Word: moral
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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WILLS DEFINES Reagan's appeal the same way Roland Barthes defined myth: "He is a durable daylight `bundle of meanings,"' Wills writes. "Reagan does not argue for American values; he embodies them." Gifted with his salesman father's Irish blarney and his sermonizing mother's penchant for moral crusading, Reagan articulates and seems to embody values Americans prize most. He can josh with an audience and then preach to them. Self-deprecating, humble, unpretentious, charming and--most importantly--a financial and social success, Reagan stands as the "fulfillment of America's ideal--Everyman suddenly put in charge of the nation...
...DOESN'T matter, Wills argues, whether the flyers' conversation ever took place or a high school football game Reagan often draws a moral lesson from was ever played. (It wasn't.) For Reagan, the moral lesson comes first; it shapes the event, not the other way around. Perhaps Wills' most important insight into America's 40th President can be found in his discussion of Reagan's days as a sports announcer. Reagan's detractors, who dismiss the president as "just an actor" and view him as no more than a tele-prompted automaton, have not looked back far enough into...
Reagan created a mythic world in the afternoon and gave it moral dimension at night. He wasn't so much describing reality as making a point. That is pretty much what he has been doing ever since. He denies that Hollywood marriages can't last as he is being divorced from Jane Wyman. He tells of acting triumphs in scenes never filmed. He brags he spent less as governor of California than either Brown after outspending both...
...what of international morality? Even if it is strategically important for the U.S. to prevent a Communist state in Central America, do not American values prevent us from overthrowing another government? In principle, no. It depends on the case. The 1983 overthrow of the thug government of Grenada, for example, surely qualified as one of the more moral exercises of American foreign policy...
...party's nomination from Gerald Ford. Even today, as Reagan battles his worst political crisis, CPAC's confidence in its hero remains high. Most of the participants consider Iranscam a murky irrelevancy, a distraction from their agenda of a still stronger defense, a reduced government, a return to the "moral values" of yesteryear. When Reagan told the group he was no lame duck but was "saving his best stuff for the last act," some listeners shouted, "Four more years! Four more years...