My Turn

by Nancy Reagan

  On December 1, 1986, a New York Times-CBS poll showed that Ronnie’s overall approval rating had dropped from 67 percent to 46 percent in a single month. No matter how often he said that he hadn’t known about the diversion of funds, the same message kept coming back: Oh yes, you did.

  With the presidency under siege, the Don Regan problem grew more serious. I was told that in one meeting, the entire Cabinet asked Don to resign. Congress couldn’t deal with him, and both privately and publicly, members of the House and Senate were calling for his resignation. Even Senator Orrin Hatch, a conservative Republican from Utah, said that Don had to go.

  In spite of what’s been said or written, I did not mastermind a plot to get rid of Don Regan. There was no cabal. I wasn’t in cahoots with anybody to bring about his downfall. I didn’t have to be. By the end of 1986, half of Washington wanted him out.

  On the evening of December 4, 1986, an unusual meeting took place in the White House residence. Michael Deaver, who shared my concern that Ronnie was being isolated, had quietly arranged for two visitors to come in to discuss the current situation with the president. One was William Rogers, who had been secretary of State during the Nixon administration. The other was Robert Strauss, a prominent Democrat and the former national chairman of the Democratic party. Mike hoped to expose Ronnie to fresh, frank advice from two respected outsiders—a Republican and a Democrat—who had been around Washington a long time, and who would level with Ronnie about the political crisis he now faced. I didn’t normally attend meetings with Ronnie, but this was a special situation, and it was held in the residence, and I wanted very much to be there.

  Bill Rogers didn’t say much that evening. The gist of his message was that the Don Regan problem was manageable and that it would soon blow over.

  Robert Strauss, on the other hand, had a great deal to say. “Mr. President,” he began in his Texas drawl, “let me tell you about the first time I was up here in the residence. LBJ was in office, and a few of us came to see him about Vietnam. When my turn came to speak, I held back. I didn’t tell the president what I really thought. Instead, I told him what I thought he wanted to hear.

  “When I went home that night, I felt like a two-dollar whore. And I said to myself, If any president is ever foolish enough to invite me back, I hope I show more character. I came to see Carter on many occasions, and I always told him what I thought.

  “Now, I have no quarrel with Don Regan,” Strauss went on. “But you’ve got two serious problems right now, and he’s not helping you with either one. First, you’ve got a political problem on the Hill, and Don Regan has no constituency and no allies there. Second, you’ve got a serious media problem, and Regan has no friends there, either. It makes no difference how earnest he is, or how much you like him, or how well the two of you get along. He’s not the man you need. You’re in a hell of a mess, Mr. President, and you need a chief of staff who can help get you out of it.”

  I had never heard anyone who wasn’t in Ronnie’s inner circle come in and talk to my husband as strongly as Bob Strauss did that evening. Later that night, I called Bob at home to thank him for having the courage to tell Ronnie what he truly believed, and what he thought Ronnie should do. Nobody else was doing that.

  Unfortunately, Ronnie wasn’t responsive to Bob’s message. At one point during this period, I said to him, “I was right about Stockman. I was right about Bill Clark. Why won’t you listen to me about Don Regan?”

  But until the very end, Ronnie continued to believe that the problems with Don would work themselves out. So much for all that power and influence I’m supposed to have.

  Then, as if we didn’t have enough to deal with that month, William Casey collapsed in his office. As head of the CIA, Casey probably knew as much as anyone about the Iran-contra affair. But now his doctors discovered a serious brain tumor which required major surgery. Suddenly, one of the principal players in the whole drama was out of commission—possibly forever.

  As I look back on that period, I find it amazing that almost nobody seems to have thought about the possible long-term effects of Bill Casey’s illness, and how his condition might have affected his judgment in the months before it was discovered. Because my father was a neurosurgeon, I wondered about this at the time. But it wasn’t until I read Revolution, a book about Ronnie’s presidency by Martin Anderson, that I saw my own hunch confirmed by somebody else. As Anderson points out, lymphoma brain cancer, which Casey had, affects the left side of the brain—the side that controls judgment. Brain tumors grow slowly and insidiously, and as they expand, they can cause paranoia, suspicion, and distrust. Because they are rarely detected early, they can develop over a course of months, and sometimes as long as two years.

  “Is it possible,” wrote Anderson, “that Bill Casey’s mind, his sense of judgment, his ability to discriminate, to reason, to think clearly was becoming increasingly impaired as the Iran-Contra affair unfolded? The answer is clearly yes, it is possible. If the symptoms began subtly, perhaps as much as two years before the tumor was detected, his brain would have started to feel the effects in early 1985. By the summer and fall of 1985, when the foundations for the general scheme of selling arms to Iran, paying ransom, and secretly diverting money to the Contras were laid in place, it is possible that Casey’s brain was feeling the ravages of cancer, suffering memory loss, making bad decisions.”

  I think Martin Anderson is right. With hindsight, I now see that Bill Casey gave us several warnings that we all missed. During 1986 his speech had become even more slurred than usual, to the point where it was very difficult for Ronnie to understand what he was saying. (Casey was always difficult to understand; I often wondered whether this was partly intentional. “I never understood him,” Bob Dole once told me.) He had also become irascible and explosive, more difficult than usual to deal with. Then, in November, a month before the tumor was discovered, he wrote a letter to Ronnie recommending that Ronnie replace George Shultz with Jeane Kirkpatrick because George wasn’t loyal enough!

  I believe that Bill Casey was deeply involved in the Iran-contra affair during a period when he wasn’t thinking clearly, and that he was making decisions he wouldn’t have made if he had been a well man. When he testified, just before going into the hospital, he wasn’t telling the whole story. I think his judgment was impaired, and that he had been doing things for a long time that nobody knew about.

  Both Ronnie and I tried to get through to Sophia Casey to offer our sympathy. I reached Sophia once, but they were not taking calls—even from old friends like Charles and Mary Jane Wick. (Ronnie and I were not old friends of the Caseys, although it was said in the media that we were.) Sophia sounded optimistic on the phone, but knowing a little about neurosurgery, I had some idea of how serious this really was.

  With Casey in the hospital, the CIA was left without a director. It seemed to me that this especially sensitive position ought to be filled as quickly as possible, especially during a government crisis. But Don, who had originally joined the administration at Casey’s suggestion, thought it was cruel of me to want Casey fired before Christmas. That wasn’t my intention, but I did feel that something had to be done.

  I felt at the time that Don was more interested in protecting Bill Casey than in protecting Ronnie and the country, and in one of our phone calls I told him so.

  Poor Bill Casey lingered in the hospital for months before he finally died, in May 1987. Whatever he knew about Iran-contra, he took with him to the grave.

  Ronnie and I went to Casey’s funeral on Long Island, which was a bizarre experience. I sat between Ronnie and Richard Nixon, and while we were waiting for the service to start—Casey’s family and the bishop were half an hour late—Nixon mentioned that Eisenhower had hated going to funerals, so he, Nixon, attended quite a few. Eisenhower made an exception for John Foster Dulles, but that was about it.

  The bishop was supposed to be an old friend of the family, so when he started to speak, I thought it would be about Bi
ll Casey, the man. But instead he started talking about his disagreements with Casey over the contras. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Jeane Kirkpatrick was supposed to give the eulogy, and all during the bishop’s talk she had her notepad out, jotting down points she wanted to make.

  She was marvelous. When she finished, the whole congregation applauded, even the priest. This was the first time I had ever heard applause in a church—and it seemed especially surprising at a funeral—but the congregation was obviously offended by what the bishop had done. Vernon Walters was so angry that he wrote the bishop a scorching letter with a copy to the Vatican.

  In December, after Don Regan and I fought about Casey, our relationship went from bad to worse. Christmas, even in Washington, is normally a respite from politics and feuds, but that certainly wasn’t true in 1986. Early in the Christmas season, a story had come out that Ronnie and I had fought about Don Regan, and that Ronnie had supposedly said to me, “Get off my goddamned back.”

  Now there was some tension between us over Donald Regan, but Ronnie and I just don’t talk to each other that way.

  But once a story gets into circulation, as I’ve said before in this book, it has a life of its own. Shortly after this report came out, I took the press through the White House to see the Christmas decorations. In the middle of our tour, Sam Donaldson called out, “Did you and your husband have a fight, and did he tell you to get off his back?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Don’t you ever fight?” he asked.

  “We have disagreements, like everyone, but not what you’re talking about,” I replied.

  Then Chris Wallace asked, “Do you think Don Regan should be fired?”

  That was too much.

  “Come on,” I replied. “It’s Christmas!”

  That ended it—temporarily.

  That same week, Ronnie and I attended the annual production of “Christmas in Washington.” When it was over, and we came up on stage, a woman from the Shiloh Baptist Choir kissed me and said, “You hang in there. You’ll be all right.”

  That meant a lot to me. But then, when I looked out into the audience, the first person I saw was Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post. My heart sank. This was the man who had recently called the Iran-contra affair “the most fun I’ve had since Watergate.”

  What a terrible thing to say! Fun? I’ll never understand that remark. I had met Bradlee before and he seemed perfectly nice. But he was married to Sally Quinn, who had written a very negative article about me for the Washington Post. And I often wondered whether he resented my friendship with Kay Graham.

  Early in January 1987, Ronnie went into the hospital for a prostate operation. After the surgery, Don and I fought (again) over Ronnie’s recuperation period. Don was determined to schedule a press conference on Iran-contra. Ronnie was leaning against it because there was still too much we just didn’t know. I was opposed to it on medical grounds, and so were the doctors. We all knew men who had undergone this particular operation and had tried to recover too soon, only to end up back in the hospital with a relapse.

  The standard six-week recuperation period after an operation applies to any kind of major surgery. And this was a man in his late seventies, who had already been shot, who had undergone a cancer operation, and who was now under enormous political pressure.

  A speech is hard enough, but the demands of getting ready for a press conference are massive. The doctors hadn’t even wanted Ronnie to deliver the State of the Union Address three weeks after his operation, but Ronnie was so determined to give that speech that he overruled everybody. Believe me, there were some nervous people in the audience that night, including the doctors and (you bet!) me.

  In February, Don Regan announced that Ronnie would hold a press conference at the end of the month. I was furious, and on February 8 we had a heated argument about it on the telephone. When it was clear that I wasn’t going to change his mind, I said, “Okay, have your damn press conference!”

  “You bet I will!” he said. Whereupon Don Regan hung up on me.

  He had hung up on me once before, after a similar argument following Ronnie’s cancer surgery, but I hadn’t mentioned it to Ronnie. It’s quite a feeling. You’re standing there holding a dead phone in your hand, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do. It’s infuriating. You want to shake the phone and say, “Talk to me!”

  After several days, Don called me and said, “My wife said I shouldn’t have hung up on you.”

  I said, “That’s right, you shouldn’t have. Don, don’t ever do that to me again.”

  What I felt like saying was “Do you need your wife to tell you that you shouldn’t hang up on people?”

  That’s when I finally told Ronnie.

  Meanwhile, there were further developments on the Iran-contra front. On February 9, I was en route to a speaking engagement in Los Angeles when I heard that Bud McFarlane was in the hospital from an overdose of Valium. When I called Ronnie from the hotel, he told me that Bud had tried to commit suicide. The poor man was supposed to talk to the Tower Commission the following day.

  Then, when I returned to Washington, Ronnie told me that the Tower Commission had decided to delay its report until February 26 because of new evidence about Oliver North. Among other things, North had said he spent several weekends with us at Camp David. But he was never at Camp David. He said he sometimes spent time alone with Ronnie in the Oval Office. But that never happened. And he apparently told the Iranians that President Reagan wanted them to win their war with Iraq. But Ronnie never said that. His position was always the same: No winner and no loser.

  The Don Regan problem finally came to a head during the second half of February. Here again, I am quoting from my diary:

  February 13: Today, at Camp David, I talked with Ronnie about Don Regan. For the first time I think he listened. I told him again how disappointed I was in the whole situation, and how morale had sunk very low in the office.

  In bed that night, we talked a little more. Ronnie didn’t know about Don’s conversation with Mermie, so I’m going to have to tell him. He should know these things.

  [When Maureen gave Don her views on how the administration could win the congressional vote on the contras, Don had exploded at her. “Goddamn it!” he said. “Who do you think you are? You’ve been trying to run the West Wing for too long, and you’re a pain in the ass.”]

  February 16: Mermie talked to Ronnie and told him about her conversation with Don Regan. I think Ronnie finally understands that he has a real problem, and that something has to be done about it.

  February 17: It broke tonight on the news that Don and I are not speaking because I want him to leave. It’s true that we’re not speaking, and it’s true that I want him to leave. But that’s not the reason we’re not speaking.

  February 18: Press asking lots of questions about Iran, and about Don and me. Today, for the first time, Ronnie left the door open on whether Don would go. When reporters asked him if Don would be staying on, Ronnie said, “Well, that’s up to him. I have always said that when the people I’ve asked to come into government feel that they have to return to private life, that’s their business and I will never try to talk them out of it.”

  That’s a pretty broad hint, but I don’t think Don will take it.

  Ronnie and I had another conversation about the Don Regan situation. Even Rex [Scouten] came to see me about it. He can’t work with him, either. Nobody can work with him, but everybody is afraid to tell Ronnie.

  The Tower report comes in on the 26th and Don wants Ronnie to go on television on the 27th to make a speech. Ye gods! You can’t prepare a good speech in twenty-four hours. Any fool would know that.

  John Herrington [secretary of Energy] came to see Ronnie about Don, and I left them alone. Somehow Ronnie seems calmer about it, almost as though he has made a decision.

  February 20: Before he left this morning, I asked Ronnie if this was going to continue much longer, and he said No.
I hope that means what I think it means.

  Richard Nixon called to say that if Ronnie wanted him to talk to Don about resigning, he would.

  It came out on the news last night that Don had hung up on me, and that’s why we haven’t been speaking. Everyone wants him out.

  People are being very sweet to me, but I feel like I’m going through a nightmare—a long, unending nightmare. And I can’t even see any light at the end of the tunnel. I’m beginning to wonder if this is going to last until the end of Ronnie’s presidency. God, I hope not.

  My feud with Don was reported today as a front-page story in the New York Times. The article began: “Two of President Reagan’s closest advisers, Nancy Reagan and Donald T. Regan, have apparently reached the point where they cannot stand each other.”

  Left for Camp David. Mike Wallace called, and I told him to please tell Chris [Wallace, his son] that I did not leak the story to the press about Don’s hanging up on me. [On the NBC Nightly News, Chris Wallace had quoted “a source very close to Mrs. Reagan” to the effect that I had purposely leaked this story as a way of forcing Don to resign.] Mike called Chris and told him. Chris told Mike that he’d heard it from two sources, and he couldn’t believe I hadn’t told these people, hoping they would tell the press. I told Mike that I don’t work that way, which Mike already knew.

  February 21: [At Camp David] Ronnie and I took a walk after lunch. Lots of calls, all regarding Don Regan. Ronnie is eager to go ahead with his speech on the 27th. I can understand his wanting to get out there after so long a period of not being able to say anything, but how can you prepare a good speech in twenty-four hours?

  ABC announced tonight that Regan had ordered a cover-up on Ronnie’s participation in the Iran affair. Boy! This is a rough town, and you have to be very strong to survive.