Saturday, May 21, 2005

Reagan's Legacy Project

In a manner that recalled Reagan's time in the White House, every move had been carefully choreographed. This was no ordinary funeral. ''This,'' as one former advance man said, ''is a legacy-building event.''
That work goes on, with Reagan's acolytes still building and burnishing. The Reagan Legacy Project, started in 1997 by the conservative lobbyist Grover Norquist, seeks to name something -- a stadium, a stretch of turnpike, anything -- after Reagan in every state in the union.
The chain bookstores, for their part, now feature a virtual Reagan wing, their shelves stuffed full of character studies, coffee-table confections, speech anthologies, hagiographies and mash notes. Beyond a basic hunger for heroes, this great cascade of Reagan lit reflects a mounting effort to retool the Reagan narrative.

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