Reagan Should Resign : He’s Now a Noble Ruin, and It’s Too Late for a Comeback

Like a prizefighter who has been on the receiving end of too many uppercuts but craves the one last bout that will help him leave the ring in a blaze of glory, President Reagan stands helplessly in his corner, surrounded by his trainers and inhaling the aromatics of hope.

The hope is that in the two years left in his Administration the Reagan revolution will achieve its unfulfilled objectives and institutionalize itself as firmly as the New Deal. But there is about as much chance of that as there is a likelihood that Leon Spinks and Sugar Ray Leonard will reclaim their titles.

Perhaps in the movies that the President so typically draws on for analogies, such comebacks are possible. After all, the 33-year-old club fighter Rocky Balboa did it in the first version of “Rocky,” and even went on to greater triumphs.

But while life may imitate art in some general sense, actual political careers succeed or fail on perceptions of power and whether it is seen as growing or ebbing. Sentimental scenarios from Hollywood would have the doddering President rallying to recapture the political initiative, helped along by his adoring and determined wife. The world of politics is harsher. We are less likely to see Nancy Reagan as the supportive Adrian urging Rocky on than we are to see her cast as the real-life Edith Wilson helping her stricken husband, Woodrow Wilson, discharge the formalities of the presidency and becoming, in effect, the Chief Executive herself.

Politicians can convince themselves that they are loved, or indispensable, or that there is just one more unfulfilled promise that needs to be redeemed. Presidents also get it into their heads that their deeds will be writ large on the pages of history and that the longer they are around the more of their accomplishments will be inscribed. Tragically, it is often that the best of them don’t know when to quit.

Grover Cleveland, for reasons of health and politics, should not have come back for a rematch with Benjamin Harrison in 1892. A dying Franklin D. Roosevelt should certainly not have run for a fourth term in 1944. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s second term was blighted by presidential illness and tainted by scandal, and it ended on a note of personal and national humiliation over the U-2 incident.

But some of the best also respond either to some private wisdom or to force majeure , and call it quits before they suffer political humiliation or pitiable incapacity.

Harry S. Truman might have sought a second term in his own right in 1952, but wisely refrained. Lyndon B. Johnson might have muscled his way to the nomination in 1968, but saw a bloody and debilitating fight looming and decided not to seek an other term. Even Richard M. Nixon declined to put us through a bruising impeachment.

To hang up your gloves takes more political courage than persisting in a course that can lead only to frustration and sorrow. The fact is that our President cannot now face the grueling give-and-take of a press conference without the risk of disgracing himself by misstating facts, becoming pointlessly garrulous or uttering vacuous homilies. He is now no better than a noble ruin. He should resign and turn over the reins of power to Vice President George Bush. Or he may eventually have to face the prospect of being pressed by Congress to invoke the terms of the 25th Amendment, which specifies the conditions under which a President who cannot fulfill his duty may step down.

A President’s forgetfulness about when he ordered a major, and arguably illegal, departure in foreign policy is not like an ordinary person’s trying to reconstruct what happened a few months ago by consulting notations in his week-at-a-glance pocket calendar. Reagan’s working day is documented meticulously and logged precisely. There are more clues to what he was doing at any given moment and with whom than there are for any other living mortal.

In a peculiar way I suspect that the American people would feel better if they thought that the President really did know the circumstances of the Iran arms deal but chose, as a matter of defiance or even cynical political calculation, not to divulge them. When he claims that he is not able to recall when he personally gave the authorization to deal with the Iranians, the impression is gained that he is being shielded by subordinates who feel that the President cannot be trusted to keep from blurting out the truth at a news conference.

Ronald Reagan, at his peak, inspired us. By the standards that he set for himself he accomplished much. He was, and continues to be, a decent and likable man with an uncommon gift for giving eloquent expression to our noblest profession. He could even voice our wrath and frustration with marvelous felicity. He understood us, and we lavished our support on him. Such a man should not be the object of pity.

Reagan’s second term has been blighted by the frustrations of trying to sell major policies that lack an underlying consensus--such as “Star Wars” and aid to the Nicaraguan contras --and by public embarrassments such as the Reykjavik summit meeting and the Iran arms deal.

What is most depressing is that the best of Ronald Reagan is behind us. Things will assuredly not get any better, and there is the real prospect of this Administration’s decomposing in a slow and unsightly manner before the eyes of the entire world. Only the President can save us, and himself, from that melancholy prospect by courageously throwing in the towel.

DR, DANZIGER, The Christian Science Monitor