Right Hook

Steyn and Noonan celebrate Reagan as a man who saw the world more clearly than the political elite; Coulter trashes Gore as a fat white guy with no political rhythm. Plus: Bradbury rips Michael Moore.

By Mark Follman

Jun 9, 2004 | Conservative valentines to Ronald Reagan have been pouring in this week. Syndicated columnist Mark Steyn dubbed Reagan "one of the two most significant presidents of the American century," giving him sweeping credit for liberating half the globe.

"Ronald Reagan saw Soviet Communism for what it was: a great evil. Millions of Europeans across half a continent from Poland to Bulgaria, Slovenia to Latvia live in freedom today because he acknowledged that simple truth when the rest of the political class was tying itself in knots trying to pretend otherwise. That's what counts. He brought down the 'evil empire', and all the rest is fine print."

Steyn then ripped into the anti-Reagan "establishment" for failing to grasp the wisdom in the 40th president's plain talk.

"Everything you need to know about the establishment's view of Ronald Reagan can be found on page 624 of 'Dutch,' Edmund Morris' weird post-modern biography. The place is Berlin, the time June 12, 1987:

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" declaims Dutch, trying hard to look infuriated, but succeeding only in an expression of mild petulance ... One braces for a flash of prompt lights to either side of him: APPLAUSE.

What a rhetorical opportunity missed. He could have read Robert Frost's poem on the subject, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," to simple and shattering effect. Or even Edna St. Vincent Millay's lines, which he surely holds in memory ...

"Only now for the first time I see
This wall is actually a wall, a thing
Come up between us, shutting me away
From you ... I do not know you any more."

"Poor old Morris, the plodding, conventional, scholarly writer driven mad by 14 years spent trying to get a grip on Ronald Reagan."

In Steyn's view, Reagan's knack for simple langauge drew from a lucid moral vision: "Reagan looked at the Berlin Wall and saw not a poem-quoting opportunity but prison bars." And Steyn's encomium reached a passionate climax when he compared Reagan to a deep and pure wellspring. "Edmund Morris has described his subject as an 'airhead' and concluded that it's 'like dropping a pebble in a well and hearing no splash.' Morris may not have heard the splash, but he's still all wet: The elites were stupid about Reagan in a way that only clever people can be. Take that cheap crack: If you drop a pebble in a well and you don't hear a splash, it may be because the well is dry but it's just as likely it's because the well is of surprising depth. I went out to my own well and dropped a pebble: I heard no splash, yet the well supplies exquisite translucent water to my home."

For Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, the legend of Ronald Reagan is a tale of heroic fiction and starry-eyed destiny.

"Ronald, nicknamed Dutch, read fiction. He liked stories of young men battling for the good and true. A story he wrote in college had a hero arriving home from the war and first thing calling his girl. Someone else answered. Who is calling? 'Tell her it's the president,' he said. He wrote that when he was 20 years old.

"Many years later, in middle age, he was visited by a dream in which he was looking for a house. He was taken to a mansion with white walls and high sparkling windows. It was majestic. 'This is a house that is available at a price I can afford,' he would think to himself. And then he'd come awake. From the day he entered the White House for the first time as president he never had the dream again."

Incredibly, Noonan later argues that Reagan didn't align himself with the anti-communist witch hunt that blanketed Hollywood with fear during the 1940s.

"As president of the Screen Actors Guild he led the resistance to a growing communist presence in the unions and, with allies such as William Holden, out-argued the boutique leftism of the Hollywood salons. But when a small army of congressional gasbags came to town, Ronald Reagan told the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hollywood could police itself, thank you. By the time it was over, even his harshest foes admitted he'd been fair."

Apparently Noonan is unaware that Reagan, according to an FBI file later released, named names in secret for the House Un-American Activities Committee. (See the New York Times' Reagan obit.)

Noonan also breezes straight past Reagan's complicity in the illegal Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages deal. As the Times obit has it: "When the secret operation was first reported, Mr. Reagan denied that it existed. On Nov. 13, 1986, he said, 'In spite of the wildly speculative and false stories about arms for hostages, we did not, repeat, did not trade arms or anything else for hostages.' But almost four months later, he ruefully referred to that remark in a speech to the nation. 'My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true,' he said, 'but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.'" But Noonan prefers to remember Reagan as a leader who, like Washington, could not tell a lie and who always saw the big truth.

"Ronald Reagan told the truth to a world made weary by lies. He believed truth was the only platform on which a better future could be built. He shocked the world when he called the Soviet Union 'evil,' because it was, and an 'empire,' because it was that, too. He never stopped bringing his message to the people of the world, to Europe and China and in the end the Soviet Union. And when it was over, the Berlin Wall had been turned into a million concrete souvenirs, and Soviet communism had fallen. But of course it didn't fall. It was pushed. By Mr. Know Nothing Cowboy Gunslinger Dimwit. All presidents should be so stupid."

Next Page: Coulter: The crowd always parts as Gore dives into the mosh pit

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