Idylls of A

By Stefan Kanfer

In the sci-fi film The Philadelphia Experiment, a youth is hurtled from the 1940s into the present. He finds solace in a motel, watching Abbott and Costello reruns. Then he switches to a Reagan press conference. "Allison," he says to a friend, "I know this guy. Is this another movie?" Her answer: "No, David, this is not a movie."

In this flawed but sweeping account of the President and the past that shaped him, Author Garry Wills happily records the incident but takes issue with Allison. He sees the President, in essence, as an auteur who "renews our past by resuming it. His approach is . . . associative; not a tracking shot, but montage. We make the connections. It is our movie."

Wills is a onetime Jesuit seminarian with a Ph.D. in classics from Yale who now teaches American history at Northwestern. In Nixon Agonistes (1970), he tracked a man contending for a lifetime with self-destructive impulses. With Reagan, he finds a subject wholly at peace with his past. Whatever is unpleasant is simply ignored, forgotten or invented. Reagan, for example, fondly remembers his Illinois childhood as "one of those rare Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer idylls." Wills, reared in the Midwest himself, knows the dark side of Twainiana, and he finds it in Tampico, Ill., one month after the Reagan family's arrival. HANG AND BURN THREE NEGROES read the headlines of the village paper. ROPE BREAKS PRECIPITATING VICTIM INTO BURNING EMBERS OF PYRE. So much for idylls.

Reagan's father Jack recalls the characters W.C. Fields liked to play. He sold shoes but grandly styled himself a "graduate practipedist," was known to tipple and shuttled his family to some 13 homes in five towns; Mother Nelle was a teetotaler and a devout Protestant churchgoer. In the Depression, the impoverished Jack and his older son Neil were rescued by the New Deal: they worked for the federal relief program. Thus Ronald Reagan, the great enemy of bureaucracy, observes Wills, "was cradled in the arms of 'govment.' "

In his private life, Reagan for the most part remained his mother's obedient son. Professionally, he was his father's offspring, "a supplier of entertainment, comfort, distraction, and healing symbols," a somnipractor, suggests the author, an arranger of others' dreams. The now famous years as radio sportscaster, describing baseball games confected from telegraph bulletins, were succeeded by decades as a Hollywood actor whose ideas of history were often derived from scenarios.

In Westerns, a genre he favored, Reagan enjoyed playing the brave loner facing a mob: "If one can't handle this" he tells a deputy in Law and Order (1953), "two won't be any good." In fact, the author notes, the old cattle towns relied upon conscientious law enforcement; Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were both forced out of Dodge City as troublemakers. During World War II, Reagan acted in propaganda films for the Army. Here, too, facts became servants of the Message, and they remained so in peacetime. "By the time I got out of the Army Air Corps," wrote Reagan in his autobiography, Where's The Rest of Me?, "all I wanted to do . . . was rest up awhile, make love to my wife, and come up refreshed to a better job in an ideal world. (As it came out, I was disappointed in these postwar ambitions.)" But where had he been that he could not make love to his then wife, Jane Wyman? inquires Wills. "They had been in the same town for the last three years."

Reagan likes to recall his early postwar days as a workingman's advocate. In fact, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, he was not, reports Wills, "speaking for labor, but ((acting as)) a strikebreaker doing the will of the producers." When his movie career faltered, he became host of a television series, General Electric Theater, and stumped cross-country, speaking for the company. After eight years, he was summarily dismissed, but Reagan has no harsh words for GE; after all, by the time he was fired in 1962, he had reached a new constituency.

As Governor of California, Reagan built a strong administration, saw the state budget double and, says Wills, "committed the very sin he inveighed against -- government." The same imbalance of reality and myth continues during the presidency, which takes up the last and weakest portion of a 41- chapter book. Here Wills' cinematic thesis tends to fade out. "What is Star Wars," he asks rhetorically, "but another, more complex projector meant to trace, in lasers and benign nuclear 'searchlights,' the image of America itself across the widest screen of all?" But Reagan is not the inventor of the Strategic Defense Initiative; he is merely its most ardent spokesman. Surely the scientists and military executives who think SDI feasible cannot all have been transfigured by the dazzle of show business. Reagan, Wills maintains, "believes that terrorists will stay away from jet planes if America acts like a cowboy." But not all shows of force are showdowns at the O.K. Corral.

Far too often, Wills, like his subject, seems to fall victim to wide- screen rhetoric and to the appeal of marquee names: if Reagan's second wife Nancy co-starred with Van Heflin and Glenn Ford, the actors and the films are duly recorded. Meanwhile, canny observers of Reagan's presidential performance, such as Tip O'Neill or Robert Dole, are wholly absent.

Despite the fast-forward quality of the presidential chapters, Reagan's America is a prodigious feat of research and popular history. The author has synthesized disparate incidents and uncovered revealing data. From here on, no scholar or journalist will be able to confront the history of the '80s without stopping off at Innocents at Home to see the Ronald Reagans: the fictional and the real one.