Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  “Since the last one was Arlington, he wanted me to say, ‘Also buried out there is this young man,’” Khachigian recalls. The speechwriter was skeptical. He knew Reagan was prone to apocryphal stories, many of which were taken from the movies, so he did some research and found out that the existence of Treptow’s diary was largely an invention, and that he was buried not in Arlington but in Bloomer, Wisconsin. Neither was a small nor insignificant detail. “Reagan refused to take it out,” Khachigian says. “I told him, ‘Governor, it will diminish your speech when it comes out that this is false.’” Reagan shook his head and said, “It’s too good a story. Just take care of it.” So the Treptow reference remained. So did another story, this one appropriated from Marine Raiders, a 1944 RKO war epic, in which a character played by Frank McHugh utters the line, “This can’t be happening to us. We’re Americans. What happened to us?” Reagan knew a good line when he heard one.

  “I don’t want a speech with a lot of flourish,” Reagan instructed Khachigian, “no fake eloquence, no soaring rhetoric.” He wanted a sort of tone poem that spoke directly to the American people. Reagan wrote most of it himself on a yellow legal pad during a flight from Washington to Los Angeles. Later, a number of influential people weighed in, appealing to their special interests. Vernon Jordan solicited a line or two that advocated intolerance to bigotry. Paul Laxalt voiced concern that “Ron might be softening his views, so make sure he sticks to the conservative position.” To appease Laxalt, Khachigian added the line, “On these principles we will not compromise.” In the end, Reagan polished the hardest edges off the speech, then transferred it to the four-by-six-inch index cards, the format with which he felt most comfortable.

  Despite his ease in front of an audience, there were plenty of nerves. The entire world would be watching. Near the speaker’s platform he could look into a VIP area where folks who held the gold parade tickets, such as Jimmy Stewart, Henry Kissinger, Johnny Carson, Frank Sinatra, and William F. Buckley Jr., were seated. It helped that his family was within eyesight. Nancy gazed at him adoringly, pinning his every move with her doe eyes. Beside her sat Patti, looking more like her father than she cared to admit. Maureen escorted Dennis Revell, her new fiancé. And Ron his new wife.

  Ron had dropped out of Yale to dance with the Joffrey Ballet troupe, fanning rumors that he was gay, which he wasn’t. On November 24, 1980, he had married Doria Palmieri, at a New York City courthouse without so much as telling his parents. But the newlyweds wouldn’t have missed the inauguration. Nor would Michael Reagan, who had already begun cashing in on his father’s renown. Michael, along with his wife and son, sat next to Neil and Bess Reagan, and behind them, Edith and Loyal Davis, Nancy’s parents.

  Former presidents, mainstays of inaugurations, were curiously absent. Gerald Ford stayed home to keep a golfing engagement, while Richard Nixon remained out of sight, the specter of Watergate still too fresh.

  Ronald Reagan became the fortieth president almost before he knew what was happening. Chief Justice Warren Burger produced a Bible, and not just any Bible, but the crumbling and bandaged Reagan family heirloom that had belonged to his mother, Nelle, and her mother before that, and just like that, he was intoning, “I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear . . .”

  Inauspiciously, Frank Sinatra’s seat had originally been placed right behind where Reagan would be standing. But when ceremony strategists previewed the camera shots, they realized that Sinatra and Reagan would be sharing the frame throughout the swearing-in. So at the last minute, chairs were rearranged to move Sinatra out of the shot.

  Auspiciously, as if on cue, a shaft of sunlight broke through dense clouds as the new president finished repeating the oath of office and stepped back to savor the heavenly sign. A squadron of fighter jets burst out of the clouds, serenaded by a twenty-one-gun salute. Before the new president pivoted to the microphone to deliver his address, Dick Allen squat-walked down the aisle and handed him a slip of paper. Reagan glanced at the message on Situation Room stationery—“Wheels up in Tehran”—and winked at Allen. The hostages had passed through Iranian airspace. He slipped the paper into his pocket, choosing not to mention it yet, not wishing to steal Jimmy Carter’s last bit of thunder.

  The address was straightforward, homespun, and warmly received. True to his word, there was no soaring rhetoric, no memorable ask not what your country can do for you. He stuck to the basics—an economic recovery, a strong defense, and the intrusion of government in everyday lives. The showstopper was saved for the luncheon with congressional leaders in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall directly following the inauguration. President Reagan pulled the slip of paper out of his pocket and announced, “And now, to conclude the toast, with thanks to almighty God, I have been given a tag line, the get-off line that everyone wants for the end of a toast or a speech or anything else.” Pausing dramatically, he said, “Some thirty minutes ago, the planes bearing our prisoners left Iranian airspace and are now free of Iran.” As the cheers died down, he raised his glass of California chardonnay. “So we can all drink to this one—to all of us together, doing what we all know we can do to make this country what it should be, what it can be, what it always has been.”

  There was a final hitch: one woman remained in Tehran who wasn’t at the embassy—Cynthia Dwyer refused to get on the plane until the Iranians returned her camera. Reagan, who still had control of Iranian assets, pulled Dick Allen aside and said, “You tell those bastards if Cynthia Dwyer isn’t out of there, the deal is off.” The ultimatum produced immediate results; Dwyer and her camera were on the next plane out. The last thing the clerics wanted was to test Ronald Reagan. They’d heard the accusations that he was trigger-happy, as well as the jokes. Question: What is flat and glows in the dark? Answer: Tehran, the day after Reagan’s inauguration.

  As president, he already had a sense of the power he wielded, and he intended to let those Iranians know they were finished interfering in American interests. If push came to shove, he’d shove—he’d use force. The sooner terrorists got that message, the better off the country would be. He’d said as much in his inaugural address: “When action is required to preserve our national security, we will act.” It was a warning that resonated in many international capitals, but especially in Tehran.

  So far, his tough talk was just that—talk. But legislators in both parties wondered where it would lead. Politicians who had resented being held hostage to the ongoing antics in Iran appreciated Carter’s efforts that had gone into resolving the crisis peacefully, but understood that Reagan might have shown no restraint. Understood—and slightly feared. And slightly welcomed. The power at Reagan’s disposal was enormous; there was no telling how he intended to use it.

  The day went by in a blur; the only highlight he clearly recalled was seeing the Dixon High School marching band fronted by its high-stepping drum major, his former role in that very unit. As he stood in front of the mirror adjusting his satin bowtie before setting out for the inaugural balls, the road he’d traveled began to unwind. He was a long way from Dixon, a long way from his wildest boyhood dreams. A grin played at the corners of his mouth, his eyes grew big, delighted, amused. He jumped in the air and did a neat pirouette, shouting: “I’m the President of the United States!”

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  —

  The brand-new Reagan administration had pledged to hit the ground running, and a skeleton staff calling itself the Economic Policy Group convened, somewhat bleary-eyed, at 10:30 the next morning in the Cabinet Room, chaired by the new president. There were several noticeable cosmetic alterations. Portraits of Thomas Jefferson and Harry Truman that had hung prominently around the room had been replaced by those of Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower to keep Abraham Lincoln company. The other major addition was a huge Waterford crystal jar filled with multicolored jelly beans that sat directly in front of Vice President George Bush, who eyed it somewhat circumspectly. The candy was a favorite of Ronald Reagan�
��s, he was practically addicted to it. “When you need some energy,” he advised his protégés, “I expect to see the jar going around the room.” Eager to please, everyone dutifully passed it around and popped a few jelly beans in their mouths.

  The Reagan Cabinet was a patchwork of newcomers. Assembling it had been the first priority after the election, perhaps more critical for this president due to his preference for a hands-off management style—deferring to staff and appointees for the heavy lifting. “He made no pretense at being an expert in all things,” says Robert “Bud” McFarlane, a National Security deputy, “but he had a solid intellect, a solid grasp of American values, a sense of right and wrong, a tolerance for risk.” Reagan expected to make the big decisions while relying on input that spared him too many details. His staff reintroduced the mini-memo, a holdover from Sacramento, which reduced the research on any given major policy to a single page of four paragraphs: one explaining the issue, followed by a summary of the facts and background data, a brief discussion, and suggested options and recommendations. If things got too complex and beyond his grasp, he’d invariably postpone discussion by saying “I want to roundtable this with the fellas” or “Maybe we should sleep on this.”

  He’d taken a similar hands-off approach with Cabinet appointments. Ed Meese, the future counselor to the president, was awarded the job of sifting through and interviewing prospective appointees, and making recommendations. Martin Anderson and Dick Allen were also encouraged to weigh in. As president-elect, Reagan isolated himself from the initial selection process to avoid being importuned by people who had ulterior motives or wanted to push candidates on him. One such special-interest group was the Kitchen Cabinet, now expanded to eighteen conservative businessmen, who “had their own ideas,” according to Meese. Another was Richard Nixon.

  Two weeks after the election, the former president sent Ronald Reagan an eleven-page memo, expressly intended to influence appointments to top-level posts in his administration. Nixon was especially expansive about secretary of state. He knew that Henry Kissinger, his candidate of preference, would never pass muster, and he had an alternate suggestion or two up his sleeve. Rumors had been circulating that Caspar Weinberger was under consideration. “That’d be a big mistake,” Nixon had warned Dick Allen earlier. Allen knew Nixon wanted someone at the State Department who would act as a conduit for him, someone he could manipulate. “I knew that Nixon was fishing for Al Haig,” Allen says.

  Alexander Haig Jr. had been White House chief of staff under Nixon and Ford, and he was an autocratic, somewhat controversial figure on the fringes of Watergate. As supreme allied commander of NATO forces, Haig had refused to meet Reagan during his 1978 visit to Europe. He had also threatened to run against Reagan for the 1980 Republican nomination, which won him no affection. Dick Allen knew Haig well as “a very bright, energetic, and very mercurial fellow, but a schemer with an agenda, and not a very good guy at heart.” And his heart lay at the core of his personality. Haig had recently undergone open-heart surgery and emerged from it, some said, a different person. “Before, Al was unflappable,” according to John Lehman, Haig’s longtime colleague and Reagan’s newly appointed secretary of the Navy. “He would rarely lose his temper, and he had a real sense of humor. But after the surgery, he had a short fuse, became less of a listener and more of a my-way-or-the-highway guy.” Even Nixon had asked Dick Allen, “Is Haig’s heart operation making him crazy?” Allen vehemently opposed seconding Nixon’s recommendation, and told Reagan as much. But Nixon was undeterred. In his memo, he promoted Haig as someone who understood the policies involving not only Europe but also the Soviet Union, China, Japan, the Middle East, and Latin America. “Those who oppose him because they think he is ‘soft’ are either ignorant or stupid,” Nixon wrote.

  Ronald Reagan wasn’t so sure. He’d met with Haig on two occasions and both times came away scratching his head. “The guy came out to see me [in California], and I didn’t know what it was all about,” he complained. Plus, Haig was known to be intransigent when it came to entertaining opposing viewpoints. Reagan had been flirting with offering the secretary of state job to Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Democrat with serious foreign policy expertise, but Jackson was blackballed by the Kitchen Cabinet, which resented his liberal position on domestic issues, and Nixon dismissed him as “a partisan Democrat.” George Shultz was another heavyweight under consideration—a seasoned statesman who’d served as secretary of labor, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and secretary of the treasury. But Richard Nixon considered Shultz a “candy-ass” and too political, and he told Reagan, “I do not believe that he has the depth of understanding of world issues generally and the Soviet Union in particular that is needed for this job.”

  Ed Meese worried about Haig’s loyalty to the Reagan agenda. Haig made no secret that he harbored presidential ambitions, and he had a lust for power that set off alarms. But in the end, Nixon was “very persuasive,” according to Meese, and Reagan concluded that since Haig was a military man used to obeying the chain of command it was worth the gamble to appoint him secretary of state.

  The bet started to unravel right away. Two days before the inauguration, Haig personally brought Meese and Jim Baker a twenty-page memorandum he’d prepared, entitled “National Security Decision Directive 1,” which, he said, required their immediate signatures. Baker, who was a fairly fast read, took one look at it and said, “Why, this memorandum means that everything in the field of foreign affairs falls within your sole jurisdiction.” From what he could tell, Haig was attempting to co-opt the National Security Agency, the CIA, the Reconnaissance Office, and the Department of Defense for State. “We’re not going to sign this.”

  Haig complained bitterly and threatened to resign. Eventually, he was mollified and made to reconsider, but as Dick Allen notes, “Haig sealed his fate with Meese and Baker that day.”

  Many appointments were faits accomplis. From the beginning, Ronald Reagan selected Caspar Weinberger—Cap the Knife, as he was known—to head the Department of Defense; William French Smith as attorney general; and Bill Casey as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Loyalists were rare commodities in an administration. William Simon was the initial choice to be secretary of the treasury, a post he’d held in the Nixon Cabinet, but he’d demanded control of the administration’s economic policy—chiefly the Council of Economic Advisers and the director of the Office of Management and Budget—and that was a deal breaker as far as Reagan was concerned. The idea that one person would be a czar was not Reagan’s idea of a collegial group of advisers. As an alternative, Bill Casey suggested a burly, no-nonsense character named Donald Regan, the former chairman of Merrill Lynch. Meese didn’t know anything about him, but Regan made an immediate impression. As Meese recalled, “He seemed to be a very forceful personality. And the fact that he’d been a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps didn’t hurt.”

  The second-tier Cabinet posts were not as easily filled. Candidates had to be vetted to satisfy the Ethics in Government Act, and several couldn’t pass the review. “A lot of fairly well-to-do people who didn’t want their neighbors to know what they had in the bank were unwilling to fill out a financial disclosure,” recalls Fred Fielding, a young Washington lawyer at the time whose job was to process their statements. “Other people didn’t make it because of undisclosed marital issues, as well as a very well-known fellow who was gay and wanted to remain totally in the closet.”

  In the end, they approved another Marine, Ted Bell, as secretary of Education, and rewarded Richard Schweiker with Health and Human Services, Drew Lewis with Transportation, Raymond Donovan with Labor, and David Stockman with the directorship of the Office of Management and Budget. The Interior Department remained up for grabs. Several good legislators were passed over because Ronald Reagan promised Paul Laxalt he’d appoint somebody from the West. Laxalt urged them to consider Clifford Hansen, a longtime Wyoming senator with impeccable cr
edentials, but Hansen refused to submit a financial disclosure. Instead, Joseph Coors, a new Kitchen Cabinet member, proposed Denver attorney James Watt, the head of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, an organization that had been fighting the federal government on behalf of free markets and free enterprise. Watt was a controversial choice. Environmentalists considered his nomination “disastrous” and criticized his unshakable advocacy of opening up wilderness areas to energy exploration and the private development of natural resources. He was also an evangelical Christian whose extremist religious views alienated people of other faiths. But Laxalt heartily approved of Watt, and the transition staff signed off on him.

  The first morning after the inauguration, the president looked around the Cabinet Room at his new team, which had been sworn in earlier that morning. It was a collection of intense men—and one intense woman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a conservative Democrat appointed ambassador to the United Nations. There was no orientation or grace period, as there had been for Reagan’s staff in Sacramento, no White House tour to locate the closest restroom. It was right to business that first morning, with the economy and energy crisis at the top of the list. The president planned to address the nation on those issues on February 5, just sixteen days after taking office, and he wanted something concrete to relate. “Everyone was prepared,” says Dick Allen, the National Security director. “We’d been at it for weeks; we were in business from day one.”