Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  Reagan got back on the golf course, playing once a week at the L.A. Country Club with old Hollywood pals. He loved their company, loved to hear what deals they had in the works, what was going on behind the scenes. It was important for him to stay plugged-in with the movie business, to reengage with Hollywood. Fortunately, there were many ways to do that in Los Angeles. Virginia Mayo and Eddie Bracken came in to see him. Lew Wasserman was a regular lunch date at Universal, where Reagan never failed to take a studio tour. He’d visit his friend, producer A. C. Lyles, at Paramount. Peter Guber stopped by the office to fill him in on what was happening at Columbia Pictures. And Ronald and Nancy huddled often with chummy Merv Griffin, who beguiled them with the latest gossip, as did Nancy’s newest confidant, Warren Beatty.

  They had missed the social scene. For dinner, they returned regularly to Matteo’s or Chasen’s, the favorite restaurant of A-list celebrities on Beverly Boulevard, where they sat in the Ronald Reagan Booth, the same booth in which he’d proposed to Nancy in 1952. Otherwise, they dined at their friends’ houses, delighted at being able to see people on a casual basis, especially the Wicks, Charlie and Mary Jane, at whose home they spent every Christmas and whose son, Doug, and his wife, Lucy Fisher, were important Hollywood producers. Reagan never failed to pump Doug and Lucy for the latest show-business scuttlebutt. “I once saw him in an incredibly animated conversation with Lucy,” Wick recalls, “and when I went over he was saying, ‘Are you kidding? Robert Redford makes five million dollars a picture?!’”

  Reagan said yes to two local speeches right away, at USC and Pepperdine, as warm-ups. Colleges were traditionally viewed as hostile territory. As governor, Reagan had been booed and heckled by liberal students. But his presidency had engaged many of those audiences and now, “he wanted to hear what was on the students’ minds,” says Mark Weinberg. “He wanted to do Q&As with them.” During the presidency, Q&As were strictly a no-no, a policy that disconcerted Reagan. “There are an awful lot of people around here who are afraid for me to open my mouth,” he’d grumble. He longed to have “a dialogue, not a monologue,” as he was fond of saying. At USC and Pepperdine he fulfilled that urge and found it deeply satisfying. The students he spoke to were extremely well informed, their questions incisive, challenging, respectful. “He felt as if he had found his voice,” recalls Joanne Drake.

  It gave him a new sense of freedom. In New York City, shortly after the college speeches, Reagan pushed the boundaries to new limits. Standing at the window of his suite in the Carlyle Hotel, looking west at the leafy expanse of Central Park, the old feeling tugged at him of being confined, isolated from the public, restricted to antiseptic situations. “Boy, if I could only go for a walk,” he said aloud, dreamily. Fred Ryan discussed it with the Secret Service detail. They had no trouble with a spontaneous excursion. It was the scheduled appearances, when details were announced in advance, that were concerning. So, minutes later, the former president found himself at liberty on the busy city streets, an experience he hadn’t had in . . . he couldn’t remember how long. “Where do you want to go?” “Central Park,” the president responded without hesitation.

  It was a gorgeous, picture-postcard spring day. The park was crowded with people who had been cooped up in apartments all winter, testing Mother Nature in shirtsleeves and shorts. And along came the president, taking a stroll, somewhat anonymously. No one really noticed the limousine following him a couple of hundred yards behind. Only the grin on his famous face might have given him away. Not two minutes passed when a nanny sitting on a park bench beside a baby stroller did a comical double take.

  “Ronald Reagan!” she cried, jumping up. “Can I shake your hand?”

  A few minutes later an orthodox Jew in a yarmulke with payot* rushed over to thank Reagan for his service to Israel.

  His chest puffed out as he walked farther into the park. The pure joy of being on his own, smelling the fresh air, seeing real people, was an intoxicating experience. It felt like he had his old life back, the life before he was president, before he was governor, before he was a movie star. When he was just Dutch. If Frank Capra were writing this scene, even he might have rejected as too corny what happened next. The president walked past a group of boys throwing a football. One of them missed a catch and the ball landed not far from Reagan’s feet. Jogging over to it, he picked it up, cocked his arm, and threw a perfect bullet pass that the boy pulled in like a pro. The old Gipper still had the juice.

  When Reagan got back to the hotel, he felt exhilarated. Nancy had been out shopping, but upon her return it was all he could talk about—how much fun he had had just going for that walk.

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  Not everything, however, was a walk in the park. Both Oliver North and John Poindexter faced upcoming trials for their indictments in the Iran-Contra affair, and Reagan’s name appeared prominently on both of their witness lists. In fact, North based his defense on Reagan’s role in the scandal. Reagan planned to resist any invitation to testify, citing “serious constitutional issues.” It wasn’t dignified for a former president to be publicly cross-examined in court as an ordinary citizen. There were precedents that shielded him—immunity from disclosing national security issues. Nevertheless, he did not want to engage in an unnecessary skirmish or to be perceived as ducking the issue.

  The president eventually agreed to be deposed, but in the federal courthouse in Los Angeles—and in private. It had been almost forty years since he’d participated in such a process, during his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Some pretrial guidance was necessary. Lawyers told him, “Just answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Don’t say anything [else]. Don’t offer information.” But Ronald Reagan couldn’t help himself. He wanted to be informative, to come up with answers to the questions North’s lawyers fired at him. Bud McFarlane had already testified that the president had called the Honduran president, asking him to intervene with his military officials who were holding up the transfer of military supplies to the Contras, and that Reagan had signed off on an airdrop of rifles at a time when Congress prohibited such assistance. But Reagan had no memory of either occurrence. North’s defense suggested the president personally approved Security Council efforts to aid the Contras. “I don’t remember,” Reagan repeated over and over. Names were mentioned to him. “I don’t remember.” Top-secret documents were produced. He couldn’t recall ever seeing them. He got confused over intricately detailed questions about the Contras. Dates, places, events drew vacant stares. A second deposition conducted in Reagan’s office produced similar results. “I don’t remember”—the phrase echoed throughout both proceedings.

  On getaways to the ranch, the trials of public life melted away. The Santa Barbara ranch was perfectly remote, away from everything, a secluded mountaintop retreat of 688 acres, seven miles up a series of switchbacks from the nearest paved road. “This is where I restore myself,” Reagan explained to anyone who visited. He liked “the wildness of the place,” the rugged, undeveloped landscape bisected by groves of oak and madrone and bushy clumps of greasewood. Deer, bobcats, and bears stalked the property. Hawks and bats flew overhead, rattlesnakes occasionally got underfoot. In contrast to the surrounding natural splendor, the simplicity of the house pleased him; he found it honest and humbling. It had begun life as nothing more than an 1872 adobe shack with a corrugated metal roof. Assisted by two ranch hands, he had knocked out walls, torn down a screen porch, added a veranda, replaced the roof with fiberglass tiles, and converted the structure into a modest Spanish-style cottage. The patio he built by hand, dragging flat rocks into place and cementing them together. The fencework surrounding the property was constructed out of old telephone poles that he’d split himself.

  The ranch was Ronald Reagan’s utopia. He transformed himself there. As soon as he arrived, the suit came off, contact lenses jettisoned for aviator sunglasses, and he pulled on a pair of jeans, a denim workshirt, wester
n boots, and a cowboy hat. El Alamein, his trusty thoroughbred, a gift from Mexican president José López Portillo, was saddled and waiting. All in all, a formidable image, not quite John Wayne, but not Slim Pickens, either.

  Now that he was no longer president, the goal was to be at the ranch at least once a month. The routine there was always the same. Ronald and Nancy took a trail ride each morning from nine to nine-thirty. Afterward, he’d load chain saws, handsaws, and pruning shears into his 1951 Willys Jeep, a big, clunky beast of a vehicle with a GIPPER license plate, and head out to clear brush, cut firewood, and mend fences. “Reagan loved to drive,” says John Barletta, a longtime aide. “It was the only time in twenty years that anyone ever let him get behind the wheel of a car.” And he loved the work, swinging those unwieldy saws as if they were no heavier than baseball bats, whistling a jaunty tune that could be heard above the work.

  The ranch was less of an undertaking now that the presidency was over. The helicopter pads and hangar that had housed Marine One were gone, as were the Secret Service outbuildings. Foundations were all that was left of the guardhouse and the lookout bunker where an agent had been staked out twenty-four hours a day shouldering a long-range rifle. In fact, the remaining support staff could be counted on two hands, down from the force of 175 that normally serviced a presidential visit. The Navy Seabees detail that oversaw the wells and sewage system was no longer in residence, nor were the dog teams and countersnipers.

  It was a blessing for the Reagans to have the ranch to themselves. They cherished the peace and quiet, the splendid isolation. Critics of “Queen Nancy” would have been shocked to see the modest interior—only fifteen hundred square feet, linoleum floors, a 1960s GE galley kitchen with harvest-gold Formica counters. Two fireplaces provided the only heat in the house, allowing them to spend the warm days outside on the patio and the cool evenings snuggled in their twin beds that had been pushed together and lashed with plastic cable ties.

  But more often than not, responsibilities intruded. In May, it was announced that Reagan would visit Japan in the fall, sponsored by the Fujisankei Corporation, whose “attractive honorarium” was rumored to edge into the $2 million range. And in mid-June, he made his first trip to Europe since leaving the White House.

  London was the first stop, where Margaret Thatcher threw him a lavish dinner at Number 10 Downing Street accompanied by bottomless glasses of Château Petrus. His engagement the next day at Buckingham Palace featured an even more spectacular reward. The queen and Prince Philip entertained the Reagans at a royal lunch in their private dining room. Following dessert, as a surprise to the president, the queen bestowed on him an honorary knighthood, the Order of Bath, one of the highest orders of chivalry, draping a neck piece in the form of a knight along with a crimson sash over his shoulders. And in Paris, while celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the Eiffel Tower with Jacques Chirac, Reagan was inducted into the French Institute’s Academy of Moral and Political Sciences.

  On July 4, 1989, he and Nancy accepted an invitation to celebrate Independence Day on a ranch belonging to his friend William Wilson, in Sonora, Mexico, just across the border from Arizona. Horseback riding had become second nature to the Reagans, and when Wilson, the former ambassador to the Vatican, suggested they go for a spin, his guests jumped at the chance. The terrain was bleak, they discovered, nothing like Rancho del Cielo, where the trails were sunbaked, lined with brush, and clearly marked at all intersections by numbers drilled into rocks. The rustic Mexican range was a soft, loamy mix of dirt, pebbles, and sand. As the trio climbed a hill, the president’s horse stumbled, then reared up and “bucked wildly several times.” Reagan hung on for a while before he was thrown. “He landed quite hard,” says Carl Janisch, a Secret Service agent following a hundred yards behind in a blue Suburban. “The right side of the hill dropped off into a deep gulley, and Reagan rolled about fifteen feet to the bottom.” He was “barely conscious” when the agent got to him. Fortunately, they came prepared with a FAT (First Aid Treatment) kit. They administered oxygen, strapped him to a stretcher, and drove him to a landing vehicle idling nearby. A Black Hawk choppered him to a hospital at Fort Huachuca, an Army base near Tucson, where doctors determined that he had suffered “minor abrasions” and bruises to his ego. “The one thing he made very clear was that he had not fallen off his horse; he was thrown,” says Fred Ryan. An official statement upgraded the action to being bucked from a wild horse, a distinction that meant a great deal to a proud horseman. In any case, the president was given a clean bill of health, and he rebounded nicely a couple of days later.

  Even so, aides described him as “a little moody,” so unlike his unfailingly upbeat nature. Mark Weinberg recalls, “There was a bit of irritability after the horseback incident. We would have meetings with him and his eyes would get heavy. I remember thinking, ‘He’s out of sorts.’” He would forget names or hesitate to speak. During Major League Baseball’s All-Star game in Anaheim a week later, Reagan joined Bob Costas and Vin Scully at the microphone, and according to people in the booth, “he was not quite himself.” When Scully greeted him, saying, “How good it is to have you in the ballpark,” Reagan grimaced, glanced around, and otherwise remained silent. He later chalked it up to being “a little uptight,” but there was something else affecting his disposition. “There is something wrong,” Nancy told an aide.

  Six weeks later, during Reagan’s annual checkup at the Mayo Clinic, a CT scan revealed a subdural hematoma—hemorrhaging resulting from torn veins in traumatic brain injury. There were two liquefied blood clots that required immediate attention. To remedy it, surgeons drilled “one burr hole roughly the size of a nickel” into the president’s skull and drained the blood. The operation sounded dire, though in practice it was a routine affair. “Nothing is without risk, but this is straightforward,” a doctor assured Nancy. “Your husband is in great shape.” Nevertheless, for a seventy-eight-year-old man there were always concerns.

  Reagan’s recovery from the surgery was remarkably swift. Within two days, he was doing paperwork in his room at St. Mary’s Hospital, up on his feet for a stroll through the halls. The only noticeable effect was his hair, which had to be shaved down to stubble for the operation. Nancy had scooped up the shorn locks into a plastic bag, which she stashed in her handbag. “I want to be able to prove that he doesn’t dye it,” she said glibly. Otherwise, she wasn’t fond of the new look. “Reagan liked it, though,” Mark Weinberg recalls. “He thought it made him look like a Marine.” He covered his head with a baseball cap on his release from the hospital, mindful of Nancy’s instructions not to remove it. But as he boarded a plane back to Los Angeles, waving to a throng of well-wishers, he paused on the steps, grinned, and swept the cap off his head to a fanfare of shouts and whistles.

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  The trips took their toll. The visit to Japan at the end of October 1989 was especially strenuous. The physical effort was punishing, but the criticism he faced for going was worse. The American public was incredibly sensitive with regard to Japan. Trade issues had inflicted serious damage on the U.S. economy, prompting a backlash against anything Japanese. The auto industry was particularly defensive. Objections were raised about buying Hondas or Toyotas. Real-estate developers who had been squeezed out of deals accused the Japanese of buying up New York. In September 1989, Sony bought Columbia Pictures (Reagan welcomed the takeover, saying it might “bring back decency and good taste” to American audiences) and Matsushita was negotiating for a major stake in Universal. Japanese investors were outbidding museums for masterpieces at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Reagan’s visit made him seem tone-deaf to America’s anxiety.

  The $2 million speaking fee didn’t help. It was an astounding figure in 1989. “Former Presidents haven’t always comported themselves with dignity after leaving the Oval Office,” a New York Times editorial observed. “But none have plunged so blatantly into pure commercialism.” The furo
r only intensified when it became known that Fujisankei put an entire 747 jet at his disposal for the flight to Japan. His staff performed damage control by engaging the USO to fill the empty seats with family members of military personnel serving in Japan, but it had little effect. A great hue and cry arose. Ronald Reagan was greedy. He was cashing in on the presidency. Aides attempted to explain that the money was earmarked for fund-raising for the Reagan Presidential Library, but the public wasn’t buying it. It also wasn’t entirely true. A large portion of the fee was allocated to pay back friends who had bought the Bel-Air house. In any case, the trip was a public-relations nightmare.

  Great pains were taken not to repeat the mistakes a year later, when Reagan traveled to Europe. The eleven-day trip was dubbed the Victory Lap—to Berlin, Russia, Poland, and the Vatican—where photo ops dominated the busy schedule. In Berlin, the press took one of Reagan standing on the other side of the Wall. It had “fallen” in November 1989, not as a result of Reagan’s plea, as some believe. Triggered by the resignation of German Democratic Republic leader Erich Honecker in October and a chain of events that swept Eastern Europe, the East German government announced that GDR citizens could visit West Germany, effectively making the Wall pointless. It was the German people themselves who took up sledgehammers and pickaxes to demolish the ugly scar, and Reagan came prepared to participate. “We furnished him with a chisel,” Fred Ryan recalls, “and did a photo op with him hacking away at the wall.” A hammer was also produced, and the president took a few aggressive swings while the local press, fifty or seventy strong, screamed encouragement in German. Another op depicted Reagan addressing Solidarity workers at a shipyard in Gdansk, an awe-struck Lech Walesa at his side.