Trying to Get in Touch With a Hands-Off Presidency

It has only been six months since Ronald Reagan left office, but already some historians are willing to guess how history will compare him to other presidents. Most put him somewhere in the middle. Lewis Gould, a University of Texas historian, compares Reagan to Calvin Coolidge, explaining: “Coolidge was strong for keeping things from being done.” Gould thinks Reagan will eventually wind up “in the middle or lower-middle ranks.” But he did give Reagan credit for having “elements of F.D.R. in his ability to communicate.” A biographer of Franklin D. Roosevelt begs to differ. Frank Freidel, professor emeritus at Harvard, said: “If I had to rank him right now, I would rank him as high as Dwight D. Eisenhower. Both were total charmers. Both clung to the same sort of small-town Middle Western verities. Both were men of principle. Both to a certain extent were hands-off presidents.” Not everyone agrees with Freidel, either. An Eisenhower biographer, Fred Greenstein of Princeton, said Eisenhower never had an Iran-Contra-type scandal and instead compares Reagan to Ulysses S. Grant, a President who, he said, “had substantial public support but left a rather messy legacy.” Historian Donald McCoy of the University of Kansas also called Reagan a hands-off President and said that “he wasn’t terrific at it but on the other hand he wasn’t a failure, either. What shall we say? So-so, average, fair.”

--For the first time in 35 years, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II will enter a horse in a race in the United States, said track officials at Arlington Park in suburban Chicago. The queen’s last entrant in the United States was Landau in 1954. That horse finished last in the Washington International.

--The people of Salem, Mass., are a bit confused about two candidates for the City Council. One of them is Jean-Guy Martineau, who holds the 5th Ward seat and is seeking one of four at-large seats. Another is Jean-Claude Martineau, who is running for the 5th Ward seat that Jean-Guy is leaving. Adding to the confusion from their similar names is the reason for that likeness: They’re 40-year-old identical twins. Jean-Claude had been living in Florida but decided to enter politics upon his return to Salem because constituents kept mistaking him for his office-holding brother. “He got all the complaints and I got off free half of the time,” Jean-Guy said.