Last Act

by Craig Shirley

  These ratings soared even higher in the years after Reagan’s death as Americans became nostalgic for his presidency. Gallup annually asks Americans whom they think is the best president. Reagan routinely ranks among the top three, sometimes first, sharing the preference of the people with two martyred presidents, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Historians may dispute these judgments, but the opinion of the people should not be taken lightly.

  Indeed, Reagan remains popular because he reached ordinary Americans of my generation in a way no other president did, save Kennedy. So it’s no accident, as Shirley observes in this estimable book, that Reagan often quoted JFK over the objections of liberals and conservatives alike. In fact, Shirley tells us that Reagan once received a letter from JFK’s son, John Kennedy, Jr., urging Reagan to keep quoting him.

  Reagan did. He was always in touch with the people.

  LOU CANNON

  AUTHOR, PRESIDENT REAGAN:

  THE ROLE OF A LIFETIME

  PREFACE

  A Tide in the Affairs of Men

  “He sits around telling stories, and they’re all fond of him, but they don’t take him too seriously.”

  The day Ronald Reagan died, Ardeshir Zahedi, the noted Iranian diplomat, wrote to Nancy Reagan and said, “Our great Persian poet Saadi says that a man who leaves behind a good name shall never die for he shall have eternal life in the memories of generation after generation of humanity. President Reagan was such a man.”1

  Mr. Zahedi was prophetic, as the second week of June 2004—the seven days of the Reagan funeral—proved to be a titanic struggle between those who wanted to enlarge the legacy of Ronald Reagan and those who wanted to diminish his place in history. For Reagan, some things never changed.

  As with his entire life and even in death, the vast majority of the elites had little regard for Reagan. The vast majority of the citizenry thought otherwise. New York City closed its government for the deaths of Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. The New York City government, however, did not close for the passing of Ronald Reagan.

  Instead, the day Reagan died, a play called Assassins was being performed on Broadway, which featured an actor playing John Hinckley firing a gun at a cardboard cutout of Ronald Reagan.2

  Celebrated atheist, commentator, and dyspeptic scold Christopher Hitchens called the week of the Reagan funeral “pseudo-monarchical, hagiographic trash.” In the face of the realities of the Cold War, nuclear annihilation, and the dire economy of 1980, liberal analyst and Nation editor David Corn said of Reagan, “It seemed at times that he was untethered from reality.” Gay activist Larry Kramer called Reagan a “gigantic sinner.”3

  As for Reagan’s place in history, FDR and JFK biographer Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., said, “He’s like a nice, old uncle, who comes in, and all the kids are glad to see him. He sits around telling stories, and they’re all fond of him, but they don’t take him too seriously.” Historian Stephen Ambrose said Reagan was simply the beneficiary of “very good luck.”4 And yet another essayist of history, Doug Brinkley, who edited the Reagan diaries, came away impressed with the agility of the man’s mind. So, too, did an underrated historian, John Patrick Diggins, a liberal whose book Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History praised Reagan as one of America’s four greatest presidents because like Washington, Lincoln, and FDR, he also freed and saved many, many people. Diggins believed, like Thomas Carlyle, that the “history of the world is but the biography of great men.”5

  The populist Reagan’s sometime nemesis, the Wall Street Journal, noted the day before he left office in 1989 how much had been accomplished in eight years.

  Not the least of Mr. Reagan’s accomplishments is how much the nation has forgotten. He took office in the very shadow of a hostage crisis, remember? Remember gasoline lines? Remember double-digit inflation and interest rates twice today’s? Remember Watergate? Remember Vietnam? As Ronald Reagan hands over the reins tomorrow . . . he leaves quite a different America. It cannot be all luck, and it is not likely to vanish as the outgoing President leaves center stage.6

  For many opponents, facts weren’t enough. Hollywood doyen Bette Midler claimed Reagan had emptied America’s insane asylums when in fact it was the courts at the behest of the ACLU.7

  Democratic pollster and Bill Clinton confidant Stanley Greenberg contended during the week of the Reagan funeral that the Gipper’s long-lasting impact on the country would be ephemeral, unlike FDR and JFK. Reagan “ ‘is a historical figure whose relevance to today’s politics is quite limited. Reagan,’ he said, ’remains a revered figure among Republicans, but a more controversial leader among non-Republicans.’ ”8

  The week of the Gipper’s death, syndicated liberal cartoonist Ted Rall would show an absence of tact and an absence of a soul when he said, “I’m sure he’s turning crispy brown right about now.”9 A former conservative, Kevin Phillips, wrote in his book The Politics of Rich and Poor, “The 1980s were the triumph of upper America—an ostentatious celebration of wealth, the political ascendancy of the richest third of the population and a glorification of capitalism, free markets and finance.”10

  The word greed was thrown about by many pundits and Phillips was no exception. The Clintons called the 1980s the “decade of greed,”11 but the prosperity of the 1990s, which had its underpinnings in Reaganomics, was not. During the week of his funeral, the Washington Times reported, “A best-selling author, says of him: ’Killer, coward, con man—Ronald Reagan, goodbye and good riddance.’ ” Also, a “gay activist” penned that Reagan would “spend eternity in hell.”12

  Walter Williams, author of Reaganism and the Death of Representative Democracy, told U.S. News & World Report, “He didn’t know what was going on under him.”13 In 1980, “radical chic conductor Leonard Bernstein said Reagan’s election would unleash the forces of fascism in America.”14

  Few men in public life suffered the enmity of the elites more than Reagan, even as statues of him continue to dot the world, in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol; in Simi Valley and Sacramento, California; in London; in Budapest; in Warsaw; in Dixon and Eureka, Illinois. Possibly, Reagan’s reverence for a quote attributed to Cicero that “the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled” had something to do with their contempt for him.15 Or as Reagan aide Mike Deaver once told another Reagan aide, Peter Hannaford, “These guys have never been with us.”16

  The story of Ronald Reagan and the story of his passing and the week of his funeral is really the story of two vastly different Americas. This in and of itself was ironic as Reagan despised class and cultural warfare. He said, “Since when do we in America accept this alien and discredited theory of social and class warfare? Since when do we in America endorse the politics of envy and division?”17

  When he left office, he was regarded as successful and highly popular—68 percent approval according to a New York Times poll—but that wasn’t enough for his detractors. The last Gallup poll taken on the elites’ beloved FDR was in 1943, two years before his death. It pegged him at 66 percent approval.18

  Last Act is also about the sixteen years of Reagan’s life following his two terms as president. Reagan was never going to just sit in a rocking chair. He’d been vital and active his whole life and for years afterward—even after the Alzheimer’s he remained active for years. But the battle over the Reagan legacy and the meaning of Reagan came to a head the week he died, and it remains a matter of debate to this day.

  This new volume is the story of his post–White House life and death. It also is a story of people trying to understand him, misshape him, rewrite him, venerate him, and destroy him.

  The week of the Reagan funeral, makeshift shrines of flowers and such sprung
up at Eureka College and in Dixon, Illinois, at the presidential library in Simi Valley, at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, at the Reagan home in Bel Air, and in towns and villages across the nation. Memorials appeared, too, in Prague and Budapest and in cities and villages across the former “Captive Nations” of the Baltics, as well as in the former Warsaw Pact countries. Few, if any, were visible on the campus of Harvard or in the tony Georgetown section of Washington, nor in the Upper West Side of Manhattan or in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  A decade after his passing, polemicists and plagiarists posing as historians still write prevarications about who he was, what he represented, and what he accomplished. A slim book called Tear Down This Myth was penned by liberal Will Bunch, whose premise was the Reagan presidency was all hype and no substance. The book featured a glowing dust-jacket endorsement by a minor left wing political activist who had already put in a long career at a left wing pressure group denouncing and attacking conservatism.

  Another book by a liberal Ivy League historian claims Reagan was “reactionary,” which flies in the face of most every issue he spoke out on or took a position on.19 Gambling with History by Laurence Barrett and The Triumph of Politics by David Stockman were like most books about Reagan—snarky and myopic. When Stockman finally left the Reagan administration as a shell of himself, the disgraced former aide modestly wrote, “The president had accepted but never understood the revolution I had brought to him on the eve of his election.”20

  The fight to preserve the facts of history is never ending.

  The calumnies heaped on Reagan over the course of his political career and into his retirement were nothing short of extraordinary. Nothing was left untouched. During the assassination attempt in March 1981, a college newspaper said John Hinckley should have had better aim. A radio commentator said Hinckley should have used a heavier caliber gun. When Reagan died, “the crowd whooped and cheered” at the offices of the leftism group ANSWER.21

  Three years into his Alzheimer’s, the Onion ran a story under the headline “Doctors Say Reagan’s Dementia Increasingly Hilarious.” “The fact that this particular patient was once the leader of the free world, only reinforces the intense comedic impact of seeing him put both feet into the same leg of his trousers and then, attempting to stand up, pitch violently forward into the waiting arms of Secret Service personnel.”22

  Just months before his Alzheimer’s was announced, the Italian high-fashion company Benetton purchased print ads in magazines all over the world depicting the Gipper with AIDS lesions all over his face. It was “accompanied by a fake obituary . . .”23

  Inside his own party and even after winning a landslide two years earlier, in 1980, Reagan had his doubters. An RNC aide and Bush booster taped a piece of paper to the door of her office, which said, “Sign Up Here for the Bush 1984 Campaign.” This was after the off-year elections of 1982 when the GOP fared poorly and Reagan and the poor economy were blamed. As far as anybody was concerned, Reagan was going to run for re-nomination and reelection in 1984, much to the chagrin of the Bush Brigades at the Republican National Committee.

  Two weeks after his funeral, the New York Times published a column by a doctor in which he hemmed and hawed “well, maybe” but then “come to think of it, no” Reagan did not suffer from dementia or the early stages of Alzheimer’s during the presidency. Deep into the column Dr. Lawrence Altman in fact noted of Reagan “his recall was sharp” and admitted that Reagan’s mental acuity was never an issue after observing him and interviewing staff and colleagues. But that did not stop the Times from running a very misleading headline, “A Recollection of Early Questions About Reagan’s Health.” To Altman’s credit, his piece backed off his earlier beliefs about Reagan’s mental health.24

  Reagan’s sleep habits were heavily and derisively reported, but the national media largely ignored that “Reagan chaired 355 meetings of the NSC [White House National Security Council] or its smaller and more secretive component, the National Security Planning Group,” as Marty and Annelise Anderson wrote in their important volume, Reagan’s Secret War.25 Instead, “The president’s afternoon naps and frequent trips to his California ranch reinforced this out-to-lunch image. A 1982 Miami News cartoon depicts Reagan sitting up in bed to take a phone call, with a bubble that reads: 'World War III? Six hours ago? No Kidding? Well, gee, thanks for calling . . . ’ ”26

  With a year left in the Gipper’s administration, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote that the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker scandal signaled “the end of the Age of Reagan” and his time in Washington was marked by “more disgraces than can fit in a nursery rhyme.” And, “Now that the Wizard’s Teflon magic has worn off . . .” and “There is no doubt that Reagan has reached the nadir of his political effectiveness,”27 and there was even more slamming of Reagan by Krauthammer, the former liberal speechwriter for Walter Mondale.

  Liberal reporters also got him wrong. Susan Page of USA Today wrote that “Reagan said the GOP should be a ’big tent’ that tolerated opposing views . . .”28 In fact, not only did Reagan never utter that phrase (Lee Atwater coined it), his speeches and his life were about anything but a political party that was many things to all people rather than one thing to all people.

  Reagan always was aware of the beating he was taking in the national media. In 1990, he wrote a private note to Cal Thomas, joking the “L.A. Times is not exactly in my corner. Oops!”29

  The battle was officially enjoined years earlier about the Reagan legacy, but it took on even greater intensity the week of his funeral in a pitched battle between the defenders of Reagan and the skeptics of his legacy. Tom Toles, the left wing political animator for the Washington Post, drew a sketch making fun of Reagan on various paper currencies, each denoting a federal deficit. Like his predecessor Herbert Block, Toles was often too mean and too caught up in his own odium to be funny when it came to Reagan.

  After the week of the Reagan funeral, critics wrote postmortems about the television coverage, attacking some hosts for being too gentle on Reagan. Brian Williams was lashed heavily by the Left for simply saying the Gipper’s life was “about as well lived as any in the history of the Republic.”30

  There were also plenty of articles about the nonsense that Reagan and Tip O’Neill were great friends, but nothing could be further from the truth. Reagan respected O’Neill but never trusted him, especially after 1982 and being bamboozled over the TEFRA bill. O’Neill did not respect Reagan and said so freely, openly, and often, including in his autobiography Man of the House. There were also plenty of deeply flawed articles that week comparing Reagan and President George W. Bush. There were a few similarities, yes, but there were also great differences.

  The intelligentsia, if asked, would contend that Barack Obama’s inaugural drew more television viewers than did Ronald Reagan’s but in fact Reagan in 1981 had 42 million viewers while Obama in 2009 had 38 million, according to Nielsen Media Research. And, in the nearly thirty-year interval, the country had grown by almost 100 million people. Still, both events pale before Bill Clinton’s televised apology to Monica Lewinsky and his admission of infidelity, which drew more than 67 million sensationalized viewers.31

  The Nobel Committee presented its peace award to Mikhail Gorbachev, for essentially having the wisdom to give up, but not to Ronald Reagan, nor to Margaret Thatcher, nor to Pope John Paul II—whose actions freed millions imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain. Even years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, liberal historians were still giving Gorbachev more credit than Reagan for the collapse of the communist state. And they still are.

  In 1992, former president Reagan was giving a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas, where he was the recipient of a crystal-styled award. A crazed left wing environmental activist, named Rick Springer, snuck on stage and smashed
the ornamental glass at the elderly man’s feet, shattering it, and tiny pieces went dangerously flying everywhere. After Springer was hauled away by the Secret Service, Reagan calmly picked up the glass pieces of the award and then returned to the podium and finished his remarks. NBC’s Today show brought the assaulter onto their show, where he was treated respectfully by Bryant Gumbel, a frequent Reagan critic.

  Ira Allen was a reporter for UPI (United Press International) in the 1980s and, during a lecture he attended at the University of Maryland in 1984, hotly denied that Reagan had been seriously injured in the assassination attempt three years earlier, even as Reagan had lost half the blood in his body with a punctured lung and a detonator bullet burned in his chest, less than one inch from his heart.

  Even in his demise, the establishment often reviled him, though the people by and large embraced him.

  As in most cases, Reagan had the answer himself. His old friend and chronicler Lou Cannon recalled Reagan telling an NBC reporter, “Would you laugh if I told you that I think, maybe, they see themselves and that I’m one of them? I’ve never been able to detach myself or think that I, somehow, am apart from them.”32

  Giant cultural and political fissures were laid bare in America the week of the Reagan funeral. The mainstream media, at the beginning of the week, generally continued the pounding of Reagan and what he stood for as they had since his rise in the mid-1960s. The great unwashed thought otherwise and as the week progressed, more and more Americans turned out, called up, wrote in, and came forward to support the legacy of a president many had grown to love. Most establishment Republicans knew they’d been beaten by this populist outsider reformer and either said little or more wisely cheered—some only softly—his legacy. Curiously, most elected Democrats, when they spoke out, were favorable to Reagan because they had seen up close and personal the rise of the Reagan Democrat and knew the Gipper had established a cultural and psychological bond with such individuals years before.