This one's a bit long, but worth the read.
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First Reagan, Now His Stunt Double
FRANK RICH
June 13, 2004
"BOY, if life were only like this," says Woody Allen in
"Annie Hall" after he brings out the actual Marshall
McLuhan to silence a pontificating McLuhan expert with whom
he's trapped on a movie line. Well, last weekend life was
like that.
George W. Bush was all suited up in Normandy to repeat
Ronald Reagan's 1984 blockbuster elegy to "the boys of
Pointe du Hoc" (screenplay by Peggy Noonan). It was not the
first time that the current president had taken a page from
his fabled predecessor's script, but it may have been the
most humiliating. The D-Day-eve timing of Reagan's death
had pushed the replay of his original oration to center
stage on TV, much as the real McLuhan is yanked on screen
in "Annie Hall." And as the McLuhan wannabe soon slinks
away in that movie, so Mr. Bush's would-be Reaganesque
speech atomized into white noise, to the limited extent
that it was broadcast at all.
Some would argue that no politician in his right mind would
even invite comparisons to the Great Communicator. In the
aftermath of Reagan's death, his fans and foes alike remain
agog at his performance chops. Kennedy may have brought the
Rat Pack to the White House, but no one has ever arrived
there with Reagan's particular gifts as an entertainer.
They were a product of training, not accident. He had first
performed as a child in church skits put on by his mother.
Later came the legendary path through baseball announcing,
52 feature films, "General Electric Theater" and the
conservative speaking circuit, where he honed what became
known as the Speech. Not even other Hollywood-spawned
politicians, whether George Murphy before him or Arnold
Schwarzenegger after, can match this résumé. To see the
difference between an acting professional and an aspiring
amateur, just look at the one recent president who had show
business on the brain, Bill Clinton. Though Mr. Clinton's
act may be better than any Reagan successor, he nonetheless
lacks the master's disciplined ability to hit his mark, not
to mention his timing, ready wit and brevity.
Mr. Clinton went so far as to incongruously appropriate
Reagan ideology ("The era of big government is over") for
political expediency. But no one has more strenuously tried
to emulate the 40th president in both style and substance
than George W. Bush. Reagan's body was barely cold when Ed
Gillespie, the Republican chairman, said: "The parallels
are there. I don't know how you miss them." Yes, the
parallels are there - hammered in by Mr. Bush's packagers
so we can never miss them. But Karl Rove and company may
have overplayed their hand. The orgiastic celebration of
Reagan's presidency over the past week, an upbeat Hollywood
epic that has glided past Iran-contra, Bitburg and the
retreat from Lebanon with impressive ease, has brought into
clear focus the size of the gap between the two men. To say
that difference in stature is merely a function of an
actor's practiced skill at performance is both to
understate the character of Ronald Reagan and to impugn the
art of acting.
The White House's efforts to follow the Reagan playbook
have been nothing if not relentless. As Michael Deaver's
crew famously would have Reagan cut ribbons in front of
nursing homes even as he cut funds for their construction,
so Mr. Bush can be found communing with nature each time
his administration takes a whack at the environment. To
pass himself off as a practiced hand at proletarian manual
labor, Mr. Bush clears brush on camera at his ranch in
Crawford just as Mr. Reagan did in Santa Barbara. In
Washington, the Bush speechwriters strain to equate an
"axis of evil" with the "evil empire."
Even his personality is presented to the public as a clone
of Reagan's. Mr. Bush is always characterized by his
associates as a "big picture" guy who leaves any detail
that can't be fit on a 3-by-5 card to his aides. As Donald
Rumsfeld says in Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack": "This
president has a lot of the same quality that Ronald Reagan
did where he'd look out, way out to the horizon and plant a
standard out there and then point toward it."
To some who admire both men, the analogy is plausible. Mr.
Bush's certitude about his war on terrorism matches
Reagan's unyielding anti-communism. Both presidents made a
religion out of big tax cuts, talked of curbing government
even as they increased spending and then serenely ignored
the daunting deficits that ensued.
Those who dislike both men see less salutary parallels.
Both presidents tried every stunt imaginable to create the
illusion that their wartime service had not been confined
to the home front. Both pandered to the religious right by
impeding urgently needed federal medical research that
would have saved lives (Reagan with AIDS, Mr. Bush with
stem cells). Where Bush and Reagan boosters see both men as
refreshingly disdainful of intellectuals, critics see a
smug lack of curiosity in any ideas but their own. The
ur-text of today's profuse Bushisms can be found in such
Reaganisms as his remarks upon returning from a trip to
South America: "Well, I learned a lot. . . . You'd be
surprised. They're all individual countries." Both
presidents inspired "Tonight Show" gags about their endless
vacations.
But whether one likes either president or not, the
difference between them remains far greater than any
similarities, and that difference has more ramifications
during a hot war than a cold one. Reagan may have been an
actor, but in Garry Wills's famous phrase, he played "the
heartwarming role of himself." Though he never studied with
Lee Strasberg, he practiced the method; his performance was
based, however loosely, on the emotional memory of a
difficult youth as the son of an itinerant, sometimes
unemployed alcoholic. That Reagan triumphed over this
background during the Depression, developing the
considerable ambition needed to work his way through
college and eventually to Warner Brothers, informed the
sentimental optimism that both defined (and limited) his
vision of America as a place where perseverance could pay
off for anyone. It was indeed the heartwarming role of
himself (with the New Deal backdrop of his own biography
eventually stripped out).
Yet there was more to Reagan's role than its Horatio Alger
success story. Reagan may have stayed in Culver City during
the war, but as a teenage riverfront lifeguard in Illinois,
he rescued 77 people, demonstrating early on the physical
courage that would see him through an assassination
attempt. And for all Reagan's absorption in show business,
he was always engaged in politics (to the point of
alienating his first wife, Jane Wyman, who found his
preoccupation a bore). As president of the Screen Actors
Guild in the late 40's, he was at the center of fierce
labor and blacklisting battles.
Nor was he wholly isolated from the America beyond
Hollywood. A contract player who became "Errol Flynn of the
B's," he wasn't a big enough star to merit all the
perquisites of top show-biz royalty. As his movie career
dwindled in the early 50's, he was briefly reduced to
serving (at age 42) as the baggy-pants M.C. to a cheesy,
showgirl-laden revue at the Last Frontier casino on the
Vegas strip. Once he was reborn as a G.E. spokesman, he
spent years meeting workers in the company factories that
he repeatedly toured when off camera.
Whether you liked or loathed the performance that Mr.
Reagan would give as president, it derived from this
earlier immersion in the real world. The script he used in
the White House was often romanticized and fictional; he
invented or embroidered anecdotes (including that ugly
demonization of a "welfare queen") and preached family
values he didn't practice with his own often-estranged
children. But even the fiction was adapted from experience.
While he had arrived in politics in middle-age with the aid
of a kitchen cabinet of wealthy financial backers, there
had been decades when he lived in an America broader than
that of Justin Dart and Alfred Bloomingdale.
Mr. Bush's aw-shucks persona, by contrast, has been
manufactured from scratch. He has rarely, if ever, ventured
out of the cocoon of privilege. He "lost a lot of other
people's money in the oil business," said Ron Reagan Jr. in
2000. "What is his accomplishment? That he's no longer an
obnoxious drunk?" While the young Ronald Reagan used his
imagination to improvise play-by-play radio accounts of
baseball games based on sparse telegraphic accounts, Mr.
Bush made a killing on a baseball team with the help of
cronies and sweetheart deals. He has no history of
engagement with either issues or people beyond big oil or
the Andover-Yale-Harvard orbit until he belatedly went into
the family business of politics.
He does the down-home accent well, and he dresses the part.
In the new issue of The Atlantic, a linguist hypothesizes
to James Fallows that Mr. Bush, a smoother speaker in his
Texas political career than now, may have "deliberately
made himself sound as clipped and tough as John Wayne"
since then "as a way of showing deep-down Nascar-type
manliness." It's as if he's eradicating his patrician
one-term father to adopt the two-term Gipper as his dad
instead. But unlike Reagan, Mr. Bush is so inured to the
prerogatives of his life of soft landings that his attempts
to affect a jus' folks geniality are invariably betrayed by
nastiness whenever someone threatens to keep him from
getting his own way. It's impossible to imagine Reagan
countenancing the impugning of the patriotism of war heroes
like John McCain and Max Cleland as the Bush machine has
done in the heat of close campaigns.
Last weekend in Normandy, the president sat for an
interview in which Tom Brokaw challenged his efforts to
pull off a bigger flimflam than impersonating Ronald Reagan
- the conflation of the Iraq war with World War II. "You
referred to the `ruthless and treacherous surprise attack
on America' that we went through during our time," Mr.
Brokaw said. "But that wasn't Iraq who did that, that was
al Qaeda." With the gravesites of the World War II dead
behind him, the president retreated to his familiar script
("Iraq is a part of the war on terror"). Even if you think
the lines make sense, the irritated man delivering them did
not sound like someone who had ever experienced pain of the
life-and-death intensity that comes with war. The problem
is not merely that Mr. Bush lacks Reagan's lilting vocal
delivery. As any professional actor can tell you, no
performance, however sonorous, can be credible if it
doesn't contain at least a kernel of emotional truth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/arts/13RICH.html?ex=1088131187&ei=1&en=eb0ece021af27a7f
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
