The Role Of A Lifetime

Hard work or being compulsive is something you may learn from family. My father has made 90 films. He did four to five a year when I was growing up. I missed him, and he was guilt-ridden for not being around. Today he’s 90 years old, having just published his ninth book. I am filled with love and admiration for what he’s accomplished. Not just in his career but in the way he has conducted himself in the third act of his life.

I’m going to be 63 this month. I’ve been married for seven years to an extraordinary woman 25 years younger than me, actress Catherine Zeta-Jones. We have two children, a daughter, 4, and a son, 7. To say my priorities have changed would be a gross understatement! My life is centered around my family’s schedule. Our daughter, Carys, just started kindergarten and our son, Dylan, began the second grade last week. They are at a precious age, and I don’t want to miss a minute of it. Like all parents, I labor to keep them on schedule, and try to teach them how to think positively and to work through daily life. I also strive to be sure they have fun. Carys is at the stage when she’s discovered “dress-up”: purses, high heels—anything pink. Dylan is a big climber—rocks, mountains and trees. He loves the outdoors. I read with my kids every night. That has become a favorite for me.

We’ve moved to the island of Bermuda, where I spent a lot of time as a kid (my mother is Bermudian and still has a large family there). I adjust my schedule to my wife’s, since she is in the prime of her career. The school year tells us when we are going to travel. The kids know what Mommy does for a living, but they have never seen Daddy’s movies (they’re too young), so Mommy makes movies and Daddy makes pancakes! I don’t really cook, but I am the takeout and home-delivery expert. I enjoy it. It’s all given me great satisfaction. Don’t get me wrong. I still go to work, but now only on projects I really care about. I have a new movie coming out called “King of California.” We filmed it in only 31 days, not like some of the 90-day shooting schedules of the past.

I play a father who reconciles with his 17-year-old daughter, played by Evan Rachel Wood. I understood and identified with the role. My oldest son from my first marriage, Cameron, who is 28, did not benefit from my new priorities. He was shortchanged. Nevertheless he understands now, and he knows how much I love him.

I love being home. That feeling is based on a good marriage and having the time to spend with the kids. Age gives you experience to nurture a relationship. Not long ago, my father gave me some great advice. He loves giving advice now. He pointed toward Catherine and said, “When it’s all over, all you really have is your wife. You can dote on your kids all you want, but they’re going to grow up and leave you someday. Then it will be just the two of you.” Many times people make more of an effort toward strangers than the people closest to them.

There is so much to learn in raising a family. So where are you going to find out how to do it, especially if you didn’t benefit from proper role models? When I went to college at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the 1960s, you could graduate with a degree in home economics. It was eventually disbanded largely due to politics and the power of the women’s movement. I’m happy to see that “home ec” is currently being revived at some colleges.

I’ve reached an age when I start getting those questions—What do you want for your children? What do you see as your legacy? Oh, oh, mortality! I have good role models in my father and mother. Basically, you want to try to leave this earth having given more to it than having taken away. That makes you a good citizen of the planet. If I can pass this on from generation to generation, that’s as close to immortality as I can hope to get.

title: “The Role Of A Lifetime” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-28” author: “Betty Ruesga”

It was enough to send Republicans dancing in the streets. Bob Dole brought out the old, hilarious chart of all the different offices and agencies that would have been created if the Clintons had passed their health-care plan. Dole also started shouting ““liberal, liberal, liberal’’ in his now patented triplicate fashion. Then, as has often been the case these past two years, the gods controlling the Whitewater mess weighed in: a new, and rather damning, report from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s inspector general put the First Lady neck-deep in a sham real-estate transaction called Castle Grande, back when she was practicing law in Little Rock. She has said she doesn’t recall the work, but no one really believes her. While it’s unlikely we’ll ever see Hillary Rodham Clinton doing a Susan McDougal turn–that is, being led from an Arkansas courthouse in shackles–it is also unlikely that we’ll hear anything more about her taking charge of welfare reform. And that is a shame. Because she’d be very good at it.

First of all, let’s get the president off the hook. No one person can ““take charge’’ of welfare reform. It’s been sent back to the states. There will be 50 separate programs; some good, some not so good. Indeed, there is a legitimate fear that most won’t be so good–that the initial battle will involve public-employees unions and large private companies (like Lockheed and Ross Perot’s Electronic Data Systems) fighting over contracts to determine who is eligible for welfare under the new law. Most of the local money and energy could go into ““eligibility’’ hearings, rather than the alleviation of poverty. It’s safe to assume that no publicly employed bureaucrat will lose his or her job as a result of welfare reform–in fact, the number of paper shufflers will probably increase. On the other hand, the small, private and charitable programs that actually try to move welfare recipients toward work (or, failing that, teach them to care adequately for their children) may find their public funding sources dry up. And that is where the First Lady should come in.

Hillary Clinton may be many things, but she is not stupid. The health-care fiasco had to be a terrible personal embarrassment; one would hope she learned something from it–at the very least, a certain humility about the limits of top-down policymaking. It’s been a while since she’s publicly rhapsodized about the wonderful (and slowly sinking) European health and welfare gargantuas. Instead, she has quietly devoted much of her time to studying and celebrating small, private and charitable programs that are working to alleviate poverty around the world. In the spring of 1995, I spent 10 days watching her do it in South Asia, and not one of the projects she visited was government-run. Along the way, I asked the directors of these efforts–including Mohammed Yunus, whose Grameen Bank, a micro-loan program for women, has spread to 33 countries and is considered the world’s most successful anti-poverty program–if they thought such things could be government-run. No way, most said. The state bureaucracies were too slow, inflexible, corrupt. Yunus simply laughed at the thought.

This is something the world is slowly learning. The best anti-poverty programs are idiosyncratic. They are usually run by inspirational figures, often religious ones. Most of them aren’t as supple as Grameen. ““They can’t be expanded or replicated,’’ says John Clark, who keeps track of these things for the World Bank. But they can be publicly supported. And this might prove a significant philosophical point of agreement, the place where Hillary Clinton finds common ground with concerned Republicans like William Bennett, Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana and, yes, even Newt Gingrich: the role of government shouldn’t be to actually run anti-poverty programs, but to subsidize those who do them well–to subsidize inspiration.

In New Delhi I asked the First Lady a rather edgy, but not inappropriate, question: why was she so enthusiastic about non-governmental programs in the rest of the world, and so wedded to bureaucratic solutions back home? Well, she said, there were good and bad nongovernmental programs. Exactly so. And as welfare reform moves forward, there needs to be a concerted effort to make sure that money finds its way to the good ones, that states don’t merely fund the paper-shuffling bureaucrats. Someone has to lead a national celebration of the people and ideas actually helping to rescue desperate lives in poor neighborhoods. The president is right: this shouldn’t be a formal role. And he’s right, too, about who could fill it.

title: “The Role Of A Lifetime” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-11” author: “Clarence Smith”

Thompson leaves little to chance. He has played a submarine captain in the movies, won re-election to the U.S. Senate and may be a formidable presidential candidate in 2000. But Thompson, a divorced 54-year-old, is perhaps best understood as a lawyer. He likes to be in control, and he hates surprises. That’s why he has been grinding lately. Next month he will begin chairing hearings into alleged Democratic campaign-finance abuses. ““He’s absolutely focused. He’s stopped dating. He’s consumed,’’ says Deborah Steelman, a former adviser to George Bush. Thompson has been studying great congressional inquisitions, including the Watergate hearings, at which he made his name by counseling the then senator Howard Baker to ask, ““What did the president know, and when did he know it?''

A veteran litigator with White House ambitions running an inquiry into President Clinton’s 1996 campaign is bad news for the Democrats. ““Indogate’’ is growing again. Last week there were new documents showing how the president squeezed big contributors. It is illegal to use government buildings to raise campaign cash, but between January 1995 and August 1996 the White House held 103 ““coffees’’ attended by either Clinton or Al Gore or their wives. Guests at these affairs contributed millions to the Democrats. White House officials insist they were engaging in ““community outreach,’’ not selling access. But top party officials, including Democratic finance chairman Marvin Rosen, were often in attendance. Rosen was there last May 13, for instance, when Clinton, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Comptroller of the Currency Eugene Ludwig hosted a dozen of the country’s top bankers–a group that kicked in $418,000 to the party coffers.

Still, Thompson is right not to invite comparisons between his hearings and the Nixon era. ““In Watergate, we had a smoking gun,’’ he says. A more immediate problem may be a lack of key witnesses. At the Watergate hearings White House counsel John Dean was able to work out a deal with the prosecutors that allowed him to speak freely about the ““cancer on the presidency’’ without fear of further criminal prosecution. Thompson may not be able to make such an arrangement; the Justice Department, which is beginning its own criminal probe, will surely oppose any grant of immunity.

Thompson–and everyone else–would especially like to hear testimony from Webster Hubbell and Bruce Lindsey. Hubbell is the former associate attorney general and Hillary Clinton law partner who is serving time for defrauding his clients. He remains a prime target of special prosecutor Kenneth Starr. After Hubbell got in legal trouble in 1994, he received a six-figure retainer from the Lippo Group, the Indonesian bank that also made major contributions to the Clinton campaign. Starr would like to know if those ““fees,’’ as Hubbell characterizes them, were really hush money. Someone who might know is Bruce Lindsey, Clinton’s close aide and keeper of his Arkansas secrets. Until recently the White House insisted that nobody there knew that Lippo had hired Hubbell. But it was revealed last week that Lindsey had been aware of the Lippo-Hubbell deal as far back as 1994. Lindsey denied any wrongdoing.

Thompson will not speculate about Hubbell, Lindsey or any other aspect of the case. He knows that New York Sen. Al D’Amato hyped the Senate Whitewater hearings and now stands at a 33 percent approval rating in his state. But Thompson is a different figure from the strident D’Amato. Thompson is hard to pin down politically. He refuses to announce a clear position on abortion (though he consistently votes pro-life). Some say that Thompson, who began taking movie roles (““The Hunt for Red October,’’ ““In the Line of Fire’’) as a hobby, is an actor off the screen as well as on. But Thompson shrugs his 6-foot-5 frame and says, ““I’ve never had an acting lesson.’’ Says political consultant Alex Castellanos: ““He is not an actor. He just plays Fred.’’ That’s precisely what the White House is worried about.

title: “The Role Of A Lifetime” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-14” author: “Timothy Gregory”

And so he was, happily and confirmedly, after an Inauguration Day that had realigned the American political landscape with a suddenness unmatched since Franklin Roosevelt’s accession to power in 1933. Unlike his predecessors, he had seen no reason to take the oath of office behind the Capitol, in the shade, overlooking a dull parking lot. Instead, he staged the ceremony on the great building’s front terrace, where he could feel the sun on his face (the gray sky broke and sent down a shaft of light as he began to speak). He directed his oratory down the sweep of its steps, the slope of its park, reverberantly onward and outward, through loudspeakers and monitors and transistors, along the expanding angles of Pennsylvania and Maryland Avenues and the grand axis of the Mall, crowded with thirty-two thousand people, across the Potomac and over the Blue Ridge Mountains, west, west, west.

The first Reagan Inaugural was not so much an address to posterity as a conversation with ordinary Americans who could not afford to attend the most expensive exercises in presidential history. (The cost of hiring obligatory morning dress–pearl-gray vest, silk tie, and cutaway coat–acted as a deterrent to the clerks and cabbies whom Reagan addressed in his speech.) But they could listen, and they could look at him towering over his drained little predecessor, noting above all the way that he faced. After all the self-doubt of the Seventies, Ronald Reagan gave his back to Islam and Communism and Malaise, and just about burst the tube of every television set in the country with his message that Independence was redeclared.

What did he see that night in the mirror of the Washington Hilton Hotel holding room, just before he turned to face his family and clicked his newly presidential heels? More to the point, what did the mirror see?

A man just about to turn seventy, one inch taller than six feet, weighing about a hundred and eighty-five pounds stripped, broad as a surfboard and almost as hard, superbly balanced, glowing with health and handsome enough for a second career in the movies. Hair so dense and fine as to amount to a Marvel Comics helmet, slicked with Brylcreem and water to a blue-black sheen, diffusing any hint of gray. Teeth white, gums like a boy’s (dentists even praise the clarity of his saliva), breath sweet, fingernails naturally shiny, unribbed, lucent as seashells. No fidgety mannerisms; an air of always being comfortable in his clothes. Rather fewer wrinkles, especially about the jowls, than photographers remember seeing a few years ago. Absolutely no makeup–just a clear and sanguineous complexion that blushes the moment he sips alcohol, or fears a woman has overheard one of his ribald jokes.

Since salubrity is an important aspect of American power–we do not like our leaders to look unhealthy, as Richard Nixon discovered–and since Reagan’s physical impact is so potent, we might ponder its larger implications. This perfectly functioning body (weak eyes, deaf right ear, and a swelling prostate aside) moves, or rather glides, toward every obstacle with neither hesitation nor hurry. It is driven by a strange will consisting mainly of paradoxes: aggression without hostility, ego without vanity, superiority without snobbery, and that moral passion Reagan describes as “a clean hatred.” Unlike Woodrow Wilson or Jimmy Carter, with their killer smiles and passion to preach, he has no contempt for the ungodly, nor does he have Theodore Roosevelt’s bulldozer determination to move in a straight line. He advances by simply not noticing obstructions. Thus, when one deflects him, he assumes he has changed course voluntarily, and if it rolls out of his way, shows neither surprise nor gratitude.

Earlier today, for example, Iran relieved him of Carter’s hostage problem before he had so much as come down from Capitol Hill. Were the 52 freed so soon after his speech for fear of him, or as a final taunt to Carter, or was the timing a mere matter of logistics? Whatever the truth, Reagan has the gift of luck.

He is also endowed with a happy nature, his optimism unquenchable, his smile enchantingly crooked, his laughter impossible to resist. If these attributes, together with all the others listed above, do not constitute grace, in the old sense of favors granted by God, then the word has no meaning. Even his rare explosions of anger are, in an odd way, benign, as when he silently and accurately hurled a bunch of keys at Mike Deaver’s breastbone, or referred a disloyal California legislator to the baseball bat in his office: “I should have shoved it up your ass and broken it off.” But such explosions only briefly disturb his equanimity, which otherwise surrounds him like a pool. He seems nerveless, incapable of fear, as when he once piled too many rocks into a trailer at Rancho del Cielo, and found his Jeep being dragged backward down a boulder-strewn escarpment: Sisyphus relaxedly steering in reverse, while all four wheels scrabbled for stability, and the engine screamed nying-nying-nying.

The world that rotates inside his cerebellum is, if not beautiful, encouragingly rich and self-renewing. It is washed by seas whose natural “ozone” produces a healthful brown smog over coastal highways, and rinsed by rivers that purify themselves whenever they flow over gravel. Its rocks suppurate with so much untapped oil that Alaska “alone” has more petroleum reserves than Saudi Arabia. Americans should not feel guilty about pumping this bounty into their private cars; the automobile has “exactly the same” fuel-efficiency rating as the bus.

Reagan’s world is not entirely without environmental problems. It glows with the “radioactivity” of coal burners (much more dangerous than nuclear plants), and is plagued by “deadly diseases spread by insects, because pesticides such as DDT have been prematurely outlawed.” Acid rain, caused by an excess of trees, threatens much of the industrial northeast. Geopolitically, the globe presents many challenges. “Almost all” its heads of government, with the exception of Margaret Thatcher, are older than himself; China seems determined to reincorporate with Taiwan, although Reagan’s personal preference would be to recognize them both; similarly, North and South Vietnam should never have been permitted to join, having been “separate nations for centuries.” The Soviet Union, bent on invading the United States via Mexico (a stratagem of “Nikolai” Lenin), is largely proof against retaliation, its vital industries throbbing away in “hardened” underground caverns; the economy of South America is a mess, particularly in Portuguese-speaking Bolivia; even the Last Best Hope of Man is under siege by the United Nations, which threatens to replace the Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments with covenants abolishing private property.

In fairness toward Ronald Reagan, even those most horrified by his encyclopedic ignorance must accept that a President-elect has for years been fielding hundreds, sometimes thousands, of questions a day, and often has to improvise policy, or call up anecdotes on the spot, when he is groggy with fatigue. What horrifies, though, is that Reagan says exactly the same things when he is fresh, and after he has been repeatedly corrected; his beliefs are as unerasable as the grooves of an LP. The only reliable way to recognize the approach of a Reagan untruism is to listen for signal phrases: I have been told… and, As I’ve said many times…

When he expresses views simply and declaratively, they should nevertheless be taken seriously, because they represent core philosophy. God wrote the Bible, and the Bible condones capital punishment. “Sodomy” is a sin. However, homosexuals have a Constitutional right to teach in public schools. Abortion is murder. Property is sacrosanct; so is privacy. Men may bear arms. Women are superior to men, therefore equal rights will downgrade them. Art should affirm moral values. Hard work is mandatory, boredom impermissible. Charity begins at home. Communism is evil because it saps the individual will. “When men fail to drive toward a goal or purpose, but only drift, the drift is always toward barbarism.”

The hardening of his mind would seem to be the result of several factors beside the onset of old age. One is the big secret of top-level politics: that most of its duties are merely automatic, and that most “decisions” are a matter of initialing the recommendations of underlings. For a long time now, he has been doing things over: campaigning for the Governorship twice, traveling from town to town and delivering the same basic speech (with variations from his well-worn file of variations); spending two terms in Sacramento, each consisting of four budget battles, four legislative sessions, four summers, and four seasons of strategy. And there have been three campaigns for the Presidency, during which the towns and speeches and babies and barbecues streamed into the equivalent of a video loop. No wonder Reagan sometimes gives the impression of being incapable of surprise.