In commemoration of City Weekly's 40th anniversary, we are digging into our archives to celebrate. Each week, we FLASHBACK to a story or column from our past in honor of four decades of local alt-journalism. Whether the names and issues are familiar or new, we are grateful to have this unique newspaper to contain them all.
Title: Reagan Vid: Geriatric Funk
Author: Ron Yengich
Date: Mar. 13, 1990
“What do you do when your president ignores all the palpable, relevant facts and wanders in circles? I could not bear to watch this good and decent man go on in this embarrassing way. I buried my head in my plate.”
– The Triumph of Politics
By David Stockman
“The witness box is an odd sort of place. Sometimes people feel unable to lie in it.”
– John Mortimer
Rumpole of the Bailey
The recent scene at the courthouse in Tinseltown makes me wish Mack Sennett was still doing his black-and-white film schtick. Sneaking up behind the Federal Courthouse was the 40th President of the United States, slithering through the back door to do his best MTV geriatric funk on video for the historical record of his testimony at the criminal trial of John Poindexter. Poindexter was once his trusted confidante during those somnambulate days at the White House. The back door entree was highly symbolic of Reagan’s dodge to avoid the witness box under the guise of a Nixonian theory of executive privilege (Rosemary Woods notwithstanding).
The fact that he finally did raise his right hand to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help him Joe McCarthy, was as surprising as the fact that he actually remembered that he once was the nation’s Chief Executive—not just the leader of the 20-Mule Team Borax. As one who would sell my soul in Faustian terms to cross-examine George Bush’s predecessor about his former lackey, now defendant, I couldn’t wait to read the former President’s answers to the hard questions about what the editorial euphemists have now dubbed for all historical time as the Iran-Contra affair.
Doesn’t the national press make it sound like a seedy hotel tryst between a Persian fakir and a Tijuana harlot (even though what Ollie and the boys did reduced Articles 1 through 7 of the United States Constitution to fish wrappings)? And we the sheep keep treating it as if Vanna White were simply going about her business of turning a letter that would let Ronnie, or more likely, Nancy, answer the evening’s epigram: I AM NOT A CROOK.
The video testimony, sans national security excerpts, hasn’t been released to we the sheared yet, but my sources in the courthouse advise me that the old cowboy set a new record for the answer “I can’t remember” in its various forms, just before relating unremembered movie scenes with Walter Brennan and Richard Crenna. His appearance also included occasional, unscripted naps during the questioning.
I also have it on good authority that two objections by Poindexter’s lawyers were precedent-setting. The first concerned Nancy (looking ever Leona Helmsleyesque) trying to squeeze into the witness box with Ronnie to help him answer, or at least whisper the answers to the Gipper during his testimony. The other was an objection to Reagan’s lawyers’ request that all questions be asked outside the courtroom under the cacophony of the whirling helicopter blades that once punctured all of the press conferences held during his presidency.
The judge, I am told, sustained objections to both procedures, but was required to use his gavel like a jackhammer to keep Ronnie awake, and stop him from telling rambling anecdotes about William Bendix and his Vice-President, Bonzo the Chimp.
Well, at least I’m told that the redacted Reagan testimony will be out in video stores for Christmas. After all, Ronnie and Nancy need the money. There can’t be too many Japanese conglomerates willing to pay the old B-picture performer a cool million dollars (or was it yen?) to eat rubber sushi. And remember that Nancy can no longer “borrow” original gowns and look, in the words of Billy Crystal, “simply maaavelous.”
Well, “as I have said many times,” zzzzzzzzzz.
