Smile When You Say That

By LANCE MORROW

It was the cold early spring of 1886 in the Dakota Badlands, and Theodore Roosevelt was angry. A man called Redhead Finnegan and a couple of other drifters had stolen his rowboat and taken off down the Little Missouri River. With two friends, Roosevelt went after the thieves.

Roosevelt and his men rode a scow downriver for three days, pushing through the ice jams. They came upon the thieves' camp and captured them without a fight. A practical man would have obeyed the custom of the territory and hanged the three right there. Some Dakotans were mystified by the course Roosevelt chose. He struggled on for ten more days, downriver and cross- country in brutal cold, standing guard through the nights, until he found a sheriff. He handed his prisoners over to the law. Much exertion over a rowboat. Much exertion, even manic bravado, in behalf of the idea of justice.

Later Roosevelt explained, "In any wild country, where the power of the law is little felt or heeded, and where everyone has to rely upon himself for protection, men soon get to feel that it is in the highest degree unwise to submit to any wrong without making an immediate and resolute effort to avenge it upon the wrongdoers."

Ronald Reagan might like to quote that passage. The Middle East can be as wild as the Dakota Territory, and the law there as unreliable. Reagan might point out that he was just as fastidious as Teddy Roosevelt in the matter of due process. The American fighters intercepting the Egyptian airliner that carried the Achille Lauro terrorists did not blow the plane out of the air. The American soldiers on the ground who had been ordered to take custody of the terrorists did not start shooting when an Italian unit insisted on taking them instead. The prisoners were handed over, unharmed, to the Italians.

In the aftermath, Yasser Arafat said the U.S. was guilty of "cowboy logic." It seemed to Americans an oddly flat and barbless phrase, something like the boiler-plate invective ("capitalist roaders," "unreliable elements") for which Communist regimes have a dreary genius. Terrorism is a haunted house, theater in the shadows. It needs its ugly special effects. Terror depends, so to speak, upon absolute artistic control. But suddenly in the Achille Lauro case, the house lights came up, and Arafat found himself blinking uncomfortably at the audience. No wonder his rhetoric sounded lame.

Arafat was right, in a way, about the cowboy logic. But his understanding of the word cowboy and an American's understanding of it are entirely different. Arafat meant the word as an indictment. Americans might take it as a compliment. They would think, "Damn straight we used cowboy logic, if that's ( what you want to call it." They might be delighted that they had been able to do a "cowboy" thing. It proved that the old American cliche can reappear now and then. It was not as if the U.S. had turned Rambo loose upon the Palestine Liberation Front. Did Arafat accuse the Soviets of "cowboy logic"--or "Cossack logic"--when they shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 with 269 people aboard? The Americans over the Mediterranean were Sisters of Mercy by comparison. They accomplished a bloodless citizen's arrest of terrorists at 34,000 ft. Cowboy logic? One imagines Reagan crinkling a little and replying, "Smile when you say that."

The archetypal cowboy, of course, is the famous leading man in the nation's collective unconscious. What Americans carry in their minds is not the historical reality of the cowboy but the myth as it came to them in books and movies, the cowboy according to Zane Grey and John Wayne. Americans, tutored in the lore from childhood, almost unconsciously see cowboy stories as morality plays. Good guys do battle with bad guys. Right generally triumphs. The bad guys end in the hands of the law. In the American understanding of the myth, cowboys may sometimes operate outside the law or in the absence of the law, but they represent justice. Gene Autry, a movie cowboy of that generation that always looked amazingly well laundered, their white hats refulgently creamy, once formulated the Ten Commandments of the Cowboy. They included injunctions to help people in distress, tell the truth always, be "kind to small children, old folks and animals" and "respect womanhood." The cowboy image got dirtier and morally ambiguous in the era of Clint Eastwood, perhaps, but the persona remained heroic. If Arafat wished to be intelligible to an American audience, he should probably have described the plane interception as the work of "desperadoes" or "varmints."

The rest of the world does not share the Americans' native sympathy for cowboys. Beyond the territorial waters, "cowboy" is often a term of derision, of contempt. In Europe, the word frequently conjures up everything that people fear and mistrust in Americans. It suggests unpredictable, violent behavior, a heedless and cavalier lawlessness and a kind of vigorous stupidity: a hard killer glint in the American eye, the loose cannon rolling around in the American mind. Viet Nam was a rip-roaring American cowboy adventure that turned into a nightmare. The cowboy idea does not always ^ travel well abroad. It works best on the native range.

Teddy Roosevelt at least went to Harvard and wrote books. Ronald Reagan, conservative and ex-movie actor, became Ronnie le Cowboy in France even before he came to Washington, and that was not a term of endearment. Europeans feel sometimes a snarling and virtually Oedipal discontent with the U.S. And they came to see, presiding over the nuclear button, the fate of the world, this cowboy, this actor of cowboys. The half-awakened image that they had in mind came from the last 30 seconds of Dr. Strangelove: Slim Pickens clutching his cowboy hat, astride the falling H-bomb, whooping it up, riding "cowboy logic" down the air to global cinders.

And yet Europeans love cowboy books and cowboy movies. Whatever their official distaste for the cowboy mind-set, they often harbor a sneaking admiration of the individualism and freedom that the idea of the cowboy implies, of the romantic recklessness that they also consciously censure.

In a way, the myth of the cowboy is like the light, just arriving now, from a star that died long ago. In the actual world, ranchers have trouble hiring cowboys today. Anyone who has ever watched a cowboy interminably working a few strays down a fenceline in the distance on a glum, gray afternoon in West Texas knows why. The real cowboys are up in the F-14s.