>>"...When he makes one of his rare references to his divorce... he presents it as a war movie: 'By the time I got out of the army Air Corps, all I wanted to do -- in common with several million other veterans -- was to rest up awhile, make love to my wife, and come up refreshed...' ... Where had he been where he could not make love to his wife? They had been in the same town for the last three years... yet Reagan obviously believes he was 'off to war.'"
That Reagan thought he was actually "off to war" is Will's stupid conclusion. Reagan wanted to go back to a normal life and spoke of that connection with other veterans.
Garry Wills is a lousy historian at a great school. He is what Himmelfarb is talking about:
In her prescient 1991 Jefferson Lecture "Of Heroes, Villains and Valets," Gertrude Himmelfarb cites Hegel's dictum, "No man is a hero to his valet; not, however, because the man is not a hero, but because the valet--is a valet."
Hegel, explains Himmelfarb, "had contempt for those small-minded men, men with the souls of valets, who reduce historical individuals to their own level of sensibility and consciousness." It is all around us today, an epidemic in contemporary historiography: the impulse, when in the presence of greatness, to level.
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