Paul Slansky - The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American 80s

"What kind of governor would you be?"

"I don't know. I've never played a governor."

--Ronald Reagan answering a reporter's query during his 1966 campaign for the California statehouse

Spoiler alert! I was not a Reagan fan.

When I was a kid, Ronald Reagan meant nothing to me. My parents watched The Dinah Shore Chevy Hour on Sundays at 9pm so I never saw him hosting and shilling on G.E. Theater , nor did I ever see any of his movies (not even his chimp epic Bedtime for Bonzo ). Growing up in New York, Reagan's governorship of California wasn't something I was particularly conscious of, though whatever I did see or hear of him made me pretty sure he wasn't my guy. (In the late '60s, that pomaded pompadour really said it all.) Besides, Richard M. Nixon whose dark essence I'd been fascinated by since having been unnerved by his countenance during that first debate with JFK was running for President, and then he was President, and keeping tabs on him took up pretty much all the time I could afford to devote to politics.

Reagan didn't really break through for me until 1970, when I was in college. Having taken office with a clear animus toward the youth movement, he was asked a question about campus protesters and responded with the witless movie-tough-guy remark, "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement." What, I thought, an asshole . (The next month, the bloodbath occurred at Kent State in Ohio.)

Four years later he was back on my radar screen. Those were the days when, if you can even imagine it, the crazed radicals were on the left, and their anti-establishment protests occasionally took illegal forms. One such blow against the empire was the kidnapping of newspaper heiress and UC Berkeley student Patty Hearst by a motley crew of idealists and criminals calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. Among their ransom demands was the delivery of millions of dollars worth of food to the poor. Shining a klieg light on his moral obtuseness, Governor Reagan observed, "It's just too bad we can't have an epidemic of botulism."

That was it for me. Anyone who could say something so stupid so not just politically but humanly incorrect was unredeemable to me, inconceivable as a political leader worthy of any respect. Idiotically, I assumed that someone like that could never win the presidency an assumption I held right up until a little past 8pm on Election Night 1980.

The Reagan years were not fun for those of us who noticed that the nation's history was being fictionalized as it occurred. A depressingly large number of Americans really didn't want to hear about it. An actor and a bad actor at that was playing the President, and the media "watchdogs" were all too happy to become bit players in the hit TV show his presidency became. Illusion was embraced as reality.

I did not find the President's ignorance charming. I was appalled by his laziness and repelled by his callousness toward the less fortunate, all the more so because of his pious claims of compassion. I was unwarmed by his genial head-waggling, unreassured by his stern frowns of manly purpose, uncheered by his hearty waves as he strolled to and from his helicopters with the blades whirring all the while to insure that he couldn't hear or have to answer reporters' questions.

His smooth purr did not soothe me. His nostalgic fables about an America that never was did not inspire me. And his canned one-liners, perversely celebrated as "wit" ("It's just the 31 st anniversary of my 39 th birthday") definitely did not amuse me.

Tens of millions of voters, humbled by their recent presidential preferences, were thrilled to have elected someone who they thought at least looked the part, but all I could see was the emptiness of his suit. This President was a pitchman who seemed not to exist when the camera light was off, a front man so personally invisible that he'd actually called his autobiography Where's the Rest of Me? , an aging ham who'd spent way too much of his time watching or at least thinking about his old movies. President Norman Desmond.

Astonished that so few seemed to share my vision, I was compelled to document the surreality. Armed with the tools of the pre-Internet era scissors, file folders, yellow highlight pens and VCRs I began gathering the material for what would become this book. Publishers were not exactly lining up. "He's too popular, no one will buy it." "What if he's not re-elected?" "What if he dies?" Only by disguising it as a history of the '80s and including other politicians, public figures and pop culture icons did I manage to get a book deal.

The Clothes Have No Emperor has been out of print for two decades, but the 61st anniversary of Reagan's 39 th birthday and the inevitable attendant hoopla about his ostensible greatness provides the perfect occasion to bring it back and remind those who lived through it, and inform those who didn't, of how truly detrimental his presidency was, and how so much of what's wrong with the country today can be traced to his administration.

PROLOGUE

At 10:10 a.m. on Election Day 1980, Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, arrive at their Pacific Palisades, California polling place. Reporters shout questions at the candidate, who smiles and says, "I can't answer till I get on my mark." Though his victory seems likely, he refuses to predict it. "You know me," he says, placing himself squarely on the taped cross showing where he's supposed to stand. "I'm too superstitious to answer anything like that." His wife nudges him and quietly says, "Cautiously optimistic." Reagan takes his cue. "Yes," he says, "I'm cautiously optimistic."