Last Act

by Craig Shirley

  Also attending the private rites at the Library were son Ron; son Michael and his wife, Colleen, and their children Cameron and Ashley; and Reagan’s honorary pallbearers. Maureen Reagan’s widower, Dennis Revell, was also in attendance. Nancy Reagan clung for stability on the arm of Major General Galen B. Jackman, the commanding officer of the Military District of Washington.9 His arm and strong, calm presence would be there for her for the entire week.

  Nancy Reagan went first. Her emotions got the better of her several times and Patti reached for her mother. Nancy replied, “Thank you, Patti,” to which her daughter softly replied, “He’s here.”10 A half hour later, she emerged from the Library and departed with Ron and Patti in a limousine.

  Already, thousands of cars from California, Arizona, and other states and tens of thousands of people were lining the Ronald Reagan Freeway. Hand-painted signs were spotted praising the Gipper and Nancy Reagan and at least twice fire engines were seen on bridges with an American flag on display. Nancy was dressed simply in a black dress and one strand of pearls. She was also wearing oversized glasses, which in an earlier time she never would have allowed anybody to see.

  Hundreds of security workers walked the grounds of the Library in search of any terrorist device and Duke Blackwood met with representatives of the local sheriff’s office, the Secret Service, the Simi Valley police, and the FBI. Foundation senior staffer Kirby Hanson also had her hands full with a number of tasks, including the printing of one thousand programs that would not be nearly enough. There was the daily meeting of all the principals involved, from Blackwood and Hanson to Jim Hooley and Andrew Littlefair. Blackwood also had “to determine which staff (noncritical) can go home (hotel) to sleep and what time they should report back . . .” according to The Book.11

  The Reagan team took care of their own. At the Library, the restaurant was open for free to any staffer or volunteer working full time on the funeral. There were also legal hurdles to clear to allow Reagan Library staff to volunteer for the week with the approval of the “Library’s General Counsel.”12

  The building then opened up to allow private citizens to begin to come and pay their last respects, many of them weeping. As they entered, they passed a ten-foot-high statue of Reagan in western garb. The name of the statue was After the Ride.13 Speaking for many private citizens, Joe Dunnigan said, “I walked by the mortal remains of a man who changed the face of the earth.”14

  At a rate of two thousand individuals per hour, Americans went to bid a final good-bye to Ronald Reagan.15 The entrance to the Reagan Library was silent, the only sounds heard were the shuffling of feet and muffled sobs. Behind the velvet cordon, some dropped to their knees if even only for a moment.

  Because of the size of the crowds, shuttle buses were running from the parking lot of Moorpark Community College nearby. A thoughtful, anonymous individual sent thousands of bottles of water to the school for the citizen mourners because of the three-hour wait in the heat to get on a bus. Still, no one complained, no one littered the parking lot. All were hushed and those who spoke did so in low tones. One man standing in line in shorts and a T-shirt described himself as a “Christian surfer.” It was, after all, California. Mourners were told to turn off their cell phones and the taking of photos was forbidden. No food could be taken in. As they entered, they stepped on blue carpeting. At the foot of the casket on the floor were two white roses.16

  A military honor guard stood watch over the casket.

  The networks broadcast much of it utilizing a “pool” in which they all used one camera system, in this case Fox Broadcasting. The viewing was supposed to end at 6:00 p.m. on Monday evening but because so many Americans had turned out to see their president off one last time, the decision was made to extend the visitations to 10:00 p.m. All night and all day, the buses went up and down the small mountain, up and down. “The mourners who walked solemnly past Reagan’s casket Monday, blowing kisses and wiping away tears, were a mural of American life—hobbled old war veterans, suburban moms and ministers, students and software consultants. Reagan . . . had touched them all.”17

  The number of people who trekked up the hill in a little over one day was the same as the population of a good-sized city. And thousands of others were turned away because of time constraints.

  The national media watched in astonishment, still wondering what the citizenry saw in Reagan, an understanding that had eluded them for years. They may have had a better grasp of him if they’d bothered to listen. In 1952, giving the commencement address at William Woods College, he told the graduates, “I, in my own mind, have always thought of America as a place in the divine scheme of things that was set aside as a promised land.”18

  As of 10:00 p.m., roads all around the Reagan Library in Simi Valley were jammed in every direction and police and other law enforcement were turning people away. Before it was all over, 118,000 mourners passed by the bier of Ronald Reagan in thirty-six hours, according to the advance men on the ground who were keeping a meticulous count, Hooley and Littlefair along with Blackwood and the Library itself.19 The planners had expected 60,000.20

  Nancy Reagan had gone home to rest and get ready for the Washington portion of the funeral, which would be a very intense and emotional time. She watched the television coverage of the outpouring at Simi Valley and was incredulous at how many people were coming and coming and coming.

  Even those who did not agree with him came to show their esteem for the Gipper. By the late afternoon of Tuesday, June 7, the wait to get on a shuttle bus was as long as six hours. But there was no wait for John Kerry. He’d been in Los Angeles to see his daughter while his campaign was on hold, but then journeyed to Simi Valley and was whisked ahead of the tens of thousands waiting to pay his last respects in the “rotunda” of the Library.21 The Roman Catholic candidate stood alone in front of the coffin for a moment, gently touching the flag, and did the sign of the cross. He then bowed and departed the room. Kerry spoke with reporters afterward, contrasting his greater respect for Reagan with his lesser respect for Bush. (In fact, Kerry had ripped Reagan eagerly and often during the 1980s.)

  He told of a time when in 1985 he carried a cease-fire proposal from Daniel Ortega, head of the communist regime in Nicaragua, personally to Reagan in the White House. Reagan rejected the proposal out of hand. Kerry slipped in a jab saying he’d met with Reagan more often than he had with President Bush.22

  Sprinkled among the hoi polloi were the rich and famous, such as actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and his daughter Stephanie Zimbalist, who waited patiently and unobtrusively.23 Also attending was actress Morgan Fairchild, representing the Screen Actors Guild according to Littlefair. Littlefair said the celebrities who came to pay their respects, including Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife Maria Shriver, generally behaved themselves.24 Some of the Hollywood men like producer A. C. Lyles kissed the Reagan men. “Very Hollywood,” muttered one hardened political operative.25

  One man told of having voted for Reagan four times for governor and for president, and how in 1976 he had to fix Reagan’s phone lines at their home in Pacific Palisades. There he found Reagan outside with a shotgun, shooting at squirrels “that were making a racket.” The young man didn’t have to worry though. “Don’t worry, it’s not for you, it’s only buckshot.”26

  A little boy, Bryce West, stood in line with his mother, Terri, and forlornly said he’d been going to the Library since he was three years old.27

  The plans for the Reagan funeral were becoming clearer publicly. The three-hundred-page script had been drafted, written, and polished over the years with a lot of early input from Mrs. Reagan, which she personally reviewed annually.28 In Washington, the casket would be placed on a caisson drawn by a single, riderless horse at Sixteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue and proceed past the White House and
up to the U.S. Capitol, where Vice President Richard Cheney would lead the congressional delegation in a memorial. Cheney had worked for Ford in the White House but if you scratched the surface, just underneath was the heart of a western Reaganite.

  The stirrups of the horse would hold Reagan’s riding boots backward. It was an ancient ritual dating back to Genghis Khan, with some myths holding that it was so a commander could view his troops one more time and another, so he could see the troops he would lead in the afterlife. According to the U.S. military, it simply meant that the officer would never ride again.

  All was going forward under the jurisdiction of the Military District of Washington, also known as the “Old Guard.” Reagan’s casket would be carried up the west formal steps and not the east, but not in deference to his 1981 inaugural that took place for the first time in history on the west façade of the Capitol. Going back to the first outdoor inaugural featuring another populist, Andrew Jackson, in 1829, all presidents had been sworn in on the east side. It hadn’t been Reagan’s idea, though, to change to the west side, contrary to myth. The decision to move the inaugural ceremony from the east to the west had been conceived by a congressional committee chaired by Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon for one simple reason: to save money.29 This time Reagan would enter the Capitol from the west because the east side was closed due to the construction of a new visitor’s center.

  Reagan would then lie in state in the Rotunda, only the twenty-eighth individual to do so, beginning with Henry Clay in 1852. Lincoln was, of course, the first president to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol, even though the building wasn’t completely finished in 1865. Only presidents and former presidents were automatically granted state funerals, but they could also designate state funerals for others. Presidents after Lincoln who were honored in the Rotunda included Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Taft, Hoover, Kennedy, and Johnson.30 But not Nixon, who had a state funeral in California, and not FDR, whose private funeral was at his favorite place in the entire world—Hyde Park. Many presidents, in fact, chose not to have state funerals.

  Americans who had lain in state in the Rotunda included General Douglas MacArthur; General John J. Pershing; the Unknown Soldiers of WWI, WWII, and Korea; J. Edgar Hoover; and a handful of senators and congressmen, along with a few private citizens.31 Some erroneous reports said the Reagan memorial would be based on the LBJ funeral. Meanwhile the Rotunda and the Capitol had been closed to tourists since Monday.

  As of 2004, Carter and Bush Sr. had their funeral plans on file with the Military District of Washington but Clinton in character had not yet filed his funeral plans.32

  The Bush and Kerry campaigns had announced a twenty-four-hour cease-fire to be observed on the day of the Reagan funeral. All political advertising would be pulled down for the day of national mourning. “There are moments where partisan differences must be put aside for the better of the nation. Friday is one of those moments,” said Kerry’s spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter.33 But this did not stop Kerry from trying to politicize Reagan’s death, saying Bush was a “divider,” unlike Reagan, who was a “master at amicable disagreement.”34

  Though the Bush and Kerry campaigns officially—if not unofficially—suspended their campaigns, the impeachment of Governor John Rowland of Connecticut for a myriad of crimes would not be postponed for Reagan.

  To everyone’s surprise, it was also announced that Margaret Thatcher would attend the Reagan funeral, despite her poor health resulting from a series of strokes a couple of years earlier. She’d already taped a ten-minute eulogy for Reagan some months before because her doctors told her she could not travel. “She is absolutely determined that nothing will stop her from traveling to Washington for the funeral,” said her aide Mark Worthington.35

  The Capitol police estimated that tens of thousands of people would come to the Capitol to pay their respects to Reagan one last time. More than 170 foreign dignitaries were expected to attend the funeral,36 all the living members of the Reagan cabinets and campaigns, and four former presidents and first ladies. The current president of the United States, George W. Bush, would give the eulogy but his father, former president George H. W. Bush—Reagan’s second in command for eight years—would also speak.

  A squadron of F-15s would streak over Constitution Avenue in the familiar “V Formation,” with one plane missing, to represent that of the fallen.37 Washington had not seen a state funeral in three decades, since Lyndon Johnson’s death, and security would be much tighter this time around. In 1973, there was little security but while his funeral was well attended by dignitaries, few private citizens attended, and the sidewalks were mostly empty when Johnson’s hearse moved through the streets of Washington.

  Of course, September 11, 2001, had changed everything in America. During the week of the Reagan funeral, a strong police and military presence could be felt and seen everywhere, including bomb sniffing dogs, radiation detectors, gas masks, and heavily armed soldiers and thousands of law enforcement officials.

  The New York Times snarkily said, “Many of the rites for the last production of the man who was the best-known practitioner of presidential stagecraft . . .”38

  Only hours after his death, at the foot of the Reagan Library, at the statue of him in Dixon, at his birthplace in Tampico, at Eureka, and on his star along the Hollywood Walk of Fame, there began to grow makeshift shrines with flowers, candles, framed photos, jelly beans, signed cards, and personal effects piling up. The statue in Dixon was also draped in black and purple bunting.

  Despite the fact that Ronald Reagan had only been dead for two days, a hotly contested debate was already ensuing over his legacy and place in history and would accelerate over the coming week. It was a continuation of a lifetime debate.

  Several years earlier the Nobel Committee had snubbed him, choosing instead the vanquished communist Mikhail Gorbachev but not Reagan, who had actually won the Cold War. (Unlike Solzhenitsyn, Reagan was never a cause célèbre among the elites and the Nobel Committee moved sharply to the Left over the twenty-year period.)

  Academics and others of their ilk from the campuses that manufactured Reagan odium and contempt of conservatism on a daily basis also worked overtime in making their case that the Cold War ended with Gorbachev’s happy cooperation and not that America defeated a savage and evil empire. Moral questions such as the millions exterminated under Lenin, Stalin, and other Soviet leaders were swept aside as beside the point. In the worldview of the academy, there was no such thing as good or evil, only collectivism, society, and the power of the state over the individual. They argued for a collectivist state in America and shockingly always placed themselves at the top of the heap. Some American leftists actually mourned the demise of Moscow, preferring its triumph over America rather than the other way around.

  Others, who had been little more than bootlicks, shills, lackeys, and “useful idiots” for the Soviets, saw the handwriting on the wall and tried to claim they, too, had opposed communism (wink, wink) all the time.

  The American people thought differently. “He stamped out communism,” said Slavic American Milan Kondic. A woman from Ethiopia left a poem at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. She said, “He means a lot to me.”39 And though he did not receive the Nobel, there were many in America who wanted to see his image on the ten-dollar bill, replacing Alexander Hamilton, or a concurrent ten-cent piece so that Americans could choose their favorite, FDR or Reagan.

  A “Reagan Legacy Project” had been the brainchild of Grover Norquist, longtime combatant in the conservative wars and longtime Reaganite. The goal of the legacy project was to name one thing in every county in America—all 3,144 counties, parishes, and independent cities—after the Gipper. Roads, schools, bridges, and what have you.40

  Also, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier had been commissioned in
2001, the USS Ronald Reagan, and in Illinois the “Reagan Trail” had been dedicated by Maureen Reagan some years earlier. It was a ninety-plus mile journey that made its way through Eureka and Dixon and Tampico and Galesburg and Monmouth, all towns Reagan had lived in as a child and a young man.

  The New York Times continued their pounding, saying Reagan “was not a strategic thinker . . . he thought in terms of anecdotes, not analysis. His knowledge of international developments was considered thin, and those who met with him said his participation in discussions was usually limited to what his staff had provided him on the 3-by-5 cards.” The Times trotted out liberal historians like C. Vann Woodward and Tom Cronin. “Professor Cronin” told the publication that Reagan “was not willing to be a leader.”41

  One better-known historian, Paul Johnson, was given a slight chance to defend the Gipper but the paper then rebutted him. “But to many other historians and political scientists, Mr. Reagan’s accomplishments will not secure his place among great American presidents.” Noticeably, the paper did not rebut the harsh assessment of liberal historians who trashed Reagan. Near the close of its long and mostly harsh obituary, the paper stuck one last parting shot against Reagan, saying he was “not a man given to introspection . . .”42

  One of the brightest and most interesting intellectuals of the day saw Reagan differently than the New York Times. Jeane Kirkpatrick had burst onto the national scene as Reagan’s first ambassador to the United Nations. There, she out-dueled her communist counterparts often, and the American liberal establishment—of whence she’d once come—hated her for it. She’d begun life as a garden-variety leftist before moving to a Hubert Humphrey–style anti-communist liberal and then as a neocon, but by 2004 she’d shed the last vestiges of statist leanings and had flowered into a full-fledged Reaganite. “Ronald Reagan believed, as I see it, that the individual is the creative principal in history and in society and economics . . . and in foreign affairs.”43 Reagan could not have said it better himself, seeing always the individual as the world’s protagonist.