Acting the Actor

By Hugh Sidey

Again Ronald Reagan's grace during personal stress is on display. That of his wife equals it. Actors are not supposed to be genuine, particularly those who are graduates of the grade-B Hollywood sound stages. But twice in four years Reagan has been brushed by death, and both times he has unfurled his gentle humor and insisted that the play go on. The second drama is just starting. But there is no reason to believe that the threat of cancer will inhibit him any more than the attempted assassination did four years ago. His friends bet it will be just the opposite. He wants this act to be his best, whatever time he may have left.

Perhaps we have in the past dismissed the theater too hastily as a training ground for leadership. A renowned drama teacher and director, Father Gilbert Hartke of Catholic University, who has known Reagan for 45 years, believes so. Theater isolates and defines the human dimensions more clearly than anything else, says Father Hartke. A skilled actor with good character is instructed by the parts he plays. An actor, perhaps more than most other people, studies courage and failure and bravery and cowardice. "The success of an actor," Father Hartke insists, "depends finally on how much the actor really loves people." Reagan's affection for people and theirs for him is a proven part of his presidency.

There is a necessary detachment in acting, says Father Hartke, whereby the person views himself from a distance and analyzes how he must behave to achieve those "great moments when he moves his fellow man." Reagan surely calculates his moves even now from his hospital room.

When Nancy went off to visit the aircraft carrier America last week, she told the men, "I hate to drop names, but last night when I kissed your Commander in Chief goodbye, he asked that I pass along a message. He said, 'Nancy, will you tell them how proud I am of them? How often I think about them?' " That message is at once so stagy as to be suspect and still so obviously corny as to be genuine. The actor and the man have become indistinguishable or, as Father Hartke would put it, they always were, we just would not believe it.

The challenge ahead for Reagan, though, will be greater than anything he has encountered before on the stage or in political office. He is not the same man physically or emotionally. And because the American presidency rests finally in his soul, the presidency will inexorably be changed. Though there has been more medical, physical and psychological speculation about Reagan in these past days than ever before, there is no way to chart the future. In hindsight it appears that John Kennedy's persistent back troubles sometimes plunged him into dark moods that were reflected in his grim assessments of Soviet power. Eisenhower's string of illnesses surely drained him of the vitality so essential in the presidency to press on against critics and adversaries. Many of the modern problems of race, environment and cities began to emerge during his tenure, and he did not pay full attention.

Yet both Kennedy and Ike at times seemed to possess the actor's detachment and view themselves from a distance and then make adjustments for their weaknesses. From Kennedy's fatalism bubbled bursts of great humor, based on the realization that man was often absurd and there was only so much he could do during any working day to repair the damage. Ike often used his wisdom and warmth to fill the gap left by waning physical vigor.

How Reagan now compensates for the changes that have occurred and will occur within him will be better viewing than any drama now playing on the stage or on film. The old motto, "The whole world acts the actor," which legend says was on one of London's early Drury Lane theaters, is the title.