It was fitting perhaps that Ronald Reagan died on the eve of the D-Day celebrations. Unlike other Hollywood actors such as Jimmy Stewart who gave up tinseltown to fly for the US army air force, Reagan remained an actor, not a doer. Later in life, before Alzheimer's disease cruelly felled him - he called the affliction "riding into the sunset", another Hollywood cliché - he would tell Israeli politicians that he remembered seeing the liberated concentration camps at the end of the second world war. It sounded good, but too bad that he was not wearing a uniform at the time but was working for a documentary unit.

In that sense there was always more than a touch of vaudeville about Reagan. He was a bad actor who knew his limitations. Not for him Gary Cooper's heroic sheriff role in High Noon (a White House favorite for successive presidents). And not for him the youthful John Wayne in John Ford's Stagecoach, two movies which helped to define 20th century America. He was always on the outside looking in, the minor bit-player who was always small-town America.

Perhaps because he saw himself as a patriot, a Forrest Gump before his time, he allied himself with the McCarthy faction and joined those Hollywood bigots who lined themselves up against anything that smacked of communism and the perils of the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war in the early 1950s. It was unworthy of him and unworthy of the country at the time, but it marked him and had he not entered politics he could have ended up a bad actor who chose bad politics.

What propelled him into the arena was a mixture of hubris and necessity. From the governorship to California, he found himself in the White House in 1981. The cold war was in full swing and for the Republicans he was the man, or cipher, to fight their last long battle against the forces of evil. In one of Reagan's first public appearances he forgot that the microphone was live and announced to his astonished audience that the missiles were about to be fired. Yet out of that bellicosity the lion learned to live with the lambs. With Mikhail Gorbachev, the president of the Soviet Union who was committed to rapprochement, he forged an unlikely friendship. Out of their discussions in Iceland in 1986 the cold war gradually thawed and the ice turned to lukewarm water.

He was a man of contradictions who was easy to mock. Famously, he addressed Princess Diana as Prince David and there were times when he believed that the Middle East was close to Minnesota in the mid-west. But this much-maligned president was not just the buffoon which his enemies painted him. True, he dirtied himself with the Iran-Contra scandal and his foreign policies owed more to the machinations of the Pentagon than to any personal knowledge. But in that sense he was probably no worse than the present incumbent.

Ronald Reagan knew how to keep a hands-off approach to the administration - for good and for ill - but whatever else his critics might say about him he knew how to meet the moment. When the space shuttle Challenger crashed in 1986 taking the lives of seven astronauts, he turned not to platitudes but to poetry.

"The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God'."

© newsquest (sunday herald) limited

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