While Reagan Slept

by Bruce Schimmel

It is a cruel but obvious irony that the mental disease that eventually took Ronald Reagan's life stands as an apt metaphor, if not an excellent explanation, for the many misdeeds of his presidency.

To conclude that Reagan was actually living in a sleepy daze while serving in the nation's highest office would be the kindest explanation to forgive so many failures of oversight.

Reagan was the oldest man to be elected president, which for many was a good reason to celebrate. By 1980, the Youth Revolution of the '60s was exhausted. Many of its exciting, even ennobling experiments in sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll had gone seriously awry.

The nation was ready for the avuncular, kindly image that Reagan projected, and so the popular media was willing to forgive an elderly man's occasional foible.

When Reagan dozed off in public, at Cabinet meetings, even famously at an audience with the pope, it was dismissed with a chuckle and a wink. For many, Reagan's occasional confusion was a fair exchange for this man's constancy in his beliefs. In Reagan's cosmology, America was good, communists were bad, and surely we were at the dawn of our greatest age.

Reagan was permitted to sleepwalk through his presidency because his dreams inspired a vision that many Americans needed badly just then. We had been battered by the reality of Vietnam — that the world's greatest power could be crushed by peasants in pajamas.

Through his terms, events from the absurd to the tragic slid harmlessly off the man who, even then, was called the Teflon president.

Yet while the president slept, we embarrassed ourselves with a bully invasion of Grenada; mentally ill people were turned to the street; the homeless swelled to 2 million; the national debt soared; we became a debtor nation for the first time and unemployment hit 10 percent, the worst since the Depression. South African apartheid was ignored, while Donald Rumsfeld was sent off with a fat check for Saddam Hussein.

While Reagan dozed, hundreds of thousands of Central Americans died in American-sponsored coups. With nary a peep from the president, AIDS infected untold tens of thousands.

While Reagan looked the other way, the president's men secretly sold arms to Iran to raise cash for Nicaraguan contras — in violation of a specific congressional ban. Eleven men were eventually convicted in a scandal that shook our Constitution.

But our insensate president was spared, because he was asleep. And with him were so many Americans who were — and still are — drunk on his dreams.