Political incivility
All state funerals are about the power of pageantry to bridge the gap between leadership and legacy. President Ronald Reagan's long goodbye was also testament to the gulf between memory and reality in American public life.
Despite contrary pronouncements last week, political civility in the United States did not expire after the 40th president left office; it died while he still served. The courtly man in the White House did not deliver the death blow to a culture that allowed him and House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. to do battle by day and to share stories by night. Reagan's acolytes did.
The polarization that so characterizes today's political climate can trace its roots to the guerrilla tactics of fevered Republicans who used Reagan's conservative mandate to launch an assault on bipartisanship from which this nation has never recovered.
Newt Gingrich was a brash young congressman from Georgia when he and Vin Weber of Minnesota and Robert Walker of Pennsylvania hijacked the House from GOP minority leader Robert Michel, who fought hard for his party on weekdays but played golf with O'Neill on weekends. By contrast, Gingrich's crowd took no prisoners. It was not enough to challenge an opponent's politics; it was imperative to question his motives and impugn his integrity.
You could hear that divisive legacy on talk radio in Boston yesterday from right-wing commentators who questioned former President Bill Clinton's right to be in the National Cathedral to honor a hero of ''our America."
It was during the administration of Ronald Reagan that being a liberal became equated with being unpatriotic. It was then that no invective became too strong to direct at a political opponent. In 1982, Congressman John LeBoutillier, a 27-year-old freshman representative from Long Island, launched his re-election campaign with a nasty personal assault on O'Neill, whom his campaign literature described as ''big, fat and out of control, just like the federal government."
What LeBoutillier did not understand is that Reagan and O'Neill shared a mutual, if sometimes grudging, respect. The worst the Speaker had to say about the President was the worst thing the North Cambridge native could say about anyone: that he had forgotten where he came from. The clarity of each man's conviction -- O'Neill's in the responsibility of the government to lift up the dispossessed, Reagan's in the need to dismantle the welfare state -- made theirs a historic clash. It was not a venomous one.
Democrats rallied to the Speaker's defense and LeBoutillier lost his seat, but Washington was forever changed. I watched in amazement from the House press gallery in those years as fistfights nearly erupted on the floor and Republicans staged a walkout against what Gingrich called O'Neill's political ''thuggery." The hard currency in Washington was no longer the kind of compromise that allowed Reagan to quietly help O'Neill secure funding for The Big Dig. The talk turned to gridlock and moderates of both parties, including New Hampshire Republican Senator Warren Rudman and New Jersey Democrat Bill Bradley, left Capitol Hill, exasperated.
The Great Man theory of history is so seductive because it is so simple. Mythic figures are easier to grasp than historical currents. But Reagan did not end Cold War anymore than O'Neill saved Social Security. They shared the stage with many others, not least of all the people of the Eastern bloc who waged their own fight for freedom and the working men and women of America who refused to be betrayed in their old age.
Ronald Reagan articulated a vision of small government and military might that no Democrat has been able to supplant. That his is not a universally admired legacy speaks to the vigor of a nation founded on the value of competing ideas. If there is to be a monument to Ronald Reagan, we could do worse than commit ourselves to the restoration of civil political discourse.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com 