by H. W. Brands
REAGAN ENJOYED HOLDING news conferences. He liked dealing with reporters, whose names he took care to learn, and he valued the opportunity to show that an actor needn’t be a dummy. If his mastery of policy minutiae was less than Jimmy Carter’s, his camera presence was far greater. And he understood that presence mattered more to television viewers, the audience he cared about, than the details of his answers.
Reagan held his first news conference a week after his inauguration. He gave a brief statement reiterating the economic themes of the campaign and his inaugural address, and then he opened himself to questions. The American hostages in Iran had been released almost at the moment of his taking office; Helen Thomas of United Press International asked whether his policy toward Iran would be one of revenge or reconciliation. “I’m certainly not thinking of revenge,” Reagan replied, while adding, “I don’t know whether reconciliation would be possible with the present government.”
Sam Donaldson of ABC News inquired what the president thought the long-range goals of the Soviet Union were. Was the Kremlin bent on world domination, or was détente possible? Donaldson patently wanted to see if Reagan as president espoused the same hard line he had taken as a candidate. Reagan made plain he did. “So far détente’s been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims,” he said. “I don’t have to think of an answer as to what I think their intentions are; they have repeated it. I know of no leader of the Soviet Union since the revolution, and including the present leadership, that has not more than once repeated in the various Communist congresses they hold their deter mination that their goal must be the promotion of world revolution and a one-world socialist or communist state, whichever word you want to use. Now, as long as they do that and as long as they, at the same time, have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that, and that is moral, not immoral, and we operate on a different set of standards—I think when you do business with them, even at a détente, you keep that in mind.”
Another reporter wondered what the president’s remarks implied for the grain embargo imposed by the Carter administration against the Soviets after the invasion of Afghanistan. As a candidate, Reagan had criticized the embargo; did he now intend to lift it? Reagan replied, “With the grain embargo, my quarrel with it from the first was that I thought it was asking only one group of Americans to participate, the farmers. You only have two choices with an embargo: you either lift it or you broaden it.” He hadn’t decided which to do. But he tipped his hand slightly. “As I say, it was asking one group of Americans to bear the burden and, I have always thought, was more of a kind of gesture than it was something real.”
REAGAN RETURNED TO the topic of relations with the Soviets in an interview with Walter Cronkite in early March. Cronkite was days from retiring as anchor of CBS Evening News; his exclusive with Reagan was a last hurrah. “Your hard line toward the Soviet Union is in keeping with your campaign statements, your promises,” Cronkite said. “But there are some who, while applauding that stance, feel that you might have overdone the rhetoric a little bit in laying into the Soviet leadership as being liars and thieves, et cetera.”
“Well, now, let’s recap,” Reagan replied. “I am aware that what I said received a great deal of news attention, and I can’t criticize the news media for that. I said it. But the thing that seems to have been ignored—well, two things—one, I did not volunteer that statement. This was not a statement that I went in and called a press conference and said, ‘Here, I want to say the following.’ I was asked a question. And the question was, what did I think were Soviet aims? Where did I think the Soviet Union was going?” Reagan reiterated to Cronkite what he had said to Sam Donaldson about the immorality of Soviet behavior. He added, “Remember, their ideology is without God, without our idea of morality in the religious sense.” And he noted, “They have never denied the truth of what I said.”
Cronkite pressed Reagan. “You don’t think that name-calling, if you could call it that, makes it more difficult when you do finally, whenever that is, sit down across the table from Mr. Brezhnev and his cohorts?” he asked.
“No,” Reagan responded. “I’ve been interested to see that he has suggested having a summit meeting since I said that.”
Cronkite noted that Reagan’s State Department had rescinded a privilege accorded the Soviet ambassador, of parking in the basement garage of the building. Anatoly Dobrynin’s car had been conspicuously turned away, and he had been told to use the street door like other diplomats. “It was obviously tipped to the press that this was going to happen,” Cronkite observed. “What advantage is there in embarrassing the Soviet ambassador like that? A phone call would have said, ‘Hey, you can’t use that door any longer.’ Was that just a macho thing for domestic consumption?”
“I have to tell you, I didn’t know anything about it until I read it in the paper, saw it on television myself,” Reagan rejoined. “I don’t know actually how that came about or what the decision was, whether it was just one of those bureaucratic things.”
“You didn’t ask Secretary Haig about it?” Cronkite said.
“No, and I just don’t know.”
“Don’t you think the Russians kind of think we’re childish when we pull something like that?”
“I don’t know; I don’t know,” Reagan said. With a slight smile he added, “Or maybe they got the message.”
Cronkite asked what Reagan would require of the Soviets before he agreed to a summit with Brezhnev.
Reagan indicated he was in no hurry. “A summit meeting of that kind takes a lot of preparation. And the first preparation from our standpoint is the pledge that we’ve made to our allies, that we won’t take unilateral steps. We’ll only do things after full consultation with them.” Reagan wanted to shore up support in the alliance so he could present a united front to Brezhnev. Answering Cronkite’s question, the president said, “It would help bring about such a meeting if the Soviet Union revealed it is willing to moderate its imperialism, its aggression—Afghanistan would be an example. We could talk a lot better if there was some indication that they truly wanted to be a member of the peace-loving nations of the world, the free world.”
“Isn’t that really what you have to negotiate?” Cronkite asked. “I mean, is it really conceivable that you’re going to get such a change of heart, a change of statement that you could believe on the part of the Soviet Union before you ever sit down to talk with President Brezhnev?”
Reagan cited Franklin Roosevelt. “I remember when Hitler was arming and had built himself up,” Reagan said. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt made a speech at the dedication of a bridge over the Chicago River. And in that speech he called on the free world to quarantine Nazi Germany, to stop all communication, all relations with them until they gave up that militaristic course and agreed to join with the free nations of the world in a search for peace.”
Cronkite didn’t point out, if he knew, that Roosevelt hadn’t been so specific and that the quarantine speech had been prompted by Japanese aggression in Asia rather than German aggression in Europe. In any event, Cronkite said ironically, “That did a whale of a lot of good.”
“Oh, but the funny thing was he was attacked so here in our own country for having said such a thing,” Reagan continued. “Can we honestly look back now and say that World War II would have taken place if we had done what he wanted us to do?” Returning to the present, he reiterated, “As I say, some evidence from the Soviet Union, I think, would be very helpful in bringing about a meeting.”
“It sounds as if, sir,” Cronkite observed, “you are saying that there isn’t going to be any summit meeting with Brezhnev.”
“No, I haven’t put that as a hard and fast condition,” Reagan said. But he repeated that a summit would come more readily if the Russians improved their behavior.
Cronkite noted t
hat many in Europe wanted the United States and the Soviet Union to negotiate an arms-control treaty. The Europeans feared a new arms race and hoped to halt the Soviet and American buildups before it was too late.
“Too late for what, is the question,” Reagan countered. “I don’t know, but I do believe this, that it is rather foolish to have unilaterally disarmed, you might say, as we did by letting our defensive, our margin of safety, deteriorate. And then you sit down with the fellow who’s got all the arms. What do you have to negotiate with? You’re asking him to come down to where you are, or you build up to where he is.” The latter was more realistic. And rebuilding America’s strength was what the administration intended to do. Once the Kremlin got the message, maybe then there could be negotiations.
41
PEOPLE OFTEN ASK me what it was like to live in the White House, and what routines we followed there,” Nancy Reagan recalled. She proceeded to explain. “Our day normally began at seven-thirty, when a White House operator called on the telephone on my side of the bed and said, ‘Good morning, it’s seven-thirty.’ ” Her husband was usually awake by then, Nancy noted. She would push a button that signaled to the White House butler that it was time to bring in the newspapers and throw open the curtains.
She and Reagan remained in bed with the papers and breakfast. Reagan read the Washington Post and the New York Times; on Mondays he glanced through the fresh weeklies: Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. Nancy started with USA Today and the Washington Times. The television was tuned to ABC’s Good Morning America. Breakfast consisted of juice, cereal, coffee, toast, and, about once a week, an egg.
Around 8:30, Reagan rose and dressed for work. He kissed Nancy and took the elevator downstairs. His personal assistant, Jim Kuhn, greeted him. A Secret Service agent accompanied him to the West Wing and the Oval Office. His physician, John Hutton, made a point of meeting him in the hallway to say good morning and assess him visually.
His first meeting, with Jim Baker and often George Bush, began at nine. Meetings filled the rest of the morning and led to lunch, which he took at his desk or in the small study off the Oval Office. He read briefing papers or made telephone calls while having soup and fruit. On Thursdays he lunched with the vice president.
Afternoon was given to more office work, broken up as necessary or advisable by meetings and photo sessions with members of Congress, dig nitaries from abroad, schoolchildren, firefighters, championship sports teams, and the like. He left the office by five and returned upstairs to the residence. At six he exercised in a bedroom converted to a private gym, on a treadmill and with resistance devices. A shower was followed by dinner, often on tray tables in the study, with the evening news on the television. The food was delivered by another butler. “Everybody who served us was from the White House staff,” Nancy remarked. She added, democratically but inaccurately, “Apparently, we were one of the very few presidential families to arrive without any personal servants.” State dinners and other public events occurred several times a month. After dinner Reagan and Nancy read; on Sunday evenings they watched television: 60 Minutes and Murder, She Wrote.
Both Reagan and Nancy found the White House confining; most weeks they fled to Camp David on Friday afternoon. They traveled by helicopter unless the weather grounded them, in which case they went by car. “Thank God for Camp David!” Nancy wrote. The presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains gave them room to walk and ride horses, the latter more comfortably after Reagan ordered the paths Richard Nixon had had paved, to facilitate touring by golf cart, restored to their natural surfaces. Reagan’s work followed him, but his staff did not, except for the Secret Service. Friends and family came to Camp David, as well as foreign visitors Reagan especially wanted to impress. Fridays and Saturdays were movie nights at Camp David; Reagan and Nancy screened films from their days in Hollywood and, with less regularity and enthusiasm, more modern pictures. On Sunday mornings they watched the news shows, particularly This Week with David Brinkley. Sunday lunch was followed by departure for the White House. “Coming back was always a slight letdown,” Nancy wrote after Reagan left the presidency. “And even now, when Ronnie looks at pictures from Camp David, he feels a pang.”
As restful as Camp David was, Reagan and Nancy’s own retreat, Rancho del Cielo, was more soothing still. Every few months Air Force One would whisk them to California for a respite at the ranch. Reporters and cameras were usually barred. Reagan could roam afoot or on horseback; he repaired fences and chopped firewood. He was able to remember what life had been like before he became president—until the telephone rang and he had to deal with a crisis or other matter that couldn’t wait until he returned to Washington.
NEVER HAS A First Couple found each other’s company more congenial and comforting than the Reagans did. Except during his work hours they spent nearly all their time together. And when he was at work, he wasn’t far from her thoughts, nor she from his. She called him Ronnie; he called her Mommy.
His pet name for her might have reflected nothing more than the fact that she was the mother of two of his children. But it suggests something else: that he found in Nancy’s love and devotion some of the security he had relied on from his own mother in childhood. When he was with Nancy, he felt strong and confident; on the rare occasions when they were apart, he fretted and counted the hours until they would be reunited. Reagan’s heart, perhaps because of its bruising by his alcoholic father, had limited capacity. He gave all of it to Nancy, as his children discovered on various occasions, to their disappointment. Nancy was everything to him emotionally. And in his view, she was enough.
Nancy, in her own way, depended on him as much as he did on her, and she was just as uneasy when the demands of their lives took them in opposite directions. She was as protective of him as his own mother had ever been; if anything, she guarded him more fiercely than Nelle had. If he had not gone into politics, she would have paid little attention to the subject. As it was, her political agenda consisted solely of promoting him and fostering his success. Michael Deaver was her liaison; he took her calls and discreetly translated her wishes, whenever possible, into action.
She witnessed all of her husband’s major speeches and many of his minor ones. But she didn’t see him address the leaders of the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO at the Washington Hilton, just up Connecticut Avenue from the White House, on March 30, 1981. Organized labor was not a natural constituency for Republicans, but some unions—the Teamsters, for instance—had endorsed Reagan over Carter, and blue-collar conservatives swelled the ranks of the so-called Reagan Democrats.
On this day the president appealed to the work ethic he said he shared with union members. He reminded them of his life membership in the AFL-CIO, and he cited Samuel Gompers, the founder of the AFL, on the subject of individual initiative. “Doing for people what they can and ought to do for themselves is a dangerous experiment,” Reagan quoted Gompers. “In the last analysis the welfare of the workers depends upon their own initiative. Whatever is done under the guise of philanthropy or social morality which in any way lessens initiative is the greatest crime that can be committed against the toilers.” Reagan noted that Gompers was speaking against socialism, but he believed the same might be said of the welfare state. “America depends on the work of labor, and the economy we build should reward and encourage that labor as our hope for the future,” he said. “We’ve strayed far from the path that was charted by this man who believed so much in the freedom and dignity of the worker.” The goal of the administration’s economic reforms was to reengage the American spirit of enterprise, Reagan said. “The idea is to unleash the American worker, encourage the American investor, and let each of us produce more to make a better life for all.” He hoped he could count on the unionists. “You and your forebears built this nation. Now please help us rebuild it.”
The union leaders listened respectfully but skeptically. One of their chiefs had already warned the president t
hat labor must not be made a scapegoat in the administration’s efforts to reform the economy. After Reagan’s speech several delegates interviewed by reporters expressed disappointment that the president had refused to endorse federal funding for mass transit and energy projects that might provide employment for some of the nation’s 660,000 idle construction workers. They gave him credit for coming to address them, but if he wanted their support, he would have to do more to earn it.
NANCY REAGAN HAD a lunch engagement of her own that day, and she had just arrived back at the White House when the head of her Secret Service detail, George Opfer, drew her aside. “There’s been a shooting at the hotel,” he said. “Some people were wounded, but your husband wasn’t hit. Everybody’s at the hospital.”
Nancy at once declared that she was going to the hospital. Opfer said it wasn’t necessary or desirable. The place was chaotic enough without the addition of the First Lady. She insisted, saying she would go even if she had to walk. He grudgingly ordered a car.
Their approach to the George Washington University Hospital was blocked by police cars, emergency vehicles, reporters, and a crowd of curious onlookers. Nancy became increasingly agitated. “I was frantic,” she recalled. She told Opfer, “If this traffic doesn’t open up, I’m going to run the rest of the way.”
Opfer kept her in the car, and eventually they reached the hospital. Mike Deaver, who had been informed by the Secret Service that she was on the way, met her at the door. “He’s been hit,” he said.
“But they told me he wasn’t hit,” she objected, growing more fearful by the moment.
Deaver and others recounted the events of the previous hour. On leaving the Washington Hilton, Reagan was about to enter his car. Several shots were fired. Reagan later said they sounded like firecrackers, but the Secret Service and the police on the scene immediately recognized them as pistol shots.