As it turned out, they were there the last time Nancy was there. Similarly, Dennis LeBlanc was there the last time Nancy was there and the last time the Gipper was at the ranch. Suffice it to say, nobody was happy on either occasion. Nancy went up previously, accompanied by Dennis, to spend two days going through things including all the books, what she wanted to take, and what she wanted to leave. She gave LeBlanc Reagan’s set of signed Louis L’Amour novels. Nancy also gave LeBlanc a hand-carved duck decoy for his wife, who collected them. Over the years, the Reagans had given Dennis clothes and other gifts, and they never missed his birthday.39
After the ranch was sold, Nancy went back in the spring of 1998 and brought things she thought belonged to the ranch. Kristen remembered she wanted to bring back “things that . . . would add . . . personal touches to the house.”40 She also, according to LeBlanc, wanted to take some personal items. Arriving, she said to Dennis, “Boy, this brings back memories, but he’s not the same man anymore. It’s a different person.”41
Nancy Reagan brought back to the ranch a bedspread, and she and Kristen made the master bed together. Since there was no one else around, Kristen and Nancy just went to work on other chores around the small house. As they worked together, Nancy reminisced. “It was just a poignant moment,” Kristen recalled. “And she brought back some items of clothing . . . some of his riding things. A Secret Service jacket . . . given to him. Different boots and things . . .” All the time Nancy was telling Kristen about each item and memories about the ranch, and as they moved around Nancy repositioned furniture and items back to the way they’d had them.
“It was important for her that people would know who he was and what their life there was like. And she wanted to make sure that Marc and I understood that . . . because she knew that we would be telling that story, sharing that information with people . . .” As the afternoon wore on, Nancy warmed up to the Shorts, especially Kristen, and they walked the house and grounds together. They went into the guesthouse and “she told us about Margaret Thatcher coming.”42
But the Shorts also afforded Nancy Reagan some distance, allowing her time to reminisce and think alone. For two kids in their twenties, it was heady stuff. Marc Short reflected on her leaving the ranch for the last time. “This was kind of the real final end to that chapter. And . . . I think that there was a little bit of not quite yet wanting to let go.” Mrs. Reagan, he recalled, “teared up at one point.”43 Alone with Dennis, “we both cried.”44
LeBlanc said the last time Reagan was at the ranch no one actually knew it was the last time, so it had little of the sorrow as when Nancy knowingly left for the last time. But ranch hand Karl Mull wrote in his diary August 14–15, 1995,
President and Mrs. R. up for 2 days. No riding-no work. President has obviously slowed down since his announcement that he suffers from Alzheimer’s disease he is far less active than before. There will be no more horse riding and no more brush cutting or other rough work. Dennis drove him in blue jeep which he enjoyed [but] other than that there was no other activity. He is still very cordial as always but far less active.45
John Barletta went even deeper in his recollection of Reagan’s last visit to the ranch, saying that he did not recognize the place, that he slept on the way there—unlike every other time—and that when he arrived, he thought he was at his Malibu ranch that he’d sold years earlier. Finally, Reagan exclaimed, “I thought we sold this place.” Mrs. Reagan, crying, could not take it anymore. “I came here just to see about this, just to see his beloved ranch, and now even that’s gone. What are we doing here?”46
Marilyn Fisher, curator of collections with the Young America’s Foundation, said, “The entry on September 26 vaguely indicates last visit to the Ranch” for Reagan.47
In 1992, Steve Colo became head of Reagan’s Secret Service detail after the calamity in Las Vegas, when a crazed left wing activist, Rick Springer, got on stage and smashed a glass eagle at the Gipper’s feet. Colo was a popular and low-key career man with the Service and over the course of his time it fell to him to gently take away the more dangerous tools for Reagan’s own safety, all with Mrs. Reagan’s quiet approval. Even then, Reagan was telling jokes. “Hey, did you hear the story . . .” Reagan was still driving the jeeps around the property though, and Colo would sit in the passenger seat with his left hand gently on the wheel.48
He got to travel with Reagan in so-called retirement, as well, such as when the former president spoke at Oxford in 1992. “That’s still kind of late in his career and he gave a marvelous speech . . . but after that he gave less and less . . .” He also accompanied the Gipper to a Stanley Cup game, to the Snake River, and to other locations and events. And to the Mayo Clinic in 1994. A doctor told him after examining Reagan, “You really need to understand that this is the onset of dementia, and that as you are protecting him, you and your team need to understand that there’s going to be some changes.”49
The analysis and arguments over Reagan’s legacy continued. Presidential historian Michael Beschloss credited Reagan with popularizing conservatism and the idea of federalism—“moving power away from Washington.”50 But a sixty-year-old woman who’d gone to the mortuary two days earlier, Donna Glassman, simply said, “When I think of him, I think of America.”51.
Some, like Fred Ryan, embraced a “supply-side” approach and simply let a thousand flowers bloom when it came to the legacy, rather than trying to keep an impossible hold on it, as his predecessors at the Library had tried.
Still, there were sometimes private skirmishes and low warfare between some of the Reagan heritage entities. In the years since leaving the presidency, the fight over the Reagan legacy often was contentious and bitter. After all, he’d been preceded by failed or mediocre presidents and succeeded by failed or mediocre men and as the years went by, his shadow lengthened over the Republican Party, over the presidency, and over the country.
The difference between the Eastern Europeans’ and the Western Europeans’ response to the death of Reagan was astonishing. Basically, those who had freedom but had been threatened were coming down hard on his legacy while those who had no freedom until the victory over communism celebrated Reagan. The French dismissed him as a “cowboy justicier,”52 while Mart Laar of Estonia said without Reagan he’d be somewhere in Siberia in chains.53 Already, statues of Reagan had been going up where statues of Lenin and Stalin once stood, but more would be built in the years that followed.
Stories both good and bad were being recounted in the national media by the high, low, and middle about Reagan.
An indignant and thin-skinned Mario Cuomo told of how when he’d been introduced to Reagan by Senator Pat Moynihan, Reagan supposedly said, “You don’t have to introduce me to Lee Iacocca!”54 Cuomo, naturally, saw it as Reagan’s faux pas instead of another perspective, which is he just didn’t make much of an impression.
James A. Baker, his supremely competent first chief of staff, disputed that Reagan was a great compromiser, meeting his opponents halfway. Reagan, he said, “would much rather get 80 percent of what I want than to go over the cliff with my flag flying.”55 Some mistakenly said that Reagan said, “My 80 percent friend is not my 80 percent enemy.” It was checked and rechecked and chased down and no one could really remember hearing Reagan say it, and it was never found in any of his interviews or writings. Still, the myth persisted, even when Reagan’s longtime speechwriter and friend Peter Hannaford remarked, “Not only didn’t he say it, I doubt he even thought it.”56 Reagan, as Baker accurately reflected, would negotiate for as much as he could but always wanted to go back and get more and eventually all.
The closest Reagan had come was in 1968 when he said, “I’m willing to take what I can get. You have to take what you can get and go out and get some more next year; that’s what the opposition has been do
ing for years.”57
Stories filled local newspapers of Reagan’s passing from the local angle, and there were plenty. Everybody from Albany, New York, to Zamora, California, and points in between seemed to have a story about meeting Reagan or hearing him give a speech or some other type of personal contact. All told of his kindness and thoughtfulness, especially by those individuals often overlooked by politicians, like busboys, housemaids, cops, and firefighters. It was almost monotonous in that almost all warmly praised Reagan. Many stories opened using the name and the state and the phrase “love affair”58 and Reagan. A retiree in Santa Monica said, “A lot of us out here have never met him, but we feel like we did.”59
In 1984, Reagan’s best state in the country was Utah, which he won with 75 percent of the vote. But it was not the greatest landslide there. That belonged to another populist from the Midwest, William Jennings Bryan, who carried the Beehive State (yes, you read it correctly) with a mindboggling 82 percent in 1896.
When Reagan hosted Death Valley Days, the opening narration was filmed in front of the Parry Lodge in Utah as he stood by a white horse. Reagan’s death so infused the culture that a sports writer for the Chicago Tribune, Mike Downey, wrote a column, weaving together Reagan’s love of horses with the winner of the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, Smarty Jones, and the Downey’s occasional correspondence with the Reagans over the years.60
Over the previous week some pretty important people had passed away, including Archibald Cox, ninety-two years old, the famed Watergate special prosecutor who was fired by Richard Nixon in 1973. Also Sam Dash, who was the counsel to the Senate committee investigating Watergate, had passed at the age of seventy-nine. William Manchester, historian and author of critically acclaimed biographies of John Kennedy, Winston Churchill, and Douglas MacArthur, perished at age eighty-two.
And Alberta Martin, ninety-seven years old, expired. She was widely believed to have been the last widow of a Civil War veteran.61 In the early part of the twentieth century, there were plenty of “May-December” marriages between wizened old veterans of Blue or Grey that married sweet young things, who would, in turn, be cared for with a lifetime military pension. Fittingly, Alberta died in Enterprise—Alabama, that is.
The Bush-Reagan compare-and-contrast debate was percolating in the national media and was intensifying, becoming harsh. “After American troops seized Baghdad, President Bush donned a flight suit and landed by jet fighter on an aircraft carrier festooned with the words ’Mission Accomplished.’ Mr. Reagan stopped wearing costumes when he left Hollywood.”62
For some in the press, Reagan was now Pa Walton and Bush was Eddie Haskell. Many in the media, never respectful of Reagan, were now using Reagan to bash Bush. It was a scene often played out in the dens of the nation’s broadcasting studios. From Barry Goldwater to Bob Dole to others they once excoriated by using other conservatives to bash them, they now used old conservatives to bash new conservatives. It was as familiar as it was predictable.
The major media were beginning to issue editorials and commentaries on the life and times of Ronald Reagan and many missed the point. The New York Times said the problems of Washington in 2004 could be traced to Reagan’s term of office—sixteen years earlier. Words such as flaws and slogan-driven foreign policy littered the lead editorials, and it generally exhibited the most superficial understanding of Reagan and his life and times. Still, the editorialists got two things essentially right: “He will almost certainly be ranked among the most important presidents of the 20th century . . . Mr. Reagan’s stubborn refusal to accept the permanence of communism helped end the Cold War.”63
Letters to the editor of the Grey Lady were running generally more favorably toward Reagan than their columnists and editorial writers. The paper did print gracious columns by Mikhail Gorbachev and Bob Dole. Dole wrote,
One of the first things he taught me was about loyalty: a few months after he took office, I was in the hospital recovering from kidney stone surgery. Much to my surprise, he took a helicopter to Walter Reed hospital to visit . . . By the time he left, I was ready to march up any hill, let alone Capitol Hill, for him. Ronald Reagan is smiling upon us today . . . 64
David Brooks, a High Tory and neocon writer for the New York Times, nonetheless wrote a superb column accurately portraying Reagan as the quintessential Exceptionalist.65 Clyde Haberman, another columnist with the paper, penned a piece ripping Reagan. He quoted Mario Cuomo saying Reaganism was “the triumph of persona over policy.” Elaborating, Cuomo said, “The results [of Reaganism] made the denial of compassion respectable.” Revealingly, Cuomo’s old nemesis Ed Koch said of Reagan, “I thought he was a terrific president. I wish we had more like him.”66 Displaying his own form of compassion during the two campaigns Koch and Cuomo waged against each other, Cuomo operatives sent signs across New York City and the state that said “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo.”67
Paul Krugman, a diminutive and longstanding Reagan basher, predictably wrote another column trashing him even in death. On a brighter note, Governor George Pataki said the state of New York would close their offices Friday, June 11, following suit of the national government as a day of mourning for Reagan. Many other states were closing down in remembrance of Reagan. But New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that New York City would remain open because of the “complications” such a closing would do to the business of the city.68 For years, the inflated and entitled metropolis felt itself apart and above the rest of the country. After September 11, there was some debate over whether New York City was even a part of the United States. Perhaps. Or perhaps the city was just dominated by left wingers.
The running joke was there were more communists on the Upper West Side of New York City than there ever had been in the politburo. Indeed, NYC had closed in memoriam for the deaths of Franklin Roosevelt, JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and LBJ, but not for Ronald Reagan.
Bloomberg’s indifference to the death of Reagan was typical for the cruel and indifferent city, as Kitty Genovese found out years earlier. In 1981, at a meeting of an ad agency, when news came of the shooting of Reagan by John Hinckley, the ad executives briefly looked at the TV news and then went back to their story boards, as their president’s condition went without concern or regard by the masterminds of Madison Avenue.
The New York Stock Exchange, however, announced it would be closed the day of the Reagan funeral. The last time it had been closed for a president’s death was for Richard Nixon in 1994. The Exchange, which had begun during the presidency of George Washington, did not close for all presidents and in fact, in the two-hundred-plus-year history of Wall Street, it had closed only thirteen times due to a president’s death.69
The major publications also gave significant coverage to outside Reagan critics and not just their own in-house writers. One headline yelled, “Critics See a Reagan Legacy Tainted by AIDS, Civil Rights and Union Policies.”70 In fact, spending on AIDS research rose under Reagan, and his appointee Dr. C. Everett Koop as surgeon general became the world’s leading advocate of AIDS prevention and research.
Both Newsweek and Time magazine issued commemorative publications on the death of Reagan, both featuring the iconic photo of the Gipper taken some years earlier at the ranch. He looked like the rugged cowboy and naturally wore a white cowboy hat, a Stetson, size seven.71 He wore a blue denim shirt. His eyes were crinkly, his lopsided smile familiar, curled up to the right. “Manly” was the way to describe the handsome photo, but point of fact Reagan was one of those lucky people who never took a bad photo, like JFK. Maybe it was their Irishness or their eternal optimism.
“We knew it might happen,” said Jon Meacham, the managing editor of Newsweek.72 Both magazines had to quickly dump their planned cover stories and scramble to paste together an entirely new magazine although,
as with most elderly public officials, Reagan’s obituary had been drafted sometime earlier but frequently updated to reflect current events and his changing status.
The cover photo had been taken after he’d lost the nomination to Gerald Ford, in 1976, by photographer Michael Evans, who in 1981 became the official White House photographer at Reagan’s personal request. At the time, Evans was there at the ranch for a “shoot” for Equus magazine.
While there at Rancho del Cielo, Evans had also photographed Mrs. Reagan, clad in denim shirt and jeans, lying in a rattan hammock, looking downright appealing, her eyes alluring and red lips full. In 1980, the campaign was casting about for an official poster, and campaign operative Lorelei Kinder took it upon herself to come up with “Reagan Country” including this photo of the Gipper73 surrounded by chintzy sketches of various town and country scenes; even though few at the time liked it, it became hugely popular and became one of the top-selling items at the Reagan Library gift shop.
The Nielsen Company, which tracked viewership on network and cable television, saw a sharp increase over the previous several days. Fox was up 11 percent, CNN was up 12 percent, and even MSNBC was up 5 percent. But more amazing was that among the key demographic, the 18 to 34-year-olds, CNN’s viewership was up 27 percent and over at Fox, among 25 to 54-year-olds, viewership was up 17 percent.74
Even at the end, young Americans followed and understood Reagan better than many in their country.
Some of Reagan’s most important speeches of his presidency were given on college campuses: Notre Dame, Eureka, Georgetown. He even spoke at Moscow State University under a giant bust of Lenin. To the children of Lenin and Stalin he said, “The key is freedom. A bird on a tether, no matter how long the rope, can always be pulled back.” Elaborating, he spoke of “freedom of thought, freedom of information, freedom of communication,”75 all notions for which men and women had been sent to gulags or disappeared into the night over the previous seventy years.
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