Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 21, 1993 TAG: 9302220252
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ADAM MYERSON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
SINS OF OMISSION
"WHERE'S the rest of me?" asked Ronald Reagan in the movie "King's Row" as he played the victim of a train wreck who awoke to discover his legs had been amputated.Reagan is entitled to ask the same question of the latest edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. The new Bartlett's contains only three quotations from Reagan, compared with 28 each for John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. George Bush and Jimmy Carter are hardly remembered for their eloquence, but each has more entries in Bartlett's than the "Great Communicator."
To make matters worse, the Reaganisms collected in Bartlett's seem chosen to diminish him. One suggests there is no shortage of food in America. In another, Reagan says Republicans want "an America in which people can still get rich." The third compares government to a baby - "an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other."
These aren't the lines that admirers of Reagan's rhetoric most remember. Along with Kennedy and Winston Churchill, Reagan ranks as the West's greatest orator in the struggle against communism. At Bartlett's, however, an iron curtain has descended over Reagan's famous Cold War speeches. Among the missing:
Notre Dame, 1981: "The West won't contain communism, it will transcend communism. It won't bother to denounce it, it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."
British Parliament, 1982: "It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history." Reagan described "the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people."
Normandy, 1984: "The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or the next. It was the deep knowledge - and pray God we have not lost it - that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest."
Berlin, 1987: "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Gorbachev remembered these Kennedyesque words. So should Bartlett's.
Bartlett's won't even credit Reagan for the "evil empire," misattributing the line to George Lucas's movie "Star Wars." Luke Skywalker battled an "evil galactic empire." It was Reagan who made the words "evil empire" famous from Moscow, Russia, to Moscow, Idaho.
Also missing from Bartlett's is Reagan's first inaugural address. Its most memorable lines include: "In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." And: "No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women."
Even Americans who disagree with Reagan's politics can agree he eloquently articulated conservative principles. "We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added." "Balancing the budget is a little like protecting your virtue: You just have to learn to say `no.' "
One of Reagan's greatest speeches was at Moscow State University under Lenin's statue: "Democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to keep government limited, unintrusive; a system of constraints on power to keep politics and government secondary to the important things in life, the true sources of value found only in family and faith."
Reagan was also famous for self-deprecating quips that endeared him to the American people. "Please tell me you're Republicans," he told his doctors after his attempted assassination. Debating Walter Mondale he said: "I want you to know that I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience." Then there's his chestnut from the rubber-chicken circuit: "And you know, in all my years in Hollywood, I was never a song-and-dance man; that's how I wound up an after-dinner speaker."
"Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Reagan asked Americans in 1980. Bartlett's and its readers will be better off if its next edition doesn't try to deny Reagan his proper place in rhetorical history.
Adam Meyerson is editor of Policy Review, the magazine of the Heritage Foundation.
The Washington Post