REAGAN HAS BEEN UNDERESTIMATED BY MOST, INCLUDING HIS BIOGRAPHER

Driving north last week, I tuned in KMOX's "Morning Meeting" hosted by Charles Brennan and Zimmer Radio Group alumnus Carol Keeler Daniel. They said the next hour's guest would be Edmund Morris, author of "Dutch," the disappointing, 14-years-in-the-making Reagan biography so much in the news. I seized a chance to talk to the biographer of a man who inspired me so greatly. When after a brief interview they took listener calls, I was second, warmly welcomed as an "old friend" by Daniel, the rising star of St. Louis radio.

Avoiding the book's many flaws, which have been exhaustively treated in both print and broadcast media, I told Morris that I had spent much of last winter with his Pulitzer-winning biography of Teddy Roosevelt. Next, stating that I hadn't yet read his latest, I asked him about a telling incident early in Reagan's political career.

"Did you pay any attention," I queried Morris, "to Reagan's appearance in 1967 on a CBS broadcast called "Town Meeting of the World" in which he was pitted against Bobby Kennedy? Reagan debated Kennedy for an hour and simply demolished him. Later, a shaken RFK told his brother, Ted, who has publicly related the story, that Reagan was the toughest guy he ever faced in a debate."

To this Morris responded: "You are absolutely right. Reagan mopped up the floor with Robert Kennedy. I didn't dwell on it in my book, owing to the fact that 1967 (the first year of Reagan's first term as California governor) was so momentous and so packed with events. But I did make a point of telling Evan Thomas, who is at work on a major biography of Robert Kennedy, about the incident."

Thus ended my brief exchange with Morris. Still, it strikes me as telling, and characteristic, that the author of the Reagan biography that has so widely disappointed readers and reviewers would omit this event. Here was "a former B-movie actor" (as dismissed by foes from Gerald Ford to Jimmy Carter), and graduate of a small-town Illinois college, who took on the Harvard-educated heir to America's Camelot dynasty and in an hour, left RFK sputtering in puzzled inarticulation.

Reagan enjoyed the inestimable advantage of being underestimated by nearly every opponent he ever faced. There was Edmund "Jerry" Brown, the late California governor he demolished by one million votes in 1966. There was the hapless Ford, who narrowly staved off RR's insurgent 1976 challenge for the GOP nomination. How about both ends of the Carter-Mondale ticket, who convinced themselves that Reagan was the guy they wanted to face in 1980? And once in the White House, there was the late House Speaker Tip O'Neill. All did the Gipper the incalculable favor of underestimating him.

Through it all Reagan was class -- always class and more class. As a college kid and Reagan volunteer at the '76 GOP national convention in Kansas City, sleeping on the hard floor of a friend's apartment, this writer labored for the Gipper. Many memories are rich. Foremost among them: Reagan's post-defeat press conference the day after losing his gallant nomination fight. Newly acquainted with the sting of defeat, Reagan's husky, stirring voice intoned the moving words of a Scottish poet:

I'll lay me down and bleed awhile,

Though I am wounded, I am not slain,

I shall rise and fight again.

And how.

As he slips still further into the dark night of Alzheimer's, a grateful nation awaits the true biography of this great and good man.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.