MY FAVORITE BOOK TITLE of all time is Sukarno: An Autobiography As Told To Cindy Adams, which was published by Bobbs-Merrill in the 1960s and later, so I’ve heard, reissued as Me and Sukarno by Cindy Adams. Not even Sukarno and Me. Ms. Adams, of course, is as highly respected a gossip columnist as you are likely to find, and the effect of her book’s title–which commingles the importance of a man who governed a country of 100 million souls with the self-importance of a tabloid reporter who interviewed him long enough to get a book out of it–strikes a plummy note. It neatly sums up the uneasy relationship between those who achieve greatness and those who try really, really hard to get somebody to thrust greatness upon them.
You could see the same thing on display on TV all last week. Cable news channels lapsed into what is fast becoming their natural condition–a kind of frenetic pseudo-activity, furious and empty busy-ness, in which the amount of airtime the producers have to fill is unimaginably greater than the amount of information they have to fill it with. After the sixtieth or seventieth replay of Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall, I found myself thinking, heretically, “Aw, tear it down yourself, already.” Much worse than the shopworn clips were the former Reaganites who emerged from the Washington lagoon unbidden. Swamp water dripping from their J. Press pinstripes, seaweed draped around their Ann Taylor ensembles, they huddled outside the studios of MSNBC and CNN and Fox News, hoping for a little airtime. Of course they were not disappointed. Everybody was escorted into the studios and put on the air for a few moments at least, and often those precious moments grew into hours.
I have lived in Washington a long time and, as they say in the interrogation room, many of these persons are known to me personally. But I was astonished at the intimacy each had enjoyed with Reagan himself. From junior politicians and special assistants and advance men on the distant end, to campaign consultants and cabinet secretaries on the near–all were pleased to testify, modestly, about the real Reagan they knew and about their own closeness to the great man, notwithstanding that anyone familiar with Reagan’s way of life will know that even at the height of his mental acuity he couldn’t have picked a single one of these people out of a police lineup. It’s a funny thing about greatness: We always hear how rare it is, but when it finally appears, there always seems to be enough to rub off on everybody.
As it happens, I am in possession of my own Reagan memories, which I uncork at the slightest provocation and which, I’ve noticed, grow richer in detail as the years pass. A few guests and I had dinner with him once at the home of R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., who captured the evening much better than I ever could in his book The Conservative Crack-Up. I shook the president’s hand at a White House party and saw him give a dozen speeches. Though I was under no professional urgency to do so, I made a point, as a reporter, of attending all his press conferences. For a Reagan admirer, these could be painful affairs, especially during the Iran-contra scandal, when the scorpions of the press circled round him in the White House East Room and seemed to delight in his increasing befuddlement. But I always thought he came out ahead in the encounters. I was happy to give him the benefit of the doubt. One always will for an intimate friend.
Intimacy, no matter how tenuous or bogus, only grows in retrospect, especially after that sad day when it can no longer be enlarged in fact. This lily-gilding is a human tendency that predates the worshipful Reaganites, of course, and even Cindy Adams, spanning cultures and centuries, dipping into the earliest wellsprings of celebrity itself. The story is told of a dirt farmer in Columbus, New Mexico, who was seized in a raid by Pancho Villa’s men. He was brought before Villa, who sat imperiously atop his mount in the village square, devouring his lunch.
The farmer begged for his life. Villa pointed to a nearby horsepie. “You eat that,” Villa said with a sadistic grin, “and I will spare your life.” Horribly, the farmer did as he was told. Villa kept his word, and the man returned to his farm.
Years later, the farmer’s grandchildren came to him in excitement. “Grandpa,” they said, “is it true you once saw the great Villa?”
“Saw him?” the old man replied. “I had lunch with him!”
–Andrew Ferguson
