Editorials and Opinions

Gary Tischler • March 30, 2016

Two people—reminders of different times—passed away recently. One of them was a fixture near the White House for more than three decades; the other, a key member of a legendary 1960s and 1970s rock group, thus adding another name to the recent losses in the rock-pop world.

Concepcion Picciotto in her shawl, heavy hat, standing by her signs and tent protesting nuclear proliferation directly across the street by Lafayette Park, due north of the White House was a familiar figure to passers-by—and the world did pass by and pass her by almost at the same time.  Tourists came and walked by as did the day-to-day busy people, especially after two blocks of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House were closed to vehicular traffic in 1995.  She and a compatriot William Thomas joined forces—Thomas as a man who founded a more or less steady peace vigil in front of the White House, Picciotto with her long-handed papers protesting and battling the presence and proliferation of nuclear weapons. 

Every city has people like this—all different and unique—and places where they gather.

When things happen—the election of an African American president, the killing of Osama Bin Laden—people gather to demonstrate and let their feelings be known, for or against, in front of the north side of the White House.  It happens in New York’s Times Square, along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, where the intellectuals and the lost got together in the 1960s, accompanied by rock and folk music, or in the parks of Chicago.

People were in front of the gates of the White House at each of the American forays into Iraq or holding vigils for peaces during the holidays. They come to the National Mall in gigantic numbers on Earth Day, on inauguration day, on MLK’s birthday, historic remembrances.

Every big demonstration usually has castoffs, people who come and then somehow forget to leave and go elsewhere. They stick around, having found a place or a home.  Picciotto came here after emigrating from Spain in 1960 and eventually, according to various stories, stayed after a failed marriage. She found her cause and her place around 30 years ago.  Soft-spoken and quiet, she never yelled or screamed, but rather put up pamphlets, whole tomes on the danger of nuclear war and proliferation. In a story by George Joseph Tanber in the Toledo Magazine in 1988, she would begin her days at 8 a.m., feed squirrels  and set up her place and the signs: “Live by the Bomb; Die by the Bomb” and so on.  As far as any one knows, she must have seen a few presidents go by, beginning with Ronald Reagan, but no exchanges have been recorded. She had run-ins with the Secret Service Police, often talked with people and remained a regular presence.

She died at the age of 80 on Jan. 25 at N Street Village, a homeless shelter and rehabilitation center for women, six blocks from the White House.

If you lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, were young, restless and a little hippified, lived in Marin County or thereabouts and read about the new music in stories by local sage Ralph Gleason, you knew who Paul Kantner was.  More accurately, you knew him as the guitarist and founding member of Jefferson Airplane, one of the major rock groups of the 1960s, legends in their mind and the minds of the fans who were often carried high by the music and the smoke.               

His death evokes not only the memory of the sound of the Jefferson Airplane’s music but the memory of a scene—that was San Francisco in the mid-to-late-1960s, when some of the most legendary singers, bands, and musicians rose out of the ashes of the folk scene to become major stars and emblematic of a pop culture (in the Haight Ashbury and in and around the Bay Area).  At the Fillmore and the Avalon, the Airplane, Janet Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Byrds and Steve Miller’s Blue Band were at the forefront of a musical movement and moment.

The Airplane’s big star was Grace Slick, the slickest female singer around, a kind of glamour queen of the movement, which had Joplin as its break-your-heart soul. Slick and Kantner were the power couple of the movement—they had a daughter named China.  The band—Slick, Kantner, vocalist Marty Balin, guitarist Jorma Kaukopnen, bassist Jack Casady and drummer Spencer Dryden—took off with such hits as the irresistible “Somebody to Love” (as in “Don’t You Want Somebody To Love”) and the enigmatic-to-Middle-America “Go ask Alice”, which married Lewis Carroll to the counter culture.  The band broke up in the late 1960s, and Kantner and Casady founded Hot Tuna while others centered around “Starship.”

At its height, Jefferson Airplane was something to behold and hear, one of the centerpieces of a whirling, colorful, unforgettable scene.

Kantner died January 28 in San Francisco at the age of 74.

Gary Tischler •

The 2016 U.S. election campaign resembles something on the order of a virus — a kind of flu that starts out as a vague little cold complete with a manageable slightly high temperature, the itchy but not yet dripping nose, the random cough here and there. It’s an odd bug, hard to quantify or identify, but surely nothing to be worried about.  It’s just in the beginning, a vague discomfiture in the middle of the night, which could just be the a summer heat or the last tendrils of a slightly unnerving dream.

These little bugs and viruses have come around before, about every four years or so, and begin usually in stately, predictable fashion. A number of people, most of them men of varying degrees of experience or ability, almost dutifully, walk up to a podium in some big city, or their hometown of Small Beginnings, USA, or a state capital, and announced that they have a fever.

They are surrounded by loved one,  including wives, husbands, children, old friends and new donors, and some former senator, vice president whom many people were surprised to find alive and breathing who will endorse them.   To a man and woman, they tell the world that they — and only they — are qualified and perfectly formed to be president of the United States at this perfectly wonderful, awful, peaceful, perilous, happy, horrible, dandy or dangerous, hopeful or hopeless historic moment in time because . . . well, just because. The surrounding media each time will note what this means for the future of you know what, and parse like baseball writers at an off-season meeting of baseball writers, who will most likely get to say at the end of it all: “I fill-in-the-blank do solemnly swear . . . ”

Imagine this: “I, Donald Trump — believe me, it’s going to be huge — do solemnly swear to make America great again.”

And I know that none of us are laughing or sitting there with jaws dropped to the floor.

The idea that Donald Trump, who is, as he often tells us, not a politician, but a tycoon and television celebrity, could win the Republican nomination for president is no longer even implausible — by the evidence so far, it’s entirely likely, if you’re big on data.  He has won two: the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, finished second in the Iowa caucus and is leading big in Nevada and a good many primaries of the states on Super Tuesday, March 1.

It’s true.

Just ask Jeb Bush, the third member of the Bush family who wanted to be president, and the odds-on GOP favorite not only of the so-called GOP establishment but most of the media experts, who officially and with a little rancor, suspended his campaign, an unlikely development. Dr. Ben Carter, on the other hand, running dead last in what remains of the original 17 GOP wanna-bes, has not suspended his campaign, which also is an unlikely development, especially to another GOP  hopeful Ted Cruz, first (or maybe runner-up) in the hearts of evangelicals and a bi-partisan last in the hearts and affections of his Senate peers. Or, as Mr. Trump so elegantly put it, “Nobody likes him.”

We are not forgetting here the presence of Bernie Sanders, although we should all prepare ourselves to forget him, after he fell rather resoundingly in Nevada, to the once-and-future-presumptive Democratic Party first-woman-to-be-president (if-Bengazi-her-e-mails-didn’t-Bern-or Bill’s past-don’t-get-her-first) Hillary Clinton who may after all be inevitable, in a diminished kind of way.

We should mention that the bounding, youthful Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who finished in a virtual tie for second in South Carolina with the aforementioned Cruz has turned into the campaign’s magician.  He has so far won not a single primary or caucus, but many victories: a third place finish in Iowa which was a resounding triumph, a New Hampshire fifth place finish, plus Chris Christie’s boot marks on his face, which was a resounding triumph over political death itself and the near-tie — at 20 percent of the vote with Cruz — which he interpreted as the triumph of a new generation of GOP leaders, of which he was the leader. It is entirely plausible that Rubio could come out of Super Tuesday without a single win, but 55 endorsements and an unsigned selfie of Lady Ga Ga, plus being named the presumptive favorite of the faceless GOP establishment.

I have a fever.  The country is feverish, after last week, which saw Trump win handily, even after doing an impossible trifecta of calling George W. Bush, who remains very popular in South Carolina, a liar, getting into a verbal brawl with the pope and a member of the Jackson brothers — and telling a grisly urban-legend from history story which no one could verify. Trump, celebrating with a certain amount  self-control, said that campaigning “was exhausting, painful . . . and beautiful.”  “Winning,” he said with a grin, “is beautiful.”  So was his family — Trump certainly wins the sweepstakes for number of beautiful family members on stage.

The campaign, which continues Tuesday in Nevada, has become the dominating context for almost anything else that happens in our lives. I’m guessing the debates, at least the GOP debates, are probably the highest rated show on television, certainly bigger than the Duck Dynasty, the head of which Trump suggested might make a good UN ambassador.  This is the campaign in which Trump hosted Saturday Night Live, and Bernie Sanders showed up on an SNL episode, hosted by his grumpy doppelganger Larry David.

Consider for a moment Supreme Court  Justice Anthony Scalia, the scholarly and big-personality justice who died suddenly at a Texas resort Friday and think how quickly the body politic, and therefore the press, turned to the sordid partisan combat taken up not only by the presidential candidates but by the nation’s political leaders of whether President Obama would or could or should nominate a successor, a subject that would now become a permanent part of the campaign.

Scalia, a devout Catholic, was also a devout social conservative and had a life big enough to accommodate the return of some humanity to our daily lives.  Agree or disagree on his stands and politics, and decisions, he was also a noted scholar, a man with an intellect coupled to a sense of humor, a man with a large ego, no doubt, but also a large and self-evidently loving family. His son, the Rev. Paul Scalia, celebrated the funeral Mass with warmth and humor at a packed gathering at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The justice’s tastes and heart were big enough to fit a devoted friendship with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg over a shared passion for opera.   

It’s fair to say, though, that the election results, and the on-going, non-stop blather over its meaning, as they say, “moving forward,” while they did not manage to blot out the dignity of Scalia’s ceremonious remembrance, took some of the sheen off, given the acrimonious, yield-not-an-inch hysteria over his successor. Nor will the rampage shootings in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of six persons, allegedly by an Uber driver prevent heated and outrageous bile over the Second Amendment on the campaign trail.

This is the virus that is Campaign 2016.  We’re all running a fever, followed by cold sweats.

Gary Tischler •

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday, the not-so-holy day when nearly a dozen states hold primaries or caucuses — mostly in the South which is why its also referred to as SEC Tuesday in some quarters — from which Republican and Democratic presidential candidates can reap delegates, gain momentum or be labeled winners or losers or potential drop-outs.

Call it Super Tuesday, if you will.  If you look at the Republican race for the presidential nomination, you might as well as call it Apocalypse Tuesday.

It’s come to this.  Insurgent candidate, businessman, developer and television celebrity Donald Trump is threatening to run away with the process and the party after three straight, convincing primary wins in states as diverse as New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada (he finished second in the Iowa caucuses).  An alarmed GOP establishment as represented by the party, Super PACs from the now defeated Jeb Bush campaign, the media, especially old-line print stalwarts, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and Trump’s principal rivals, Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Texas Senator and Christian evangelist presumed darling Ted Cruz are finally fighting back by all available means necessary.  The collateral damage, of course, is the American electoral process and perhaps the Republican Party, as we understand it.   

Such damage became evident in a fractious spectacle of a CNN-sponsored debate Feb. 25, when both Rubio and Cruz attacked Trump, taking turns questioning Trump’s conservative and party bona fides. Rubio, especially, since he appears to have inherited the financial backing of Bush allies, seems  to have decided that the only way to trounce Trump is to descend into the muddy, mucky waters of personal attacks, questionable claims made repeatedly and without letup, exaggerations and rumors, accusations and claims mixed together artlessly and loudly.

Artless assertions are the kind of things that Trump has done from the get-go, broad promises—no Muslims, Mexican rapists, thousands of Muslims cheering in New Jersey and on and on goes the list.  He has attacked opponents, critics, media members, the president, women, members of Congress and the judiciary, and his rivals, with Bush a particular piñata for him, as he continuously and in the crudest terms questioned Bush’s courage, stamina, energy, and manliness.  During all this, Cruz, and Rubio—who also took on Bush—stood by without standing up to Trump. They were for the most part, silent.

Now, it’s Trump’s turn to receive sustained criticism: for his not disavowing the KKK, hiring foreign workers and Poles, messing with his makeup, mis-spelling words on twitter, supporting Planned Parenthood, not make his tax returns public— could there be a Mafia connection? — and so on.

The debate battle in Houston, with Rubio shouting over Trump and Trump calling both liars and idiots, was a spectacle that tempted many people to change the channel to reruns, any reruns, or to run to the bathroom.   It’s been like this non-stop ever since, with the media at once tut-tutting, grilling Trump to little avail, while seeming to enjoy the drama.  The strategy, certainly on the part of Rubio, the candidate around whom the media and the so-called establishment seems to have gathered, is to take off the gloves and go on a 24-7 attack mode.

Mind you, this is not about a cogent strategy to deal with ISIS or the Middle East or creating jobs or balancing the budget and policy.  This is about hair, makeup and pants stains and foreign workers and calling Trump a con man, something many of us have known for a long time.  If you listen to the Conservative Solutions ad for Rubio, you see a chin-held-high, young but seasoned man, “a Reagan disciple,” strong and looking to the next generation of Republicans to lead. That generation apparently includes the likes of Bob Dole and Mitt Romney, but never mind. The contrast with Rubio, the presidential-timber candidate and the campaign trail and debate Rubio, his teeth sometimes bared into a gleeful smile, as if he’d just stolen some brash kid’s marbles, telling people to google Trump and Polish workers, or looking at his Blackberry for misspellings or talking about Trump wanting a full-length mirror to check for pants stains couldn’t be more dramatic and sadder.

This is what the campaign has come to and is bound to continue.  In order to fight Trump, his rivals — Rubio and Cruz and some media types — have decided they must become Trump.  On appearances, they seem to have succeeded.  Most of the information and surely some misinformation that’s splashed into newspapers, talk shows and news shows, must have been out there for months.  If political courage and character are such highly valued qualities by the GOP and its candidates, where were Rubio and Cruz all these months when Trump was making outrageous claims, insulting women, apparently lying about his record?  They stood back, content to watch others fall by the wayside, and to assume, like most of the experts and the media did, that Trump would sooner or later implode from the sheer weight of his bull and that people would see that the developer had no clothes.

Instead, Trump appeared to re-invent newer and strong versions of Teflon. Yes, he deserves the treatment he’s getting, but perhaps he should be getting it from better men than himself, instead of from people who are imitating him.

Is it working?

Well, a CNN-ORC national poll out Monday — not state by state — shows that Trump is at 49 percent with GOP voters, with Rubio trailing at 16 percent and Cruz at 15 percent.   A RealClearPolitics poll has Trump leading in nearly all of the Super Tuesday states, except Texas, where Cruz is expected to win.

It’s telling that the one moderate—Governor John Kasich of Ohio, who has a primary in mid-March—is trailing behind even Ben Carson.

Meantime, Democratic Party leader Hilary Clinton, fresh from a big win in South Carolina and a squeaky one in Nevada, is heavily favored to garner big primary wins March 1.

Georgetowner • March 24, 2016

When Mayor Muriel Bowser recently announced her comprehensive plan to tackle the city’s burgeoning homeless problem by closing the woefully problematic Washington General Hospital, constructing or renovating shelters in each of the city’s eight wards to replace it, most people agreed that such a plan — particularly the closing of D.C. General — was necessary and overdue.

At the time, not everybody agreed on the details, especially the locations, and some objected to a perceived lack of transparency in the city’s planning process. Town hall meetings after the announcement produced some arguments regarding the locations, notably a Ward 5 location in an iffy neighborhood. Concern was also expressed about the potential for a decline in real estate values in certain wards.

Turns out there have been other problems. Transparency was mentioned again at a recent Council meeting that looked more closely at the proposal. The District (that is, taxpayers) would be footing the bill, which seems pretty exorbitant to some Council members and residents.

Here’s a bit of the fine print: The cost of leasing the land and buildings over three decades is estimated at around $300 million. In one proposal, as reported by the Washington Post, the city would pay $56 million to lease 38 units — more than $6,000 per unit in an upscale neighborhood where the average cost is closer to $3,000.

In addition, there have been questions about the fact that some of the designated properties are owned or controlled by individuals and groups that were major donors to the mayor’s campaign.

Council chair Phil Mendelsohn has said he wants to bring the issue to a vote, possibly in early or mid-April.

Some ministers and advocates for the homeless have urged quick approval so that action can be taken to provide the homeless population with shelters that are safe and dignified, as opposed to the conditions that exist at D.C. General.

Still, given the questions that have come up about cost, transparency and, at least in one case, location, it seems a wiser choice to publicly answer these questions and air more details about the selection process. We doubt that that the bulk of the opposition is due to unwillingness on the part of individual neighborhoods to share in making the plan a success, the so-called NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) objection.

We think the mayor’s plan might proceed more smoothly if everyone involved knew more, and had enough confidence in it to lend their support. The District and the participants in the plan need to make sure that it is about helping the homeless, not only to be housed safely but to be put on a path to independent living — and, certainly, not about individuals or groups making profits.

Gary Tischler • March 18, 2016

Here we are again.

Tomorrow is Tuesday. And you know what that means.

It’s Super Tuesday.

Wait. Didn’t we just do that? Maybe it’s Saturday and Michigan and Bernie and the Bern.

Nope. Been there and done that.

And it’s not South Carolina, or Iowa or New Hampshire, either.

Tomorrow, in German rally fashion, is Der Tag.

This is another epochal day, the day of the Last Chance Saloon. This is the day that is the last chance to stop Donald Trump, or there will be…

What?

In the age of Donald Trump, the important question to ask is not what can possibly happen tomorrow, but what hasn’t already happened.

Tomorrow is the apocalypse, the dance on the edge of the cliff. Tomorrow is Ohio, Illinois, Florida, Missouri and somewhere else.

Tomorrow is Ohio Governor John Kasich and his last stand and chance in his home state, where he is currently favored (but not by much).

Tomorrow is the last stand and chance for Marco Rubio, once the best and last hopes of the establishment, but considerably reduced. Little Marco indeed.

If Kasich and Rubio don’t win in Ohio and Florida, they are, to put it in the parlance of Donald Trump, outta here.

Tomorrow, the pundits, strategists and consultants will tell you, is the last chance of the Republican establishment to stop Donald Trump.

Fat chance.

Throughout this campaign, I’ve often thought of the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s film version of “King Lear,” which ends with a blind jester dancing precariously at the edge of a cliff.

Nothing so elegant is a part of the American political process these days. It is more akin to March Madness — and not the basketball version that is in progress and is about as tame as a bunch of kittens knitting compared to the politics that are currently being practiced.

We’ve come a long way to where we are now — and it’s not even worth talking about working class white anger, or deadlock in Washington or the erosion of jobs and all the causes thereof. We’ve come a long way since Trump opened his campaign with talk of a big wall on the Southwest border paid for by Mexico, and images of Mexican rapists streaming across the border.

These are the verbal bricks — inchoate, inarticulate but big and bombastic — from which Trump has built a presidential campaign that now threatens to be a runaway train. Some people are desperately trying to chase it and jump on like Depression-era drifters, while others are trying to sabotage it with arcane political strategies: robocalls from Mitt Romney, Rubio urging his Ohio supporters to vote for Kasich.

In the last two weeks or so, things have gotten so bad that at one time Rubio and Trump were talking about small hands and other appendages. They dug in like bulls in suits in a sandbox, and things were heard on the campaign trail that no one had ever heard before outside of “The Sopranos.”

Trump — whatever the cause, whoever the supporters — had blotted out the political sun. Could it get much worse, people were asking?

Well, yes.

We have entered the physical combat stage of the campaign, where the government may finally have to send boots on the ground. Over the weekend, a 78-year-old man sucker-punched a black man being led out of a Trump rally. In Chicago, protestors — or disruptors according to Trump, with his gift for coining new words — clashed with Trump supporters in the streets and managed to force Trump to cancel a rally. For Chicago folks with a long memory, it recalled bad memory of the riots around the 1960 Democratic convention.

Lots of other things happened, locally and nationally and around the world. There was the death of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia, which politicized the court, which is already politicized. Former First Lady Nancy Reagan passed away gracefully in her 90s amid praise and sorrow. But it was all Trump in the end.

Trump ratcheted up his rhetoric even more, while every pundit on television tried to get him to apologize or take responsibility for the increasingly violent atmosphere surrounding his rallies.

People say that he speaks out and says the things that everyone else is afraid to say, that he has found the heart of the forgotten man. But his is an oddly insulting kind of language, full of short phrases, big adjectives, violent imagery, repetition, delivered not with inspiration but with a kind of stubborn bravado. Somehow, the not-quite-self-made-billionaire who’s never had to worry a moment in his life if he’d have a job the next day, let alone a meal, has bonded with the working man who worries about this all of the time.

It’s strange times when Saturday Night Live, which usually follows or precedes primaries and debates, can, in its caricatures and outrageous imitations, seem like a documentary.

But here we are. Tomorrow is Tuesday.

Can anybody trump Trump?

It may turn out to be that only Trump can trump Trump.

Gary Tischler •

Somebody somewhere talked about Jim Kimsey as Washington’s John Wayne. Washington sports king and Ted Leonsis, Kimsey’s good friend and partner at AOL, the internet access company which Kinsey helped found, said on his blog, “He reminded me of a local Clint Eastwood type of hero. He had that kind of charisma.”

Kimsey, who died at the age of 76 of melanoma, had all kinds of charisma, as a point of fact, which perhaps accounts for the fact that he could move like a light-footed dancer through board rooms and bars with equal grace, always adding to occasions and places by his presence and considerable charm.

If you want to think of Kimsey as embodied, you might want to think of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, blessed with being able to move in and inhabit the American dream.  Kimsey achieved much: He was blessed with intelligence, an ability to combine style with a certain Irish raffishness. He had a personable quality that was probably pretty hard to resist. He had the gift of gab, hard work and a little luck to go with it. He was generous with the rewards of his success and with the gift of his friendship. He made money — lots of it — and he made  friends — lots of them.

Everyone says and knows the same thing — that when all was said and then done, that when was introduced to a small tech company called Control Video, history shifted. Steve Case, a young marketer who had made his bones at Pizza and Kimsey got together and would eventually turn Control Video into America On Line, with Kimsey as founding chairman and chief executive, and Case taking on the role of executive vice president.

The rest as they say is history, with the company shooting off like a hot train.  Kimsey, it’s probably fair to say, provided leadership, connections, vision and optimism, if not digital know-how. Some years later, when the Georgetowner interviewed Kimsey in his office, we saw a computer in his office, but Kimsey, in typically off-handed humor said that he had never really learned to use it properly.

Kimsey’s shares in AOL brought him wealth of the kind that Gatsby dreamed about.  He left in 1995 and became an icon of charitable giving, power-brokering, a supporter of the arts and culture, especially the Kennedy Center and he lived large and moved about the city and its upper echelon environs, at parties, galas, receptions, the opera and board meetings with a certain swagger.   There was never anything boorish about that — his pictures was constantly in the glossies, the society pages, almost always in the company of spectacular women, including Queen Noor of Jordan, and other classy ladies.

He looked good doing what he did — whether it was Fight Night or the symphony.

Not bad for a kid who grew up in Washington in less than wealthy circumstances, got ejected from Gonzaga College High School, got re-instated, went to West Point, served as a legendary Ranger in the U.S. Army in Viet Nam, where he also supported an orphanage, got involved in the restaurant business in Washington and owned some famous spots, including Bullfeathers and the Exchange.

He is survived by three sons — Mark, of McLean, Michael of Prague and Raymond of Washington.

When people who knew him, intimately or in passing, learned of his death, it’s not difficult to imagine they felt the loss, as if a little bit of an original kind of energy had left the room, replaced  briefly by memories, whether truckloads or just as a moment. 

Jim Kimsey gave wealth and wealthy people, often the target of resentment these days, a good name — and enjoyed his wealth of family and friends for all the best reasons.

(There will be a funeral Mass at 10 a.m., Saturday, March 5, at the Cathedral of St. Matthew.)

Georgetowner •

On Sunday, we learned that former first lady Nancy Reagan had died of congestive heart failure in California at the age of 94. We learned this amid the cacophony of pronouncements from the men and the woman who would be president, several of whom invoked the name of Ronald Reagan. We learned this even as a movie company had been reenacting the 1963 funeral of President John F. Kennedy for the film “Jackie,” starring actress Natalie Portman as a first lady, who, like Nancy Reagan, seemed to embody glamour and class.

The news, the day, the time, summoned thoughts of a more recent presidential funeral, when the life of Nancy Reagan’s husband was celebrated at the National Cathedral in 2004. The iconography and the memories, 40 years apart, ran parallel: de Gaulle, the brothers Kennedy, John John saluting the coffin, the widow, the former presidents; then, later, the son of Reagan’s vice president (and a president himself), Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev. In California, where the president was laid to rest, Nancy Reagan laid her head on the coffin and kissed him goodbye.

Presidents and their families and extended families are never far from our minds, especially during a year when we will choose the next occupant of the highest office in the land. So the news of the passing of Nancy Reagan triggered a host of emotions, especially if you’ve lived in Washington, D.C., for any length of time. What we know mixed with what we remember: inauguration day, the Reagans waving to the crowds, jets overhead, hearing about the release of the hostages. Yes, Nancy was wearing red.

The more time that passes, one realizes that there are not only second acts in American life, but third and fourth acts — especially, it would seem, among actors and presidents. Not only was Ronald Reagan the first actor to become president, but Nancy was the first actress to become first lady. Now they were playing out their roles in public.

He was the jovial, magnetic, charismatic, eternally optimistic and sunny conservative. She was the adoring wife, the fashion plate, the small, thin queen, a very protective and often controversial first lady.

The thing people seem to remember most was how tightly and intensely held a marriage the Reagans had, the kind that few couples achieve. But Nancy had her own style — sometimes bordering on the ostentatious in times that were often difficult for lesser beings — and she brought dazzle and light to a time that her husband had decreed to be “morning in America.”

They lived in a drama: the assassination attempt, the overture to the Soviet Union, White House controversies, “Just Say No,” the AIDS epidemic, Iran-Contra and so on.

Maybe the bravest things she did came after. In Reagan’s fading and twilight years, she showed the depth of her devotion, caring for him as he moved through the stages of Alzheimer’s, which finally robbed him of the memories of his own large life and their life together. In so doing, she battled the GOP on stem cell research, which may yet help in the fight against the disease.

After more than 50 years by her husband’s side, in the end she was alone, diminished physically, but grown to a size that matters in the imagination, in history, in our collective memory.

Gary Tischler •

On Sunday, amid the cacophony of the latest heated pronouncements from the people who would be president,  many of them invoking the name of conservative icon Ronald Reagan, and even as a movie company had been re-enacting the 1963 funeral of President John F. Kennedy for the film, “Jackie,” starring actress Natalie Portman as the first lady who seemed to embody glamour and class, word came that former first lady Nancy Reagan, who was also known as a high fashion-conscious icon, had died at the age of 94 in California of heart congestion.

The news, the day, the time, brought on conflicting and intense feelings and memories, including thoughts of another presidential funeral not so long ago, when the life of Nancy Reagan’s husband, the hugely popular Republican president Ronald Reagan was celebrated at his state funeral at the National Cathedral in 2004.  The iconography and the memories, 40 years apart, ran parallel — De Gaulle, the brothers Kennedy, John John saluting the coffin, the widow Jackie in 1963, former presidents remembering, and later the son of Reagan’s vice president and a president himself, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and  the former prime minister Margaret Thatcher and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sitting along. In California, where the president was laid to rest,  Nancy Reagan laid her head on the coffin and kissed him goodbye.

Presidents and their extended as well as actual families are never far from our minds, especially during an election year in which we choose our next president. So news of the passing of Nancy Reagan immediately invoked a host of memories and feelings, especially if you’ve lived in Washington, D.C., for any length of time.   What we know mixed with what we remember —inauguration day, the Reagans waving to the crowds, jets overhead, the news, triumphant and hopeful and that the Iranian hostages had been released this day. Yes, Nancy was wearing red.

The more time passes, among presidents and their loved ones, the more the image and the life changes, and you realize that there are not only second acts in American life, but third, and fourth acts, especially, it would seem, among actors. Ronald Reagan was not only the first actor to become president, but Nancy was also the first actress to become first lady, and those jobs became roles they played out daily in public.  He was the jovial, magnetic, charismatic, eternally optimistic and sunny conservative. She was the adoring wife, the fashion plate, the small, thin queen, a very protective and often controversial first lady. The two had risen from being second-tier actors to the state house in California and on to the U.S. presidency.

The thing that people seem to remember most was how tightly and intensely held a marriage the Reagans had, the kind that few couples achieve. But Nancy herself did have style — sometimes bordering on the ostentatious in times that were often difficult for lesser beings — and she brought dazzle and light to a time that her husband had decreed to be “morning in America.”

They lived in a drama: the assassination attempt, the overture to the Soviet Union, White House controversies, “Just say, ‘No,’ ” the AIDs epidemic, Iran-Contra and so on.

Maybe the bravest things she did came after.  It was when she showed the depth of her devotion, care for Reagan in his fading and twilight years as he moved through the stages of Alzheimer’s which finally robbed him of the memories of his own large life and their life together.  In so doing, she battled the GOP on stem cell research, which might help in the fight against Alzheimer’s, and was always near or at the side of the man with whom she spent more than 50 years of married life.

In the end, she was alone, diminished physically, but grown to a size that matters in the imagination, in history, in our collective memory.