On Reagan’s Sayings--You Can Quote Him

I have a letter from Charlton Heston deploring the fact that the 16th edition of Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations,” published in 1992, contains only three quotations from Ronald Reagan, and opining that those were selected to make him look bad.

Heston further alleges that the editor of that edition, Justin Kaplan, was guilty of “Draconian censorship” in excluding from Bartlett’s “most of the conservative comment” of the last generation.

Heston concedes he and I may be on opposite sides of the political fence, but suggests that because of my outspoken opposition to censorship I will agree that Kaplan’s prejudice is despicable.

Actually, as my readers must know, I am not a political animal. I vote. Beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I have voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election. (They just seem to have better personalities.) But I am not a Democrat. In the last gubernatorial election, I voted for the Peace and Freedom candidate.

Heston encloses an article by Adam Meyerson, from Policy Review, quoting Kaplan as telling the Philadelphia Inquirer, “I’m not going to disguise the fact that I despise Ronald Reagan,” and Kaplan’s later writing in the Wall Street Journal that Reagan was not a memorable phrase maker but “only an actor masquerading as a leader.”

Whether Kaplan deserves to edit the 17th edition of Bartlett’s or not, those two quotations should surely be in it.

It does seem that Kaplan shouldered his task with a prejudice that should have troubled the book’s publishers. As a popular two-term President, Reagan, I think, deserves to be quoted more extensively, even if it makes him look bad. After all, even his enemies called him the “great communicator.”

In an interview with Bettijane Levine of The Times in 1992, Kaplan said he intended to trim what he regarded as excessive amounts of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James and Oliver Wendell Holmes, but he said nothing about limiting Reagan to three quotations after his eight years in the White House.

In the three passages quoted, Meyerson points out, Reagan states that there is no shortage of food in America, that the Republicans want “an America in which people can still get rich,” and that government is like a baby--”an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.” These were chosen, Meyerson asserts, “to make Mr. Reagan look ridiculous.”

The book does not include the remark that perhaps endeared Reagan to the public more than any other. When he looked up at his team of surgeons after being shot in the chest by a would-be assassin, he said: “I hope you’re all Republicans.”

It is perhaps worth noting that the 15th edition of Bartlett’s, edited by Emily Morison Beck and published in 1980, has not a single quote from Reagan, suggesting that before he became President he said nothing memorable.

Kaplan’s edition has 10 quotes from Richard Nixon, including “I am not a crook,” “I want you all to stonewall it,” and, to the press, after losing the California gubernatorial election, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

Gerald Ford has three quotations, the most memorable being, “I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln.”

Jimmy Carter has six, including his revelation to Bob Scheer of Playboy: “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”

Harry Truman has 19 entries, (nine fewer than in 1980) including, “If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen”; his famous desk motto, “The buck stops here,” which President Clinton echoed in his recent State of the Union speech, and his stunning announcement in August, 1945, “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima.”

It does not, however, include what was perhaps history’s most most consequential message. It was written by Truman with a lead pencil on the back of a pink message sheet from the War Department: “Suggestion approved. Release when ready but not sooner than Aug. 2.”

Truman was at the Potsdam conference with Stalin and Churchill at the time and wanted to get away before the bombing of Hiroshima, which took place Aug. 6.

Evidently Kaplan has a thing for the American expatriate poet T.S. Eliot. He is given 129 quotations covering almost six pages, including “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

For laughs, the book has three quotations from that great master of rhetoric, Casey Stengel: “Most people my age are dead.” Kaplan also quotes Samuel Goldwyn: “Include me out.” And the inimitable Yogi Berra: “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

John F. Kennedy is quoted 28 times. On how he became a hero: “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.”

Speaking of prejudice, I’m not quoted once.