Last Act

by Craig Shirley

  “They had dreams of what they wanted to do,” said Ryan, but that was all gone. Reagan showed Fred the letter and said, “I guess we should get this typed up,” but after Ryan looked at it, he thought, “It’s in the president’s own hand. That’s the best possible indication of his thinking . . .”63 Ryan departed for the office to release the supposed “shaky” letter to the world. The Reagans then left for the ranch.

  Mrs. Reagan called the four children and told them about their father’s affliction, and Ryan, arriving home, noted that during the Notre Dame–USC football game, the Gipper’s diagnosis was announced live on national television.64 That the game pitted the school where he depicted George Gipp and a school from his beloved California only deepened the poignancy. Later, he made calls to the board members of the Library and close associates and friends to let them know.

  The only times Reagan ever discussed his Alzheimer’s was in private with Ryan and a couple of others, but only in the context of what his decline would do to him. After Reagan’s remarkable letter, his doctors issued a statement explaining how the Reagans went to Mayo each year for testing. It continued,

  Over the past twelve months we began to notice from President Reagan’s test results symptoms indicating the possibility of early stage Alzheimer’s disease. Additional testing and an extensive observation over the past few weeks have led us to conclude that President Reagan is entering the early stages of this disease. Although his health is otherwise good, it is expected that as the years go on it will begin to deteriorate. Unfortunately, at this time there is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease and no effective treatment exists that arrests its progression. We applaud President Reagan for the courage he has demonstrated by sharing this personal information with the American people.65

  Five doctors signed the statement, including Beahrs and General John Hutton, MD, of the Uniformed Services. Hutton frankly told a reporter several years later that Reagan was “in the throes of continual neurological degradation.”66

  Nancy Reagan always thought there was a correlation between his fall from a horse in 1991 when he hit his head and the onset of Alzheimer’s. Everybody around him said for the first several years out of office he was fine, his memory was fine, and it may be that she had a point.

  In 2013, Neurology magazine published an article saying there was potentially a causal relationship between head trauma and Alzheimer’s.67

  Sergeant Murphy was the last horse he ever rode.68

  Margaret Thatcher on June 5, 2004, understood better than most the complete significance of Reagan’s time on earth—and not just that he was a nice man who told funny jokes. “He will be missed not only by those who knew him and not only by the nation that he served so proudly and loved so deeply, but also by millions of men and women who live in freedom today because of the policies he pursued,” the Iron Lady said of the Great Lion.69

  Jack Kemp had once elegantly called Reagan the “last great lion of the twentieth century,” evocative of Churchill, FDR, MacArthur, de Gaulle, and Eisenhower.

  The Great Lion Reagan was now dead.

  The details surrounding Reagan’s death were simple and reserved in an effort to protect his and Mrs. Reagan’s privacy.

  Behind the scenes, tacky and tasteless questions were asked but none in the open as most reporters chose to respect the wishes of Mrs. Reagan and few details were reported.

  The weather in Los Angeles was hot—ninety-four degrees—and mostly clear.70

  Tributes began to pour forth. The Reverend Billy Graham said in a statement, “The love between Ronald and Nancy Reagan was an example to the nation.”71 A kind but ill-timed letter dated June 5—the day of Reagan’s passing—from Graham to Nancy had arrived and said he was aware of Reagan’s failing health.72 Nancy Reagan had originally wanted Graham to preside over the funeral of her husband but Graham’s health was poor, so she turned to John Danforth, former Republican senator and ordained Episcopalian priest, several years earlier.

  Senator Jesse Helms released a two-page statement praising his old friend.73 President George W. Bush said, “A great American life has come to an end.”74 Bush had learned of Reagan’s passing after Fred Ryan had called his chief of staff Andy Card.75 Ryan was also tasked with calling former president George H. W. Bush, Jim Baker, Ed Meese, and other close friends and associates.76

  Bush stepped before the media in Paris late in the evening and read a heartfelt and profound statement.

  On behalf of our whole nation, Laura and I offered her and the Reagan family our prayers and our condolences . . . He leaves behind a nation he restored and a world he helped save . . . Now, in laying our leader to rest, we say thank you. He always told us that for America, the best was yet to come. We comfort ourselves in the knowledge that this is true for him too. His work is done. And now a shining city awaits him. May God bless Ronald Reagan.77

  Bush was visibly moved as evidenced by the tears that welled up in his eyes. And then he ordered the flags at the White House lowered to half-staff.

  Simultaneously, governors around the nation ordered flags flown at half-staff, as did ballparks, racetracks, and other facilities.

  It was only the beginning.

  In Kennebunkport, former president George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush went outside to meet the press, as well, and express their condolences. There Bush revealed he’d spoken to Nancy Reagan just hours before Reagan’s time on earth was over. “She made clear to us that his death was imminent.” Expanding, the Bushes were gracious and unfailingly kind in their comments. He said, “Barbara and I mourn the loss of a great president and for us a great friend.” Mrs. Bush said, “I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who was so innately polite. Ronald Reagan was a gentleman.”78 She also kindly said of Nancy, “We love her and we’re missing her husband already.”79

  Tastelessly, a reporter asked Bush if he’d seen any sign of “mental deterioration during his tenure in the White House,” but Bush contemptuously brushed it away, saying he’d never seen anything of the sort. The AP story also mistakenly reported that Reagan had never served in the military80 when in fact he had, first in the reserves and later as an active duty captain during World War II, though he did not see action.

  The relationship between Bush and Reagan had been complicated to say the least. Bush, ever the gentleman, often spoke of their friendship but in fact, there was more of a slowly growing mutual respect, like neighbors who discovered something impressive about each other but still did not socialize. ABC noted, “There was some talk after Ronald Reagan left office that there was bad blood or some hurt feelings.”81

  For one thing, Reagan and the Bushes were simply from different social classes. Though Nancy Davis Reagan was from the Bushes’ economic class, she and Barbara Bush eyed each other warily in spite of both attending—though Nancy graduated in the spring of 1943 and Barbara entered in the fall of 1943 but did not graduate—Smith College. It was noted “over the past quarter-century the relationship between the families has been strained for periods by political ambition, social resentment and a lack of chemistry between two formidable first ladies.”82

  Plus they had battled mightily for the 1980 nomination, Reagan the conservative and Bush the moderate, and bad blood, which never completely resolved itself, had developed between their staffs, even as the two men got comfortable as running mates and later became friends as president and vice president.

  In Reagan’s principal hometowns of Dixon and Tampico, citizens who knew Dutch in the old days shared with reporters and others their recollections of the handsome young lifeguard who grew up to be president. His college, Eureka, had been somewhat ambivalent about how to treat Reagan over the years as a large contingent of the faculty was politically liberal but by 1980 had
unabashedly embraced its most famous alumnus. “In January 1974, graduates of tiny Eureka College pulled out their pens to complete a routine questionnaire from the alumni office. ’Present employment: governor of Calif,’ scribbled 1932 graduate Ronald Reagan.”83

  Reagan wrote that it was because of Eureka College that he’d gotten involved in national politics because getting involved was expected of students there.84 In the Ronald Reagan Peace Garden at the school, flowers and jars of jelly beans began to pile up at the base of a handsome bust of Dutch Reagan.

  Dixon had no internal conflicts or liberal opponents. His boyhood home was a museum and designated federal historic location, and next to the house was a life-sized statue of Reagan. Dixon citizens were already laying flowers at the base of the statue. On the other side of the small and charming if also spare house was a tiny museum and gift shop run by a handful of energetic and devoted women. At the First Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, where Reagan and his mother, Nelle, attended, the Reverend Lynn Bond was presiding, telling the congregation, “The son of a shoe salesman becomes president of the United States. It truly is an American story.”85 Reagan had been born in Tampico, thirty miles away. At the time of his birth in 1911, Tampico had a larger population than it did at the time of his death ninety-three years later.

  At 7:00 p.m., ABC went up with a special episode on the life of Ronald Reagan, hosted by Peter Jennings. Reagan’s remains were still at his home in Bel Air but would shortly be moved to a funeral home in Santa Monica. The local police began to seal off the roads around the Reagan home and the Gates, Kingsley & Gates Moeller Murphy funeral home.86

  The plan was for the former president to repose at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley and then make his last trip to Washington to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, undergo a funeral at the National Cathedral, and then finally head back to Simi Valley for interment. The entire event would cover the course of almost a week. Two tombs had been constructed at the Library. One was for Ronald Reagan. The second was for Nancy Reagan. But to get the laws changed for someone to be buried at the Library they had to send the director, Ralph Bledsoe, some years earlier to “be licensed” and “ . . . get certified . . . because you can’t just go bury somebody, even in your own yard,”87 Ryan said.

  Jennings was cool and detached in his reporting. Rarely betraying any personal feelings one way or the other, despite his own liberal leanings, he was at times reflective and even wistful. “As we said, President Reagan, who ushered in [a] conservative era to the United States in a way that gave the country back its self-confidence in many ways, no matter what people thought of the president’s record.”88

  Old Reaganites such as Ed Meese were spread far and wide. Meese was at the mysterious and ultra-private men’s club Bohemian Grove, but a message was gotten through. Meese hustled out quickly, consumed with wistful thoughts about his old friend and boss and their many years together.89

  An ABC News reporter, Judy Muller, was reporting live from the funeral home and was astonished at how many people began to show up just to catch a glimpse of the vehicle bringing the body of Ronald Reagan there. One woman, crying, told Muller, while carrying a small American flag, she wanted “ just to be near him. I loved him. I thought he was a great man . . . this disease is so devastating.”90

  ABC, along with the other networks, was making hasty preparations to report on the life and times and America’s long good-bye to Reagan. In a sense, the good-bye had begun in late 1994 when his Alzheimer’s was announced.

  Two of the first to appear with Jennings were Sam Donaldson, with whom Reagan had often crossed swords over the years, and Lou Cannon, who first began covering Reagan in 1965 in the stirrings of his first run for governor. Later, he covered Reagan’s terms as governor, his runs for the White House in 1976 and 1980 for the Washington Post, and then wrote five very fine books about the object of his reportage over a nearly fifty-year period. Cannon was regarded by 2004 as the best and fairest and most knowledgeable of all the Reagan biographers. Cannon believed, he told Jennings, that Reagan’s “greatest asset was that he was underestimated.” Cunningly, Reagan knew it. In fact, said Cannon, “He did everything to make people underestimate him.”91

  Donaldson was in character, somewhat complimentary, somewhat superficial in his analysis, though he did give Reagan credit for actions that “hastened the ends of the Soviet Union without a war.” Jennings chimed in that Reagan had brought Moscow “to its knees.”92

  Cannon, like Thatcher, had a better grasp on the man than most, calling him “deceptively complex. And this ’aw, shucks’ style of his . . . concealed a very, very smart political brain.” Later in the broadcast Jennings used the phrase “The Great Communicator.”93 It would be an appellation heard often in the coming days.

  ABC had a video obituary of Reagan ready to go. Narrated by Donaldson, it made much of the assassination attempt and how it bound him closer to the American people, saying it showed “grace and courage of a true, self-assured Hollywood hero, it became a defining moment . . .”94 CBS also aired a special on his death that was for the most part surprisingly kind.

  One of the better early insights of the attempt on Reagan’s life came unexpectedly from former aide David Gergen, viewed with suspicion by conservatives and Reaganites. “When Reagan came into office, the affection was there that Eisenhower had but there was no sense of personal courage. The shooting changed that. People saw Reagan with all the handlers and the PR masters and everything like that stripped away, they saw him as he truly was . . . his true character and I think they felt that there was a man with true grit.”95

  The short documentary on ABC reviewed the Reagan presidency and was fairly favorable if also blunt about the growth of government, Afghanistan, Star Wars, the summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Nicaraguan Contras. Of course, the Iran-Contra scandal was also heavily dwelt upon. Like many other videos and pronouncements, the ABC documentary lodged a heavy number of asides at Reagan as a performer, even as president, even though Reagan always understood.

  Reagan knew that, as Shakespeare once wrote, “The play’s the thing.”96 After his presidency, he wrote in his autobiography, An American Life, “I’ve sometimes wondered how you could be president and not be an actor?”97 Reagan always understood that stagecraft was as important in many ways as statecraft.

  The past ten years had been dreadfully hard on Nancy Reagan. Aides and family came and went, but for her, she lived with the disease 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. She was never away from it and rarely from him. Even when she’d go out occasionally for lunch with “the girls” it would be at a restaurant nearby their home in Bel Air, just in case. Overnight trips were very, very rare for Nancy Reagan, especially since 1999 when he “plateaued”98 down another step.

  Nancy went to Maureen’s funeral without him in August 2001, where she sat with Jane Wyman and the two held hands. She journeyed to Norfolk for the christening of the USS Ronald Reagan in 2001 and its commissioning in 2003. But other than a speech at the GOP convention in San Diego in 1996 and receiving the Congressional Gold Medal in Washington in 2002 that was about it—besides a speech she’d given a few weeks earlier urging increased stem cell research.

  There, she bravely if forlornly spoke of the Alzheimer’s that was taking her husband away from her. “He doesn’t go for walks or he doesn’t swim anymore. It is probably the worst disease you can ever have because you lose contact and you’re not able to share, in our case, you’re not able to share all those wonderful memories that we have. I mean, we had a . . . wonderful life.”99

  Following the order by Bush to lower the American flags at the White House, the president then ordered all flags at all federal buildings and overseas embassies to be lowered; most assumed they would be at half-staff for a lengthy peri
od. Behind the scenes, officials and military personnel were all assuming their duty stations for the week of the Reagan funeral. President Bush and Laura Bush also placed a phone call to Nancy Reagan to personally express their condolences.

  By early evening, cable and the networks were filled with reporters and Reagan experts and not-so-experts speaking of the life and times of Ronald Reagan, many of them not very competently. The rough outline of several themes was emerging in these interviews, including that Reagan was good on camera (“Reagan knew that the camera was his friend”),100 which wasn’t very instructive or insightful and possibly a little backhanded, as if to say he was inauthentic. With many, it was chalked up to his time in Hollywood, which was also heavily deliberated.

  One of the early guests used by CNN was David Stockman, the banished former budget director. A young congressman from Michigan, Stockman had been flying high, wide, and handsome during the 1980 campaign as a stand-in for John Anderson and later Jimmy Carter in mock debates with Reagan, and as a reward for his performances was appointed head of the Office of Management and Budget at the tender age of thirty-four. But he flew too close to the sun and his wings melted when he spoke too frankly and too often to the national media. He was reduced to a ghost of supply-side past, rattling his chains in the halls of Washington desperately trying to get someone’s attention.

  He’d been banished from Reagan World years earlier and worked hard in his appearance on CNN to try to get welcomed back in, praising Reagan’s preparation for his press conferences effusively as viewers were shown pictures of the black hearse bearing the body of Ronald Reagan in a flag-covered coffin moving toward the funeral home. Then CNN went to a commercial break.101

  Stockman had written in a widely panned roman à clef: “If the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] had jurisdiction over the White House, we might have all had time for a course in remedial economics at Allenwood penitentiary.”102 Try as he might, he would never be welcomed back into the band.