From 
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StumbleUponWas it the puckish, lopsided grin that he perfected during his Hollywood years? Was it the Irish humor he inherited from his father? Was it the bons mots he kept at the ready to cut his adversaries down to size?
Maybe all of them.
During a week of mourning in June, we recalled how he revived the nation's self-confidence with his gift of optimism. We forgot -- or chose to ignore -- the problems the country faced in the eight years of his Presidency. Memories of a soaring deficit and societal ills were lost in the pageantry of remembrance as the nation celebrated the life of Ronald Reagan.
For that week, all of America, it seemed, was concentrated on the tall, handsome, genial man who brought to the Oval Office a talent for disarming critics and defusing tensions with a favorite anecdote or a story more likely to be directed at himself than at anybody else. How could anyone resist a guy who made himself the butt of his own jokes?
When he ran for re-election, for example, and some suggested he was becoming too old to handle the job, he met the criticism head-on. "I will not make age an issue of this campaign," he announced during a debate with Walter Mondale. "I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience." The audience erupted in laughter, and even Mondale had to smile at Reagan's offhand dismissal of his 12 years in the Senate and four years as Vice President.
His own age became a favorite topic for him, and he particularly loved a quote he attributed to Thomas Jefferson. "He said that we should never judge a President by his age, only by his work. And ever since he told me that, I've stopped worrying. And just to show you how youthful I am, I intend to campaign in all 13 states."
Of his tendency to keep banker's hours, he undercut those who said he was plain lazy. "It's true [that] hard work never killed anybody," he remarked about halfway through his Presidency. "But I figure, why take the chance?"
For a man who didn't think much of Washington, he campaigned hard to get there. And once he arrived, he said of the capital, "You don't have to spend much time in Washington to appreciate the prophetic vision of the man who designed all the streets there. They go in circles." And, "I've learned in Washington that it's the only place where sound travels faster than light." Or, "Where but in Washington would they call the department that's in charge of everything outdoors ... the Department of the Interior?"
But Reagan didn't tell jokes simply to amuse an audience. He used humor to make a point. It was somewhat out of character for him to be as direct as he was when he stood at the Berlin Wall separating Eastern Europe from the West: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
More Reaganesque were the stories he told to describe the rot that was the Soviet Union. There was the one about the Russian Communist official who asked a collective farm worker about the potato crop. " 'Oh, Commissar, if we could put the potatoes in one pile, they would reach the foot of God.' But, replied the commissar, 'this is the Soviet Union. There is no God.' 'That's all right,' the farmer said. 'There are no potatoes.' "
In the same vein, he used to say that a Communist "is someone who reads Marx and Lenin. A non-Communist is someone who understands Marx and Lenin." As for what was wrong with Communist agriculture, he had an answer that was simplicity itself: "Spring, summer, winter and fall."
Ronald Reagan delivered his barbs so gently, with such a winning smile, that when he died, his old adversary Mikhail Gorbachev had nothing but praise. He wrote in The New York Times: "A true leader, a man of his word and an optimist, [Reagan] traveled the journey of his life with dignity. He has earned a place in history and in people's hearts."
Not surprisingly, there was no such tribute from Fidel Castro. Perhaps it was because Reagan loved to tell the story of the Cuban leader being interrupted during one of his endless speeches by a voice in the audience shouting, "Peanuts, popcorn, Cracker Jack!" Reagan said, "Finally, Castro, furious at being interrupted, warned: 'The next time he says that, I'm going to find out who he is and kick him all the way to Miami.' So everyone in the crowd started chanting 'Peanuts, popcorn, Cracker Jack!' "
His humor took on more of an edge when he confronted demonstrators who heckled him when he was governor of California. "The last bunch of pickets," he explained, "were carrying signs that said 'Make love, not war.' The trouble was they didn't look like they were capable of doing either."
Even if he told these stories more than a few times, President Reagan was the first to acknowledge a tendency to repeat himself. "Life not only begins at 40," he said, "so does lumbago and the tendency to tell the same stories over and over again." Like the one he told legislators at a luncheon in which he managed to skewer the audience and himself at the same time: "I've learned that one of the most important rules in politics is poise -- which means looking like an owl after you have behaved like a jackass."
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