Dear Mr. President,
Happy Birthday.
What is it like to be you these days? What do you dream about at night? Do you wonder why the tall men in dark suits constantly surround you? Are there moments over breakfast when you briefly recognize the slender lady with the sweet gaze?
Do you have any idea what happened to the small man from Arkansas who sat in your old office? Perhaps it is good that he wasn’t removed but allowed to finish two terms as you did. It’s important to keep small men around to remind us on a daily basis how large you were.
We can’t imagine you ushering an intern into the back room.
How your enemies hated you. How often they lied about you. There were my friends in junior high who said you would blow up the world, teachers in high school who said you were just an actor, professors in college who said your faith was phony, fabricated to win the votes of the moralists.
My journey with you began in 1976. I was eight years old with a transistor radio at my ear, hearing the news of your loss to Gerald Ford in the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. I was only eight, but I sensed there was something different about you. I didn’t know much about politics, just that you were somebody I could trust. I didn’t know what tax cuts were, just that they were good. I certainly didn’t know what an abortion was, but you said it was bad and I believed you.
I was sure that I’d never get to see more of you than those autographs that came with those letters you sent to me, but years later, after you’d served your two terms as president, I finally did. Maybe it was a slow day or maybe my story – about breaking federal election law to vote for you with my Dad’s absentee ballot when I was twelve – impressed your staff enough to let me in.
As I walked into your office, I noticed that your assistant was speaking to you in an odd tone, the way a mother speaks to a child, gently reassuring. You were shorter than I expected. The earth is slowly but surely pulling you closer to it, and one day very soon it will fold you into its bosom and we will grieve.
We talked, but you seemed vacant. I slipped an arm around you as we took pictures and I felt extra padding around your waist, the kind that slowly accumulates when a person is denied his favorite activities – like riding horses and chopping wood – for more Republican ones like playing golf and walking in the park.
As I was ushered to the door, I felt a twinge of regret – my time with you was already over and we hadn’t really connected. You were polite but in a fog. I tried one more time, with the only thing I knew to do: say the words that I heard a million times from my mother as you did from yours.
“We all love you very much, Mr. President,” I ventured, as I shook your hand for the last time. Immediately and to my surprise you came to life! Your eyes danced and sparkled, your face broke into a wide grin, and you winked at me. I had seen that grin before, those eyes dance before. Maybe it was in the debate with the small man from Plains when you said “There you go again,” or the debate with the small man from Minnesota when you promised not to take advantage of his youth and inexperience, or the many times you told the small man from Moscow to trust but verify.
As the awful disease slowly pulls you from us, do you have moments when you hear the voice of God? What do you hear Him say? Do you remember the letter you wrote to the old Methodist minister who had come to doubt his own faith and for some reason thought you, the governor of California at the time, could set him straight? He was right, of course, for you did. Imagine – the governor of California teaching a Methodist minister about theology.
How difficult it must be to be the son of a big man – especially one who shares the same name. It must be as difficult as it would be easy to be the namesake of small men. It’s easy enough to be Jesse Jackson Jr. – just have personal integrity and hold to your convictions. If your last name is Bush and your first name George, it’s as easy as talking in complete sentences, knowing and being able to articulate why you believe what you believe, and remembering that campaign pledges are sacred promises to the people. But how does one go about being Ronald Reagan Jr.?
Nathan Sharansky tells the story of how your Evil Empire speech gave courage to the dissidents rotting in Soviet jails – that they tapped out messages to one another and spread the word among the disheartened that one big man in Washington believed in them and refused to accept the world as it was.
And now it is you locked up in the prison of your own mind. But in the not-too-distant future it will be over, Mr. President, for you will soon, to borrow yours and the poet’s words, slip the surly bonds of earth and touch the face of God. We will grieve. But you will be welcomed.
At your farewell service in the Rotunda dozens of small men and women will put on their game faces and do their best to pretend that they had anything but contempt for you while you were alive and active.
The small man from Arkansas will bite his bottom lip and fight back a crocodile tear. The small man from Kennebunkport – who was elected president only because of his association with you but who didn’t study you well enough to know that a promise means more than merely saying “read my lips” – will be there.
There will be a few friends there, but mostly it will be honored members of an establishment that barely concealed its contempt for you. Most of your true friends will find themselves without the proper credentials to get in. They will be in the heartland that gave you to the world. In Dixon, Tampico, Des Moines, St. Paul, Tuscaloosa, and La Mirada.
As another small man observed on the day he left your office in disgrace nearly thirty years ago, the French have a better word for such partings – au revoir, we’ll see you again…on the other side.
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