Oh, Ronald Reagan, lovable, shrewd, twinkly, out-of-it, blithe, brilliant Ronald Reagan. The transmutation of presidential politics and governing into entertainment had started a generation earlier, in the 1960s, with John Kennedy. JFK was like a movie star and like a fictional character. He was young and dashing, witty and sexy. He’d been a war hero, and Hollywood made a movie about those heroics, PT 109, while he was president, a production on which he gave notes. His glamorous patrician wife was even younger, only thirty-one when she became First Lady, and one of his girlfriends was a real
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