Edward Kennedy on President Reagan: A State of Disunion

Lance Corporal George Dramis, who was the last marine killed in Beirut before President Reagan withdrew the forces, was buried in Villas, New Jersey, on the very day the president made that decision. Many felt, as they heard the news, that Corporal Dramis and 263 of his comrades had died in Lebanon not for a reason, but for a mistake. That, however, was not the mood of Mr. Reagan's statement, which was cast in the Orwellian tones that characterize most of his claims as we enter this 1984 presidential campaign. Withdrawal, as Mr. Reagan phrased it, was only ''redeployment'' and ''reconcentrating our forces.'' The crumbling Lebanese government was attempting to ''reconstitute itself.'' The retreat from Beirut, so reminiscent of the American flight from Saigon, would ''strengthen our ability to do the job we set out to do.'' Our ships, themselves potentially vulnerable to a suicide attack, would ''help assure security in the Beirut area'' — where we had not been able to secure the safety of our own marines. The shelling from the battleship New Jersey — with blunderbuss 16—inch guns that devastate an area the size of a football field and that inevitably take civilian lives—was a way to ''peaceful reconciliation.'' As Orwell predicted, in 1984 ''war is peace.''

This description of the events in Beirut, which flipped reality on its head, is the latest example of the Reagan method of acting: In the face of a crisis gone bad or a problem grown worse, he ad libs, proclaims success, and then as things take another turn, twists the facts to fit a new and different claim of progress. Occasionally, the footwork isn't fast enough, and the failures briefly intrude on the image-making. Incongruously, Secretary of State George Shultz was in Grenada to watch sky-diving demonstrations and to celebrate American firepower as the president announced retreat in Lebanon. It was less than three weeks after Mr. Reagan had boasted, in his State of the Union speech, that America was now ''standing tall.''

This time, Mr. Reagan decided to issue a press release from his California ranch rather than address the nation on television. Perhaps, in a case this extreme, even he could not bring himself to appear on camera as though defeat were victory. Yet on camera or in print, in domestic as well as foreign policy, the Reagan appeals, each of them carefully crafted to the present campaign, all emphasize the temporary gain, the plausible hype, the sham argument. The administration blithely assumes that the public and the press have short memories and almost no attention span. The president himself seems to worry not at all about the credibility gap between the rhetoric of the 1980 Reagan campaign and the realities of 1984. In 1980, we were told that a supply-side tax cut would generate new savings and new revenue, and that by the end of 1983, we would have a balanced budget. Today, the savings rate has dropped to the lowest level in twenty-five years, and we have the highest federal deficit in history.