Coming to Grips with Reagan

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

The press has a long history of underestimating Ronald Reagan, which may be why it still has trouble laying a glove on him. Of course, columnists and commentators who are paid to have opinions are in there mixing all the time, but it is the reportorial press that has the problem. Reagan uses anecdotes to great political effect in his speeches, pat-a-caking them into neat, sugar-coated homilies, but his facts often turn out to be wrong. Lately, according to Lou Cannon of the Washington Post, two sets of Jewish leaders have described a story told them by the President: he had been a member of an Army unit that photographed Nazi camps and therefore would never forget the Holocaust. Cannon, who as a Reagan biographer knows him well, says the President "spent the war with the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps, making training films in Hollywood and living at home." When asked, Reagan said he had never left the country and was talking about a Holocaust film he had seen at the time. Being caught in misstatements, which can be so devastating to other Presidents, seems not to hurt Reagan at all, as if the public had accepted his factual carelessness long ago.

In a perceptive article last fall in the New Republic, Sidney Blumenthal concluded that the press and Reagan see truth differently. To the press, "collections of facts add up to the truth, particularly if the facts are balanced." Reagan, Blumenthal believes, gets his truth from his ideology; to him facts are means, "parables tailored to have a moral."

Reagan commands television better than any anchorman, which enables him to go over the heads of Washington journalists. Print pundits seem to matter to the White House principally because they influence broadcasters. But Reagan dislikes press conferences and has held only one this year. He can be bothered in two ways. Unglamorous print journalists ask factual questions that can expose his ignorance. As for TV types, their questions aim for a flustered on-camera response from Reagan. Andrea Mitchell, NBC: "Can you say to those parents, now that you've withdrawn the Marines to the ships, why more than 260 young men died there?" Bill Plante, CBS, frequently cites an unnamed "those" as authority for his questions: "Well, sir, what's your response to those who suggest that you don't spend enough time at the job of being President?" On the nightly TV news, however, Reagan is able to score unopposed by reading out some simplified snippet, knowing this is as much as the networks want to hear from him.

The President can also disappear from TV screens when it suits him. No videotape exists of his ordering the Marines to retreat to the ships; this was one announcement he did not make on-camera. As his former political strategist John Sears says, "He walks away from more political car crashes than anyone."

Reagan gets poorer marks from commentators and columnists than from the public. The liberal Anthony Lewis calls him "a rigid, ignorant, irresponsible President." Reagan's Tory friend George F. Will thinks Reagan's budget proposals "patently cynical," sarcastically refers to the Marines "retreating tall," and compares Lebanon to the Bay of Pigs. The New York Times's James Reston, dean of Washington journalists (he is about a year older than Reagan), believes Reagan's record "the most vulnerable target the Democrats have had since Herbert Hoover" but sees a wide gap between those who follow events closely and those who do not. As Joseph Kraft has written, "It is very hard to challenge pleasant fictions without seeming harsh to a public that likes Reagan."

Election year gives the press a chance to prove that it can scrutinize Democrats as severely as it does Reagan. In succession, Glenn, Mondale, Jackson and Hart have been sharply examined. But it is not up to reporters to cut down either the President or his opponents, though some seem eager to try. As the campaign warms up, it becomes easier for the press evenhandedly to let Republican and Democratic candidates savage one another.