Dutch: deus ex machina?

There is a movement afoot to replace FDR on the dime with the profile of Dutch. Rename the Oscar; call it the Dutch or the Gipper. Leave the dime alone. If this is (fair & balanced) petulance, so be it.

[x Newsweek]
Reagan: Why We've Deified the Gipper
by Jon Meacham

He always loved superlatives—being the lifeguard who saved the most swimmers back home in Illinois, pushing for the lead parts in his beloved Westerns, driving himself from a fading career hosting TV shows to the presidency of the United States. It seems likely, then, that Ronald Reagan would have loved knowing that, tucked away in his hushed house in Bel Air last Feb. 6, he marked his 92d birthday, adding to his record as the longest-living former president in American history.

Battling Alzheimer's disease, Reagan has not been seen in public for years; the last photographs circulated in 2000. As the shadows lengthen in what the Reagan circle wistfully calls "the long goodbye," Reagan's flame has never burned brighter beyond the walls of his California enclave. George W. Bush models his presidency more on Reagan's than on his own father's; admirers are trying to establish monuments to the 40th president in every county in the nation; there is serious talk of trying to put Reagan on the dime and depose the man he voted for four times—Franklin D. Roosevelt. A book of Reagan's letters, coming shortly after a volume of his handwritten radio addresses from the pre-presidential years, did for many readers what nearly three decades in public life, two landslide White House victories and the end of the cold war did not: impress skeptics that perhaps, just perhaps, Ronald Reagan was not the empty suit they had believed him to be.

Still, the reverence in which Reagan's held seems confounding to critics of his administration. Many liberal-leaning people who still can't get over the move to count ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches find themselves flummoxed by Reagan's rising reputation: he is outpolling Washington, Lincoln and FDR in some surveys of great presidents.

Presidential hero worship is nothing new—FDR's death brought tears to the eyes of millions, and Kennedy memorials proliferated in the grief after Dallas—but the intensity of the affection for Reagan is remarkably wide and deep for this more cynical age. The fury over the soap-operatic CBS mini-series about the president and Nancy roiled the nation for weeks in this year of hot wars and fears of terrorism; other docu-dramas with fictional elements, from a heroic rendering of Bush 43's 9/11 performance to Kennedy shows with bad Boston accents and faked sex scenes, failed to produce similar levels of outrage.

Why? I think part of the explanation lies less in the experience of the 1980s and more in what happened to Reagan in the 1990s, as Alzheimer's took hold. The public's esteem stems not only from respect for the substance of what he accomplished in office or from sympathy, but from a subliminal respect for the strength of a man to endure so much so long. Detractors can question what he stood for; fans can airbrush his legacy (which is itself dangerous; turning great men into monuments robs them of their humanity and, often, their ability to resonate in future generations). But no one can gainsay his pure will to live in tragic circumstances. As he clings to life, much of the nation is not yet ready to begin a cold assessment of his vices and his virtues. Let him go in peace, America was saying this year: let him go in peace. After that, there will be plenty of time to fight the wars of biography and history. But only after.

Copyright © 2004 Newsweek, Inc.