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http://www.lrb.co.uk/v13/n03/alexander-cockburn/right-stuff
Right Stuff
Alexander Cockburn
An American Life by Ronald Reagan
Hutchinson, 748 pp, £19.99, November 1990, ISBN 0 09 174507 1
As he neared the end of a recent diatribe against President Bush
for plotting war secretly, and in defiance of the US Constitution,
the American journalist Anthony Lewis felt impelled to add: ‘None
of this argues that George Bush is a bad man. He is not.’
Years ago Roland Barthes wrote about the bourgeois propensity to
think in essences, and nowhere is this more evident than in the
way Americans think and write about their political leaders. It
was not as if Lewis needed the after-thought about Bush’s
non-badness, His column would have ended perfectly well without
it. But the need to reassure both himself and his readers was
overwhelming and thus, after solemn censure, the President was
sent on his way with his essential non-badness duly guaranteed.
‘Essential Bush’ is not, in fact, alluring. There’s always been a
fairly broad streak of impulsive petulance in him. In any sort of
tight spot his voice tightens up into a waspy whine. He reacts
badly to criticism or challenge, like a man who feels a carefully
constructed self-image is under improper duress. Essentialists can
search for continuity of political belief in the man, some
backbone of principle stiffening his curriculum vitae, but such
investigation, if conducted with any degree of realism, is not
encouraging, and discloses a kind of Flashmanesque moral
seediness, particularly in his CIA/Contragate incarnations and his
fascination with rogues. He has countenanced some very bad things
in his time.
In these days of Desert Storm Bush is on display as
commander-in-chief and man of calm resolve, just as five months
ago he was the master diplomatist pledging only ‘defensive’ forces
to Saudi Arabia. He’s slid from the latter stance to the former,
not because of strong and purposeful leadership, but because of
political cowardice, since the road to a peaceful settlement –
simultaneous linkage of Iraqi withdrawal to a Middle East
conference and so forth – would have required courage of the sort
almost invisible in American political life. After all, the fact
that people are fighting, killing and dying in and around the Gulf
is the consequence of cowardly political leadership stretching
over years. The hateful figure of Saddam Hussein emerged as one of
hope for many Arabs in part because of the failure of the United
States to address in any determined way the aspirations of the
Palestinians.
One can delve down and down through Bush’s intellectual and
spiritual architecture without hitting anything particularly
solid. I remember interviewing members of his family back in the
late Seventies when he was running for the Republican Presidential
nomination, and coming more than once on wonderment at the thought
that Poppy was running, mixed with utter bewilderment about his
belief in anything beyond doing something tentatively described as
the right thing. A decade later, when he was once again running
for the Presidency, I began getting letters from a veteran who had
been tail-gunner in a bomber in the Pacific during the Second
World War. He’s collected and compared various accounts made by
Bush or his publicists about his best-known misadventure as a
pilot in the South Pacific, when his plane was hit by Japanese
flak and he bailed out and was eventually rescued by submarine.
These accounts did indeed vary, though all agreed that after Bush
bailed out his plane, carrying two crew members, crashed into the
sea and they both were killed. It wasn’t long before I lit on the
account of a man who’d been in the plane immediately behind on the
same bombing run. He’d seen the plane list and asked his pilot to
chop back to take a closer look. Then, and years later, he
maintained that the engine was not on fire, and that Bush could
have almost certainly crash-landed the plane in the sea. In this
man’s view, Bush appears to have popped open the cockpit hood and
jumped out as soon as the plane was hit.
It wasn’t the sort of story that journalists, in general agreement
that Bush was essentially non-bad, were interested in discussing,
and though I wrote it up in a column just before the 1990 Election
no one paid any attention, though if true – and it seemed to me
pretty certain that it was – the episode did provide useful
insight into the man who, in the 1988 campaign, was trading on his
war record, courtesy of an amateur movie of his rescue from the
Pacific shot by one of the submarine’s crew members.
I’d fallen prey to the illusion that Bush was vulnerable to
something journalistically classified as a ‘damaging story’. Nixon
was always reeling – eventually out of the Presidency – under the
impact of these ‘damaging stories’ because a powerful segment of
the press hated him enough from time to time – though not during
the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, to be sure – to make a great
hullaballoo whenever a damaging story surfaced. Journalists, none
more than Lewis, had decided that Nixon was essentially non-good.
After he was gone, the illusion, held by others as well as myself,
persisted for a time that ‘damaging stories’ would go on making a
difference. I was writing a political column with James Ridgeway
at the time, and when Jimmy Carter’s fortunes began to rise in the
1976 campaign we had a researcher work through documentary records
in the Georgia State archives, amassed during his stint as
Governor. Our man toiled diligently away – so diligently in fact
that we concluded he was also in the employ of the Republican
National Committee – and soon unearthed materials disclosing
impressive amounts on non-goodness in the conduct of Governor
Carter, who at that time was promising to inaugurate a new age of
virtue in American public life, raising essentialism – his
goodness, reflective of the goodness of all Americans except his
opponent – to an altitude unprecedented in campaign rhetoric.
It was plain enough, from the testimony of the archives, that
Carter was just as much a liar, double-dealer, blowhard, serf of
corporate power, and coward, as your average seeker after high
office, and we hastened to publish the evidence. It made no
difference, given the consensus on his non-badness, and I realised
then that the ‘damaging story’ was a thing of the past, part of
the discarded paraphernalia of the Nixon age.
Reagan answered most satisfactorily this essentialist expectation,
since as an excellent actor he had no problem in assuming or
discarding roles, and could constantly refashion the ‘essential
Reagan’ and live each new role with utter inner conviction.
The first time I saw him in the flesh I thought immediately that
‘flesh’ seemed too intimate a word for the tissue he was then
presenting, in 1976, as the visage of a man younger than his
years. The ‘age factor’ was thought to be a problem. During the
press conference in the New York Hilton in which this ‘age factor’
was delicately raised he invited us to come up and look at his
hair, give it a tug if necessary, make sure it wasn’t tinted dark
by Grecian formula. As I gave his hair a dutiful yank he held his
head forward with a detachment so docile that it was clear that
here was a man of iron resolve, every resource recruited to the
business of being Reagan-as-young-man-with-dark-hair.
The last time I saw him, with Nancy at the Republican Convention
in New Orleans in 1988, flesh was no longer a word one could even
toy with, as I gazed at his impassive lizard-like countenance. The
President’s body sat there, not at all like a human frame reposing
in the moments before public oratory, but as Reagan-at-rest
extruding not a tincture of emotion until impelled by some unseen
spasm of synapses into Reagan-amused, the briefest of smiles soon
being dismissed in favour of the sombre passivity one associates
with the shrouded figure in some newly-opened tomb before oxygen
commences its mission of decay.
Nancy as loyal wife complemented the bogus arc of her husband’s
career, now arrived at its political terminus underneath the
Super-dome. By the early Forties, when he first met Nancy and when
young Poppy was still at Yale, preparatory to shipping out to the
Pacific and his appointment with the cameraman on the submarine,
the studio publicity department was already turning Ronald Reagan
into a war hero.
By day he would work in ‘Fort Wacky’ in Culver City, where they
made military training films. Experts would take old stock footage
of Japan and then edit it as though viewed through a gunsight.
This not only helped gunners in planes about to make sorties over
Japan but was also used in ‘live-action’ newsreels for American
audiences craving combat footage. Things were more sophisticated
back then: these days we have to be content with a CNN man holding
a microphone out the window to hear the bombs drop on Baghdad, as
he extols the pin-point accuracy of the US bombers while CNN
displays on the screen a photograph of downtown Baghdad, thus
fostering illusions once more about the effectiveness of air
power. The fanzines discussed the loneliness of Reagan’s first
wife Jane Wyman, her absent man off at the war (a few miles away
in Fort Wacky, home in time for supper) and his hatred of the foe.
‘She’d seen Ronnie’s sick face,’ Modern Screen reported in 1942,
‘bent over a picture of the small swollen bodies of children
starved to death in Poland, “This,” said the war-hating Reagan
between set lips, “would make it a pleasure to kill.” ’
In his Oval Office speech launching Operation Desert Storm
President Bush didn’t say it would be a pleasure to kill but gave
the overall impression that it would be a joy to kick Iraqi ass,
and he brandished rhetorically the latter-day equivalent of those
photographs of Polish children – namely, the ‘innocent children’,
as he described them in his address, suffering in Kuwait.
He was most probably referring to his favoured symbol of Iraqi
vileness, the babies supposedly left to die in Kuwaiti hospitals
by Iraqi troops looting their incubators for shipment back to
Baghdad. It turns out that baby-from-incubator mass murder – over
three hundred in the early versions – is entirely untrue, as I
discovered recently from Aziz Abu Hamad, a Saudi consultant
researching the matter for the New York-based human rights
organisation Middle East Watch. The story had been given the
imprimatur of a December report by Amnesty International which
swallowed whole the account (which he soon began to emend) of a
Red Crescent doctor in the employ of the Kuwaiti
government-in-exile and lodged in the Sheraton Hotel in Taif’ as
an employee of that government. After extensive investigation Aziz
concluded there was no credible eyewitness or testimony to sustain
the charges of mass baby murder. Bush apparently fortified his
resolve in the pre-war hours by reading the Amnesty report with
set lips, before attending divine service conducted by the Rev.
Billy Graham who, in former non-good old days, urged Nixon to bomb
the dikes in North Vietnam.
Forty years after he gazed at those photographs of Polish children
Reagan would tell Yitzhak Shamir, then foreign minister of Israel,
that he had helped liberate Auschwitz in Poland, and had returned
to Hollywood with film of the ghastly scenes he had witnessed, and
if in later years anyone around the Reagan dinner table
controverted the reality of the Holocaust (apparently a
conversational staple at such repasts) Reagan, so he would tell
Shamir and others, would roll the footage till the doubts were
stilled. Of course Reagan never left Fort Wacky and in due course
his false account to Shamir became known. But the exposure of
these demented fictions of his never made the slightest difference
to the esteem in which he was generally held by the press.
Essentially ‘good’, and hailed as such, even as he cut school
lunch programmes and Federal housing subsidies, Reagan could
survive any damaging story, outsmile the exposure of any lie, and
An American Life is just one more episode in this mendacious
odyssey. The new act is a golly-gee account of how a small-town
boy got to the White House, saved America from economic ruin and
founded a new era of world peace.
It’s eerie to read this stuff now: like looking at the silent
movies of Reagan’s childhood. The acting styles have already
changed, the props look out of date. Gone from us only two years,
Reagan already seems as remote in time as Harding or Coolidge, and
the vainglory of his renewed America and his new world era seems
as tinny as a silent-movie piano amid the rumbling disasters of
the new decade where non-badness is having its violent rendezvous
with Evil.
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