Last Act

by Craig Shirley

  Earlier that morning, Reagan’s coffin was sealed at the funeral home. The fortieth president of the United States would never again be seen by the American people.

  CHAPTER 5

  A RANCH IN THE SKY

  “In Washington, Reagan would count the days before an upcoming trip to his ranch . . .”

  When Thomas Jefferson left the presidency in March 1809, he went home to Monticello, and in the seventeen years before his death on July 4, 1826, “The Sage of Monticello” never returned to Washington. Not that he didn’t have plenty of invitations but he’d always despised the city and preferred to walk among his gardens, spend time with his children and grandchildren, entertain guests, and supervise the building of the University of Virginia, which he considered a more important accomplishment than serving as the third president of the United States. “I am supremely happy in being withdrawn from these turmoils,” he said of his retirement from politics.1

  After his presidency Ronald Reagan felt much the same as Jefferson, and he avoided Washington and he, too, would supervise the building of a place of education, his presidential library just down the road in Simi Valley, between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. The library was to house millions of presidential documents and personal effects, including thousands of letters written over the course of his lifetime, a treasure trove of history covering the monumental times and life of Reagan and the men and women around the fortieth president.

  The first letter Reagan wrote after leaving office was to Richard Nixon. “Dear Dick: Your letter caught up with us here in California. In fact I’m in our new office from which I can see the blue Pacific.”2 A year later he wrote Nixon another letter, this time complaining about the IRS, who had moved into Reagan’s offices for six months as they audited Reagan because some designers had donated some of their dresses to Nancy.3

  Jefferson also had financial problems.

  Jefferson, it was said, had achieved philosophical balance and spiritual harmony by the age of sixty-six, when he returned home to his beloved “Little Mountain.” Reagan, eleven years older than Jefferson at his own retreat from the “turmoils,” had arrived at that point also, content to look forward and not dwell on his time in office. His very last entry into a presidential diary was, “then home & the start of our new life.”4

  The ranch was also spiritual for Reagan and he repeated Psalm 121:1–2: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.”5

  Stu Spencer, a frequent golf and luncheon companion of Reagan’s in the post-presidential years, said the president almost never spoke about his time in office and never about his legacy.6 He enjoyed talking about politics, who was up, who was down, baseball, the ranch, his days in Hollywood, and other things, but not his presidency.

  When there at his ranch Reagan dressed down. Way down. He clutched “casual” until it could no longer scream. Mostly, he wore old dungarees and frayed shirts that sometimes Nancy would try to toss out, only to discover later he’d fished them out of the trash bin. He often wore a sweat-stained old blue baseball cap embroidered “United States Mounted Secret Service.” It was only there out of sight of the media and the curious that he could be himself and really relax. Mike Deaver always said Reagan was utterly indifferent to fashion.7

  In his first days of 1981, Reagan called Deaver into the Oval Office and said he’d been reviewing his schedule and saw no time included for the ranch. He told Deaver to fix this and then said, “The more I visit that Ranch, the longer I’m going to live.”8

  He so loved the ranch he even mentioned it in his farewell televised remarks to the nation on January 11, 1989. Reagan also mentioned the ranch in his farewell radio remarks.9

  Later that year, Reagan was inducted into the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma. He gave a speech there and said, “Western heritage has a special place in my heart . . . the spirit of the West is the spirit of America.” During the campaign of 1980, Reagan gave an interview in Oklahoma in which he made fun of the eastern liberal establishment for not understanding “fly over country” and that they thought people who lived there were yahoos from “South Succotash.”10 For a time, South Succotash became a household phrase.

  Historian Jon Meacham said that in many ways Reagan “was even more Jeffersonian than Jefferson. The ranch was a true retreat; Monticello was a big, bustling operation, with slaves and a constant stream of (usually unannounced) visitors.”11 Indeed, to get away by himself Jefferson went and hid out at “Poplar Forest,” a small house southwest of Monticello where, he said, he could live the “solitude of a hermit.”12 On the other hand, the ranch was best described as adobe—plaster over brick—or “simple hacienda” kidded Marilyn Fisher, the staff historian at Young America’s Foundation.13

  Further, Meacham said, Monticello was only 800 feet above sea level while Rancho del Cielo was at an altitude of 2,240 feet—more than half a mile—and the road up was always arduous and sometimes impossible to traverse. (Originally named Tip Top Ranch, Reagan changed it to Rancho del Cielo—Ranch in the Sky—when he and Nancy purchased it in 1974.)14 Reagan’s spread really was a breather from the world, unlike Monticello. Finally, Meacham noted that “Reagan probably did more manual work than Jefferson ever did.” But, “the spiritual side is clearly something they had in common, and I suspect both men liked the idea that they could see more from their mountains than they could from the arena.”15

  At the last, unlike Jefferson, Reagan would make one final trip to Washington, though ironically, it was faster to travel three thousand miles via jet in 2004 than it was to travel less than two hundred miles via carriage in 1826. Jefferson’s final days ended at his beloved little mountain just as he had hoped.

  Reagan’s sadly did not.

  It was only at the ranch where Reagan could operate a vehicle (other than a golf cart at Camp David) during the presidency, the two jeeps, which he could drive at his leisure over the crude roads of the 688-acre spread. More than one agent came back shaken by Reagan’s sometimes harrowing driving.

  “Mornings usually meant riding his favorite horse, El Alamein. Afternoons usually were spent chopping wood, trimming trees or working on a project like building a fence,” recalled Pete Souza. “Dressed in blue jeans, a work shirt and some sort of hat, Reagan could easily have been mistaken for one of his workers.”16 He’d made the patio in front of the house with flat sandstone rocks he’d dug up on the property. There was also a “pet cemetery” on the property, complete with carved headstones.17

  But he sometimes went out for a late afternoon ride, once to the embarrassment of a female Secret Service agent. At least according to rumor.

  She was posted to a remote part of the ranch and as such decided to sunbathe—with her blouse off. Reagan, riding in quiet, startled the young woman—now deeply red—but he had a good laugh. He was the first president to have a woman on his protective detail, and there was never any problem, except he kept insisting she go first through doors.18

  The two jeeps—both standard transmissions—that were owned and used by President Reagan at Rancho del Cielo were the well-used red 1962 Willys model CJ-6 that still resides at the ranch, and the pristine blue 1981 Jeep Scrambler CJ-8.19 (This is on permanent display in the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara.) The Scrambler had a 1985 Inaugural license plate that said, “GIPPER.” He also showed off his sense of absurdity, putting up a fictitious movie poster of him as Clark Gable and Margaret Thatcher as a bosomy Scarlett O’Hara in the tack barn, and the “Kangaroo Crossing” sign he’d been given by an Australian women’s club.20

  Water supply was always a problem, which meant brushfires were always a problem, and though “Lake Lucky” contained some one million gallons of water, transporting
or pumping it to a distant part of the ranch was impossible. But there was no way to adequately describe the spectacular beauty of the Santa Ynez Mountains where the ranch was located. Olive trees and Coast Live Oak trees bloomed there as did the Vladrone flower. There were Mountain Lilac and Black Sage and Toyon and White Sage and Yerba, all beautifully flowering exotic plants. The Coast Goldenbush was exquisite and the Hummingbird Sage was a gorgeous shade of deep red. A plant called Our Lord’s Candle was spectacular, and the Meadow Barley and the Purple Needle grass when watered were spectacular. It was a horticulturalist’s dream.

  Wild animals were plentiful too. Everything from bobcats to foxes, California mule deer, mountain lions, black bears, and varmints like skunks and squirrels were there. In the air were ducks, woodpeckers, and hawks and slithering on the ground were all sorts of snakes, including the poisonous kind. There was an old television inside that got pretty good reception from Los Angeles. The house was only heated by the two fireplaces and many were a morning when Nancy Reagan did not want to get out of her warm bed and put a toe on the cold tiled floor.

  Their bed in the tiny bedroom was actually two single beds shoved together. The kitchen was small and had only an oven and underpowered range. The dishes and utensils were unmatched, a mishmash collected over the years. Nancy Reagan must have laughed silently to herself when at the ranch as she thought of all those reporters and politicians who had attacked her as the “queen of Beverly Hills.”21 If she was the queen, she had no subjects to command, especially at Rancho del Cielo. Reagan had his own reminders of humility, including a copy of a Montgomery Ward catalogue that sat on a table there for years, perhaps to remind him of how he’d applied for a job in the sporting goods section with the chain department store in Dixon after graduating from Eureka, only to lose out to a local high school basketball player.22

  At night, there was no ambient light from a neighboring town or from street lamps, only from the little house itself. Often the night sky was so brilliantly clear, shooting stars and the constellations filled the heavens. The air was bracing, clear, and quiet. Throughout his presidency the networks leased some land from a higher adjoining property, though at a great distance, and aimed their cameras down on the main house and surrounding land, which nonetheless perturbed the Reagans, who saw it as a violation of their privacy. Still, Reagan liked to jerk their chains, as he proved one day by facing the cameras and clutching his chest, feigning a heart attack.23

  During his eight years in Washington, he spent approximately one entire year at Rancho del Cielo. (Because he didn’t like Washington, he and Nancy also spent 183 weekends at Camp David.)24

  Indeed, 333 Refugio Road was their official residence, and the Reagans were registered to vote there, as they did in 1984. It had been the Reagans’ official residence since 1974. They’d sold the Pacific Palisades home in 1981, the very house built for them by General Electric in the 1950s.25

  Dennis LeBlanc said toward the end of Reagan’s second term the temporary buildings for the helicopter, the military, and the doctors began coming down and finally, the only government building left was the Secret Service command post. LeBlanc had gone to Governor Reagan’s detail fresh out of a new graduating class of California Highway Patrolmen. He quickly bonded with both Reagans, later going on the payroll of Deaver and Hannaford, handling security but also working closely for years with Reagan at the ranch. Sometimes it would be just the two of them there, working during the day, eating simply, and watching television in the evening.

  Outside the family, LeBlanc was one of the very, very few who stayed overnight at the ranch. At the end of a hard day, Reagan would tell LeBlanc, “We did good today,” and then discuss what he wanted to do the next day.26 Up there Reagan almost never discussed politics, except in 1996 when he and LeBlanc were watching the Democratic Convention, where President Clinton was being renominated. Reagan got “irritated” according to LeBlanc. “He said, ’We can’t let this happen. We have got to do something. What can I do, what can I do?”27

  Toward the end of his presidency, Reagan called LeBlanc and said, “Dennis, you know I am going to be leaving office. I’m thinking about spending a lot of time up at the ranch.” LeBlanc warned Reagan that his employer in 1988, Pacific Bell, liked the cache of one of their executives being close to the president of the United States but might be less willing to let him go work at the ranch if Reagan needed him after January 1989. Reagan asked LeBlanc for the name and phone number of his boss. Less than an hour later LeBlanc’s boss, Art Latno, called the young man.

  “How did he take it?”

  “He took it very well and you should, too, because you are going to continue going up to the ranch.”28

  In the last months of his administration, Reagan’s speechwriters, including Clark Judge, often inserted references to the ranch into Reagan’s remarks. No doubt he really wanted to get back but also Judge and others knew Reagan felt it was important to signal to the world that he believed the peaceful transfer of power was a hallmark of the American government and that all presidents upon leaving office were merely private citizens once again.29

  Like Jefferson, he also did a lot of writing and thinking at the ranch. Well-marked books on the many shelves there included several volumes by William F. Buckley, novels, and How to Pitch by Bob Feller.30

  As he wrote in his autobiography, An American Life,

  As I rode Little Man around Rancho del Cielo during the spring of 1975, I thought a lot about the lost vision of our founding fathers and the importance of recapturing it and the voices from around the country who were pressing me to run for president. And I remembered something I’d said many years before: A candidate doesn’t make the decision whether to run for president; the people make it for him.31

  No doubt presidential biographies contain a bit of fluff and revisionism, but even so, it was clear that Reagan did decide to take on Ford, setting off a chain of events that altered the course of American and world history.

  With Reagan’s health failing in 1998, Nancy Reagan reluctantly sold the ranch to the Young America’s Foundation for “nearly $6 million”32 and for a time some family members, especially Michael, squawked. But their complaints faded when it became clear that the Foundation—headed by Ron Robinson—and the ranch—headed by Frank Donatelli, Reagan’s old political director—had only good intentions and planned on using the ranch sparingly with high-dollar donors and as an inducement for high school and college students who wanted to study and learn about American conservatism and Reagan. Years later, Patti Davis wrote a charming article for Town & Country and while she couldn’t get comfortable with their philosophy, she noted with pleasure that they had taken marvelous care of the ranch her parents had loved. “The ranch was my father’s refuge, his sanctuary; it fed his soul.”33

  Donatelli handled much of the negotiations for the sale of the ranch on behalf of the Young America’s Foundation, and later he said it was not true that Nancy did not like the ranch, as some had claimed.34 It was the one place in the world she could have Ronnie to herself. Dennis LeBlanc agreed and said while at first the ranch was not “her cup of tea,” Nancy ended up “really, truly enjoying her visits up at the ranch.”35

  Frankly, Mrs. Reagan needed the money. The care for her ailing husband was extraordinary and the cost to maintain the ranch was prohibitive. The Clinton administration failed to protect it as an historic site as had the state of California, and prior to the Foundation’s purchase a wealthy liberal, Ron Burkle, had made his interests known. There had also been some talk about subdividing the property for development. Dennis had been there when the widow of Ray Kroc, the McDonald’s hamburger king, looked over the property.36 She, too, was a wealthy liberal even though her deceased husband was a Republican who’d known Richard Nixon and Reagan.

  Real e
state values in Santa Barbara had always been at a premium and the ranch, with its seclusion and spectacular views of the Pacific Ocean, would have been attractive for many of the rich and famous who wanted to have a second or third home. Sotheby’s had the listing on the property. It was not unusual for a presidential home to fall into the wrong hands or disrepair as had happened to both Mt. Vernon and Monticello, which descended into rotting ruin for years until citizens stepped forward to save both of them.

  In Reagan’s case, neither the local, state, or federal government ever showed any interest in obtaining the historically important ranch.

  Fortunately, the ranch was obtained by an organization with which Reagan had a long and warm relationship. The same was true with the Young Americans for Freedom, a once-affiliated organization. Donatelli, who had worked on all the campaigns and had produced the very first CPAC at which Reagan spoke, was also a top official with the Foundation and this was further evidence the ranch would not be abused.

  Reagan had always had an extraordinary relationship with young people. But not all loved him, like at Berkeley, where thousands protested his election in 1980, burning and plundering the campus. Sponsored by Students for Peace, scores were arrested.37 But many more did support him and now he’d created “a remarkable generation of conservatives,” said CNN’s Judy Woodruff.38 For years, Reagan had a close relationship with the Young Americans for Freedom, serving on its board of advisors, and gave some of his most important policy speeches on college campuses.

  Marc and Kristen Short were hired in 1998 by the new owners of the ranch to oversee its maintenance and begin to put together a program to attract young people to the conservative legacy of Ronald Reagan. The Shorts were newly married in their twenties, were young and photogenic, and had grown up as children of the Reagan Revolution. But before they could even get their feet wet, the first order of business was to meet Mrs. Reagan at the ranch.