Today, Paul Krugman responds, arguing, as he has before, that Reagan used racist appeals for political benefit.  Referring to Mr. Cannon and Times columnist David Brooks, he notes: "Reagan's defenders protest furiously that he wasn't personally bigoted. So what? We're talking about his political strategy. His personal beliefs are irrelevant."

One other interesting note: The Reagan controversy prompted us to ask last week why Times columnists can't refer to each other by name in their columns. Today, Mr. Krugman refers in passing to "my colleague Bob Herbert," who has been on Mr. Krugman's side on the issue.  So if Times columnists can name their colleagues when they agree with them, why can't they also do so when they disagree?     

Anyone who ever covered Ronald Reagan-O.K., maybe not every reporter, but lots of them, and more hard-bitten ones than you'd think-has a story about when they realized that, however screwy his opinions could be (like the assertion that trees cause pollution), Ronnie was a helluva guy. It's like being able to recall the precise circumstances of learning that J.F.K. had been shot: The experience is so shockingly unexpected, the details are permanently engraved.

For me, a former resident of California who hadn't been a fan, it happened aboard a campaign bus in the middle of the night somewhere between Orlando and Ocala, Fla. It was a few weeks before the onset of the 1976 primary season: Richard Nixon was safely exiled to San Clemente, and Mr. Reagan-fresh from two eventful terms as governor of California-was in the midst of a doomed attempt to wrest the nomination from the hapless Gerald R. Ford. On the Reagan Express, all were dozing save the driver, yours truly (sleeplessly inventing expense-account items) and-I was startled to see upon glancing up at the oversized rear-view mirror-Ron and Nancy. They were in the very last seat, one of those padded numbers that stretch the width of the coach. Their lips were locked, their bodies entwined and-just as decency intervened to avert my gaze-the candidate's hand was headed breastward.

A Republican like that you gotta love.

Lou Cannon was on that bus, too, reporting for The Washington Post , and the episode is one of the few involving Ronald Reagan that he's missed in the last 36 years. A demon reporter, Mr. Cannon-a fiercer, more rumpled Mr. Whipple in appearance-is the author of four previous volumes on Ronald Reagan, including President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (1991), which is the book that authorized Reagan biographer Edmund Morris might have written had not end-stage egotism produced the execrable Dutch . In Governor Reagan , Mr. Cannon demonstrates yet again why he's so consistently lauded-and why his subject is so consistently underestimated.

In this, of course, Mr. Reagan is not alone. Another actor lately turned California governor hasn't been getting boffo notices, either, except for not being the aptly named Gray Davis. In time, Arnold Schwarzenegger (whom I admit to knowing and liking) may turn his doubters around-those, anyway, who don't pay dues to the National Organization for Women. While it's unlikely that Arnold devotes many evenings to exegesis of Proust, he, like Mr. Reagan, is no dope (marrying Maria proves that). Also like Mr. Reagan, he's self-made, appealingly squishy on social issues, telegenic, charming, good-humored and-hardly least-terrific at sticking to a script crafted by savvier others. (There are some differences, too: Ronnie's father was a department-store clerk, Arnold's a Nazi cop.)

But back to the selling-short of Mr. Reagan, which began the instant it became known he was running for governor in 1966. "No, no," studio boss Jack Warner reputedly said on hearing the news, "Jimmy Stewart for governor, Ronald Reagan for best friend." Genial Edmund G. (Pat) Brown-who'd all but licked the stamps on invitations to his third inaugural-didn't take him seriously, either. "I'm running against an actor," he told an elementary-school class, "and you know who shot Lincoln, don'tcha?"

Californians didn't care. They sent the star of Bedtime for Bonzo to Sacramento by a margin of 993,730 votes-never mind that Mr. Reagan had been upstaged by the chimp.

This wasn't just the usual Golden State perversity. Unlike California's latest governor-elect, Mr. Reagan came well-apprenticed in the political arts via six one-year terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild, navigating between the Scylla of the Red-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee and the Charybdis of the Lew Wassermans and Louis B. Mayers. He was also kitted out with the self-assurance of the Gipper he played; quickness with a quip ("That may be only soap to you," he said to a heckler, making fun of his Death Valley Days sponsor, Boraxo, "but it's bread and butter to me"); and-along with a stage presence honed by endless speechifying at G.E. plants-an actor's sense of timing such as would have made James Lipton puddle. That last talent told him that Pat Brown's clock was up.

Once in the statehouse, Mr. Reagan displayed another knack, this one for making lunatic pronouncements. Mr. Cannon records a diverse plentitude, on topics ranging from viewing redwoods ("I saw them; there is nothing beautiful about them, just that they are a little higher than the others") to taming Berkeley ("If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement"). Most portrayals of Mr. Reagan leave it at that; Mr. Cannon doesn't. Instead, he peels back the rhetoric to examine the reality. What he uncovers will discomfort believers in stereotypes.

On the environment, for instance, Mr. Reagan did a good impersonation of being president of the Sierra Club, preserving forests, protecting wild rivers from damming, and mounting horseback to personally halt in its tracks a proposed highway that would have sliced the John Muir Trail in two. He also enlisted on the side of the eagles when sheep ranchers wanted to cleanse the sky of them. "I hate to see them shot," Mr. Reagan explained to his conservation chief. "Besides, I don't like lamb chops."

On abortion-a topic then so sensitive that the Los Angeles Times would refer to it only as an "illegal medical procedure"-he stood conservative convention on its head as well, signing into law a "therapeutic" termination-of-pregnancy measure that, pre– Roe v. Wade , was the most liberal in the nation.

As would Bill Clinton nearly 30 years later, he reformed welfare-and in the process, upped benefits for 80 percent of recipients, a trick even Mr. Clinton couldn't pull off. Unlike the current occupant of the White House, his judicial appointments were notably free of crazies. Nor did Mr. Reagan share a certain former Texas governor's bouncy enthusiasm for the death penalty; during his eight years in office, pellets dropped in San Quentin's gas chamber exactly once-to execute a cop-killer whose clemency appeal Pat Brown had already denied.

There were further apostasies: introducing conjugal visitations to the prison system; enacting an income tax that soaked the rich more than any Democrat dared; playing a pivotal role defeating a ballot initiative that would have discriminated against homosexual teachers. By the time Mr. Cannon drops the final eye-popper (the 1952 decision by the Los Angeles Democratic Central Committee not to endorse Mr. Reagan for an open Congressional seat on the grounds of being "too liberal"), you're beginning to wonder if maybe he wasn't a card-carrying member of the ACLU to boot.

Anne Coulter can relax: As President, Ronald Reagan thought James Watt, Ollie North and "Star Wars" were swell.

"A foolish consistency," the saying goes, "is the hobgoblin of little minds"-and Emerson, no surprise, was thinking specifically of "little statesmen." Whatever Ronald Reagan's faults (Mr. Cannon chronicles many, despite his obvious affection), no one ever accused him of thinking small. He entered government determined to make it work, as he believed-deeply-it ought to work. Close-minded, though, he was not. He listened, he compromised, he cut deals. And if, along the way, someone whose help he needed told him to go fuck himself (as, one day, the tipsy state controller did), he laughed-which disarmed his enemies. If that was acting, the Academy should have taken notice.

There are a number of lessons to be drawn from this fine book-about statecraft, about appearances, about being a good guy and behaving well. Arnold ought to read it.

Robert Sam Anson, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair , reviews books regularly for The Observer .

His nibs went on to tell his audience that "out of this violence and ugliness came new hope." Like hell it did. Nothing came out of the violence except dead people, lots of 'em, 54 of 'em, of whom 26 were African-American, 14 Hispanic, nine white and two Asian. Not that some wisdom and understanding might not have come out of this lugubrious anniversary. There is much to be learned from it, but it won't be learned from the likes of George Bush and those depressing Democrats who seem to be lining up to run against him.

The first difficulty with profiting from this disaster is finding a reliable source of information, but one does exist in the form of a book entitled Official Negligence by Lou Cannon, published five years ago by Times Books. Mr. Cannon is one of the very best journalists of his time, a political agnostic of unsurpassed accuracy whose books on Ronald Reagan have not been superseded. Until something better comes along, Official Negligence should also be relied on as the definitive work on the L.A. riots. I draw on it for what follows.

The first thing Mr. Cannon disposes of is the shocking video of white LAPD officers beating the stuffing out of African-American Rodney King. That tape was played ad infinitum in Los Angeles and around the world. For those who could stand to look at it, the conclusion was inescapable: Those police officers were sadistic race-haters of the worst water. High and low, people of every estate based their opinions of the event in Los Angeles on that tape, which seemed to show cops being everything no cop should ever be. Thus, when the four officers tried for beating Mr. King were acquitted, countless millions were dumbfounded. "Viewed from outside the trial, it was hard to understand how the verdict could possibly square with the video," then–President Bush had said. "Those civil-rights leaders with whom I met were stunned, and so was I, and so was Barbara, and so were my kids." Also stunned and enraged by the tape were the men and women who touched off the riot at the intersection of Florence and Normandie.

The hitch is that the video which the world saw had been edited, snipping out a vital 13 seconds which showed a bull-snorting Rodney King attacking the cops with such menace that the subsequent beating suffered by him was susceptible to a very different interpretation. From the time the editing became public knowledge, it has been gospel among some conservative groups that what we had here was yet another example of the liberal media putting the cops and white people in the worst possible light.

Mr. Cannon comes to a different conclusion. His reporting leads him to say that the tape was edited for commercial, not political, motives. The TV people wanted the bloodiest, the most crisply vivid, most shocking, most viewer-sexy slice of tape they could put on the air. The distortion of the facts was done not for politics, but for money.

Would that it had been done for politics. If that were the case, we could correct for it whenever we see a piece of action footage; but when they do it for money, there's no guessing what they're leaving out. There's no way to correct for it, and on the 10th anniversary of the riot that's a valuable lesson, especially given all the action in the Terror War crowding our TV monitors. Are they sensationalizing the coverage? We await another Lou Cannon to go back over what's being done and tell us-but then the one thing we can be sure of is that TV's pursuit of the buck is no less ardent now than it was in 1992 Los Angeles.

The Cannon book speaks directly to Sept. 11 and events subsequent to that little piece of mass murder. The city of Los Angeles was repeatedly warned to be ready for the worst if the four officers being tried for police brutality were acquitted. The judge even held up making the jury verdict public for two hours to give the city and the LAPD time for precautionary measures, but none were taken. The U.S. government had nearly 10 years' warning that the World Trade Center was a target. It had tried and convicted members of a conspiracy which had already attempted and all but succeeded in blowing the place up once before. It had memos warning of terrorists planning to hijack airplanes. And yet the authorities were caught flatfooted the day of disaster.

Is it that nobody believes a soothsayer? Our people are warned, they're told it's going to happen, and yet they're unable to parry the blow. It happened at Pearl Harbor more than 60 years ago, in Los Angeles 10 years ago and last year in New York. Or is it that they're swamped by too many warnings? That's the excuse we've been hearing of late, but shouldn't it be the duty of the intelligence services to sift out the real from the phony? They tell us they do; they tell us we don't appreciate the number of plots they foil and disasters they avert. But it's not good enough-not when failure results in a Los Angeles riot or the destruction of the W.T.C.

Mr. Cannon explains that among the reasons for the LAPD's failure was the belief, based on the city's experience with the 1965 Watts riot, that mass violence is a nighttime phenomenon, that there are no daytime riots, and thus police planned to mobilize after the sun went down. The riot broke out in the afternoon and went on for hours before sunset. In like manner, the federal people were ready for every kind of plane hijacking except the kind that occurred on Sept. 11. Who would have thought that the terrorists would be suicide bombers? Anybody who'd been reading about the suicide bombers in Israel might have considered the possibility.

For hours after the riot began, the mayor and the chief of police were both invisible; the same for George W. Bush in the hours after the airplanes demolished the W.T.C. You wouldn't think somebody would have to explain to men and women in such positions that, even if they're too scared or befuddled to do anything else, they must show themselves in the hour of crisis, even if their bodyguards are telling them it's dangerous.

Mr. Cannon's account of the lack of training, the wrong kinds of equipment and, above all else, the failure to coordinate and use large numbers of police from nearby law-enforcement organizations who were ready and anxious to help, is a thrice-told tale. We see it in nearly every disaster, and we certainly saw it when the anthrax attack or whatever it was burst on us. What the real response to the W.T.C. was, we can't know. There is so much secrecy and, for aught we know or don't know, so many lies, propaganda and-what is the phrase? "Strategic information"? Even so, we've learned how poorly the F.B.I. was doing its job, for all the thousands on its payroll and the billions in appropriations.

After the four Los Angeles policemen were set free by a state jury, they were indicted and tried again. The Fifth Amendment forbids trying a person for the same crime over and over again. In the case of the four cops, it was the cheapest and quickest way the Bush administration could placate black and liberal opinion. Why they should bother, since they never had a chance of getting those votes, is beyond understanding, but they did-and by so doing, took an important step toward the abrogation of double jeopardy. Nowadays, they can and they do try you over and over again for the same crime. They keep doing it till they get you, and that is another topic that was worthy of discussion on the 10th anniversary. There are many more to be found in Mr. Cannon's book, and if they got skipped, there will be more anniversaries and more horrible events to memorialize. Perhaps then we can speak of that which we do not speak of now.