COLUMN LEFT : The People Were On to It All Along : Only the press thought Americans were too stupid to figure out the Reagans.

It’s Dump-on-Nancy time, but the only people to feel shame should be those who toadied to the Reagans for eight long years. That means most of the press, who went along with the charade right up to the moment that Police Chief Daryl Gates invited Nancy and a platoon of reporters and photographers down to watch the Los Angeles police conduct a storm-trooper “drug raid” in South-Central Los Angeles while Gates congratulated Mrs. Reagan on her courage.

Kitty Kelley sounds sharp because she is cutting into a butter-mountain of balderdash about Ron and Nancy, served up by publicists and faithfully reproduced by the Fourth Estate.

One of the most conspicuous features of this Fourth Estate is the way it mesmerizes itself, like a rabbit practicing self-hypnosis in the absence of a stoat. Year after year the White House press corps and the cud-chewers on the opinion pages went on about R.R.’s unassailable popularity and soaring credibility, long after there was a mountain of evidence showing that the American people had strong reservations about the First Man and the First Lady.

Now we are seeing the same with President Bush. Commentators will be calling him the most popular leader in the history of the Republic and shoveling earth over the Democratic coffin long after the voters have come to a far more balanced assessment of the commander in chief.

The press constantly underestimates the public’s common sense. Twenty-some years ago it invented a “new Nixon” and then tortured itself with worry whether this “new Nixon” was in fact the same old Nixon. Meanwhile, the public figured all along that Nixon was Nixon, whom some thought was worth having as President however badly he fiddled the books.

Many people liked Reagan’s act, but this does not necessarily mean they believed in it. Being snooty know-it-alls, with neat little models of “Joe Sixpack” and “What plays in Peoria,” the White House press corps thinks that when the truth comes out, the public will be devastated.

Most Reagan fans knew the truth all along, but backed him anyway, same as they backed Nixon even though they knew his relationship to the higher side of morality was unstable. I remember folks along Reagan’s campaign trails in the late 1970s enjoying the old man’s act while knowing at the same time that most of what he said was a pack of lies.

The press corps never understood, so when Reagan was caught in some amazing stretcher, like claiming he’d helped liberate Auschwitz (repeated twice, to Yitzhak Shamir and to Rabbi Martin Hier), they expected the heavens to fall in. But with Reagan the voters had already discounted for stretchers, having decided that between a man--Jimmy Carter--who swore he’d always tell the truth and a man who made no distinction between truth and fiction, they’d opt for the honest label.

Nancy was a good actress in the Brechtian manner. She said the lines but she also made it plain enough to the audience that she thought the lines were ridiculous. I’ve always taken the view that she was good for the country, and that astrology was merely a cover for some sensible women to give prudent advice. The ancient Druid priestesses were on to the same idea.

It was Nancy who urged R.R. to dump Al Haig, too late to stop him from plotting with Israel the invasion of northern Lebanon but soon enough to prevent this mad general from starting a naval embargo of Cuba. It was Nancy who bid R.R. to go to Moscow to hatch peace with Gorbachev.

In the New York Post last week, Amy Pagnozzi had a strong column discussing Kelley’s revelations of what Selena Walters has described as her “date rape” by R.R. and of Jacqueline Park’s story of R.R.’s indifference to her pregnancy during an affair with him in the 1950s. Pagnozzi wrote:

“Afterward Reagan played dumb to the pain he’d caused Walters, just as he played dumb when Park had her illegal abortion--just as he played dumb during the Iran-Contra scandal and countless other times during his jelly-bean presidency. . . . And Nancy is supposed to be the master manipulator, running everything? The truth is, Ronald Reagan was never simple, or even the bad actor he was made out to be--he was just, simply, bad. And despite the conclusion in Kelley’s book--that Nancy Reagan was the President--her main role has really been to allow her husband to play victim instead of the victimizer--first politically, and now, again, where women are concerned.”

So, in that sense, Kelley’s book has the effect of letting R.R. get away with it one last time.