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EDITORI L

IDENTITYCRISISWho is this Ronald Reagan? His conservatism iswell-advertised, but one gets no sense of hisidentity. That, indeed, seems the significant

common denominator between the candidateand his chosen running mate, the .slipperyGeorge Bush. Identi ties can’t be ghosted.

Across the page, E.L. Doctorow searches forReagan’s identity in his past, and it is probablysymbolic of the malaise which o inflicts the Car

ter Administration that the only identity it hasfocused on is gimmick-the national identitycard, currently under study as a “solution” t theillegal alien problem. Consider its side effects:

A police officer could stop you at any timeand demand to see your card. Using his walkie-talkie or his car radio, in a few seconds he could

check your identity against -the records in thecomputers of the Federal Bureau of Investiga-tion’s National Crime Information Center anduse the results to detain you.

A police officer or other official could con-fiscate or threaten to confiscate your identitycard, causing you great inconvenience.

For each identity card there would be a dos-sier on file in a national population registry.

You would no doubt have to present yourcard every time you cash a check, register in ahotel, travel by air or rail or purchase anythingon credit. A permanent record of your move-ments could be readily compiled.

The cards might record arrests, convictions,treatment for mental illness, draft status, or

status^ as a welfare recipient or hospital patient.This would save employers a lot of time in inves-tigating job applicants.

There is no cause for immediate alarm, how-ever. Even if the current discussion does producean identity-card system, it would take quite awhile to put it into operation. According to pres-ent estimates, it wouldn’t be ready until 1984

DREAM CANDIDATE

E

E.L. DOCTOROWRonald Reagan was born in 1911 in rural Illinois.His father, John Edward Reagan, was a storeclerk and eistwhile merchant whose jobs tookthe family to such towns as Galesburg, Mon-mouth nd Dixaq-just the sort of placesresponsible for one of the raging themes~ fAmerican literature, the soul-murdering com-placency of our provinces, without which thecareers of Edwin Arlington RobiFson, Sher-wood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis .and WillaCather, to name ust a few, would never havefound glory. The best and brightest fled all our

Galesburgs and Dixons, if they could, but thecandidate was not among them.TheReagans were a poor, close, hard,working

family. With his older brother, Neil, Reagan soldhomemade popcorn- at high school footballgames and was charged with the ser ious businessof maintaining the family vegetable garden. Formany summers‘ he worked as a lifeguard at

Lowell Park on the Rock River in )&on, pullingseventy-seven people out of the water by his owncount and socking away most of his salary- tomake up college tuition.

The candidate attended Eureka College inEureka, Illinois. He was no student. He had aphotographic memory, and t was this trait,rather han application to books ornnatecleverness, .that got. him through his exams.What really interested him:was making the foot-ball team, pledging a fraternity, debating andacting in campus theatricals. But his prioritieswere correct. Eureka, a fifth-rate college, providedmeager academic credentials to itsgraduates. But a third-rate student at a fifth-rate

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82 The Nation. Ju 19-26, 980

power to maintain the funding of the Willowbrook reviewpanel.

Judge John R. Bartels, the presiding Federal judge,understood the significance of the termination of funding.“They cut my right arm off,” he said in court at a hearing ina suit to restore the funding brought by the N.Y.C.L.U. “Wecannot run the programs without the Willowbrook Panel. Icannot find out what is going on without the WillowbrookPanel. I cannot have it audited. No one b-elieves hat itis possible or feasible, therefore, without the Panel theCohrt cannot operate or enforce a consent agreement actionand the consent agreement will become a nullity and power-less. Bartels ordered Carey to come up with the funds tohonor his 975 commitment.

At that point, Carey had a choice. He could have obeyedthe court. Any political problem he might have ad with thelegislature in circumventing the action of their finance com-mittees was laid to rest by the court order. His alternativewas to appeal and that was the course that he chose tofollow. On appeal, Bartels’s order was reversed. The appel-late judges lacked Bartels’s familiarity with Willowbrook

and the central role of the panel in making the ConsentJudgment work. Even more important, they apparently sub-scribeJo the view that judges should play a severely limitedrole in seeing to it that violations of constitutional rights instate institutions are corrected.

At this writing, the chances of sustaining the reviewpanel’s work are not good. The Civil Liberties Union facesuphill battles in pursuing the matter in the courts and in try-ing to get the New York legislature o provide funding whenit reconvenes in September. The only person who couldsurely save the day remains Governor Carey. The Court ofAppeals upheld his refusal to provide funding from othersources but did not prohibit his doing so. And, even if

Carey still maintains that he cannot provide funding, it isdifficult to believe that the New York legislature would urndown such a paltry appropriation if he made strong per-sonal appeal for the funds or f he used the persuasive tacticsthat usually work when something matters to him. Finally,Carey has at his discretion 6 million in Federal funds forprograms relating to the developmentally disabled, includ-ing the mentally retarded. State legislative approval is notrequired to spend this money to honor his commitment tocarry out the Willowbrook Consent Judgment.

So far Carey.has not indicated any willingness to go tobat for the Willowbrook review panel. While he is known otake pride in what has been accomplished since e signed theConsent Judgment, he hears a lot of complaints about thepanel from state officials who resent constant scrutiny oftheir work. And there is mounting opposition to the panelfrom state legislators who oppose the resettlement of theretarded in their districts. Perhaps the most important fac-tor is that it ‘is a long time since ugh Carey touredWillowbrook and saw that man covered with lies. Thememory may be dim by ow and the great progress that hasbeen made may cause him to believe that the panel is nolonger needed. But Judge Bartels-who said “They cut myright arm off”-remains close to what is going on at

f

Willowbrook. Unfortunately, he is likely to be right in pre-dicting that the Consent Judgment will become a “nullity”without the review panel to see to its enforcement.

Hugh Carey has taken political risks on other matters affecting public decency, as in his repeated vetoes of deathpenalty laws and in his maintenance of state funding forabortions for poor women. He does not deserve to be con-demned as inhumane. But it would be sad if he now aban-dons the state’s weakest citizens: the retarded inmates oWillowbrook.

Reagan(Continued From Front Cover)

college could learn from the stage, the debating platform,the gridiron and the fraternity party the styles of manlinessand verbal sincerity that would stand him in good steadwhen the time came to make his mark in the world.’In fact,the easy, garrulous charm Reagah developed at Eureka got

results very quickly. Graduating in the depths of the Depres-sion, he had no trouble finding a job as a radio announcer.

Whave hese facts from a biography, Th

Rise of Ronald Reagan, by Bill Boyarsky,California journalist, and from the candidate’s autobiography, Where’s he Rest

Me?, the title of which is aken from his most memorable lineas a film actor. In the picture King’s Row, he played the roleof a young rake who is careless with his attentions t o thedaughter of a surgeon; when he lands in the hospital aftercar accident, the vengeful surgeon amputates his legs. Rea-gan delivers the memorable line coming o after the operation.

It was when he became a sportscaster for WHO in DeMoines that Reagan’s peculia& affinity for simulated lifebegan to emerge. He was called on to describe baseballgames played by the Chicago White Sox and the Cubs onthe basis of Western Union messages telegraphed from theballpark. These were characteristically brief-a hit, a waland so on-but the chatty Reagan made an ar t f describingthe game as if he were sitting in the stands, faking the scenein all its drama with 0nly.a sound effects man to help him.He became quite popular with the regional audience and didpromotional work on he. side as the station’s celebrityspeaker, giving talks to fraternal lodges, boys’ clubs nd thelike, telling sports stories and deriving from them Y.M.C.Asorts of morals.

In 1937 Reagan went to Santa Catalina Island to coverthe Chicago Cubs in spring ttaining. The proximity toHollywood reawoke his collegiate ambition to act, and hemanaged to get himself a screen test. He didn’t really expectanything to come of it but was offered a contract by WarnerBrothers for 200 a week. An agent had persuaded the

E L Doctorow is the uthop of Welcome to Hard Times,The Book of Daniel, Ragtime and the forthcoming LooLake uU published y Random House).

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