by Craig Oliver
After the shooting, the security surrounding the president would never be the same again. Gone were the days of simply flashing a pass and being buzzed through a White House gate. The pass now restricted reporters to the two-storey press room and the lawn in front. All other areas of the sprawling executive offices were off limits without an escort. The Secret Service used the incident to win an arrangement they’d always wanted: They closed off the streets in front of and beside the White House, distancing it from street traffic and pedestrians. Perhaps such measures were necessary to protect presidents, but they somehow diminished the lustre of this advertisement for America’s open democracy and the notion of government by the people, for the people.
CTV’s offices were next to ABC’s quarters in the heart of the downtown. We shared the street with the Mayflower Hotel, a favourite luncheon spot for many of the city’s well-known citizens. (A wall plaque noted that J. Edgar Hoover had lunched there every day for a quarter century but did not mention that his alleged lover and assistant, FBI director Clyde Tolsen, had accompanied him.) Only four of us were in the bureau: a staff cameraman, a soundman, a locally hired producer, and me. Down the street, our competition at the CBC numbered about twenty. My bureau chief counterpart there was Joe Schlesinger, for whom I had the greatest respect and affection, so ours was a friendly rivalry.
The daily routine was generally predictable. I called the Toronto assignment desk every morning to decide what story we would file that day. Usually the topic was obvious, although from time to time that decision became a protracted negotiation. Then we set to work collecting interviews and videos for the item we would assemble and edit for that evening’s newscast. We had contracts with three American networks that allowed us to weave some of their material into our items. This was known as a “U.S. melt” and it is standard practice for everyone in the business. Of course, more often than not some breaking event would intervene and I would be grabbing the next flight to a destination elsewhere in the country, there to package an entirely new item.
I was settling in, but still operating without a White House pass, the high-security photo identity card that was essential for access to the precincts of official Washington. As soon as I had arrived, I underwent a detailed police check and fingerprinting, but after a few months of anxious delays, the Secret Service requested that I be fingerprinted again. The agent who took my prints the first time had apparently done a poor job. A year passed while I worked without clearance. Finally an apologetic agent called to ask for a third fingerprinting session. This time two Secret Service experts, after a close examination of my fingers, informed me that I was a one-in-a-million curiosity. I had no latent prints: The fingertip whirls that would normally distinguish me from others did not exist. Proud as I was to be such a rare specimen, I was more concerned that the absence of prints would deny me the coveted pass. I should have chosen a life of crime, the experts told me with a laugh, but they gave me their approval since the distinct smudge I produced would just as surely identify me.
Soon thereafter, a blue-bordered envelope bearing the White House seal arrived in my mailbox. It was an invitation to a private dinner party hosted by the president and Mrs. Reagan. Naturally, I suspected a hoax by the people in my office, but just to be sure I called the presidential social secretary. I could hear the doubt in her voice as she informed me coolly that she would check and call me back. Next day, her tone had changed dramatically. “Ron and Nancy” did indeed want to have me over for dinner with a small group of friends, presumably people I would know well. They included such luminaries as Secretary of State Haig, Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, and the Post’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee, of Watergate fame. Our old friend Bob Hope would be dropping by for drinks but couldn’t stay for dinner.
I bought my first tuxedo and on the appointed night showed up, invitation in hand, at the security door of the White House. From there I was escorted to the Roosevelt Room with other arriving guests. When I was announced to my hosts, a startled look crossed Mrs. Reagan’s face, but Ronnie welcomed me warmly. At dinner I was seated beside the somewhat subdued wife of the director of the FBI, though we eventually found a happy conversational topic in her children. (She did not mention her ill health and it was a shock when she succumbed to cancer within days of that evening.)
At one point after dinner, I went out on the Truman balcony with a glass of champagne. It had begun to snow very lightly, the marine band was playing in the background, and Reagan joined me for a breath of fresh air. Just like home, I told him, and he recalled how cold Toronto had been when he visited there during one of his past speaking engagements.
I left that evening with a feeling of euphoria, speculating on the career benefits of so dazzling a debut in Washington’s power circles. I was soon disabused of that notion. A few days later, a friend from CBS called to say that “Craig Oliver is sure pissed off at you.” Who? That would be the American Craig Oliver of NPR and PBS, a much-admired figure in public broadcasting—and an acquaintance of Nancy Reagan. Like me, he had a White House press pass, but it was to my address that the invitation had been sent. With the pass and the invitation, I’d had no trouble getting through the front gate security and into the president’s private dining quarters. I treasure the keepsake photo in which Nancy is clearly perturbed that the Oliver she is shaking hands with is not the one she invited, yet she said nothing about it.
What I saw in Reagan that night supported the widely held observation that he didn’t care and barely noticed what social set he was in. His was an anecdotal mind, more interested in people’s stories than their status or rank. Reagan seemed to accept everyone as an equal and to trust what they told him. It was Nancy who had to make the tough judgments about people who might try to abuse their access to him. She spotted the phonies and hangers-on and shunted aside those who were not useful. All leaders need a spouse like that.
My next meeting with Reagan was in the Oval Office itself. In advance of the G7 economic summit in 1983, the White House agreed to a sit-down interview with the president and a group of reporters from the G7 countries, an unheard-of privilege today. As we took our places, Reagan noted that I was from Canada and asked me to remind him to tell the story of his desk, the one used by John F. Kennedy and other presidents before and after him.
The interview over, Reagan’s senior staff moved in to whisk him away, but to their evident annoyance I intervened to ask about the desk. He walked over to the massive oak piece and motioned me to join him behind it. “Look here,” he said, instructing me to reach under the desktop where I felt some large steel bolts. “They are shipwrights’ screws,” he explained; the desk was made from the timbers of the HMS Resolute, one of the vessels sent out on the international search for the lost Franklin expedition in the mid-nineteenth century. To my surprise, Reagan was quite familiar with the tragic mystery of the 128 British seamen who had died in the quest for the Northwest Passage, and together we bent to examine the piece more carefully.
He knew the fascinating history of the Franklin Expedition and told it well: how the Resolute’s British crew had abandoned the vessel in the Arctic ice in 1854, and then an American whaler found it adrift in the North Atlantic. The American government subsequently restored HMS Resolute and returned it to Queen Victoria in 1856. Two decades later, the Resolute was taken out of service, but Victoria ordered the creation of at least two desks from its timbers, one of which was presented to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880. It resided in the White House thereafter and was retrieved from storage by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy for her husband’s use in the Oval Office.
Exasperated aides broke in to insist that this president get on with his schedule, which was running late. I was hustled out while Reagan shrugged apologetically as if there were nothing he would rather do than spend more time chatting about Arctic history.
At another session with reporters held before the 1985 G7 summit, I asked Reagan how he felt about Canada’s defe
nce spending, at the time the lowest per capita of any NATO country except Luxembourg. Reagan launched into the answer of another question altogether, one having to do with the nation’s deficit. I summoned up my courage and interrupted him to bring him back to the point. He corrected himself and the session went on smoothly. After it ended, he came up to me and apologized, pointing out that I had been seated on his left, his bad ear.
Since I briefly had Reagan’s attention, I asked if he might allow his official photographer, who was in the room, to take a photo of the two of us. While the shot was set up, I knew better than to engage Reagan in small talk about matters of policy. Instead, I asked him about horseback riding and his eyes lit up. It was well-known that every Saturday morning he travelled to Camp David to ride. Striding across the White House lawn toward the waiting helicopter, clad in riding breeches and cowboy boots that flattered his powerful build, he was the very picture of all-American athleticism.
In Bonn, Reagan told me stories about the famously uncomfortable McClellan saddle, developed just prior to the Civil War by the army general of the same name. Reagan mentioned that he himself had been a second lieutenant in the U.S. Cavalry, to which I responded with a raised eyebrow. He then pointed out that horse soldiers had not been officially “dismounted” until 1941. It was great fun at Washington dinner parties, when the conversation invariably turned to Reagan, to drop the fact that the president had ridden with the cavalry. When asked where I had heard such a thing, I replied that Ron himself had told me about it. A pathetic bit of one-upmanship, I admit, but irresistible.
The photograph was later signed and framed and made its way to the wall behind the reception desk of the tourist motel Mom was now managing in Prince Rupert. Vacationing Americans en route to Alaska were delighted to see their president’s likeness prominently displayed, but were not entirely convinced that the chap beside him was the desk clerk’s son.
The chance to observe Reagan up close confirmed for me the judgment of one of his Cabinet secretaries, who explained that what you saw was what you got. I saw a natural performer, a Hollywood actor who understood he was playing the role of a lifetime. In the era of image management, he could be cast in any role: a believable commander-in-chief when the Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafineeded to be cut down to size; a supportive padre to the nation when the crew of the space shuttle Challenger lost their lives before the eyes of millions; a huggable Republican to counter the mean-spirited extremists who had previously characterized the right wing of his party. He was full of contradictions, spoke a lot about God but rarely attended church; lauded the family, although he himself was divorced and estranged from some of his children. Yet he cut the kind of heroic figure that makes Americans swoon—a man possessed of strongly held beliefs and, in his public life at least, morally beyond reproach. Above all, Reagan was no phony.
There were any number of irritants in the relationship between Canada and the United States in the early years of Reagan’s regime, and the hard-line anti-Communists in the president’s circle ranked our prime minister high on the list. Trudeau’s friendly relations with the Soviets and holiday-like visits to Cuba were anathema to them, as was his government’s economic nationalism. At a Senate hearing around this time, Robert Hormats, Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, condemned Canada’s embrace of measures like the National Energy Program as the act of a Third World country, on a par with leftist dictatorships in Latin America. The Reaganauts needed a willing partner in their anti-Communist crusade, and Trudeau’s refusal to co-operate with their economic embargo of Nicaragua in 1985 infuriated them.
The Americans were also gazing jealously at Canada’s vast oil reserves and were eager to make a deal that would allow them access and a measure of protection from the uncertainty of Middle East supplies. They sought a continental energy policy, even though they believed they would not get it from Pierre Trudeau, or at least not on terms they would find acceptable.
A visit by the prime minister to Washington in 1981 did nothing to improve relations. A Trudeau aide reported to me the Canadians’ frustration with Reagan’s simplistic world view, while the Americans greeted Trudeau’s promotion of détente with a new generation of Soviet leaders as collusion with the enemy. In his usual contorted style, Al Haig summed up the discussions as “atmospheric dissonance.” A friend who was close by when Trudeau and Reagan conversed between themselves reported that they got along just fine. They simply weren’t hearing each other.
The situation was no better a few years later when, just before he left office, Trudeau embarked on a much-criticized world tour to promote peace. He received a chilly reception in Washington. Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger told reporters he believed Trudeau was smoking something. On his way out of the White House, the prime minister publicly condemned what he called “Pentagon pipsqueaks” who were committed to the arms race.
In February 1984, I had a truly bizarre encounter with William J. Casey, director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a former wartime spymaster with its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services. I was introduced to him at a dinner party where the subject of Trudeau naturally arose. In a casual, matterof-fact way, he remarked, “I guess Trudeau is quitting in a few days.” I was nonplussed and thought I had missed some breaking announcement, but when I phoned Trudeau’s press secretary, Pat Gossage, in Ottawa later that night, he had no such information, nor was there any speculation. And yet less than a week later, Trudeau took his famous walk in the snow and announced his resignation from politics.
Did the CIA have 24 Sussex bugged? Were they eavesdropping on the prime minister’s phone calls? I concluded the guess must have been a fortuitous one; why would someone in Casey’s position give away secrets? Casey died of brain cancer in 1987, but not before his role in covert activities in Afghanistan, in various Soviet bloc countries, and in South and Central America became common knowledge. An old friend of his, columnist William Safire, wrote after Casey’s death that the CIA had been concerned that the cancer might have impaired Casey’s judgment before it was detected.
The administration was looking beyond Trudeau well before his formal departure, however, and they were quick to recognize a more congenial figure in Brian Mulroney when he became leader of the Progressive Conservative Party in 1983. He and his beautiful wife, Mila, attracted some attention in the local press, and I was invited to appear on the McNeil/Lehrer News Hour where I predicted Mulroney would win Canada’s next federal election. As it turned out, Mulroney had an ally in Washington that he might never have expected.
Allan Gotlieb was the sociable Ottawa mandarin whose mix of brilliant charm and political savvy made him an ideal match for the Reagan crowd when Trudeau appointed him ambassador to the United States in 1981. Peering myopically through circular glasses, Gotlieb looked every bit the pinstriped and bookish Canadian emissary. He was anything but. Instead of sitting in his office, operating through junior officers and waiting for his calls to be returned, Gotlieb decided to court the Reagan administration’s power brokers. He arranged a birthday party for Michael Deaver, the president’s much-trusted public relations and media manager, and sent invitations to everyone in the administration. Few declined to fete the well-liked and influential Deaver.
Whether because of our mutual connection with Trudeau or because I was a single man happy to fill a chair left empty by an unexpected cancellation, I enjoyed a lot of dinners on the embassy tab and was able to see the effectiveness of Gotlieb’s strategy. Once the major players were in your dining room, the relationship became personal and the access much easier. It helped that Gotlieb was clever and engaging and that his wife, Sondra, was hilariously eccentric, as well as an accomplished hostess. She wrote an amusing column in the Washington Post about a mythical ambassador’s wife who is overwhelmed by her life in the American capital. Everyone knew it was Sondra writing about herself.
Receptions and parties at their official residence became something of an after-work club
for certain members of the Reagan administration, among them George Schultz, Caspar Weinberger, and James Baker. They did business and talked out differences away from the pressures of their offices, and it was not unusual to see senior figures, from Cabinet officers to congressional leaders, pulling one another aside for private chats. An invitation from Canada was the hottest ticket in town: People wanted to be there because they knew that others they wished or needed to see would be there too.
In Ottawa, Gotlieb had been considered almost an honorary member of the Liberal Party. In fact he was a professional public servant, and when Mulroney won the Conservative leadership, Gotlieb saw that he might soon have new political masters. Happily, he believed in the need for a continent-wide trade deal to protect Canada’s crucial privileged entry into the American market, and so did Mulroney. Not long after, I was at another dazzling party at the Gotlieb residence when Ed Meese, then White House Chief of Staff, asked me about Mulroney. Over port and cigars, the big heavy-jowled Californian told me, “This is a man we can work with.”
The White House let Gotlieb know they would welcome a visit. The subsequent Canadian embassy party was a hugely successful coming-out for Mulroney. In an unprecedented show of diplomatic courtesy to an Opposition leader, all of the top officials of the administration attended. Gotlieb took his career in his hands with this event. He made an effusive after-dinner toast in which he predicted a bright new era for Canada under a youthful new leader. The Trudeau camp was furious at this traitorous talk, but Gotlieb had made the right move.