Hat-in-Hand Reagan

Former Presidents of the United States are paid decent pensions. They are provided with a staff, comfortable and even sumptuous office space, personal security and other benefits, all without cost to themselves. Every retired President in modern times has had the chance to earn a lucrative fee for his memoirs. Some former Presidents have been richer than others, but no modern former President has had to live poor.

This insulation against financial insecurity hasn’t prevented some who occupied the White House from squeezing as much cash advantage as possible from their former notoriety. Thus Gerald Ford, after his election defeat in 1976, lavishly lent his name to a number of companies that were willing to pay well for the perceived prestige of having a former President on their boards. Ford’s self-commercialization, however, pales besides that being practiced by Ronald Reagan. For a fee of $2 million--an amount Nancy Reagan has now confirmed--Reagan is spending nine days in Japan promoting the business interests of the Fujisankei Communications Group, the country’s largest media conglomerate.

To earn his $222,222-a-day fee, Reagan is appearing on the company’s TV programs, givinginterviews to its newspapers, speaking at its sponsored dinners and generally exuding geniality, flattery and good will. For the most part he sticks to carefully scripted remarks, but sometimes he ad libs, with unfortunate if not riotous results. Thus Reagan has suggested that a Japanese company’s recent purchase of Columbia Pictures could serve to “bring back decency and good taste” to American films. Japanese moviegoers, with their well-known appreciation for gore, violence and explicit sex in films, must surely have gone into paroxysms of laughter when they heard that.

Reagan was a wealthy man when he entered the White House, he was wealthier still when he left it, and together with his wife he stands to earn new millions in book royalties. He does not, in short, have to sell himself in Japan. Why then is he doing so? Perhaps it’s nothing more than the old show-biz habit of getting it while you’re hot, which let Reagan the actor add handsomely to his income by endorsing cigarettes, shirts and other products. Whatever the explanation, it does nothing to lessen the cheap and demeaning nature of what he is doing now, or reduce the insult that is being delivered to the office he was privileged to hold.