Reagan's Hollywood skills served him well in D.C.

WASHINGTON - To this day, many people still remember how Ronald Reagan used humor during a 1984 presidential debate to deflect questions about whether he was too old to be president.

Sam Donaldson recalls not just Reagan's words, but also the pictures from that night. Reagan, then 73, was running for a second term and coming off of a disastrous first debate with Democrat Walter Mondale in which he seemed tired and at times incoherent. In their second debate, Reagan confronted the age issue head on.

"I will not make age an issue of this campaign," he promised, tongue planted firmly in cheek. "I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."

Donaldson, who was the White House reporter for ABC News, remembers how the exchange played out on TV.

"The camera was on Walter Mondale," Donaldson recalled. "He laughed! Not at Ronald Reagan, clearly with Ronald Reagan. And then the camera goes on Ronald Reagan. ... The old actor picked up a glass of water, took a sip, put it down with a sense of satisfaction on his face."

"At that moment," Donaldson said, "I knew it was game, set, match. It was over."

Reagan's skills as an actor -- his theatricality, his sense of timing, his ability to connect with an audience -- were often mocked by his critics but are considered by many scholars to be important keys to his success in the White House.

Reagan's political philosophy and his deftness as a negotiator began to take shape when he was in Hollywood and served as president of the Screen Actors Guild, said Kenneth Duberstein, who served as Reagan's White House chief of staff.

His sense of timing was classic Hollywood. Everybody remembers the signature line from his 1987 speech at the Berlin Wall: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

"But if you go back and look at the tape," Duberstein said, "it was the skill of an actor who delivered that line well."

Reagan decided to keep the line in his speech, much to the chagrin of the State Department, and rehearsed it over and over while on his way to the Berlin Wall because he wanted to make sure he had the delivery down pat, Duberstein said.

Reagan also initiated the president's Saturday morning radio address, a weekly tradition still followed by his successors. Reagan conceived of the radio address as a way to speak directly to the American people for five minutes without having his words filtered through an often-critical news media, Duberstein said.

Former Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd, who is CEO of the Motion Picture Association, recalled that Democrats were almost giddy when it became clear in 1980 that the GOP would nominate an actor for president.

But, "Ronald Reagan had an incredible capacity to relate to people," Dodd said.