The Bottom Line on Reagan

By Hugh Sidey

There is a tendency in the fervid national catharsis over the Iran arms scandal to treat the past six years of Ronald Reagan's presidency as a kind of hallucination.

In the white-hot center of the controversy, it is as if inflation had not been bested, the interest-rate genie not stuffed back into the bottle. The exuberant entrepreneurship that created 630,000 new businesses and 11 million new jobs is forgotten, as if the thought had never darkened the detached cerebrum of the Hollywood has-been. The truth is that Reagan's unabashed enthusiasm for competition, risk and profit has given the managers of U.S. capitalism enough new spirit to carry the message right through to the next President, be he Democrat or Republican. Prosperity has been no mere conjurer's trick; it was paid for with a painful recession that was the first valley of the Reagan presidency. Since then, a few rascals like Ivan Boesky have let greed run wild, but most business people got down to work and reaffirmed that the honorable creation of wealth is at the heart of a healthy democracy. The scent of the buck is kindling creativity again even in the depressed farm belt and idled steel valleys. And Reagan's sermon that trade must be free the world over will continue to resonate even as new pressures build for protection.

While the White House has been in and out of more political battles than one can count in the past half a dozen years, the armies of the industrialized world have been mercifully underemployed. There have been no superpower standoffs, no new Viet Nams in Central America, no Cuban missile crises or Afghanistan invasions, no oil embargoes. There have been failures like Lebanon and frustrations like Nicaragua. Yet a significant number of experts believe that even if Reagan does not manage to negotiate a reduction in nuclear weapons, the grim specter of World War III, an image relished by demagogues on both right and left, has actually receded a bit. No small part of that legacy is Reagan's insistence on building a better fighting machine and his courage to use it when American interests are threatened. The young Americans who bombed Libya, who apprehended the Achille Lauro hijackers, feel better about themselves and their capabilities, and for that reason the world has more respect for U.S. power. That change will not go out of office with Reagan.

At the time of the Iran fiasco, the free world was making gains in the war against terrorism. That war was declared globally and carried to the enemy almost exclusively by Reagan. The President struck back against fanatics who murdered the innocent. He pressured other countries to pursue suspected terrorists. Whether or not his heartfelt if foolish effort to trade arms for hostages, and with Iran, of all nations, will now encourage even more ( terrorism remains to be seen, but the betting is that the global village has come to understand that no society that seeks respect can support or tolerate the savagery of the Rome airport massacre.

The President has not managed to reduce the size of the Federal Government, a Reagan pet peeve. But it is now a political staple of both parties that the Washington monster is too bloated, too wasteful and too intrusive, and needs to be tamed. While the Democrats who currently control the Congress are preparing for spring battles on spending, there is no pell-mell rush to enlarge federal programs. Instead, they are considering the limits of Government: in the midst of the Iran crisis, hearings were held on how to reform a welfare system that has damaged families and undermined self- sufficiency.

To many analysts, the way Reagan wrought these changes in attitude and policy is almost more of an irritant than his ideology. The President carried half a dozen notions along in his heart and poured them out at every stop, disdaining the details and rituals of Government, stumbling time and time again to the precipice of disaster only to be rescued at the last minute by some alert aide or his own eleventh-hour arousal. In his first six years there was sleaze among his aides and a frightening failure to curtail the deficits. In the long run the huge debt he leaves behind may be a far worse legacy than Iranscam.

But what always saved Reagan until now was the bottom line for so many American households. In that very real world, so far from Washington's theories and controversies, the family income went up, the pension fund grew, taxes became fairer, the 18-year-old son did not face a war draft, the community answered the call against drugs, the schools got the message about improving performance. Those families, so besieged in the tumultuous decades of self-gratification, began to take pride in their values and reaffirm repressed impulses like patriotism.

Reagan, in the end, has not been even the principal strategist of his own era. Others formed the ideas, and he gave them voice. Reagan looked presidential, he acted presidential, he honored America's heritage. He understood above all else that there was romance and adventure in American politics, that the presidency had been transformed from a bully pulpit on Pennsylvania Avenue to a stage the size of the world that needed a real-life drama. He relished the part. He assailed the worship of despair, swept past the doubters and ignored his mistakes in his own giddy pitch to America. For longer than many people thought possible, he inspired and instructed his countrymen to do a lot of things they never dreamed they could or would do.

That was not quite enough; the unrelenting realities of leadership have caught up with him. For all his shortcomings, Ronald Reagan's singular script may shape the presidency dramatically in the years ahead. The evidence still indicates that the nation wants a superstar in the White House -- although now they would also like him to check the back room and see what is afoot.