Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 17, 1991 TAG: 9104170465
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JIM DWYER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Nancy certainly annoyed enough Republicans so that they are getting a kick out of this spectacle. In the liberal and Democratic colonies, you can hear people justifying the glee: The Reagans sold us the image. They piously conjured up family and flag, a great sound and stage projection, and behind it were hairbrushes and a marriage with shadows.
So here we are, learning at the top of the news that a young actress may have been sexually active with the casting men of Hollywood - 40 or 50 years ago. Shocking! Who could have thought such a thing possible! And in Hollywood! We also have a direct-from-the-lips report on an aggressive kiss that she supposedly gave two men in 1945.
This is history, and ketchup was a vegetable. Remember?
One of the keys to the Reagan presidency was treating the public as common idiots. In 1984, his handlers ran a re-election commercial with images lifted from Pepsi commercials. "It's morning again in America," was the slogan. During the presidential debates, he just about forgot his own name.
Those who bothered to vote sent Reagan back in a landslide.
That is the genius of Kelley's book and the stories that leap from it. They don't matter about anything to do with running the country or the government. They tickle, they divert, like a Reagan commercial. Then they do nothing.
The writer Garry Wills opened up bits of the Reagan family's troubles. Although God was practically a certified member of the Reagan Cabinet, Wills noted that the Reagans hadn't darkened the door of churches while in office. For all the preaching about family values, a number of relatives were iced out of the inner circle of the Reagan household.
Between sermons, the "pro-family" Reagan administration fought laws that would give new parents three months' leave after the birth of a child. Still, the voters sent them back into office.
Any Democrat or liberal or lefty who thinks the dish on Nancy Reagan means it's pay-back time is having a long swig of delusion.
There's still no federal law letting you take time off when a kid is born.
Instead, we even today are unwrapping the tinseled trash that the Reagans served us for eight years. The same public that gave them two terms will buy this book and watch Kelley on "Donahue."
Thus we have the dashing revelations that Nancy lied about her age and that she disowned her real father. (Both facts had been published three or four years ago, in an earlier biography.)
The close and private time with Frank Sinatra? That's news. It's interesting. Is it important?
Yes, I suppose that during those three-hour, no-phone-call lunches, Nancy and Frank were really plotting how to get the Department of General Services to fix gravel contracts for Sinatra's pals in the construction rackets.
Then there is the "petticoat presidency" - the great historical significance of Nancy's influence on the presidency that pumped the story of this terribly readable book onto the front page of The New York Times.
It seems, on the whole, to be a pretty thin influence, given Kelley's own reporting.
Yes, Nancy could tie up the White House switchboard looking for a jewelry box. But when she wanted Caspar Weinberger out as secretary of defense because he was too "militaristic," Weinberger was kept and the United States got the biggest spend-up for a military budget in the history of the world.
The former President Reagan thought AIDS was a disease like measles, except that you earned it by being a bad person. Nancy, who had a number of gay men as friends, had little success in changing her husband's outlook on the disease that has wiped out tens of thousands of people.
The "petticoat presidency" phrase is just flimsy lingerie for what is little more than a series of skin-flick shorts about the way a family devours and sustains itself. These pathetic things are none of our national business.
Jim Dwyer is a columnist for Newsday. Los Angeles Times/Washington Post News Service
by CNB