Last week I witnessed the “Cannonization” of Ronald Reagan. His biographer, devoted fan, and long-time friend, Lou Cannon, gave a speech in which he extolled the former president as one of the greatest ever to occupy the White House. At the very least, “his successors have made him look ten feet tall,” said Cannon as he listed the man’s vir-tues and praised his accomplishments as president.

“I was going to keep on writing about Reagan,” Cannon promised himself long ago, “until I got it right.” When Reagan himself heard about this promise, he commented, “Good line.” No wonder Cannon called the most recent of his books about the man “The Role of a Lifetime.”

“Ronald Reagan was a success in everything he did,” Cannon told his audience. As this biographer explained it, Reagan’s success came about for three main reasons. First, “Ronald Reagan was very happy with himself.” That quality armed him against criticism and freed him to follow his own instincts.

Secondly, he had a type of intelligence that enabled him to deal superbly with other people. Borrowing from theories about intelligence developed by Harvard School of Education professor Howard Gardner, Cannon admits that Reagan ranked low on logical intelligence but very high on interpersonal and language intelligence. From that flowed his trademark way of communicating – by way of telling stories.

Thirdly, he strictly limited his agenda. In 1980 as he began his presidency, Reagan resolved to accomplish three things: cut taxes, increase military spending, and balance the budget. Even his champion Cannon admits that the third of these objectives could not be accomplished if the first two were. Reagan, however, did not mind settling

for the first two: “I think it will be great if we accelerate the arms race,” Cannon quotes him as saying.

Many other things that interest other presidents did not interest him. Among them was politics, at least the kind of detail that tends to fascinate political junkies. Nor did he much care about whole areas of government. Cannon recalled Reagan meeting his own secretary of Housing and Urban Development and calling him “Mr. Mayor.”  This gaffe was understandable when considering that Reagan, during his eight years of presidency, never once visited HUD.

According to Cannon, Reagan’s ability as a negotiator was far greater than the experts thought or the public believed.  He negotiated skillfully with Gorbachev and the Reykjavik negotiations, regarded by many as a near disaster, were actually another deci-sive step toward arms control. Both men agreed that nuclear weapons should be done away with. “The world is safer today because Reagan was president,” concludes Cannon.

Many more of Reagan’s virtues came in for discussion during this talk at Har-vard’s Kennedy School of Government. Students, most of them undergrads, asked further details about the Reagan presidency. Like the speaker, they showed themselves almost entirely positive about the man and offered hardly any criticisms from the historical record.

Lou Cannon himself did not go so far as to exempt Reagan from all defect, how-ever. He admits that the former president cared too little for detail. He was also an incon-sistent conservative, his biographer says, allowing his pragmatism to blunt his convictions on some issues such as abortion. Reagan was admittedly poor on the AIDS issue. Perhaps most telling, he naively believed  the old saw about a rising economic tide lifting all boats.

The most moving statement made by Lou Cannon came at the beginning of his talk. “I want people to realize that there is still a stigma attached to Alzheimer’s disease,” he told the audience solemnly. “It’s a public health crisis, “ he added as he appealed to the audience for attention to this devastating disease now afflicting the former president.

By way of personal response to the above, let me agree with Cannon completely in his remarks about Alzheimer’s. I, too, feel for President Reagan and his family in the suffering that afflicts them currently. For me, Ronald Reagan’s 1994 letter on the subject of his own illness was moving and amounted to a public service.

But much of the rest of Cannon’s presentation went against my own convictions about Reagan’s presidency. Unlike one of my neighbors who told me recently, “Reagan was my hero,” this man was my least favorite president. I am only too well aware that he was wildly popular with the American public at large. The last poll of his presidency showed 63 percent rating him positively.

One of the prerogatives of later years, however, is to assert one’s own judgment in the face of majority views. No one ever accuses me of being normal anymore.  I continue to hold against Reagan, the president, that many of his policies changed our society for the worse. My biggest complaint is that he espoused economic policies that drove deeper the wedge between rich and poor Americans. And that’s just the beginning of my qua-rrels with him.

Richard Griffin