Nicholas F. Benton's White House Report

Some insiders insist that President Reagan was never quite the same after the failed assassination attempt on him on March 30, 1981, even though he served as president for a full seven years afterwards.

Reagan was far closer to death than many were willing to admit, and one wrong turn by the driver getting him to the George Washington Hospital from the sidewalk in front of the Washington Hilton Hotel on Connecticut Avenue on that cold but clear winter day could have cost him his life, according to sources.

Those were the days when it was possible to walk up alarmingly close to the president on a busy sidewalk, which is what John Hinckley, Jr., did. That incident did more to transform the intensity of security provisions around leading public figures in the U.S. than anything up until 9/11.

Reagan escaped death that day, only to have it catch up with him now. The enduring impact of his life on the course of history was made, especially during those first seven years, in between.

He is a quixotic figure in our history. How could such a seemingly genuine and nice guy, as close to an archetypical father figure as any president we've had, do such damage to the union movement or so thoroughly ignore the ravaging AIDS epidemic?

The only president to come to his post as a career actor, he appeared more genuine and unrehearsed in public settings than almost any politician before or since. He was affable, he was at ease, he was gracious and he had a simple eloquence in his inflections and word choice that could only be explained as a natural gift.

Being caught up in scandal was totally out of character for him because he was such a man of character, of principle, of the old-fashioned notions of honesty and virtue. He was almost structurally incapable of duplicity, it seemed. It seems believable, in his case, that Iran-Contra and other crimes of his administration, were carried out without his personal, or at least complete, knowledge.

As a White House correspondent during his second term in office, I and my journalistic colleagues saw plainly the wear and tear of his office take its toll on this man, probably initially brought on by the assassination attempt years before.

It seemed to hurt him deeply, on a personal level, to be mired in scandal toward the end of his presidency. But he understood the burden of his station in life, and always stood tall at the podium during formal White House press conferences, even as his hands and head softly shook and he searched his memory, like looking for an old hat in a cluttered closet, for appropriate answers to angry questions from the press.

Veterans of the press corps at that time remember holding their collective breaths during those press conferences out of empathy for the man's struggle to maintain his dignity and an appearance of being in control. The anxiety was felt not only for him, but for the entire nation and its need to be confident of a cogent leadership.

There was a nobility in his belabored effort at that stage which, we can be confident, he carried every step as he sank into the oblivion of Alzheimer's, and which was, in the final analysis, beyond politics and pomp, his most endearing quality.

As a man called to public service, he abandoned the easy life of success in Tinseltown and carried himself as someone who saw his personal life and its strife as eclipsed by the purposes, the institutions and the public he served.

His politics, his rhetoric, his policies were controversial and drew strong and deserved criticism from many, ballooning deficits, driving down wages, ignoring real suffering. It makes it doubly frustrating when a person like this honestly feels he is not intending or causing any negative outcomes by such actions and gets a genuinely pained look on his face whenever accused of it.

He was not an angry or strident man. He was not two-faced. He was comforted by his own deep confidence in the simple values he lived by. He came into public life in the 1950s believing that the fascism America fought in World War II and the Stalinist tyranny of the Soviet Union were two sides of the same coin that was the arch-enemy of individual freedom and democracy. Hence his passionate antipathy for "big government" and resolve to stand down the East Bloc.

Unlike the devious neo-conservatives ideologues that rose to power in the GOP following him, and who dominate the Bush administration today, Reagan's world view started not with a twisted ideology of the global American bully but with a core respect for the individual and his or her freedom.