It’s a safe bet that this week we won’t lack for coverage, opinions, hagiographies and rants about Ronald Reagan, so I figured that the last thing anyone needed to see here was Ronald Reagan: One Bakerina’s Opinion (with accompanying mood music by Einsturzende Neubaten). I was fine to let my pals do the heavy lifting for me. Then I decided to check my stats, and discovered that someone had hit my page via Yahoo, searching on the phrase Ronald Reagan Lenin pie crust.
Well. Did I really want to know what Lenin pie is? Do you get meringue with that, so you can have Lenin meringue pie? The mind boggled.
But not for long. With a little thought, and with a peek at one of the more interesting links, I remembered that Reagan once made a speech in which he credited Lenin with the line that “promises are like pie crusts, made to be broken.” He also credited Lenin with an aphorism that there would be no need for a Communist takeover of the United States; all the Soviets would have to do was take over Europe, then Asia, then Africa, then South America, and then the United States “would fall into our outstretched hands like overripe fruit.” I don’t know who was responsible for the pie crust line, but the overripe fruit line was actually the brainchild of Robert Welch of the John Birch Society. Either way, at the time (1983) I suspected that Reagan’s grasp of the facts might be a bit tenuous, not least because he kept referring to “Nikolai Lenin” (as opposed to Vladimir, which was, in fact, Lenin’s first name).
For those of you nostalgic or constitutionally strong enough for a walk down memory lane... Me, I had my fill at about the fifth time Larry Speakes defended Reagan’s use of folksy apocrypha with “It’s a good story, though, isn’t it?” or the astonishing “When you tell a story five times, it becomes the truth.”