Old Man Reagan - 12 October 1984

We have just over three weeks to go to the presidential election, which is always the first Tuesday in November.

And while all the reporters travelling with both camps and all the commentators, and all the pollsters have unravelled and re-ravelled every possible issue that might decide the outcome, suddenly, out of the blue, there comes looming up an issue that was dead and buried four years ago.

A man from Mars who knew nothing about American politics might have guessed at it as an important issue, but that would only have shown his charming ignorance of the whole subject. It is the issue of President Reagan’s age.

Surely its always been there? Well, no it hasn’t. Of course, when Mr Reagan was nominated by the Republicans four years ago, it was a lively theme – here was a man, who, if he were elected, would within a month or so of his inauguration be the oldest president ever to have lived in the White House. In other words, no other president at the very end of his team had been older than this one would be at the beginning of it.

The issue no sooner came up than it gradually, and then quickly, began to disappear. Let me remind you how this happened. Many of you will recall what turned out to be the crucial television debate between President Carter and Mr Reagan. President Carter was then 56, Mr Reagan was 69. But many months before that debate, in the late winter, when the primary elections were getting underway, the Democrats were going around with mock glum faces, making secret giggles and saying, just think, by the end of this man’s first term he’ll be 73.

Mr Reagan’s campaign team – who nobody knew much about at the time except the Californian politicians who knew it was a very smart team indeed – Mr Reagan’s team quickly thought up an artful tactic. They encouraged him, as he barnstormed around the country, to bring up the issue himself, in the form of chuckly little jokes. He’d say something like "Neither George Washington or Thomas Jefferson would have stood for the abuse of government we’ve been seeing in the past 20 years. I know because both of them told me so." Things like that, it was a winning ploy in both senses of the term.

The clincher was the Reagan team's decision, just before the New Hampshire primary, to organise and advertise public celebrations of Mr Reagan’s 69th birthday, when he was seen on television acknowledging well-wishers and cutting a cake with a comically shaking hand. That ploy dissolved the issue in the most effective way that a grave topic can be dissolved, in laughter.

Of course, the Democrats went on mumbling warnings about the enormous strains of the presidency, and what it was likely to do to the health of a man over the turn of his 70s. Anyway, we’d all get a good long look at both men in the coming presidential debates.

What I have called the crucial debate was the one in which Mr Reagan responded to warnings from Mr Carter of what life under Reagan might be. Usually Mr Carter would hint at a statistic which Mr Reagan would then disarm, suggesting Mr Carter had got it all wrong. The telling, the triumphant, phrase accompanied by a regretful, almost a forgiving shrug, was, there you go again, but what was far more powerful, far more reassuring as a sign of Reagan’s health and blitheness, was the sight and sound, the demeanour of Reagan, matched against the demeanour of Carter.

What we saw was Reagan as a natural optimist, against Carter, a cautionary school principal. Reagan the confident purveyor of half-truths, and sometimes of howling blunders, against a Carter insisting that life is real and earnest and painfully complicated. Reagan the broadcaster, who had learned through years of practice in as many as 14 speeches a day on the road as a salesman for General Electric, had learned to be his best self talking to neighbours in a room, against a more thoughtful but verbose lay preacher addressing a congregation. And, here was the rub, a seeming young Reagan against a seeming old Carter.

None of us enquires about a man’s age before deciding how bright or healthy or vigorous he is – we react to his appearance of life and only then ask how old he might be. And those of us who know 60-year-olds doddering in mind or body or both, never got the feeling, watching President Reagan, that he is any special age at all. At least we didn’t get the feeling until last Sunday.

That's when the issue raised its wrinkled head again. The debate, the television debate between the two principal nominees I say principal since there are, for instance, this year, 21 other presidential candidates running on such exotic tickets as those of the Libertarian party, the Populists, the Farm Laborites, the Socialists, the Temperance party, and of course, the Communist party.

The so-called "presidential debate" is by now not only a fixture every four years, it’s become as compulsory a duty as if it had been laid down in the Constitution. It is, of course, a new thing.

I don’t know why I say that those of us who were already mature, or sentient. shall I say in 1960, must realise with a shock that there is a generation already in its mid-twenties, that was imbibing mother’s milk when the first television debate took place between vice president Richard Nixon and Senator John F Kennedy.

What most of us recall from that debate is the appearance of Nixon against the appearance of Kennedy. There were other debates after that first one with the contrasting appearance of the two men, and what their appearance implied was all-powerful was, as the lawyers say, controlling. Before we saw them together, Kennedy was suffering from the age issue in reverse. He was only 43. If he won, he would be, after Theodore Roosevelt, the second-youngest president on the day of his inauguration. Mr Nixon was 47, a fact which now shocks oldsters to recall because Mr Nixon looked on television a generation older than Kennedy.

Mr Nixon at that first and, as it turned out, fateful evening had been campaigning between the Pacific and the east coast. He’d had a very short night, the make-up man had failed to mask what was then known as a five o’clock shadow, but which looked at the time, more like a three-day shadow; in short, Nixon looked like Bela Lugosi, Kennedy looked like a choir boy. Even President Truman had wondered whether the Republic could be safely entrusted to such a youngster and Lyndon Johnson, who had lost the nomination, felt similar misgivings about the safety of America in the hands of what he called, a beardless youth. Well, in the result Kennedy’s Boy Scout appearance worked for him, he was completely unintimidated by the expertise of the vice president, his grasp of facts and policies was at least as firm, so the impression he left was that of a boy prodigy.

Now last Sunday, before the Reagan-Mondale debate, I didn’t read anything by way of commentary, speculation, which even hinted the age issue would rise, and dither from its grave. If we had a preconception about the failings of both men, it was one summed up in a cartoon, two boxed pictures, one showed Reagan asleep at a Cabinet meeting, the other showed Mondale addressing his potential Cabinet, and the Cabinet was asleep. The public image of Mondale, which has bedevilled him from the start, has been that of an earnest speaker, chop-chopping away at his opponent, one strike at a time, with no emotional rise and fall to a long speech.

Everybody knows by now what is most successful about President Reagan – the ease, the intimacy, the emotion rising almost against his own wish, the directness and simplicity, Reagan turned from a B-film actor into an A-film actor of the quality of Gary Cooper.

Well, on Sunday we saw a new Mondale, a pink, courteous and firm debater, gutsy and graceful at the same time. We saw a Reagan as an incumbent president must always be in these debates, on the defensive, he had no script beautifully printed on a wraparound, invisible teleprompter, he was on his feet and on his own. And he was nervous and hesitant. Now, when he pulled out of the bag his old famous line, "There you go again...", Mondale was ready for it like an outfielder ready for the catch that clinches the world series.

Mr Reagan did not know until later that the Mondale team, working on a mock debate, had given Mondale six different ways of reacting to just that line. In the event he leapt in with, "Do you know when you said that, do you know when you said that? President Carter said you are going to cut Medicare and you said, 'Oh no, there you go again' and what did you do right after the election? You went out and tried to cut 20 billions out of Medicare." In fact, "right after the election" was two years later. It didn’t matter on Sunday night.

So the result has been, in the past week, a whole literature from columnists and gerontologists and various medical men, on the quality of physical stamina and mental alertness to be expected from a man, a president, between the ages of 73 and 74. The White House pretended for a day or two to regard the whole thing as frivolous, but on Wednesday it released the latest medical report on the president, backing up its assertion of a robust physique and a sharp mind, with enough statistical details to satisfy the fussiest clinician from alkaline phosphatise through segmented neutrafills, to mean corpuscular haemoglobin. Think of that, he’s in great shape, in a word.

But what was recalled by some of the debate was not the physique, it was Benjamin Franklin’s "By my wrangling digressions, I perceive myself to be growing old". The consensus of the pollsters that Mondale was the overwhelming winner,last Sunday has certainly bought a spark of life to Mondale’s campaign and it will tantalise a larger audience for the next and final debate between the two men.

It probably won’t, in the short run of three weeks, cut significantly into Reagan’s handsome lead. It may, however, stir new misgivings in a lot of people about the image of President Reagan they will be seeing, in the long run, two, three years from now.