A Rancher's Thanksgiving

By Hugh Sidey

With all 60 rambunctious pounds of First Dog Lucky tugging at his arm and Richard Wirthlin's soaring polls lifting his heart, Ronald Reagan jetted off last week to a rancher's Thanksgiving (turkey, monkey bread, horseback riding, wood splitting) in the California hills.

Lucky, having outgrown the White House, began an unfettered life among the cedar trees on Reagan's 688 acres above the Pacific. The President called it "dog heaven." Likewise, Reagan was entering, at least for the moment, some kind of political Promised Land. Wirthlin's findings showed Americans gave Reagan an 81% approval rating for his performance at the Geneva summit and a 77% overall job approval. Once again, his popularity achieved a record high.

Reagan is now clearly the world's pre-eminent leader. He has five successful years as President under his belt. That is too long to dismiss as mere luck. The derisive labels of "amiable dunce" and "the Teflon President" lie shattered and discredited. The open contempt that the likes of Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill had for Reagan's limited grasp of the issues and his lack of understanding about his programs looks irrelevant these days. The endless reports about staff conflicts and personality clashes within the Administration, however true, turn out to be footnotes. The vaunted foreign people eaters, such as Canada's Pierre Trudeau, West Germany's Helmut Schmidt and now the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev, have marched one by one into Reagan's presence. None managed to devour him. Instead they have, to a man and woman, emerged with varying degrees of respect and affection.

Nothing about Reagan is spectacular--except his continuing success. Almost nothing that Reagan does is all that great--but he does something. The lions of the liberal-policy elite of Washington, so enamored of cosmic theories and academic credentials, have retreated into a sullen silence. "They harbor a horrible resentment of Reagan because he is not following their prescriptions on how to run the world," says one scholar. "Worse, he is successful."

Almost nothing about Reagan the Leader is dismissible: his height, his straight back, his hair. In every scene played out in Geneva he had a slight physical advantage. "But it was never threatening," said one ambassador who was there. "Reagan radiated good will." ABC's David Hartman, the host of Good Morning, America and a former film actor himself, watched the Geneva script unwind on his monitors and said, "The President always played it so they came to him. That's the first rule of the stage."

"I know Communism," Reagan told an aide before he sat down with Gorbachev. "I've followed it for 30 years." He would not, he vowed, make it a Mike and Ronnie show, nor a kissing, hugging acquaintance. Yet, when the Soviet boss showed up, Reagan, in directing him up the stairs, touched Gorbachev gently on the arm. A surprising number of people who saw that small gesture remembered it. That was body language for civility, not intimacy.

It is part of Reagan's human nature to like people. At one point during the Geneva summit, Reagan came out of a good private session with Gorbachev and told a close aide, "Sometimes I've got to remind myself just who he is and what he represents." Despite the amiability that came through in public, Reagan seems to have succeeded in that also.