A Shared Father
Four years after his death, Ronald Reagan's daughter reflects on how the former president would have felt about the current race for the White House.
Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of my father's death. For anyone who has lost a loved one, those anniversaries are both sad and sweet. The sadness is obvious—you don't stop missing the person who has gone; you don't stop wishing you'd had one more year, one more day. The sweetness sneaks up on you. It comes in the form of memories, some of them long buried. But mostly it comes with the realization that nothing ever dismantled the love between you, even though many things seemed to along the way.
At this time of year in California, the jacaranda trees are blooming. On some streets, there is a canopy of purple above and a blanket of purple blossoms on the pavement below. Jasmine is also blooming; the soft perfume lingers in the air. If I didn't have a calendar, I would still know that this anniversary was upon us. Jacaranda and jasmine will always be the background palette of that time.
As similar as my experience is to anyone else's who has lost a parent, it is also different because my family lived in the public eye. Because the country grieved along with us when my father died. Because tomorrow at the Reagan Library, when my mother and I go to put white roses on my father's grave, there will be more people than usual there, all of them marking the occasion, too.
It seems valuable, I think, in these thorny political times, to remember why so many people mourned so deeply when Ronald Reagan died. It had nothing to do with politics, but rather with the quality of his character. It had to do with his goodness, his dignity—qualities that we as a nation are hungry for. We know we need leadership, but we also know we need compassion. We're sick to death of meanness and sniping, yet we've also grown accustomed to it.
My father would be perplexed by the overabundance of meanness in the political field. And he would be deeply saddened by it. His wish, I think, would be that we as a country turn our backs on the vitriol that has become too commonplace and demand that the "race" for president become a dignified one, as archaic as that may sound these days.
A friend who recently lost her mother said to me, "Death distills everything." It's true. I, like many people, live with regrets that will never lessen—the times I lashed out at my father, refused to appreciate him or consider his feelings, his point of view. I envy those who can say after a parent's death that they don't have remorse—I just don't know too many people like that. But regrets can lead you to a profound awareness of what's important, what's meaningful. Since I do share my father with America and with the world, how he lived his life—not just as a politician, but as a man—has resonance for all of us.
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Member Comments
Posted By: dougom @ 08/20/2008 11:40:39 PM
Comment: Oh Good lord.
"My father would be perplexed by the overabundance of meanness in the political field. And he would be deeply saddened by it." Two words: Lee Atwater.
Compassion? AIDS. Goodness and dignity? Iran-Contra. Reagan sent Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq to give presents and compliments to Saddam Hussein. He vetoed economic sanctions against the South African apartheid regime. He enabled decades of union-busting with his firing of the air-traffic controllers. He presided over a huge increase in economic disparity. And on and on and on.
I realize that the continuing work in canonizing Reagan and All His Works continues unabated, but even by the typical standards of right-wing hagiography, Ms. Davis' article is pretty absurd.
Posted By: Gerald Fnord @ 08/20/2008 7:33:54 PM
Comment: I loved my father, but he had his faults. I sympathise with Ms Davis, but is she really talking about the man who publicly hoped for food poisoning in the soup kitchens set up by the Hearsts in an attempt to meet their daughter's kidnappers' demands?; I hope she's not remembering fondly that part of the man who, though he didn't want to feel like he was a racist, dined out on the Cadillac-driving "welfare queen" who might have existed in a couple instances, but who was completely unrepresentative of women on welfare---but a very convenient way of saying "black" without really saying it. This was a man who announced his presidential run of 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, with a speech replete with the rhetoric of "states' rights" (important, but often a code word for segregation) but nary a mention of the murder of good men for the crime of registering black people to vote which was perpetrated not ten miles from where he was speaking?
Perhaps this, and the famous "bloodbath" comment, were the fringes of his personality. Perhaps he was not a mean or bigoted man...but he profited from the politics of bigotry and meanness.---his apparent niceness was often a matter of having others around more suited to the nasty stuff. When you've nurtured the likes of Ailes and Atwater , why bother doing it yourself?
Still, he is dead, and I gather that he was a good father to you, and I hope you will get some measure of solace as you remember what was best about him.
Posted By: Gerald Fnord @ 08/20/2008 7:32:44 PM
Comment: I loved my father, but he had his faults. I sympathise with Ms Davis, but is she really talking about the man who publicly hoped for food poisoning in the soup kitchens set up by the Hearsts in an attempt to meet their daughter's kidnappers' demands?; I hope she's not remembering fondly that part of the man who, though he didn't want to feel like he was a racist, dined out on the Cadillac-driving "welfare queen" who might have existed in a couple instances, but who was completely unrepresentative of women on welfare---but a very convenient way of saying "black" without really saying it. This was a man who announced his presidential run of 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, with a speech replete with the rhetoric of "states' rights" (important, but often a code word for segregation) but nary a mention of the murder of good men for the crime of registering black people to vote which was perpetrated not ten miles from where he was speaking?
Perhaps this, and the famous "bloodbath" comment, were the fringes of his personality. Perhaps he was not a mean or bigoted man...but he profited from the politics of bigotry and meanness.---his apparent niceness was often a matter of having others around more suited to the nasty stuff. When you've nurtured the likes of Ailes and Atwater , why bother doing it yourself?
Still, he is dead, and I gather that he was a good father to you, and I hope you will get some measure of solace as you remember what was best about him.