But the Fisher King was sketching another big picture, one he had had in mind since California. We have heard again and again that Mrs. Reagan turned the president away from the Evil Empire and toward the meetings with Gorbachev. (Later, on NBC “Nightly News,” the San Francisco astrologer Joan Quigley claimed a role in influencing both Reagans on this point, explaining that she had “changed their Evil Empire attitude by briefing them on Gorbachev’s horoscope.”) Mrs. Reagan herself allowed that she “felt it was ridiculous for these two heavily armed superpowers to be sitting there and not talking to each other” and “did push Ronnie a little.”
But how much pushing was actually needed remains in question. The Soviet Union appeared to Ronald Reagan as an abstraction, a place where people were helpless to resist “communism,” the inanimate evil that, as he had put it in a 1951 speech to a Kiwanis convention and would continue to put it for the next three and a half decades, had “tried to invade our industry” and been “fought” and eventually “licked.” This was a construct in which the actual citizens of the Soviet Union could be seen to have been, like the motion picture industry, “invaded”—in need only of liberation. The liberating force might be the appearance of a Shane-like character, someone to “lick” the evil, or it might be just the sweet light of reason. “A people free to choose will always choose peace,” as President Reagan told students at Moscow State University in May of 1988.
In this sense he was dealing from an entirely abstract deck, and the opening to the East had been his card all along, his big picture, his story. And this is how it went: what he would like to do, he had told any number of people over the years (I recall first hearing it from George Will, who cautioned me not to tell it because conversations with presidents were privileged), was take the leader of the Soviet Union (who this leader would be was another of those details outside the frame) on a flight to Los Angeles. When the plane came in low over the middle-class subdivisions that stretch from the San Bernardino mountains to LAX, he would direct the leader of the Soviet Union to the window, and point out all the swimming pools below. “Those are the pools of the capitalists,” the leader of the Soviet Union would say. “No,” the leader of the free world would say. “Those are the pools of the workers.” Blank years further on, when brave heroes blanked, and where the leader of the free world blank, accidental history took its course, but we have yet to pay for the ardor.
— 1989
SENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS
1
We know her story, and some of us, although not all of us, which was to become one of the story’s several equivocal aspects, know her name. She was a twenty-nine-year-old unmarried white woman who worked as an investment banker in the corporate finance department at Salomon Brothers in downtown Manhattan, the energy and natural resources group. She was said by one of the principals in a Texas oil-stock offering on which she had collaborated as a member of the Salomon team to have done “top-notch” work. She lived alone in an apartment on East 83rd Street, between York and East End, a sublet cooperative she was thinking about buying. She often worked late and when she got home she would change into jogging clothes and at eight-thirty or nine-thirty in the evening would go running, six or seven miles through Central Park, north on the East Drive, west on the less traveled road connecting the East and West Drives at approximately 102nd Street, and south on the West Drive. The wisdom of this was later questioned by some, by those who were accustomed to thinking of the Park as a place to avoid after dark, and defended by others, the more adroit of whom spoke of the citizen’s absolute right to public access (“That park belongs to us and this time nobody is going to take it from us,” Ronnie Eldridge, at the time a Democratic candidate for the City Council of New York, declared on the op-ed page of the New York Times), others of whom spoke of “running” as a preemptive right. “Runners have Type A controlled personalities and they don’t like their schedules interrupted,” one runner, a securities trader, told the Times to this point. “When people run is a function of their lifestyle,” another runner said. “I am personally very angry,” a third said. “Because women should have the right to run anytime.”
For this woman in this instance these notional rights did not prevail. She was found, with her clothes torn off, not far from the 102nd Street connecting road at one-thirty in the morning of April 20, 1989. She was taken near death to Metropolitan Hospital on East 97th Street. She had lost 75 percent of her blood. Her skull had been crushed, her left eyeball pushed back through its socket, the characteristic surface wrinkles of her brain flattened. Dirt and twigs were found in her vagina, suggesting rape. By May 2, when she first woke from coma, six black and Hispanic teenagers, four of whom had made videotaped statements concerning their roles in the attack and another of whom had described his role in an unsigned verbal statement, had been charged with her assault and rape and she had become, unwilling and unwitting, a sacrificial player in the sentimental narrative that is New York public life.
Nightmare in Central Park, the headlines and display type read. Teen Wolfpack Beats and Rapes Wall Street Exec on Jogging Path. Central Park Horror. Wolf Pack’s Prey. Female Jogger Near Death After Savage Attack by Roving Gang. Rape Rampage. Park Marauders Call It “Wilding,” Street Slang for going Berserk. Rape Suspect: “It Was Fun.” Rape Suspect’s Jailhouse Boast: “She Wasn’t Nothing.” The teenagers were back in the holding cell, the confessions gory and complete. One shouted “hit the beat” and they all started rapping to “Wild Thing.” The Jogger and the Wolf Pack. An Outrage and a Prayer. And, on the Monday morning after the attack, on the front page of the New York Post, with a photograph of Governor Mario Cuomo and the headline “None of Us Is Safe,” this italic text: “A visibly shaken Governor Cuomo spoke out yesterday on the vicious Central Park rape: ‘The people are angry and frightened — my mother is, my family is. To me, as a person who’s lived in this city all of his life, this is the ultimate shriek of alarm.’”
Later it would be recalled that 3,254 other rapes were reported that year, including one the following week involving the near decapitation of a black woman in Fort Tryon Park and one two weeks later involving a black woman in Brooklyn who was robbed, raped, sodomized, and thrown down an air shaft of a four-story building, but the point was rhetorical, since crimes are universally understood to be news to the extent that they offer, however erroneously, a story, a lesson, a high concept. In the 1986 Central Park death of Jennifer Levin, then eighteen, at the hands of Robert Chambers, then nineteen, the “story,” extrapolated more or less from thin air but left largely uncorrected, had to do not with people living wretchedly and marginally on the underside of where they wanted to be, not with the Dreiserian pursuit of “respectability” that marked the revealed details (Robert Chambers’s mother was a private-duty nurse who worked twelve-hour night shifts to enroll her son in private schools and the Knickerbocker Greys), but with “preppies,” and the familiar “too much too soon.”
Susan Brownmiller, during a year spent monitoring newspaper coverage of rape as part of her research for Against Our Wilclass="underline" Men, Women and Rape, found, not surprisingly, that “although New York City police statistics showed that black women were more frequent victims of rape than white women, the favored victim in the tabloid headline … was young, white, middle class and ‘attractive.’” In its quite extensive coverage of rape-murders during the year 1971, according to Ms. Brownmiller, the Daily News published in its four-star final edition only two stories in which the victim was not described in the lead paragraph as “attractive”: one of these stories involved an eight-year-old child, the other was a second-day follow-up on a first-day story that had in fact described the victim as “attractive.” The Times, she found, covered rapes only infrequently that year, but what coverage they did “concerned victims who had some kind of middle-class status, such as ‘nurse,’ ‘dancer’ or ‘teacher,’ and with a favored setting of Central Park.”