Last Act

by Craig Shirley

  As with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the death of FDR, and the assassination of JFK, each American citizen and especially every Reagan man and Reagan woman—everyone who had ever worked for Reagan or knew him in Sacramento or Washington or Century City or at the ranch or at Simi Valley or worked on the campaigns or knew him in Hollywood or Eureka or Dixon—remembered exactly where they were and what they were doing when they learned of the passing of Ronald Reagan.

  CHAPTER 3

  TO BURY REAGAN

  “He wasn’t elusive and he wasn’t inscrutable.”

  A man born in 1911 could expect to live just over fifty years, according to the actuarial tables. Reagan had beaten the odds by forty-three years.1 He had lived longer than any president, surpassing John Adams, and would often joke that his longevity was “a source of great annoyance”2 to his political opponents. By all rights Reagan should have passed away around 1961, given his generation. Born in the same year as Reagan, Dodgers manager Walter Alston, playwright Tennessee Williams, singer LaVerne Andrews, and comedic actress Lucille Ball had all passed away years earlier. In the span of his ninety-three years, he covered “43 percent of the time from the inauguration of George Washington to today,” wrote columnist Michael Barone.3

  That Reagan lived so long, accomplished so much, and stirred up much debate was clear to many but equally confusing to others. Most of the citizenry “got” Reagan. The elites did not.

  On the first full day after Reagan’s passing, both ABC and NBC led their broadcasts with the news of his death, while CBS did not and chose to lead with Bush’s speech at Normandy.4 Many vets had returned to Normandy sixty years later to remember, in remembrance, and to recall—possibly for the last time.

  The preparations at the Reagan Library were not just related to the ceremonial. Some were tedious, others logistically difficult, and the details were numerous. Some involved the reality of the post–September 11 world. “Duke Blackwood to contact terrorist agencies to schedule meeting to determine terrorist threat,” read a line item in the funeral manual. Then handwritten was the addition, “schedule meeting to determine threat assessment.”5

  The nation’s newspapers were now filled with reports on the death of Ronald Reagan. On Sunday, June 6, it was all everybody was talking about. Every front page in the country boldly and bluntly carried the headline “Reagan Dies” or “Ronald Reagan Dead” or “Ronald Reagan dead at 93.”6 In the old days, such newspapers were referred to as “five star editions,” usually reserved for the beginning of wars and the end of presidents.

  The day before, former president, former naval officer, and former Annapolis graduate Jimmy Carter was in Groton, Connecticut, to christen a new submarine bearing his name.7 The charming photo of the smiling former First Lady Rosalynn Carter breaking the requisite bottle of champagne across the prow of the boat should have been on the front page of every paper in America. Instead, the Sunday papers were filled with photos of the president and Nancy Reagan.

  “From all corners of the planet, the eulogies streamed in—a barrage of quotations and orations for the president known as the Great Communicator, the man whose enemies and friends agreed he changed the world.”8 The lead editorial of the Chicago Tribune was headlined simply, “Ronald Reagan, Revolutionary.” After reviewing the high and low points of his presidency, it closed by saying, “He will be remembered as one of this nation’s most influential and successful presidents. If you want to see Ronald Reagan’s legacy, just look around.”9

  On the other hand, Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson wrote that Reagan had “destroyed” the “moderate wing” of the GOP and made it a Southern party, ignoring the fact that Reagan had carried most of the states of the Northeast in 1980 and all of them in 1984. “Ronald Reagan changed America . . . not for the better.” He said only that Reagan “helped wind down the Cold War abroad” but “he absolutely revived class war here.”10

  A clear pattern was emerging after Reagan’s death. The liberal elite of the national media and academia were skeptical of his stewardship of the presidency, as well as of Reagan as a man, and said so loudly. On the other hand, the citizenry who “got” Reagan were nearly all complimentary. “He was a good president. He did our country great. He was a better president than Bush,” said one mourning American citizen.11

  As the word spread across the nation, attendees at Yankee Stadium were asked over the public address system to observe a moment of silence and then they joined in and sang “God Bless America,” as recorded by the Gipper’s old friend Kate Smith.12 Across town at the Belmont racetrack, the unruly bettors were asked to do likewise and they did.13

  There’d been some early discussion about where the week of grieving should begin. One option suggested was Reagan’s Presbyterian church in Bel Air, but it was eventually decided that the Reagan Library was the only appropriate location. There was also some initial consideration given to moving Reagan by train, like Lincoln and FDR and RFK and using Roosevelt’s famous “Ferdinand Magellan,” which was used in Ohio during the 1984 campaign, but that idea, too, was shelved.14

  Jim Hooley, after speaking with Joanne Drake the previous day, got a call from Fred Ryan and that began the process of beginning to implement their carefully constructed plans.15 The plan was extremely organized, even having calls scripted for each staff member, such as Drake calling one group of people; Melissa Giller, who was in charge of media relations for the Library, contacting national reporters, the wire services, and the networks; and assigned duties for senior staffers such as Kirby Hanson.

  Drake was to go immediately to Mrs. Reagan’s home to call “family, friends and honorary pallbearers.” Duke Blackwood, the director of the Library, had numerous duties to carry out. Even Mrs. Reagan had calls to make to her friends Merv Griffin and “Mrs. Wick,” wife of Charlie Wick, both of whom had been lifetime friends of the Reagans. Footnotes showed the entire plan had been updated as recently as May 25, 2004.16

  The entrance to the Library on Presidential Drive was closed for the day and precise instructions were given to the guard. “Guard is ONLY to say that the Library is closed for access.” Handwritten on the document was “security needs to watch hillside.” The plan also said to make sure to place trash bins near the media outside the Library, which demonstrated experience.17 Anyone who ever worked with the national media knew that whatever environmental sensibilities they avowed on television and in print, they practiced none of those concerns when on a stake out.

  Just the day before, Ryan, Hooley, General Galen Jackman, and others had met at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland where, by prearrangement, a military jet would take them to California. The plan said the “East Coast team gets on flight” at 2:00 p.m.18 but there was some confusion and the plane carrying Ryan, Hooley, General Jackman, who was head of the Military District of Washington, was hours late in departing, which helped no one’s mood.19 Meanwhile, memos were faxed by Library staff to local florists with clear instructions and rules for making deliveries.

  The plan left nothing to chance. It addressed the obvious details related to people and speeches and schedules but also tended to other finite details such as the emplacement of American flags on Presidential Drive, “meeting with docents . . . to give out work assignments for line detail.” Bands and color guards and parking assignments, refreshments, and the care and feeding of dignitaries, and a thousand other things.20 Nothing, it seemed, was overlooked. It was impressive also because everything seemed to be covered in great detail but with a politeness and dignity that was emphasized throughout.

  When Hooley arrived in California, he proceeded immediately to the chapel at the funeral home and waiting upon his arrival were some thirty volunteers, mostly former advance men and women, most of them crying. Someone—maybe it was Andrew Littlefair�
��said, “Jim, tell us what you need.” Also there to pitch in to help was Ashley Parker Snider, daughter of actor and Reagan pal Fess Parker.21

  In the next room was the body of Ronald Reagan, discretely under a sheet as the undertaker prepared him for his final resting place. There was a Secret Service agent sitting patiently in a chair next to Reagan’s remains.22 Even as they prepared for their last week working for the Gipper, both Hooley and Littlefair shed tears, overcome with the reality of the moment. They were not alone in expressing their grief, a grief that was not part of any script.

  That very day and twenty-six years earlier, Ronald Reagan, Leader of the Free World, had stood on a windswept bluff overlooking the English Channel, directing the eyes of the world to the heroes of D-day and the liberation of a continent forty years prior. Now his remains were on another coast, but this time looking out over the Pacific Ocean, almost six thousand miles away from Normandy, the eyes of the world now affixed on him. Nancy Reagan always said he liked heights and indeed, he’d reached the pinnacle of world power and fittingly he would be buried at the top of a prominence.

  He always liked heights, according to Patti, because it gave him a “feeling of openness.” Sometimes he’d take his daughter to a nearby hill to fly kites. He told her, “I’m not crazy about riding on flat land . . . you can always see what’s ahead. There are never any surprises.”23

  Scientists had discovered around the time of WWII something that many sailors had already suspected—that there was a distinct difference between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific. The Pacific was indeed bluer, while the Atlantic was indeed greener. Generally, the Atlantic was also colder and saltier than the Pacific.

  In a moving but often overlooked speech, President Kennedy once observed that people were of the sea and “we are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea . . . we are going back from whence we came. It is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears.”24

  Reagan was never the sailor that JFK was but he was an excellent swimmer. And like Kennedy, he loved the ocean. Now the former lifeguard’s passing was engendering millions of salty cries from Americans and millions around the world, just as the death of JFK had in late November 1963.

  Patti recalled her father teaching her how to body surf and Ron recalled racing his father in many pools. She told herself that sometimes as a public man she overlooked “the song beneath the myth.”25

  Both Reagan and Kennedy in their youth had saved others from drowning. Reagan had never been much of a Kennedy basher; at least his heart was not into heavily criticizing the family. The same could be said for the Kennedys when it came to Reagan. Maybe it was their shared Gaelic heritage. They had much in common, and those who knew both men say they would have liked each other. They had winning smiles and winsome ways, liked people, and were terrific public speakers and superior athletes. Reagan as president had been the star attraction at a fund-raiser for the JFK Library in 1985 where he delivered remarks that brought tears to the eyes of those present, including Jackie Kennedy Onassis.

  While Reagan was often criticized by liberals and conservatives alike for quoting John Kennedy, he once received a letter from son John Kennedy, Jr., praising Reagan’s use of his father’s words and urging him to keep on quoting President Kennedy.26 In 1980, nearly all the extended Kennedy family had voted for Reagan rather than Jimmy Carter.27

  It was also twenty-three years earlier on June 5, 1981, that Reagan had presented the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously to Robert Francis Kennedy, who was also a victim of an assassination, like his brother John Kennedy had been and like Reagan had almost been. As Reagan once said, “History is . . . a record of human will.”28

  One of the first people to call Nancy Reagan and offer his condolences over the death of her husband was Ted Kennedy.29

  At various times over the past ten years, all the members of the Reagan family had opened up about his affliction. Son Mike told people in 1999 that his father hadn’t spoken his name in two years. Two years earlier, in 1997, he told UPI that his father still recognized him—“I think he knows me more from the hugs than anything else.”30 Ron said his father “hadn’t recognized him for five years.” Maureen noted that even with the advancing Alzheimer’s, he was doing what he could to make it easier for his family, adding, “He’s very lovable.”31

  Patti once taught a class entitled, “Recovering from Dysfunctional Families.” The family was strained at times, and that is an understatement. After all, Patti had once posed for Playboy. Maureen, at age twenty-six, was hurt to read a biography of her father making reference to Ron and Patti but not to her or Mike. Mike was shipped off to boarding school and once complained that his father did not recognize him standing in line. A college roommate of Patti’s, Wendy Weber, said that the kids were close to their parents as children “but as adults, it was different.” The disease brought them all together again, bumpy as it may have been. Patti said, “I had a choice. Am I going to try to look at it in a loving, forgiving way, or am I going to be a punk?”32

  Earlier, the Reagans’ old friend Mike Deaver spoke of how he saw Reagan fumble over a joke to a group of businessmen—the one about the pile of horse manure and the pony and the little boy that he’d heard Reagan tell a thousand times—and wondered to himself what was wrong with Reagan.33

  In January 2001, Reagan fell at his home and cracked a hip. He was rushed to the hospital to undergo surgery and afterward a statement was issued that he was “fully alert, in good humor and in stable condition.”34 He asked for and received a lot of ice cream. Nancy was with him the whole time, except when he was in the operating room, and even then she tried to stay by his side. “But otherwise, I was there.”35

  Afterward, though, he was almost never seen in public and only infrequently a photo was released. He would go for quiet walks and for lunches, and timid school children, encouraged by their parents, would go up and introduce themselves to the former president of the United States.

  Mothers and nannies occasionally spotted him, with only his nurse Diane Capps, in Roxbury Park in Beverly Hills, as he watched the children play. When greeted, he would say hello. “Reagan didn’t speak much to the adults. It was our children he was interested in.” He’d say hello brightly to the children and one mother who saw him said wistfully, “It was the most Reagan thing left of Ronald Reagan in those days.”36

  He gave the children autographs and cheered on their soccer games and once even kicked the ball into the goal. He’d also throw errant balls back, earning a “Thank you, Mr. President!” from the kids.37

  For some time, his clothing included a jacket and tie but as the disease progressed he would be seen in baggy, comfortable pants and an oversized baseball cap. As more time passed, he was seen at the park less frequently and when he was seen, he had pretty much stopped speaking. A mother saw him one last time. “He was very gray and very thin.” She wanly told her children “that not remembering meeting the president was not nearly as sad as not remembering being president.”38

  It was all Nancy Reagan could do to choke back the tears each time she spoke in public of “Ronnie.” “I have found that even though the person I love and have loved for forty-four years is slipping away, my love for him grows,” she said mournfully.39 It had been noted even before he went into seclusion that “slowly, perceptibly, he was undergoing a wrenching change.”40 He still was broad-shouldered and handsome, even for a man in his eighties, but at the Nixon funeral in the spring of 1994, some people whispered, “Something’s not right with Ron.” On her husband’s eighty-ninth birthday, Nancy appeared by phone on Larry King’s show and he asked her, “How is Nancy doing?” an
d not missing a beat, she answered in the third person, “Nancy is hanging in there, I guess.” She also told King of how her husband had lost his world-famous sweet tooth and was eating very lightly.41

  Lou Cannon wondered if he should have known or whether he should have been told of Reagan’s condition. But his illness was becoming more apparent: “The public received its first inkling of his decline on February 6, 1993, when Reagan repeated a toast to . . . Thatcher verbatim during the celebration of his eighty-second birthday at the presidential library. Guests pretended not to notice, but the number of public events on Reagan’s schedule was soon reduced.”42

  Maureen Reagan—“Mermie”—had seen all the consternation and heard all the bluster and false statements spoken about her father, including from the pages of the book Dutch, a widely panned Reagan biography authored by Edmund Morris. In writing the book, Morris had channeled Lewis Carroll. (“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle?”43) After years of work, Morris had pronounced Reagan a mystery and someone he could not “get” or understand, which, as any of the men and women around Reagan knew, was utter nonsense.

  Maureen “got” her father more than most. In the early 1960s, she was in Washington earning her way as a secretary when she wrote a letter to her father telling him he ought to run for governor of California before most had given any thought to her father running for office. Reagan replied, “Well, if we’re talking about what I could do, Mermie, I could be president,” as recounted by Cannon.44 Mermie and her father were often on the same wavelength.

  Reagan wasn’t an open book but he wasn’t Lamont Cranston either. He had his need for privacy—sometimes deeply private—and he could lose himself in a Louis L’Amour novel or on a horseback ride or writing. But so many of the men and women who had spent so much time with Reagan traveling, working, eating, joking, campaigning, governing, arguing, pushing, pulling, laughing, and crying, hardly recognized the Reagan portrayed in the Morris book and many were infuriated at the false image, how Morris strangely “channeled himself ” into the narrative. Some were angered by the factual mistakes, such as how many children Gerald Ford had or what day Reagan announced for president in November 1975.