Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  In Moscow, Reagan was advised to embrace Mikhail Gorbachev as soon as the two men saw each other. Reagan balked, fearing it might look as though he was doing it for the camera, but Nancy insisted. “No, as soon as you see him is the right time,” she said. The encounter occurred in front of the Kremlin. As Gorbachev appeared in the doorway, Reagan reached to wrap him in a bear hug. Gorbachev jumped back, a look of panic across his face. Unbeknownst to the American contingent, an old Russian wives’ tale prophesies that an embrace in a doorway signifies an end to a relationship.

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  The Victory Lap was a welcome diversion, but back home politics intervened. In March 1991, the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act, named for Jim Brady, Ronald Reagan’s press secretary who’d been paralyzed and brain-damaged as a result of the 1981 assassination attempt, was making its way through Congress. The Brady Bill, as it was called, established a seven-day waiting period and required law enforcement to conduct background checks before a firearm could be purchased. The National Rifle Association pumped millions of dollars into defeating the legislation and counted on the former president, a lifetime NRA member, to join its opposition. In his eight years in office, Reagan repeatedly expressed his objection to national gun control laws. But despite being an enthusiastic hunter with a lavish collection of guns in his house, there were indications that he intended to endorse the bill. During the speech at USC, he’d answered a student’s question about gun control by very firmly stating that he viewed AK-47s as assault weapons and did not think they belonged in private hands. As governor, he’d expressed approval for a fifteen-day waiting period in California. “It’s just plain common sense that there be a waiting period to allow local law enforcement officials to conduct background checks,” he emphasized in an address at George Washington University.

  “He had given Jim and Sarah Brady his word that he would support the bill,” Mark Weinberg says. “He felt it was perfectly reasonable.” Reagan echoed his support during a visit to the White House. The NRA had contributed a small fortune to George Bush’s reelection campaign, as well as to Republicans running for Congress, and Reagan’s remarks during an event in the Rose Garden were intended to give them political cover.* And just in case anyone remained unclear about where he stood, he wrote an editorial for the New York Times on March 29, 1991, entitled “Why I’m for the Brady Bill.”

  It wasn’t the only time he found himself standing on the other side of the Republican Party line. Conservatives had never been comfortable talking about AIDS, and Reagan had adroitly sidestepped the issue for most of his administration while the epidemic ravaged the gay community. It wasn’t until he read an article in the Los Angeles Times that the disease took on a human aspect for him. It was a story about Elizabeth Glaser, the wife of actor Paul Michael Glaser of Starsky and Hutch fame, who contracted AIDS after receiving a contaminated blood transfusion while pregnant with her son. The HIV virus was passed on through breastfeeding to her daughter, Ariel, who died of AIDS in 1988. Her son had also contracted HIV in utero, inspiring her to launch the Pediatric AIDS Foundation.

  Reagan had ripped the article out of the paper and called the journalist who wrote it. He wanted to speak with Elizabeth Glaser. As it happened, she was friendly with Lucy Fisher, Doug Wick’s wife, who arranged for Elizabeth to tell her story to the president. “He was very moved,” Wick recalls, “really emotional—and angry. It was clear to him that his staff had intentionally kept him in the dark about AIDS, that they’d done him a disservice. He misunderstood the disease, thinking it occurred in far-off places, when the hospital where Elizabeth had gotten her blood transfusion was in L.A., at Cedars [Sinai Medical Center],” where he’d often been a patient during his Hollywood career.

  Reagan told Glaser he wanted to get involved with whatever it was she was doing for AIDS awareness. Naturally, she was wary. So many AIDS activists were angry with Reagan for not acting while he was president. Glaser didn’t want to be involved in something that played as an apology. “I’m not interested in going backward,” she told him. “Only forward.” Both of the Reagans promised they were fully on board. They agreed to make a public-service commercial that Paul Glaser would direct, as well as a six-figure donation to the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which they joined as honorary chairmen. The commercial was particularly poignant. “Maybe it’s time we all learned something new,” the president said, looking earnestly into the camera. “I’m not asking you to send money. I’m asking for something much more important—your understanding.” It acknowledged his own shortcomings. Reagan also relied on his friendship with Elizabeth Taylor, who helped to educate him on the AIDS crisis and to defend against the political fallout.

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  Politics took a backseat on November 4, 1991, at the dedication of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. The project had been in the works for more than six years, when the Kitchen Cabinet and close advisers, including Walter Annenberg and Lew Wasserman, began sketching blueprints for the building designed to seal the president’s legacy. They began actively raising money and discussing architectural plans, consulting Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on her experience launching the Kennedy Library. Originally, the Reagan edifice was to be housed on the Stanford University campus as part of the Hoover Institution, where Martin Anderson and George Shultz held chairs—that is, until the faculty and students fought it. To avoid smothering the project in controversy, it was decided to look for another location, perhaps closer to the Reagan Ranch.

  Farmers volunteered their spreads. A woman who owned an enormous piece of beachfront property called Gull’s Way in Malibu offered to donate it. But a developer in the Simi Valley, about thirty miles northwest of Los Angeles, had a parcel of land that appealed most to Reagan. It was a hundred acres of rocky, scrub-covered hills that the movie studios had used as a location for countless westerns. A visitor could imagine Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, or even Ronald Reagan riding up over a crested butte. It had natural beauty; it made a statement about the mythic power of the American West.

  The 153,000-square-foot Spanish-style library, enough to hold 55 million documents and paid for with private funds, opened to great fanfare, with four thousand mostly Republican guests thronging the manicured grounds. It was the first time in history that five living presidents appeared on the same dais. In addition, there were Kennedys, Trumans, Roosevelts, and Eisenhowers mingling in the crowd. “It was surreal,” says Joanne Drake, who would eventually head the Reagan Foundation in a quadrant of the library. Minutes before the dedication began, she entered a holding room where all five leaders were sitting in a circle. Her mission was to fetch Reagan to the ceremony. “I leaned down and whispered, ‘Mr. President,’” she recalls, “but I was on his bad-hearing side, so there was no reaction.” She said more loudly, “Mr. President . . .” All five of them looked at her and, in unison, answered, “Yes?”

  Each of the presidents contributed brief salutes. The last to speak, the current head of state, George Bush, called Ronald Reagan “a political prophet, leading the tide toward conservatism.” The remark, however opportune, was tinged with ambivalence. Bush was engaged in a reelection campaign that effectively tied him to the Reagan legacy. But there were qualifications. Word had reached Bush that Reagan wasn’t overly enthusiastic about his successor’s record or the way that Bush had distanced himself once he won the White House. He’d vowed to reverse the feckless trends of the Reagan administration, insisting on an ethical, kinder and gentler government, and promising to be a “hands-on” president, in contrast to his predecessor. He’d also terminated research for the Star Wars program. Reagan had endorsed Bush as “our best hope to build a strong America,” but Reagan’s support for his former vice president was considered underwhelming by Bush strategists. The Washington Post reported that Reagan told friends, “[Bush] doesn’t seem to stand for anything.” Reagan categorically denied making that comment, but questions
about his commitment persisted when he skipped a Bush fund-raiser.

  In the months preceding the 1992 election, Ronald Reagan returned to the stump on George Bush’s behalf. The race was tight. Bush’s opponent, a political dynamo named Bill Clinton, had come seemingly out of nowhere to mount a serious challenge for the presidency. And Bush was damaged goods, plagued by a weak economy, a huge and growing deficit, a substantial tax increase, the emergence of the United States as a debtor nation, and his obsession with Saddam Hussein. His foreign policy accomplishments—presiding over the fall of Communism and defeating Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—seemed distant to the concerns of most Americans.

  It wasn’t morning again in America; it was the morning after. Voters held George Bush up against their nostalgic recollections of Ronald Reagan, and they didn’t appreciate the contrast. Bush’s patrician DNA kept people from thinking, He’s one of us, as they’d done with Reagan.

  Reagan’s rousing oratory at the Republican Convention in Houston, Texas, came too late to rescue Bush. The Grand Old Party was taking the low road. There was too much polarization, too much negativity in the boisterous Astrodome—talk about culture wars and family values, recognizing “good Christians” and casting antiwar activists as traitors—bumping Reagan’s speech to a time slot so late that Eastern audiences had already gone to bed. The American public wanted intimacy from their president, and optimism. If anyone possessed Reagan’s magnetism it was the Democrat, Bill Clinton. He was camera-ready, expressive, and entertaining. And he could cry on cue.

  Clinton sought out Reagan soon after winning the election. The new president made a courtesy call to Reagan’s Century City office on a toasty California afternoon in December 1992. It was an awkward rendezvous. Reagan had taken Bush’s loss “personally and very hard,” but he was “intrigued, even fascinated” with Clinton’s persona. The meeting was scheduled for four p.m., but Clinton was characteristically running late. Twenty, thirty, forty minutes ticked by. Reagan stood at his office window, watching, as the Clinton motorcade approached with lights flashing and helicopters circling overhead. It was an odd, almost out-of-body experience observing the operation from a new and unfamiliar perspective.

  Reagan had an agenda. “I’ve thought about three things you could do,” he told Clinton as the two got comfortable on adjacent chairs. The first piece of advice was that the new president should use Camp David on the weekends. It was essential to get away from the White House—the fishbowl—to get outdoors and rejuvenate the spirit. His next suggestion was to extend the Grace Commission, which Reagan had authorized in 1982 as a way to control waste and inefficiency in the government. Only a few of its proposals had been enacted over the years, and Reagan urged him to step up its activity.

  The third point was more unconventional. “You should salute the military,” Reagan advocated. Reagan had begun the practice in 1981, “throwing a snappy ‘high ball’ during White House photo opportunities.” There was no protocol for a presidential salute. Senior military officers acknowledged that a president could salute merely by standing at attention. But Reagan recognized its dramatic and public-spirited potential. George Bush, an authentic war hero, had continued the practice, but not all the time, occasionally just waving instead. Clinton’s position was more precarious. He had opposed the Vietnam War and avoided the draft while studying at Oxford. And his intention to lift the ban on homosexuals in the military put him at odds with the military establishment. Still, Reagan encouraged him to salute and even stood up to demonstrate how it should be done—“the hand had to come up slowly, like it was covered with honey, and then brought down sharply.”

  Afterward, he handed Clinton a souvenir jar of jelly beans.

  One thing was certain: Bill Clinton’s ascendency to the White House signaled a changing of the guard. The contrast was stark in the two men’s physical appearances—the eighty-two-year-old retiree and his forty-six-year-old heir apparent. Why, the younger man could be mistaken for his son. They were a generation—or two—apart. Politics aside, they had different ideals, different philosophies, different dreams. It was Clinton’s turn to lead the nation in a different direction.

  The so-called Reagan Revolution had officially ended. Ronald Reagan gracefully stepped aside.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  “THE SUNSET”

  “And before you know me gone Eternity and I are one.”

  —WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

  Dick Allen had noticed it first: something was wrong with Ronald Reagan.

  In the summer of 1991, Allen was walking through the Bohemian Grove with Ed Meese and Marty Anderson when they spotted Reagan on the porch of a ramshackle cottage. They bounded right over to pay their respects.

  “Hello, Mr. President,” they chimed in unison.

  “He was seated in the chair and he was startled,” Allen recalled. “I could see he had no idea who we were.”

  Reagan had famously been fuzzy on names. But faces?—never. “He always knew when he had met you or seen you before,” says Joanne Drake. Suddenly, he’d begun forgetting words. “I cannot come up with it. What is that word?” he’d complain, frustration mounting as he racked his brain. Or he’d forget a word in a speech once in a while, and his aides would cringe. “We knew there was something wrong,” Drake says. “But he was eighty years old. We wrote it off to the fact he was finally showing his age.”

  The doctors at the Mayo Clinic suspected otherwise. In 1993, during the president’s annual checkup, they began to surmise that more was awry. Perhaps he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, the progressive mental and physical deterioration that affected the minds of more than four million elderly Americans. Physically, he was in tip-top shape. But mentally? They weren’t so sure.

  Reagan himself wondered whether he might have Alzheimer’s. His mother, Nelle, had been senile “for a few years before she died,” and as early as 1980 he’d confided to an associate that maybe he’d inherited Alzheimer’s from her. His brother, Neil, certainly had the symptoms. In fact, Reagan had told his White House doctors that “he expected them to check him periodically for signs of a failing memory” or mental deterioration, and should they discover he was at risk he would resign.

  There were lapses when he was absent-minded, even inattentive, but for eight years in the White House Ronald Reagan tried to maintain the picture of a focused and decisive executive, his moments of haziness or distraction easily explained by mental overload or fatigue. His judgment was sharp, if not always . . . that sharp. He was engaged. His cognitive function was strong. Now, however, during a celebration in honor of his eighty-second birthday at the Simi Valley library, he raised his glass in a lengthy toast to a favored attendee, Margaret Thatcher . . . then toasted her again, repeating himself word for word.

  Evidence of Alzheimer’s revealed itself early in 1994 on a trip to New York. “He couldn’t acclimate to his longtime hotel room at the Carlyle,” says Fred Ryan. “He wasn’t comfortable in his surroundings. They weren’t familiar to him.” According to Ryan “something didn’t seem quite right.” A few days later, in Washington, Reagan became disoriented in his hotel room. “Which way are we leaving again?” he wondered aloud. He was scheduled to speak at a big-ticket Republican fund-raiser, a black-tie affair with Margaret Thatcher again in the audience. It was the kind of after-dinner monologue he could do in his sleep. Plus he had his trusty index cards fanned out on the lectern.

  This time, however, instinct failed him. Following a stirring introduction, he looked down at his cards and nothing made sense. He began speaking slowly. One. Word. At. A. Time. The audience squirmed. What’s wrong? Something is not right here. “We were dying because of the full press coverage,” Fred Ryan recalls. Then . . . Reagan blinked. Something shifted in his eyes. He noticed the teleprompter, swept his cards aside, and regained his equilibrium.

  Then, in May 1994, on a chilly afternoon in Yorba Linda, California, Reagan
stood somberly at the rain-soaked grave site where Richard Nixon, a beloved mentor, was being buried next to his wife, Pat, who had died ten months earlier. He related how Nixon pressed him not to convert to the Republican Party so that he could campaign for Nixon in 1960 as a Democrat. A familiar account. But his fellow presidents in attendance exchanged whispers about Reagan’s fitness. As Hugh Sidey recounted in Time, “George Bush told friends he was profoundly worried about his old compatriot. Jimmy Carter confided to a companion that Reagan’s responses were not right. And Jerry Ford thought Reagan seemed hollowed out.”

  Hollowed out. Aides blamed it on jet lag. They built in more rest during trips, cleared great swatches of time during the day so he could adjust his inner clock to the travel. But on a visit to the Mayo Clinic for a checkup that summer, doctors developed an alternative theory. “We’re seeing memory loss that is more than just age-related,” they reported.

  A battery of tests was run over two days. First, general questions: “Do you know who the president is? Can you count backward from fifty?” Then a more complicated quiz: three numbers and three colors, followed by a story in a book. Afterward: “What were those numbers and colors?” He had trouble remembering. It wasn’t the first time that memory had failed him in this way. Recently, it was reported, he “now forgets the punch lines to some of his favorite jokes.”

  “I have this condition,” Reagan told his daughter Patti; “I keep forgetting things.”

  The doctors finally put a name to it. On November 4, 1994, a doctor from the Mayo Clinic informed Nancy Reagan that, having had an adequate chance to observe the president, the diagnosis was conclusive: he had Alzheimer’s. “She was quite upset, emotional,” recalls Fred Ryan, who spoke with her at length later that evening. “So we’re going to tell him tomorrow,” she said, “and I’d like you to be there.”