attended by an end to both inflation and the wage-price spiral. Some argue that it was Fed Chairman Paul Volcker's policies that conquered inflation. But Reagan was the catalyst for the recovery. Nine million new jobs have been created during the Reagan | Administration. It was Reagan who, in the aftermath of Jimmy Carter's "malaise" and all that had come before, revived some exuberance of purpose, of entrepreneurship, patriotism, self-pride.