by Nancy Reagan
But Camp David is secure and private, and the setting is awe-inspiring, so before we returned to California we started to help raise funds to build a simple wooden chapel there. We left before it was completed, but it’s good to know that just about the only thing Camp David lacked will be in place one day. It will be nice for the men stationed there, and for the president, whoever he is.
For me, one of the best parts about Camp David was that there wasn’t a whisper of controversy about the renovations I made there. Because the entire place is off-limits to the press, nobody ever knew what I did. Not that I changed all that much. The furniture was drab, so I had some of it slipcovered and painted. I dressed up the dining room in Laurel with some new tablecloths, painted the walls white, and found some great old army, navy, and marine posters to hang. And when I saw how narrow the windows were in the cabins, I had them enlarged so you could enjoy the magnificent view.
We left after lunch on Sunday, and that was always a painful moment. In the fall, Ronnie would bring back a large plastic sack of acorns to feed to the squirrels outside the Oval Office. They came right up to the window and looked at him, as if to say, “Well, what are you going to do for us?”
We usually arrived at the White House around three. Ronnie would have a pile of work waiting for him in his study, and I’d have papers and messages in my office, so we’d spend the rest of the afternoon working. But coming back was always a slight letdown, and even now, when Ronnie looks at pictures from Camp David, he feels a pang.
If the White House had been in Los Angeles, we would have spent most weekends at our ranch near Santa Barbara. As it was, we got there three or four times a year. We had sold the Lake Malibu ranch after Ronnie was elected governor, and bought this one, which we named Rancho del Cielo, shortly before we left Sacramento.
Ronnie is so happy there! He loves to be outside, building fences, cutting down trees and brush, and chopping wood for the two fireplaces, which are our only source of heat. The ranch is on top of a mountain, and when you get up there, the rest of the world disappears. Here, as at Camp David, we were usually alone, except for the Secret Service, the White House physician, and the military aide.
Although the ranch is fairly big—688 acres—the few visitors who do come up are always surprised by the small size of our adobe house, which was built more than a hundred years ago. Everyone expects that the ranch house will be large and elaborate, but it’s very modest. George and Barbara Bush once came to the ranch on their way home from a foreign trip, and I remember Barbara saying, “You know, Nancy, this house gives me a whole different picture of you.” A lot has been written about my supposed love of big houses, but visitors to the ranch see a tiny two-bedroom house, with Mexican rugs, wicker chairs, and newspapers piled on a pool table. On the front door there’s a sign that reads:
ON THIS SITE
IN 1897
NOTHING HAPPENED
When we first bought the ranch, the house was even smaller. It had a million problems, but we loved it. Our bedroom was originally so narrow that I couldn’t make the bed without kneeling on the bed. We knocked out walls, laid new tile floors, painted the house, converted the screened porch into a family room, and made a rock patio in front.
And I do mean we—with the help of Barney Barnett and Dennis LeBlanc. Dennis is originally from Sacramento, and he worked in several of Ronnie’s campaigns. Barney was a member of the California Highway Patrol; he was Ronnie’s driver during the governor years and has been with us ever since. He and Ronnie are almost like brothers; they were even born on the same day. Whenever we go to the ranch, Barney comes too. Ronnie is especially proud of the roof, which he and Barney put up together, using a plastic imitation mission tile that looks just like the real thing.
Few things give Ronnie as much pride and satisfaction as the work he does at the ranch. When we go up there, he just can’t wait to start in on another project. And there’s always work to be done on a ranch. While Ronnie is working outdoors, I catch up on mail, read, talk on the phone, or just putter around.
During the presidential years, there were many times when the real world intruded on the serenity of the ranch. I remember the night in 1983 when Ronnie received a call that a Korean jumbo jet was missing en route from Alaska to Seoul. Early the next morning the phone rang again, and I heard Ronnie say, “My God, have they gone mad? What the hell are they thinking of?” The Russians had shot down KAL 007 with an air-to-air missile, killing all the passengers.
Ronnie’s advisers urged him to fly back to Washington, which he did, although the ranch contained all the communications equipment that a president could ever need. (So did Camp David.)
At the ranch, you could forget the world for a few hours, but every day a government car would drive up the mountain road with a big envelope of mail, security documents, and newspapers. And even when Ronnie went into the woods, he would be followed by the Secret Service, the doctor, and a military aide with a portable telephone, just in case.
Like Camp David, the ranch was off-limits to the press. Every time we were there, a large contingent of reporters would camp out at the Biltmore Hotel in Santa Barbara, where their information was limited to occasional press briefings which went something like this: “The weather is warm and sunny. The president attended to routine paperwork this morning and is now getting ready to go horseback riding with Mrs. Reagan. After lunch with Mrs. Reagan, the president will chop wood and clear brush on the ranch property.”
Although there was usually nothing to report, the press rarely complained about coming to Santa Barbara—especially those who remembered what Plains, Georgia, was like. Every summer we gave a barbecue for them in town, and at the last one, in 1988, Ronnie got up after dinner and said, “As soon as I’m out of office, I’m going to start working for a constitutional amendment …” Everyone assumed he was about to refer to the two-term limit for presidents, which Ronnie opposes, but he finished the sentence by saying “… to make every president spend his vacation in Santa Barbara.”
This was greeted by cheers. When Jerry O’Leary of the Washington Times (and president of the White House Correspondents Association) got up to thank Ronnie, he said, “The press is supposed to be impartial as far as the candidates go. But we do measure them a little bit by their vacation spots.” He went over some of the past presidents, and when he got to Carter, he said, “With President Carter you couldn’t stay in Plains, Georgia, because there was no place to stay. So we all stayed in Americus, Georgia, where the big excitement of the week was watching them spray their vegetables.”
In March 1983 we invited Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to visit the ranch. Although their visit to California coincided with a terrible rainstorm, and the weather was so bad that they weren’t even sure they could leave the ship, the queen was a wonderful sport and refused to cancel their plans. The road to the ranch was so muddy that she and Philip ended by driving up the mountain in a Land Rover through a fog that was so thick you couldn’t see a thing. We had told them about the ranch during our visit to Windsor Castle, and the queen was dying to go riding with Ronnie. That plan, of course, went right out the window. But despite the weather, the queen had a wonderful attitude: “Don’t be silly,” she said when I tried to apologize. “This is an adventure.”
She was wonderful, and she really endeared herself to me by the spirit she showed that day. I ended up leaving the ranch with them and continuing our visit on the royal yacht Britannia. I spent that evening with the queen, sitting on a sofa in the large living room, talking about our children like old friends.
I sailed with them to San Francisco, where somebody suggested that we should all go out to dinner at Trader Vic’s. I remember saying to Philip, “Oh, Trader Vic’s, that’s a wonderful Polynesian place where you really feel like you’re on a Pacific island.” What I hadn’t realized was that we would be seated not in the main restaurant but in a private dining room that looked just like any other private dining room. When we walked i
n, Philip looked at me as though I had five heads.
Later in the week, the queen and Prince Philip gave Ronnie and me an anniversary dinner on board the Britannia. What more could a girl ask? Ronnie got up and said, “I know I promised Nancy a lot of things thirty-one years ago, but I never promised her this.”
It was an unforgettable evening—to be on the queen’s private yacht, celebrating our anniversary. A few friends were with us, including Mike and Caroline Deaver and Lucky Roosevelt. The chef made us a special cake, and the crew presented us with an enormous greeting card. After dinner, Mike played the piano and I sang “Our Love Is Here to Stay.” The queen and Prince Philip even gave us an anniversary present, an engraved silver box.
We still have that box, but we had to buy it from the United States government. Yes, we had to buy our own anniversary gift! The rule is that any gift you receive from a foreign official becomes government property if it’s valued at over $180 (the figure changes slightly from year to year). That’s the law, and it doesn’t matter how personal the gift is—even if it’s engraved with your name or initials. Ronnie and I wanted to have some mementos of those eight years of our lives, so before leaving the White House, we bought several of the gifts we had received.
We were allowed to keep gifts from our personal friends, but Ronnie had to declare each one he received. In other words, even if somebody has given the president a birthday gift every Christmas for twenty years, when you’re in the White House that gift—and its estimated value—becomes public knowledge. That’s one thing I won’t miss about the White House—together with the fact that our tax returns were published in the newspapers every April. I hated that.
During eight years in Washington, I almost never carried money—except when I went out for a manicure. During that whole period, I didn’t once set foot in a supermarket or almost any other kind of store, with the exception of a card shop at Seventeenth Street and K, where I used to buy birthday cards.
When you live in the White House, it’s very hard to do anything on the outside. During the middle of Ronnie’s second term, I started looking at houses so we would have someplace to live when the time came to leave Washington. I found a nice three-bedroom house in the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles, but I just couldn’t see making such a big decision without showing the house to Ronnie.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to go there with the usual retinue of more than a dozen vehicles, including a van full of armed Secret Service agents. One afternoon, when we were in Los Angeles, I persuaded Ronnie to lie down on the floor of the car so we could leave the hotel and he could go to see the house without letting the press know about it, and without inconveniencing the neighbors. After all that trouble, it’s a good thing he liked it!
I was proud of myself for finally doing something that the press didn’t report. We kept that secret for about two years—and by Washington standards, that’s almost forever.
14
Landslide (1984–85)
HAD it been up to me, Ronald Reagan might well have been a one-term president.
In 1983, I tried to persuade him not to run again. After eight years in Sacramento and four more in Washington, not to mention the many long months of campaigning in 1976 and in 1980, we hadn’t been settled at home in a long, long time. I yearned for more family time, and more privacy. I missed my friends and my family, and I missed California. Ronnie had already accomplished so much that maybe it was time to pull down the curtain.
I was also concerned about his safety. True, there had been no incidents since 1981, but why press your luck?
Ronnie, however, was determined to run again. There were still things he wanted to do. He also thought it had been too long since an American president had served two full terms in office.
In the end, it was just a matter of convincing me.
For a while we talked about it every night, until it became more and more obvious that this was something Ronnie just had to do. Finally I said, “If you feel that strongly, go ahead. You know I’m not crazy about it, but okay.”
I had to laugh when I read in the papers that President Reagan was reluctant to run for reelection, but Nancy had pushed him into it.
Looking back, I’m glad I lost that argument—especially in view of what Ronnie was able to achieve with the Soviets in his second term. But it has to be said that, politically, his second term was a lot tougher than the first one.
Ronnie announced his decision on January 29, 1984, in a broadcast from the Oval Office. I went over there with Mermie and Dennis. Because the announcement was going to be carried live on the networks, Ronnie began with a run-through so the television crew could time his remarks.
Ronnie hadn’t told anybody except the children and me what his plans were, and until the last moment there was some speculation that he might announce his retirement. “It’s been nearly three years since I first spoke to you from this room,” he began. “Tonight I’m here for a different reason. I’ve come to a difficult personal decision as to whether or not I should seek reelection.…”
Maureen told me later that when Ronnie said this, she wondered for a moment whether he had changed his mind. He kept up the suspense until finally he announced that, yes, he was running again. When they heard that, the crew broke into applause.
“Come on, honey,” I called out. “Aren’t you going to time the speech you’re really going to give?”
There was a stunned silence until people realized I was joking. I guess my reservations were showing through.
The wires and calls that came in later that evening ran ten to one in favor of Ronnie’s decision to run again.
That night, I wrote in my diary: “I think it’s going to be a tough, personal, close campaign. Mondale is supposed to be an infighter.… Ronnie is so popular that they might be desperate. I’ll be glad when the next nine months are over.”
I was mostly right. It was a tough and personal campaign, and I was glad when it was over. In the end, however, it was anything but close.
The 1984 campaign was easier than those in 1976 and 1980, when Ronnie was trying to unseat an incumbent president. It was also a much shorter campaign, because Ronnie had no opposition in the primaries. But campaigns are never pleasant, and this one was no exception.
For me, the most nerve-racking moments of the campaign were the two debates between Ronnie and Walter Mondale.
I’m against debates. They’re long, often boring, and the incumbent is at a disadvantage. The candidate who has never held the office can just attack, without having to defend his own record. And when it comes to foreign policy, the incumbent knows information that, for security reasons, he can’t use.
With one exception, which I’ll come to in a moment, Ronnie has been a very successful debater. Many people think that he won the nomination in 1980 as a result of his debate with George Bush, and that his debate with Carter won him the presidency. In 1976, Ronnie’s supporters wanted to arrange a debate with President Ford, and if they had, Ronnie might have won the nomination.
The first of the 1984 debates was held in Louisville, Kentucky, on October 7. In my view, it was the worst night of Ronnie’s political career.
Right from the start, he was tense, muddled, and off-stride. He lacked authority. He stumbled. This was a Ronald Reagan I had never seen before. It was painful to watch. There was no way around it; that debate was a nightmare.
When it was over, I ran up on the stage, as did Joan Mondale. We all shook hands, but as we were leaving, Ronnie said to me, “I was terrible.” I made some sort of comforting remark, but we both knew he was right.
Neither of us slept well that night. In part, it was because the hotel room was so stuffy, but we both knew that the real reason was that the debate had been a disaster.
Even Ronnie, the eternal optimist, was down in the dumps.
He told me he had felt “brutalized” during the rehearsals, and that his mind was so jammed with facts and figures that he hadn’t been able to foc
us on what Mondale was saying. Ronnie has always been an inspiring leader who outlines broad themes and visions, but his staff had spent weeks cramming him full of details and statistics. Instead of letting Ronnie lead with his strengths, they tried to turn him into somebody he wasn’t.
“What have you done to my husband?” I said to Mike Deaver angrily, back at the hotel. “Whatever it was, don’t do it again!”
The press was highly critical. Even some of Ronnie’s supporters became concerned when the Wall Street Journal ran a headline that said: IS OLDEST U.S. PRESIDENT NOW SHOWING HIS AGE? REAGAN DEBATE PERFORMANCE INVITES OPEN SPECULATION ON HIS ABILITY TO SERVE. For the first and only time in the campaign, it actually seemed possible that Ronnie could lose.
After the shock of that first debate, the second one, scheduled for October 21 in Kansas City, became even more important. This time the preparations were very different. “Let Ronnie be Ronnie,” I told Mike, but he already knew that.
Mermie and Dennis flew out with us to Kansas City. I had also arranged for Ron and Doria to join us at the hotel, for additional moral support. Still, I don’t think I have ever been more nervous than I was that evening. Everybody assured me that this time would be different, and that Ronnie would be his old self, but I was still very worried. I felt as if I had a basketball in my stomach, and my hands were like ice.
A few minutes into the debate, Henry Trewhitt of the Baltimore Sun asked Ronnie, indirectly, about the so-called age factor. “I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” Ronnie replied. Then, after a pause, he added, “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
The audience laughed, and I slowly began to unclench one of my fists.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the election had just been decided.
With that one quip, Ronnie had disposed of the only issue that could have defeated him in November 1984. All the news shows picked up this remark, and people saw it over and over again.