Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  Reagan glanced over his shoulder at the memorial behind him, a chiseled shard of stone that gashed the air above the beaches. The sculpture, he said, symbolized the daggers the rangers thrust into the cliffs to help them up. “And before me are the men who put them there,” he said, looking again to the veterans. “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.”

  Reagan inquired rhetorically into their motives. “You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here?”

  He offered the answer: “It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love. The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge—and pray God we have not lost it—that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.”

  Reagan acknowledged the other heroes of D-Day: the British, the Canadians, the Poles, the Free French. He paid tribute as well to the contributions of the Soviets to the defeat of the Germans. But he dis tinguished between the Soviets and the other Allies as he described the denouement of D-Day and the war. “In spite of our great efforts and successes, not all that followed the end of the war was happy or planned. Some liberated countries were lost. The great sadness of this loss echoes down to our own time in the streets of Warsaw, Prague, and East Berlin. Soviet troops that came to the center of this continent did not leave when peace came. They’re still there, uninvited, unwanted, unyielding, almost forty years after the war. Because of this, allied forces still stand on this continent.”

  Yet he made this point primarily to emphasize his broader theme of remembrance and reconciliation. “I tell you from my heart that we in the United States do not want war. We want to wipe from the face of the earth the terrible weapons that man now has in his hands. And I tell you, we are ready to seize that beachhead. We look for some sign from the Soviet Union that they are willing to move forward, that they share our desire and love for peace, and that they will give up the ways of conquest. There must be a changing there that will allow us to turn our hope into action. We will pray forever that some day that changing will come.” He spoke to his larger audience but referred to the heroes present and missing as he concluded: “Strengthened by their courage, heartened by their valor, and borne by their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.”

  Reagan shook hands and personally thanked the veterans. He proceeded to Omaha Beach, to the American cemetery above the sand. He stopped in the chapel for a moment of prayer, walked among the nine thousand graves of the American dead, and laid a wreath at the burial site of Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who as the only general officer accompanying the landing forces had won the Medal of Honor and then died of a heart attack. He quoted General Omar Bradley observing of his troops, “Every man who set foot on Omaha Beach that day was a hero.”

  He told of Private First Class Peter Robert Zanatta, who hit the beach with the first assault wave. Private Zanatta survived the battle to relate its story to his daughter, Lisa. “Someday, Lis, I’ll go back,” he said. “I’ll go back, and I’ll see it all again. I’ll see the beach, the barricades, and the graves.” But he hadn’t gone back; he died too soon. Yet his daughter promised, as he was dying, “I’m going there, Dad, and I’ll see the beaches and the barricades and the monuments. I’ll see the graves, and I’ll put flowers there just like you wanted to do. I’ll feel all the things you made me feel through your stories and your eyes. I’ll never forget what you went through, Dad, nor will I let anyone else forget. And, Dad, I’ll always be proud.” Reagan gestured to a young woman as he completed his story: “Through the words of his loving daughter, who is here with us today, a D-Day veteran has shown us the meaning of this day far better than any president can. It is enough for us to say about Private Zanatta and all the men of honor and courage who fought beside him four decades ago: We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free.”

  He continued to Utah Beach for a gathering of the heads of state of several allied countries. Only France’s Mitterrand spoke, but American soldiers joined French, British, Canadian, and others in representing the combined forces that had freed Europe from the Nazi yoke. The Eisenhower and the other ships stood offshore, out of earshot but in full view of the television cameras.

  Reagan returned to London by helicopter. He flew once more over the Eisenhower, whose five thousand crewmen assembled on the aircraft carrier’s deck in a formation that spelled out “Ike.” His helicopter circled the ship while he addressed the officers and men by radio-telephone. “Believe me, all of us up here are inspired by the sight of your magnificent ship and the battle group which accompanied you to the coast of Normandy,” he said. “Today, as forty years ago, our navy and all of our armed forces are advancing the cause of peace and freedom.” The helicopter circled one last time. “Admiral Flatley, Captain Clexton, officers and men of the ‘Ike,’ ” Reagan said, “I salute you for your devoted service to the cause of freedom.”

  69

  WALTER MONDALE HAD emerged from the defeat of the Carter-Mondale ticket in 1980 with reputation intact, as losing vice presidential candidates often do. And the Democratic victories in the 1982 elections gave Mondale and other Democrats cause to think Reagan might be vulnerable in 1984. The recession grew worse past the election, with unemployment reaching nearly 11 percent in December 1982; many voters reasonably wondered if Reagan’s recipe for recovery wasn’t, in fact, a formula that aggravated the problem.

  Other issues contributed to the Democratic hopes. The Reagan arms buildup, including SDI and the Pershing program for Europe, continued to energize the antinuclear left. Deregulation of industry pleased business but antagonized labor, which still smarted over the firing of the air-traffic controllers. Environmentalists decried the policies and pronouncements of James Watt, Reagan’s interior secretary. Watt’s policies featured opening more federal lands to commercial development; this made many westerners happy but caused large numbers in the rest of the country to fear that the national patrimony was being sold for a mess of corporate pottage. Yet it was Watt’s words that sparked the greatest uproar. The interior secretary, a conservative Christian, suggested to a House committee that long-term conservation was a waste of time. “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord comes,” he said. Watt lambasted his opponents as un-American. “I never use the words Democrats and Republicans,” he declared. “It’s liberals and Americans.” He ridiculed affirmative action, saying of a coal advisory committee, “I have a black, I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple.”

  Reagan supported Watt as long as he could. Watt’s policies were essentially the president’s policies. Reagan considered himself an environmentalist, with stewardship of his ranch to prove it. But he opposed what he called “environmental extremism,” as he said Jim Watt was doing. “He’s not going to destroy the environment, but he is going to restore some common sense,” Reagan told reporters.

  Yet Watt’s language eventually made him a liability. Reagan wearied of questions about Watt at news conferences, and Watt’s derisive comment about the coal committee, with the 1984 campaign approaching, was a phrase too far. Tellingly for Reagan, the Democrats were coming to love Watt. “He’s the best thing we’ve got going for us,” a Democrat on Capitol Hill anonymously said of Watt. Reagan was starting to think so too. A reporter asked if Watt cou
ld possibly be effective after his latest remark. Reagan left Watt dangling. “I think that’s a decision that he, himself, would have to make, whether he feels that he has made it questionable as to whether he can be effective or not.” Watt got the message and resigned.

  If Watt had been the best thing going for the Democrats, the worst thing, by the beginning of the 1984 election season, was the economy. The fever of the recession broke in early 1983, and during the next several months the important economic indicators turned in directions favorable to the country and therefore to an incumbent president. Unemployment and inflation fell; production and profits rose. Reagan had always asserted that the economy would revive once his program took hold; now that the economy was reviving, he could persuasively claim credit.

  Walter Mondale entered the 1984 Democratic primary season as his party’s front-runner. He fended off challenges by Gary Hart, a Colorado senator who struck voters as a bit light for the top job in American politics, and Jesse Jackson, an African American minister and activist who thrilled black audiences and carried three southern primaries but left majorities elsewhere tepid or cold. Mondale claimed the Democratic nomination with little drama.

  He created a modest buzz of his own by choosing as his running mate Geraldine Ferraro, a New York member of Congress and the first woman on a major-party ticket in American history. The rest of his campaign was more traditional, focusing on the federal deficit and pledging to rein it in. “Here is the truth about the future,” Mondale told the Democratic convention, meeting in San Francisco. “We are living on borrowed money and borrowed time. These deficits hike interest rates, clobber exports, stunt investment, kill jobs, undermine growth, cheat our kids, and shrink our future. Whoever is inaugurated in January, the American people will have to pay Mr. Reagan’s bills. The budget will be squeezed. Taxes will go up. And anyone who says they won’t is not telling the truth to the American people.” Mondale was generally accounted a liberal, but on this central issue he took a stance that made him more conservative, in the received fiscal sense, than Reagan. “I mean business. By the end of my first term, I will reduce the Reagan budget deficit by two-thirds. Let’s tell the truth. It must be done, it must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”

  Mondale took this message into the autumn campaign. “One of the key tests of leadership is whether one sees clearly the nature of the problems confronted by our nation,” he declared in the first of his two debates with Reagan, in Louisville. “And perhaps the dominant domestic issue of our times is what do we do about these enormous deficits.” The president had promised to balance the budget but hadn’t come close. “Every estimate by this administration about the size of the deficit has been off by billions and billions of dollars. As a matter of fact, over four years, they’ve missed the mark by nearly $600 billion. We were told we would have a balanced budget in 1983. It was $200 billion deficit instead.” The current fiscal year looked even worse. “Virtually every economic analysis that I’ve heard of, including the distinguished Congressional Budget Office, which is respected by, I think, almost everyone, says that even with historically high levels of economic growth, we will suffer a $263 billion deficit.”

  Reagan shook his head while Mondale spoke. In reply he ignored Mondale’s numbers and attacked his convention speech. “I don’t believe that Mr. Mondale has a plan for balancing the budget,” Reagan said. “He has a plan for raising taxes.”

  Mondale repeated what he had said in San Francisco. “Mr. Reagan, after the election, is going to have to propose a tax increase,” he insisted. Mondale had been following Donald Regan’s progress on tax reform, and he wanted Reagan to own up to what was being prepared in his name. “His secretary of the Treasury said he’s studying a sales tax or a value-added tax. They’re the same thing. They hit middle- and moderate-income Americans and leave wealthy Americans largely untouched.”

  One of the debate questioners posed the issue to Reagan directly. “Do you think middle-income Americans are overtaxed or undertaxed?”

  Reagan put on his best sheepish smile. “You know, I wasn’t going to say this at all, but I can’t help it. There you go again.” He paused for the laughter, which came perfunctorily, unlike the honest amusement and applause that had greeted his use of the line four years earlier. “I don’t have a plan to raise taxes,” he continued. “Our problem has not been that anybody in our country is undertaxed; it’s that government is overfed.”

  Mondale was ready for Reagan’s recycled humor. “Mr. President, you said, ‘There you go again,’ right?”

  “Yes,” Reagan responded.

  “You remember the last time you said that?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “You said it when President Carter said that you were going to cut Medicare, and you said, ‘Oh no, there you go again, Mr. President.’ And what did you do right after the election? You went out and tried to cut $20 billion out of Medicare. And so, when you say, ‘There you go again’—people remember this, you know.”

  THE HO-HOS AND clapping that greeted Mondale’s riposte suggested he had the better of this exchange. And the reviews in the media extrapolated his victory to the debate as a whole. Reagan knew he had done poorly. He wandered off topic; he cited too many statistics; he forgot his closing statement; he looked uncharacteristically flustered. In a rare negative self-review, he afterward admitted, “I have to say I lost.” But he didn’t blame himself. “I’d crammed so hard on facts and figures in view of the absolutely dishonest things he’s been saying in the campaign, I guess I flattened out.” He refused to concede defeat on the substance. “He was never able to rebut any of the facts I presented and kept repeating things that are absolute falsehoods.” Yet Reagan of all people knew that politics is about more than substance, and in the court of perception the verdict was against him.

  Reagan’s disappointment was fleeting, as disappointment generally was with him. “We left Louisville not feeling too bad,” he wrote the next day. “There was a rally at the hotel last night—1000’s of people who had all seen the debate and they thought I’d won.”

  But the hotel crowd was a gift from the advance team, as Nancy Reagan knew. She took her husband’s dismal showing harder than he did. “It was the worst night of Ronnie’s political career,” she recalled later. “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.” She rushed to the stage at the end of the debate. He was seriously upset. “I was terrible,” she remembered him telling her. She offered comfort but not dissent. “We both knew he was right.” She couldn’t sleep the night after the debate. He said the hotel room was stuffy. She agreed. “But we both knew that the real reason was that the debate had been a disaster.”

  She looked for answers. “What have you done to my husband?” she demanded of Mike Deaver. “Whatever it is, don’t do it again.” She called for the firing of Richard Darman, who had led the debate preparations. Darman’s boss, Jim Baker, refused. “I never had one difference of opinion with her but one,” Baker remembered, the one being over the responsibility for Reagan’s flop. Baker thought Reagan simply hadn’t studied. This made Nancy even angrier. She complained to Paul Laxalt, who accompanied her on the return from Louisville to Washington. “Jesus, Nancy Reagan was so unhappy,” Laxalt remembered. “I went back with Nancy and heard for two or three hours how this debate had been screwed up.” She vowed that things would change. “By God, it’s going to be different, the preparation is going to be different next time,” Laxalt recalled her saying.

  The unspoken fear driving Nancy’s anger was stated aloud in the media. The consistently sympathetic Wall Street Journal headlined it starkly: “Fitness Issue—New Question in Race: Is Oldest U.S. President Now Showing His Age? Reagan Debate Performance Invites Open Speculation on His Ability to Serve.” The article beneath the b
anner went on to say, “Until Sunday night’s debate, age hadn’t been much of an issue in the election campaign. That may now be changing. The president’s rambling responses and occasional apparent confusion injected an unpredictable new element into the race.” The article quoted a management expert who had voted for Reagan in 1980: “I am very concerned, as a psychologist, about his inability to think on his feet, the disjointedness of his sentences and his use of the security blanket of redundancy … I’d be concerned to put him in a corporate presidency. I’d be all the more concerned to put him in the U.S. presidency.” The article cited two gerontologists who contended that Reagan should take a mental-impairment test of the kind used to measure senile dementia, with the results made public.

  Other papers and reporters pursued the age question. Lou Cannon of the Washington Post, who had followed Reagan since the California days, interviewed various members of the campaign before writing, “The president’s advisers, pressed to find an explanation for a performance they consider unusually ineffective, are trying to defend Reagan, 73, from the charge that he is showing his age.” James Reston wrote in the New York Times, “Age may have been a factor in his faltering performance in Louis ville. Usually he is at his best onstage, and the bigger the audience the better. But he forgot his lines, even in his memorized closing speech, and that did surprise and trouble even his most devoted aides.”

  The Reagan campaign team, beyond enlisting the crowds to boost the candidate’s spirits, felt obliged to trot out one of his physicians to attest to his soundness of mind. “Mr. Reagan is a mentally alert, robust man who appears younger than his stated age,” the doctor declared.