This is a reflective time of year for me. My father, Ronald Reagan, died in June 2004, and each year I let myself drift into whatever realm my thoughts and memories lead me to. Sometimes it’s about who he was as a father — magical when I was a small child, but elusive and a bit awkward as I grew up.
This year I have found myself reflecting on who he was as America’s parent — not in a political framework, but as a human being. I’ve thought about how baffled he would be at the language and the statements that bellow out of the current White House. I can imagine his eyes darkening, his head bowing in sadness when the current president warned on social media that a “civilization will die tonight,” referring to bombings in Iran. My father would wince at talk of overtaking other nations and claiming them as part of America — that “51st state” trope we hear in reference to Canada or Venezuela, or the rumblings of seizing Greenland. I can see him recoiling from the profanities that are tossed out, which he might have used in private but would never allow to cross into his role as leader of the free world.
I’ve thought about his phone call to Margaret Thatcher in 1983, after he ordered an attack on Grenada, a former British colony, without first contacting her. The audio of the phone call is public now, and the exchange shows mutual respect, admiration and adherence to international norms on both their parts. My father began the call by saying, “If I were there, Margaret, I’d throw my hat in the door before I came in.” He explained to her the phone call he got at 3 in the morning, the urgency of the situation and the awareness that somewhere in our government there was a “loose source, a leak.” Hence the secrecy of the mission. Thatcher accepted his apology, called him Ron and all was forgiven.
Obviously, a long list of presidents have adhered to civil discourse with other world leaders and have never publicly descended into profanities and threats. As a child, I listened to President Kennedy and felt that I was listening to someone who I was meant to see as a role model, a person I needed to try to emulate.
It’s hard now to find an elected official who is worthy of being emulated. An influential way of thought within the Trump administration considers empathy to be a “sin.” And as Conan O’Brien observed in his graduation speech at Harvard last month, “We are living through a period of extreme narcissism.” These attitudes are contagious. If unkindness, lack of empathy, even cruelty, abound at the highest levels, they too easily seep into the rest of our culture. It takes some determination to remember that there is a different way, that we can coexist respectfully and use empathy as our watermark.
So now, at the edge of summer, the season when my father left this world, my thoughts go to him. I remember going into the Oval Office the day after he was inaugurated and seeing how quietly reverential he was about that space and the history that loomed there. Many years later, I saw the sadness in Mikhail Gorbachev’s eyes when he came to my father’s service in Washington. Brian Mulroney’s eyes brimmed with tears as he eulogized him, and a frail and not-well Thatcher made the trip across the Atlantic to honor her friend. These former leaders of the Soviet Union, Canada and England had shared the world stage with my father, who like them had operated with dignity and respect for one another.
If we don’t remember how world leaders have behaved in the past, how they are supposed to behave, if we just accept that dignity and civility are now extinct, we’ll find ourselves in a wasteland from which we can’t escape. We’ll be changed forever, not necessarily by the language tumbling out of the White House, but by our normalization of it. Remembering that this is not who we are supposed to be — that America’s dignity may have been sidelined but can still be reclaimed — is our lifeline. It’s how we pull ourselves back to who we are supposed to be.
Patti Davis is the author of “Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter About Family, Memory and the America We Once Knew.”
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