Cartoon Bubbles

They kept talking about Reagan being a "big picture" man, indifferent to petty detail. The phrase gives a false impression that Reagan looked out at the world as though at some Cinemascope epic, a vast battlefield where, through those famous spectacles (one lens close-up, for speech reading, the other long-distance) he could assess the global balance of forces. Wrong. Reagan stayed awake only for the cartoons, where the global balance of forces were set forth in simple terms, in the tiffs between Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, or Tom and Jerry.

When he became president, and thus "commander in chief," the Joint Chiefs of Staff mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete with simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple terms. Reagan found these briefings way too complicated and dozed off. The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. The balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature, with Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their launchpads, with the minuscule US ICBMs shriveled in their bunkers. Little cartoon bubbles would contain the points the Joint Chiefs wanted to hammer into Reagan's brain, most of them no doubt to the effect that "we need more money." Reagan really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.

I have boundless faith in the American people, but it was startling to see the lines of people sweating under a hot sun waiting to see Reagan's casket. How could any of them take the dreadful old faker seriously? The nearest thing to it I can think of is the hysteria over Princess Di. In its way, the "outpouring" reminds me of what, nearly 20 years ago, I termed "news spasms," expertly fueled by the imagineers in the Reagan White House. These spasms--Nuremberg rallies really--were totalitarian in structure and intent, obsessively monopolistic of newsprint and the airwaves, forcing a "national mood" of consensus, with Reagan (in this reprise, his casket) as master of ceremonies. Particularly memorable spasm events included the downing of KAL 007, the destruction of the US Marine barracks outside Beirut, the Achille Lauro hijacking, and the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle of January 28, 1986, which disaster prompted one of the peak kitsch moments in a presidency that was kitsch from start to finish. Reagan ended his address to the nation thus: "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.'"

In fact it was the White House that had doomed Christa McAuliffe and her companions to be burned alive in the plummeting Challenger. The news event required the Challenger to go into orbit and be flying over Congress while Reagan was delivering his State of the Union address. He was to tilt his head upward and, presumably gazing through the long-distance half of his spectacles, send a presidential greeting to the astronauts. A CounterPuncher living in Florida remembers that fatal morning well: "I was working on my open air porch that morning, before sunrise, and in Florida that morning it was freezing. Frost was on everything. I had CNN on (they were the only channel following the launch, as I recall), and the talk nonstop was about Reagan talking to the Astronauts that coming night on the State of the Union speech. Now I'm an engineer, and though I knew nothing about the details of launch condition protocol, I did know enough from prior launch news to know that temperatures in the 30s F threatened a safe launch. I recall scoffing at the Challenger going up that AM and turned off the set."

But NASA was having its arm twisted by the White House to stay on schedule. The Challenger was launched with that notorious O-ring fatally compromised by the cold. The day after the crash there was one brief news item in, I think, The Washington Post, about the possibility of pressure on NASA, then silence. The White House news managers successfully iced the story. It wasn't until October 5, 1986, the day of the crash in Nicaragua of Eugene Hasenfus' plane, carrying documents linking him to officials including vice president George Bush and to an arms smuggling operation, that the press gave Reagan any sort of a hard time.

Back at the start of 1983 Reagan authorized a disinformation campaign, calling for a "public diplomacy" campaign superintended by the NSC and "designed to generate support for our national security objectives." This secret propaganda program surfaced eight days after Hasenfus crashed, by Alfonso Chardy, a terrific reporter working for the Miami Herald, who got many scoops around that time. The public diplomacy campaign seems to have consisted mostly of leaking anti-Nicaraguan material to journalists who leaked it to their readers without saying where it came from. The usefulness of this operation, subsequently transferred to the State Department, was best demonstrated by the great disinformation coup of election night 1984, when television reporters--Bernard Kalb in the lead--breathlessly cited White House tips of a shipload of Soviet MIG fighters nearing Nicaragua. With this tremendous Reaganite bluster about worrisome escalation filling the airwaves, any remote possibility of benign or even objective coverage of Nicaragua's first elections in history was successfully averted.

The press would buy any threat from the Reaganites, no matter how preposterous. Grenada "lay athwart vital US sea lanes," thus threatening all trans-Atlantic trade. Libya, the press trumpeted on cue from the White House in late 1981, had sent a team of assassins south across the Canadian border to murder Reagan. The "Libyan Assassination Plot," received wide coverage. There were anywhere from three to twelve hit men, armed with missiles, depending on which channel you were watching. They were coming from Canada, or from Mexico. The hit squads were made up of three Libyans, three Iranians, two Iranians, and three Syrians. Imagine all the ethnic jokes they swapped. But the networks all agreed that there was one Palestinian, one Lebanese, and one East German. During the Iran/Contra hearings it came out that the disseminator of these fairy tales was an Israeli agent, and the CIA had known all along the story was false. A federal customs agent working the tunnel from Detroit to Windsor, Canada, told me later that no word had ever come through to watch out for this supposed Libyan hit team even through the tunnel was an obvious point of entry.

The problem for the press was that Reagan didn't really care that he'd been caught out with another set of phony statistics or a bogus anecdote about him liberating Auschwitz or fighting on the Normandy beaches. Truth, for him, was what he happened to be saying at the time. He went one better than George Washington in that he couldn't tell a lie and he couldn't tell the truth, since he couldn't tell the difference between the two.

He was an awful president, never as popular as the press pretended, presiding over a carnival of corruption and greed. On March 23, 1983, a friend of mine watched as a naval officer and a defense contractor in the Fort Myer Officers' Club in Virginia listened impatiently as Reagan churned his way through a longish overture to his excited launch of Star Wars. Then, as Reagan began to token forth the billion-dollar feeding trough of SDI, they screamed to each other in incredulous delight, "He's going to do it...he's doing it...he's done it! We're rich, we're rich!" With these words, they both made a rush to the telephones.

Reagan's rhetoric was anti-government, but in fact he was pressing programmatically for a different use of government power, in which the major corporations would occupy a much stronger position. The tendencies he presided over were probably inevitable, given the balance of political forces after the postwar boom hit the ceiling in the late 1960s. Then it was a matter of triage, as the rich made haste to consolidate their position. It was a straight line from Reagan's crude attacks on welfare queens to Clinton's compassionate chewing of the lip (same head wag as RR's) as he swore to "end welfare as we know it." As a PR man, it was Reagan's role, as it was Thatcher's in England, to reassure the wealthy and the privileged that not only might but right was on their side. He installed fantasy as the motor of national consciousness, and it's still pumping disastrously along.