REAGAN A REVIEW OF THE LONG RUN

The slow, relentless eye of history will give his presidency mixed reviews at best. But when Ronald Reagan leaves the Oval Office for the last time next week, the nation--and especially the nation’s capital--is going to miss him, personally as well as politically.

Forget for a moment his own partisanship and the often sharp policy and political disagreements that have marked his eight years as President. He will be missed for the optimism and gallant cheerfulness he showed even in the face of adversity.

Remember what he told Nancy after he was shot in the assassination attempt early in his first year as President?

“Honey, I forgot to duck.”

And the quip he made to the doctor who was laboring to save his life:

“I hope you’re a Republican.”

The doctor, Joe Giordano, replied, “Today, we’re all Republicans, Mr. President.”

Reagan could make people forget about political differences--at least temporarily.

Washington will also miss Reagan’s self-deprecating humor. In a recent farewell speech he said things will be different when he’s back at the ranch in California. As soon as he gets home, he said, he plans to “lean back, kick up my feet and take a long nap.

“Ah, come to think of it,” he added to loud laughter, “things won’t be all that different after all.”

Every year of his presidency, Reagan has been a hit at the annual spring Gridiron dinner in Washington, the journalists’ lampoon of major public figures. His greatest performance came during the nadir of his presidency--at the 1987 dinner. Think back to that time:

Reagan’s popularity had plummeted in the disgrace of the Iran-Contra scandal. The Tower Commission issued a devastating report saying the government had spun out of control.

For weeks the President had held no press conferences. Word seeped out from the White House of a sad, lonely figure, a psychological wreck afraid to face the public. Aides were so alarmed about Reagan’s condition that one prepared a memo for Chief of Staff Howard H. Baker Jr. suggesting the 25th Amendment might be invoked to declare Reagan incapacitated and remove him from office.

Then into the Gridiron dinner marched Reagan in white tie and tails to face Cabinet members and Supreme Court justices, the lords of Congress, the elders of both parties plus the nation’s leading publishers and editors.

Reagan flashed that famous smile and began:

“Do you remember the flap when I said, ‘We begin bombing in five minutes?’ Remember when I fell asleep during my audience with the Pope? Remember Bitburg? Boy, those were the good old days!”

That kind of humor, the ability to smile in the face of an assassin’s bullet and laugh at one’s own failings is invaluable in a politician. It can blunt opponents’ spears and blow away rancor.

In Reagan’s case it could lift the spirit of the nation and help restore its faith in itself.

When Reagan entered the Oval Office eight years ago, the powers of the office had been greatly diminished by a series of failed presidencies:

Lyndon B. Johnson, discredited by the Vietnam War, had chosen not to run for another term. Richard M. Nixon, disgraced by Watergate, had resigned rather than face certain impeachment. Gerald R. Ford, burdened by his pardon of Nixon, was defeated by a little-known Georgia governor. And Jimmy Carter had turned out to be politically inept.

Against this background, Reagan was given little chance of exerting strong leadership. But he made the White House work. Despite Iran-Contra and other crises, he restored vigor and authority to the presidency. He fulfilled pledges to reduce taxes and slow the rate of growth for domestic programs, and he brought about the most massive peacetime defense buildup in history. Reagan can also claim credit for his part in the transformation of U.S. relations with the Soviet Union. He began his presidency calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and ended it by putting his arm around Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Red Square and achieving a historic arms reduction treaty.

A longtime Democratic critic paid tribute to the President early in his second term, describing what may be his most positive legacy. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy lauded Reagan for restoring the presidency as “a vigorous, purposeful instrument of national leadership.” He said his brother John would not have always agreed with Reagan, but Kennedy told the President: “I know he would have admired the strength of your commitment and your capacity to move the nation.”

In moving the nation, Reagan has been

the ultimate television President. He himself has said he sometimes wonders how anyone could function as President without having been an actor.

When Michael K. Deaver was deputy White House chief of staff, for example, he always focused on getting Reagan’s picture onto the evening network newscasts, regardless how negative the story might be. A Reagan aide tells of one incident when other advisers urged Reagan to keep a low profile because of a particularly negative piece of news.

But Deaver said: “Let’s just get that smiling face on the tube. That’s all we need. Forget the story.”

There is another side to the Reagan legacy, however, and Giordano’s experience sheds light on that, too.

During a Reagan 1984 campaign speech to the Italian-American Federation, Giordano was in the audience when the President told one of his famous anecdotes, citing the young doctor for saving his life three years earlier.

Reagan pointed out that Giordano was the son of an Italian immigrant--a milkman, who worked hard to put his son through college, that the family struggled to make ends meet and “put their money into education that made their son a prominent surgeon, one who saved the life of a President of the United States .”

Giordano, a Democrat, later wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times saying Reagan had accurately described his family’s path to success and that he and his parents were proud of the President’s comments. But there was another part of the story that needed telling:

The kinds of government social programs Reagan so frequently criticized had played a vital role in his family’s success. The man who saved Reagan’s life got his medical education through low-interest government loans.

Just as many Americans do, Giordano likes Reagan personally, but finds much less to like in many of his policies. Polls have continually shown that while most people continued to like him personally, the public opposed many of Reagan’s policies, sometimes by 2-1 margins.

There were blind spots in Reagan’s vision, ideas about the world he had formed long ago and seemingly could not change no matter how inadequately they reflected reality. Those blind spots hobbled his ability to deal with some of the country’s most pressing problems.

As a result, there is much in the substance of the Reagan legacy that his successor--and all Americans--will find costly and painful to deal with in the years ahead.

As H. Ross Perot recently said, “It’s stock-taking time. The election is over and the nation wishes our next President the best of luck. He will need it.”

Industrialist Perot paints a chilling picture: “We are now the largest debtor nation in the history of man; 10 years ago we were the largest creditor nation. We’re the most violent, crime-ridden nation in the industrialized world. We’re also the biggest user of illegal drugs; we have 5% of the world’s population and we’re using 50% of the world’s annual output of cocaine. Nine of the 10 largest banks in the world are now Japanese. The 10th is an American bank, but if you took the Third World loans out of it, it would be insolvent.”

The Reagan White House has tended to gloss over such disturbing facts. Instead of grappling with underlying problems, Reagan lieutenants often focused on short-term, politically advantageous responses. The President himself just kept beaming his boundless optimism.

Reagan sticks to his contention that the homeless sleep on grates and in alleyways not because of lack of funds or housing, but because they want to. He can’t understand why anyone is unemployed when there are want ads in the newspapers. He still considers government part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Reagan has been the No. 1 representative of U.S. government for eight years but still talks as though he’s not part of it: “The previous Administration said the nation’s problems were too complicated to manage,” he said recently, “so we said, ‘Of course they are, so government should stop trying to manage them.’ ”

As Reagan’s friend and supporter, the conservative columnist George Will, wrote in Newsweek, the President’s cheerfulness has been salutary on balance, but also “has been a narcotic, numbing the nation’s senses about hazards just over the horizons.”

If Reagan himself ever seriously considered the possibility of hazards just over the horizon, he has never shared such thoughts with us. Indeed, except for a brief period during Iran-Contra, Reagan maintained an awesome equilibrium throughout the triumphs and travails of his presidency.

Gridiron speakers usually wind up on a serious note and here’s how Reagan ended his 1987 speech:

“Since I came to the White House, I’ve gotten two hearing aids, had a colon operation, a prostate operation, skin cancer and I’ve been shot--damn thing is, I never felt better in my life.

“And I also feel good about my country, because no matter what we come up against, we really are a resilient people. And as aggravated as I get, I genuinely think the press is one of the reasons we do emain flexible.

“Our nation rolls with the punches, and those of us who represent the people should do no less. I meant what I said a few weeks ago--when you make a mistake, the healthy thing to do is take your knocks, learn your lessons and then move on.” Perhaps that spirit of taking his knocks with good grace and never losing his faith in himself or his country explains why--despite all the serious problems he never really addressed, despite all the troubles he leaves for his successors--the people never lost faith in Ronald Reagan.

Perhaps that is why he will leave office more popular than when he came in--the most popular President to step down from the Oval Office in recent times.