Last Thursday night the President attempted to persuade the nation that his decision to deal arms to Iran was merely a gesture of rapprochement, but logic suggests that those arms were meant to secure the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon. What shocks Americans about this transaction is that it seems so uncharacteristic of a President who has railed against trading with terrorists, and who appears to sense that the public agrees with his position. In fact, the effort to free individuals in Lebanon at a possible extreme cost is perfectly consistent with the way Reagan has always conducted the presidency's business. In forests of complex issues, Reagan likes to point to the trees, to individuals. The suggestion is that individuals embody policies, that if one appreciates the situation or nature of a particular person, he will also understand general actions taken in that person's behalf.
Think back to all you know of Ronald Reagan, and there is almost always some other person in the picture. Originally that person was you, the individual tree he addressed with startling success when he posed the question in the 1980 presidential debates, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" In the six years since, you have remained pre-eminent in the President's view. It still is you he addresses in weekly radio broadcasts and in television appearances, establishing an intimacy by look and voice that television, for all its domestic directness, usually denies.
Britain is America's ally, but that abstract agreement is brought to life by personification, by the friendship and ideological comradeship of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Libya is America's enemy, but that enmity glowers as a private hostility between Reagan and Muammar Gaddafi. If the values of American initiative need commending, Reagan will shed his spotlight on a Mother Hale of Harlem, as he did in the 1985 State of the Union message, and elevate one woman to emblemize an entire economic and social theory. If heroism in war is to be honored, a single veteran will stand beside the President on the White House steps, creating a tableau that speaks, if imprecisely, for itself.
To see the world in terms of individuals may succeed occasionally as a political tactic, but the tactic would never be consistently effective if such a view were not part of a deep and sincerely held vision. Reagan wholeheartedly seems to believe that individuals and stories about individuals are the keys to general truths. That vision can go crazily awry; Reagan is known for responding to general questions with irrelevant, albeit funny or touching, anecdotes. But the vision itself can be valid and clarifying. When John Donne wrote, "I am a little world made cunningly," it was a comfort to believe that the overwhelming complexities of the cosmos could be reduced to the size of a man.