Last Act

by Craig Shirley

  Of course, the mainstream media reported heavily that African American leaders opposed him even though he left office with a 40 percent approval rating among blacks,33 as high as it had been in memory for a Republican since and even before the New Deal.

  The city-state of Washington and indeed most urbanites had difficulty understanding Reagan. Cynicism was fashionable for the sophisticates and because so many of their friends and neighbors worked in government or were dependent upon government, they reacted with hostility toward Reagan’s criticism of government.

  Political philosopher and writer Angelo Codevilla wrote in his book The Ruling Class of the Country Party and the City Party. It took little imagination to see which party Reagan belonged to and to what party his critics belonged. “He stood against communism, he believed in small government,” said an engineer, Bill Richardson of Kentucky, a member of the Country Party.34

  Before he went to Washington, most especially while he was in Washington, and after he left Washington, the dominant culture loathed Ronald Reagan, had always loathed Reagan, would always loathe Reagan and spent many an hour trying to tear him down. Simply understood, Ronald Reagan had made a lifetime of challenging conventional wisdom. Even in the hours after his death, they attacked and criticized him, even taking time to lambaste his movie career, which had ended exactly forty years earlier in 1964.

  A writer for the Washington Post, Stephen Hunter, devoted a long piece to trashing much of the Gipper’s movie career. “As an actor, Ronald Reagan just don’t get no respect. Almost nobody will argue that he was good at it,” Hunter disingenuously wrote, “. . . the New Biographical Dictionary of Film, calls him, less charitably . . . a loser in pictures.” Pretty much the only features Hunter liked about Reagan the actor were his good looks, his eyes, and his hair or that “he also seemed . . . to lack subtext.”35 But again the American people thought otherwise. In Hollywood, Reagan received so much fan mail, he eventually employed his mother Nelle to answer much of it.36 He also was often in the top five among the studio’s box office attractions.

  During his years in Hollywood, he generally received good reviews for his work, which was constantly evolving and improving. There had been real flashes of talent but, in a system that turned out eight hundred movies a year,37 the emphasis was not always on quality. Reagan sometimes quipped that some movies “didn’t have to be made well, they had to be made by Thursday.”38

  It was only after his politics evolved from FDR liberal to populist conservative that people on the Left started to criticize his acting career. When he was stumping for Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Helen Gahagan Douglas, that was one thing, but his move to the Right shifted the focus of critics. They seemingly could not help but to view Reagan through the taint of a left wing prism. Reagan had been very popular among his fellow actors in Hollywood—until his conservatism began to emerge—and then many discovered how much they disliked his acting skills. To wit, Tinseltown royalty Jane Fonda was a hardwired Reagan hater, bashing the Gipper from the 1960s right up to and even after his death. “Ronald Reagan was a lousy actor and he’ll make a lousy president,”39 Fonda acidly said the day after he was elected president in 1980.

  The day after Reagan’s death, the Post devoted the entire component of their notorious Style section to an often superficial, smarmy, and shallow look at the fortieth president of the United States and Nancy Reagan, repeatedly channeling the Reagans through glitz, glamour, and Hollywood and for the most part not treating him seriously. Even another story about the marriage of the Reagans was about Nancy’s care and feeding of his “image” and that she was some sort of Lady Macbeth character, manipulating him from behind the throne of power. It also repeated unfounded and nasty rumors about Nancy Reagan and that he may have proposed to another woman in between Jane Wyman and Nancy Davis.40 Many a Washington outsider over the years had come to despise the snarky Style section, including the men around Jimmy Carter.

  In defense of the Post, they were not alone, although their front section political reporters treated Reagan more fairly than their columnists, featurists, and editorialists. The Post was at the head table of the media-establishment complex, but nearly all members of the kommentariat were devoted to opposing Reagan over the years, from Wall Street to K Street to America’s Fleet Streets. The media also noted, however, that Reagan was never really all that hot to trot for the culture of Washington. And it was true.

  In the hours after Reagan’s passing, the most praise many insiders could muster was he was a nice guy who told funny jokes. This was pervasive in the cable and network coverage during the following days as well. He was not entirely and not always under siege during his years away from Washington beginning in 1989. There was the occasional intellectually accurate and historically correct portrayal of Reagan the man, Reagan the political leader, and Reagan the world leader. Often though, they got things both large and small about Reagan wrong.

  The elite media had miscalculated Reagan. Even in death. Only after a giant blowback by the American citizenry did some come around, by the end of the week of the official period of mourning for Ronald Wilson Reagan, and even then often only grudgingly.

  To be sure, there have been the almost obligatory mentions of failings, misdeeds, and controversies—above all, the Iran-Contra scandal and Reagan’s initial denial of wrongdoing. There have also been reminders of the inattention to the spreading AIDS epidemic, the widening economic inequalities that accompanied the go-go boom of the 1980s, and, of course, the soaring budget deficit and a near tripling of the national debt.41

  Not reported was the work Ronald and Nancy Reagan did for the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, including taping fund-raising appeals. Along the way, they became friends with the actor Paul Glaser and his wife Elizabeth, who’d contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion. She died in December 1994, just one month after Reagan had announced his Alzheimer’s and yet among the first people Glaser heard from were the Reagans.42 Nonetheless, years later, a columnist for the Post called Reagan “infamous” for not taking up the issues of AIDS earlier in his presidency.43 Webster’s Dictionary defines infamous as “having a reputation of the worst kind.”44 The news magazines and weekend TV shows, after monitoring a full week of outpouring from the American people, struck an often different tone than did the newspapers and columnists and commentators during those seven days.

  Over the weekend of June 12, after the funeral, every public affairs show on cable and network television was devoted to the legacy and memory of Ronald Wilson Reagan, and a more substantive understanding took hold with many guests and hosts. From Cal Thomas’s After Hours, which featured a deep discussion with former Reagan policy aide Marty Anderson, to CNN’s The Novak Zone, which had no guests, just columnist Bob Novak hosting, reminiscing about Reagan, interspersed with footage of the life and times of the Gipper, there was also serious consideration. Outside of Lou Cannon and a few other veteran beat reporters, Novak had known and covered Reagan nearly longer than anyone else in American journalism. As a conservative columnist, Novak was allowed to offer his opinion of Reagan over the years and frequently was favorable—though not always.

  On another news show, Fox News Watch, the topic was: “Media coverage of the Reagan funeral. How can journalists strike a balance between appropriate and excessive coverage of a major national event?”45 Also, many explored the impact the Reagan funeral had on the presidential campaign. And the discussion began in earnest about Reagan’s place in history. When Warren G. Harding had unexpectedly died in office, there had been a respectful outpouring of favorable commentary and observations, but within a year, historians began to tear his legacy apart and, as Lewis Gould, a political party historian, reminded his readers, “historian Paula Fass delivered this stinging verdict . . . ’The presidency of Warren G. Harding began in mediocrity and ended in corruption.’ ”
46

  The counter-counteroffensive against the counteroffensive against the offensive had begun. Lewis Lapham of Harper’s said that Reagan not only probably did not write his own memoirs, “He probably didn’t read it.”47

  Other papers and columns began to appear almost immediately, disputing the plaudits and praises of the last week for Reagan and his legacy. Katie Couric had said some kind things about the marriage of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, words that resulted in her receiving some criticism. The network talking heads could not win for losing. At the beginning of the week, they’d been too harsh, viewers thought, and many citizens had called to complain. By the end of the week, having heard from and seen the outpouring, they had pulled back and now were in trouble with the professional critics. Even Dan Rather got knocked a bit because he described the origins of the 21-gun salutation and read from the Navy Hymn. Bernie Shaw, who’d retired from the anchorman gig, had been personally invited by Nancy Reagan to the National Cathedral, and he bravely had no hesitation about describing the funeral and the week as “American majestic.”48

  After he left office, Reagan’s place in history was clarified by several things, including the contrast with his successors—George H. W. Bush was perceived as a good man who did not understand the presidency or power and Bill Clinton whose legacy was as a “Good Time Charlie” was more interested in the trappings of power and the love of the crowd than any great revolutionary ideas. He left the White House popular but also scarred by scandals. The jury in the spring of 2004 was still out on George W. Bush. He’d started in a deep hole, and the Florida recount in 2000 and that unprecedented and nation-splitting path to power, despite losing the election by half a million votes, caused the intelligentsia to gag. Then September 11, 2001, changed everything for the younger Bush—but only for a time. Barack Obama seems to understand power only too well, but only as a means to deliberately divide Americans. He is easily the most polarizing president since Richard Nixon.

  The second altering event was Reagan’s classy and dignified manner in which he told the American people of his Alzheimer’s—manly, calm, courageous—with no whiff of victimhood.

  The third was the release of the books In His Own Hand in 2001 and Reagan: A Life in Letters in 2003, both collections of his letters edited by Marty and Annelise Anderson and Kiron Skinner. The publication of these tomes was fortuitous as Reagan’s legacy was in real danger of drifting into irrelevance. His opponents on the Left in academia and the media and the GOP establishment were only too delighted to consign him there, but these books showed an erudite, wise, well-read, witty, and solicitous man, nothing like the caricature his opponents had tried to portray him as over the years.

  Fourth and most important were the facts of his world-altering presidency. For all the talk of him being divisive, in two national elections, Reagan received 1,014 electoral votes to the 62 electoral votes for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale. For all the talk about deficits during his presidency, it shrunk as a percentage of GDP from 6.3 percent to 3.2 percent by 1988, according to the Wall Street Journal.49

  Pick up nearly any high school textbook in America today and most books of history and they are filled with agenda-driven misstatements of facts if not downright prevarications about Reagan or just downright misunderstandings of the man. Too often, writers bend history to their own liking rather than bending themselves to satisfy the facts.

  Larry Kudlow, a top official in the Reagan administration and one of the few supply-siders to come out of Wall Street, grasped this better than most. “Reagan would say something and people would say, here’s what he really meant, but what he really meant was what he said.”50 Kudlow was part of a small group of conservatives in 1991 who had enjoyed a private lunch with the former president at the City Club in New York. Ed Meese was there, as was Caspar Weinberger and conservative writer John Fund. It was at a time when some on the Right were having growing concerns about President Bush but Reagan made clear he was sticking with Bush, supported his reelection, and that was that. Kudlow also recalled happily that Reagan had always hated the International Monetary Fund. Kudlow was impressed with Reagan’s loyalty to Bush and judgment about the IMF.51

  As is too often the case, American history is reduced to a shorthand interpretation or construction, rooted not in fact, but based upon a fallacy. George Washington in fact lost more battles than he won during the Revolution. It is taught that America’s entry into World War II began with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when in fact Roosevelt studiously avoided declaring war on Germany and Italy and only did so after Hitler and Mussolini had declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941. Even after the attack on December 7, 1941, there was no will for getting involved in another European war, though there was 100 percent will for going to war with the Empire of Japan.

  As George Santayana once said, “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”52

  The history of Ronald Reagan is too important to be left to people who weren’t there who wrote about things that never happened.

  CHAPTER 1

  MORTAL COIL

  “Even though the day must ultimately come, it will be hard to say goodbye.”

  For years Jim Hooley had been dreading the phone call, even though he knew it was inevitable that Ronald Reagan, the man to whom he’d devoted much of his life, was going to die.

  Soon.

  Days were now down to hours and maybe even minutes.

  It was early June 2004 and the private word from California about President Reagan’s condition was getting steadily worse. No one who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s ever got better. People frequently recovered from surgeries and cancers and broken bones. But no one ever got better who was diagnosed with the horrible disease—about which so little was understood—that ravages and ultimately does fatal damage to the brain and the body.

  Hooley and other key Reaganites had already had one false alarm just a week earlier, getting an urgent phone call from the president’s chief of staff, Joanne Drake, telling him Reagan’s time was nigh and he’d better get on the next plane. Reagan, according to sources, had been unconscious for a week.

  But then the ninety-three-year-old Gipper rallied, as if pushing back against death, as he’d pushed back his whole life: against Eureka College administrators who wanted to fire professors during the Great Depression; against Hollywood moguls who refused to share residual profits with actors and actresses; against political opponents, both Republican and Democratic; against the entrenched Washington bureaucracy; against dictators who ran Evil Empires.

  Just a few days earlier, on Memorial Day weekend, Robert Higdon received a call from Nancy Reagan. “I just wanted to call and tell you, you need to get ready.” He pulled the car over to the side of the road to give Nancy his undivided attention. “As in?” he gravely replied. “The doctor’s just here and he said we need to get ready . . . I think by the end of the week,” she said.1 Higdon was a family friend who’d been asked to help raise money to get the presidential library off the ground many years earlier.

  One week later—on June 4—Drake called Hooley again and said, “Things are looking close.”2

  Those involved in the planning of the Reagan funeral—Fred Ryan, Joanne Drake, Higdon, Rick Ahearn, Hooley—had been on call for years. As a longtime advance man for Reagan, Hooley—and many others—had to make sure the rites came off without a hitch. There were thousands of moving parts involved. Ryan, Drake, and Higdon had been personally close to the Reagans for many years and knew how many friends and associates and admirers and detractors and critics and enemies they’d picked up over the years.

  The logistics for the movement of a president were difficult enough, but for the funeral of a president they were mind numbing. Imagi
ne every ego in Washington jammed into a small animal cage, each armed with a sharp knife, an American Express card, and battery acid.

  Reagan had always believed he was the master of his own fate but also, as a man of God, believed in divine destiny. Reagan used the phrase “Man with God”3 because he believed he, like all people, was made in the image of his Creator. But he also embraced Immanuel Kant’s rational being because God wanted man to be a rational being. He was going to go when God called him but not one minute sooner.

  The disease was named after Alois Alzheimer, the Bavarian German scientist who’d first undertaken the use of high-performance microscopes to study brain tissue nearly a century earlier while searching for the causes of dementia. According to How We Die, “The fundamental pathology of Alzheimer’s disease is the progressive degeneration and loss of vast numbers of nerve cells in those portions of the brain’s cortex that are associated with the so-called higher functions, such as memory, learning and judgment.”4

  Twenty-one years earlier—in the fall of 1983—President Reagan designated November as “National Alzheimer’s Disease Month.”5 This was just as nationwide attention was slowly beginning to awaken and become more familiar with the affliction. He himself went through the seven stages as defined by the Alzheimer’s Association, from Step One “no impairment” to Step Seven “very severe decline.”6 Still, the fact that it took ten years was a testament to his physical endurance and capacity. Lou Cannon noted that Reagan was very proud of the weight room that he’d installed in the White House after the shooting and that did much to help him recover, “but, there’s a price that he paid. If he hadn’t been a healthy man, he probably wouldn’t have lived all those years.”7 Many Alzheimer’s patients—such as his old friend Jeane Kirkpatrick—went very quickly, in a matter of months or a few years.