California corporate gift idea

IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND the allure of President Ronald Reagan, the best place to go is the Presidential Library No, not the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, where the president is buried. Sure, you can go to the library (as hundreds of thousands have), itself a kind of shining city on the hill, completed now with the president's own grave. If a grave site can seem shiny and optimistic and death defying, then this one does, its curved limestone wall etched with Reagan's homiletic words about the goodness of man.

The entire library is like that. In feeling, it is more Knott's Berry Farm than a library (all the archival material is down below and inaccessible to the public). There is one cozy stage set after another: an oldfangled kitchen (the kind that was in his boyhood home) and an old style radio studio (like the one he used in his early announcing days), even a booth from Chasen's, the famed West Hollywood restaurant, circa 1952, the year Ronnie and Nancy wed. And pretty pictures everywhere of the square jawed Gipper and his well-dressed gal and, on display, the clothes they wore here, there, and everywhere. It all has the same impenetrably cheery look, as if the whole place were exhaling a kind of self satisfied, all-American "aw shucks, didn't we have fun." There is scarcely a dark cloud, not a moment of introspection, not a scintilla of self-doubt or self-scrutiny That's why, if you want some insight into the 40th president of the United States--and how and why he recaptured the country's attention during his transcontinental funeral march--the place to go is not the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library but the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda. The comparison is striking, revelatory, even wrenching.

Not that the Nixon Library isn't itself hopeful. Through its displays and memorabilia it lays out the narrative of a small-town Southern California kid who made good, who struggled up and out of his narrow, rural, Christian-inflected boyhood, out, in fact, of the small, cramped farmhouse that is right here" on the grounds and into the wider, more sophisticated world, going the ultimate distance to the White I louse on pure grit and grasp. This was not an innately charming or physically blessed boy or man. Not that any of that is said in so many words. As is the wont of such libraries, the tale of the rise (and fall) of Richard Nixon tries to be upbeat. But the cumulative images tell the story. Walking through the library is like walking through a Greek tragedy: a petulant, fatally flawed hero who rose as high as you can rise and then fell as hard as you can fall. Oh no, this was hardly the trajectory of Ronald Wilson Reagan, bathed in a golden glow as he made his way in the reverse direction, from his small town in the heartland to (mid-level) Hollywood stardom and into the arms of his starlet-turned-wife, Nancy, and of the rich local burghers (his so-called Kitchen Cabinet: Justin Dart, Alfred Bloomingdale, Holmes Tuttle, Charles Wick, among others) who would help pay and pave his way into political office. If Reagan had to get here to launch himself, Nixon had to get out of here. He didn't have a telegenic bone in his body. You just have to watch again that painful tape of his 1960 presidential debate with John F. Kennedy (it's at the library), Kennedy all charming and suave and handsome, Nixon sweaty and frowny and ill at ease. Politics aside, Ronald Reagan would be the first president to evoke John F. Kennedy in the public imagination, almost two decades after Dallas.

In the beginning, of course, Ronald Reagan was more of a Kennedyesque liberal than not. That's another interesting part of the tale, his optimistic--or is it opportunistic? or are they the same?--switch from being a card carrying Hollywood liberal to being an impassioned corporate sponsored conservative. My parents, both actors, socialized with the newlywed Reagans in the late '40s and early '50s and remember his good-natured and vociferous Democratness. When he switched, he was equally vociferous on the new side, giving a barnstormer of a speech in 1964 in praise of Barry Goldwater. It is fair to say that the mind of the convert--he who swings sharply from one side to the other--does not tend to he a nuanced one. It is a box to be filled with fervor, this kind, that kind, this side, that side, so that there was always about Reagan a sturdy, self-convinced simpleness, a rightness that did not brook shadings. Communism is bad; it has to go. Big government is bad; it has to go. Taxes are bad; they have to go. It's morning in America. That his conservatism, when it came, came in a sunny Southern California wrapper helped, too. It was not the hectoring, biblically fraught, neocon conservatism of many of his Republican heirs, including the ones currently dominating the White House. No question, Ronald Reagan was pure Southern California, in the way people are who come here with big dreams and get them requited (as opposed to all the other poor slobs who come here toting schemes and dreams of fame and fortune that go belly-up). Another chance, a new beginning, a new career, heck, a whole new ideology. Why not? Nixon, on the other hand, was the homegrown grunt who had to claw his way up and out, a man who took on complexity as he went--defeats and scars and resentments--while Reagan always seemed simpler and simpler, a man who slept well and cleared brush and was blissfully untroubled by his own contradictions, if he even saw them as such: an exemplar of family values who had opaque, often estranged relations with his own children (of whom there are almost no pictures in his library), a conservative who nearly tripled the national debt, a land lover who opened public land to developers. For shame! Oh no. Not if you're Ronald Reagan. He was shame free, which is what made him blame free, or Teflon, as he was famously called. Things slipped off him because he didn't let them in, didn't take them on. What? Who me? Even the arms-for-hostages Iran-Contra mess just seemed to slide off him, leaving a handful of slippery underlings to go a few rounds with Congress.

We like presidents who tell us we're the unalloyed good guys. We are weaned, all of us, on that idea of American goodness, uniqueness, the gift of our beginning, our bounty. We are all susceptible to that idea on some deep, almost preconscious level. We fight always the knowledge of our transgressions against that goodness--slavery, for example; slaughtering the Indians, for example--and the shame and sadness that knowledge brings, a shame reruffled by numbers of things, most recently those disgusting pictures from Abu Ghraib. We want someone to get us back to the fuzzy-warm feelings of that beginning, and nobody did that better than Ronald Reagan. There will be "morning in America." There will be "bright dawns ahead." The word choices were perfect: morning, dawns. We can begin again. Just follow me. George W. Bush tries, of course; he gets it, ingratiating himself into the Reagan funeral extravaganza as deeply yet delicately as possible, but you can hear the gears shifting in Bush's optimism. He has none of the former president's natural eloquence or ease, giving us, instead of misty-eyed, mellifluous phrases, patriot-bravado and tense cliches.

So we buried the 40th president with lavish attention in accord with the 130 pages of detailed plans the Reagans themselves had drafted. It was somber and big and stately and over-the-top, with calculated Kennedy funeral references: a grieving widow leaning her cheek on a flag-draped coffin, marching her frail, determined self across the country and back again, the custodian of the coffin and the legend. This was no beautiful young widow This was a woman in her eighties--still Bel Air chic with her black dresses and big glasses and well-coiffed hair. The Reagans lived out their post-White House lives in an expensive Westside enclave, in a house bought for them by rich friends where he slid further into never-never land with Alzheimer's. She is admired for her long, painful vigil and her fight for stem-cell research and her enduring attention to her husband's legacy. If nothing else, the library, where she finally brought him to rest, is a testament to a long, exclusive love affair. The once-distanced children were there in Simi Valley as the sun set. In that shining California moment, his reconstituted family in attendance--along with world leaders and old Hollywood pals--Reagan's journey came to an end. The obits were written, hundreds of them, but almost all of them carried the strange sense that no one--maybe not even the treasured wife--had really known this man at his core, the sense that you can't help carrying away from his sunny, sunny library.