In an even more moving moment, at Omaha Beach, Reagan read the letter of an American woman, Lisa Zanatta Henn, whose father, Private, First Class, Peter Zanatta, had been on the first wave landing at Omaha Beach in 1944. “He made me feel the fear of being on that boat waiting to land,” she wrote the president. “I can smell the ocean and feel the seasickness. I can see the looks on his fellow soldiers’ faces, the fear, the anguish, the uncertainty of what lay ahead. And when they landed, I can feel the strength and courage of the men who took those first steps through the tide to what must have surely looked like instant death. I don’t know how or why I can feel this emptiness, this fear, or this determination, but I do. Maybe it’s the bond I had with my father.… All I know is that it brings tears to my eyes to think about my father as a twenty-year-old boy having to face that beach.”
When Reagan had received her letter months before, he wrote back offering to pay her way personally and fulfill her dream of going to Normandy for her father. As he read her moving words that day, she sat among graying Normandy veterans, television cameras tracing the glances between them. For part of Reagan’s political genius is to make such moments personal for everyone by speaking to one person. The scene made a powerful visual symbol of Reagan the patriot-president, identifying him with the heroism of the common man, though Reagan himself had never seen combat.
At moments of supreme gravity, the Reagan team masterfully employed symbolism to give shape and meaning to events of uncertain outcome, such as Reagan’s 1985 summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva. From policymakers and from their own intuition, Deaver and Henkel divined the proper symbolic message for the summit and then scouted months in advance to locate the right symbolic settings. Henkel found an elegant old château, the Fleur d’Eau, as a site for Reagan to host Gorbachev. But what caught Henkel’s eye was a garden walk-way leading to a pool house with a big fireplace—the symbolism of a warm get-together.
“I knew Fleur d’Eau was the right place for the summit as soon as I saw the pool house where you have the classic roaring fire,” Henkel recalled. “I know Mrs. Reagan was very keen on it. I think the president, at first, wasn’t as receptive.”35 Both Mrs. Reagan and National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane encouraged Reagan to use the pool house for private, man-to-man talks by the fire. So the public relations outcome was set before Reagan and Gorbachev met. It became the “fireside summit.”
Overall, the Geneva summit was an image-making triumph. As Ronald Reagan’s first encounter with the top Soviet leader, it broke the ice, and that was important. But otherwise there were no agreements, no breakthroughs, no real progress.
Beforehand, the administration had shrewdly lowered public expectations, a critical image-game task—to protect the president from mass disappointment. Virtually every advance briefing or press conference predicted nothing would happen. The press and public were conditioned. A news blackout imposed during the summit was an imagemakers’ delight, heightening the mystery and giving greater value to little scraps about how the two leaders got along. The lack of substantive information magnified symbolic details: Reagan, the ruddy seventy-three-year-old going bareheaded in a bit of one-upmanship to meet the young Soviet champ in a topcoat; the fireside chat itself. A postsummit stop was inserted in Brussels—theoretically to brief NATO leaders, but actually, Henkel told me, to retard Reagan’s homecoming and to synchronize it with the evening news shows. The live coverage, arranged by Deaver and Henkel, created a magnetic effect: helicopters ferrying the president from his encounter with the Kremlin boss on the final leg home to report to Congress and the nation. It was a production to inspire envy in Hollywood and to project an aura of success, however modest the reality.
The President as Storyteller
Reagan obviously brought formidable talents to the image game. He has the dramatic voice and the confident, jaunty air of Franklin Roosevelt, the warm optimism and aw-shucks smile of Dwight Eisenhower, the easy masculinity and glamour of Jack Kennedy. Reagan is a leader operating powerfully at the level of visions, dreams, and legends, the most magnetic ingredients of political imagery. He has the lure of a pied piper.
Especially at moments of triumph or despair, Reagan has sensed instinctively how to bond himself with the emotions of others and how to draw them into bonding with him. After the explosion of the Challenger 7 and the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Reagan masterfully gave voice to the nation’s grief and outrage. And as he identified with the nation’s feelings, the public identified with him.
Reagan is so natural onstage that unlike most politicians, he creates the illusion of not being onstage. He is so practiced in using Tele-PrompTers that many viewers have mistakenly thought he knew his script by heart. And he has known so well how to create a sense of familiarity by tossing a smiling wave at an isolated camera crew that millions of folks back home felt he was sending them a personal greeting. Reagan’s ideology is divisive, but he knows how to soften it with a mellow TV style. Years ago, other politicians mistakenly dismissed Reagan as “just an actor.” But he has been so successful at the image game that acting experience is now reckoned an asset, not a handicap, in the new politics. Reagan has understood that politics for the millions—in the television age—is not rational, but emotional.
The storybook presidency is a form of political artistry for which Reagan was naturally suited as a born storyteller. Hence his reputation as the “great communicator.” Some of his most compelling political speeches are masterpieces of narration: his report to the nation after the invasion of Grenada, his tragic story of the truck bombing in Beirut, his angry tale of the Soviet downing of the Korean airliner. The storyteller’s skills were honed by Reagan during years of radio announcing, when he created the crack of the bat, the cheers of the crowd, the close plays at home plate from a skimpy wire-ticker report of baseball games. He created flesh-and-blood reality from a skeleton, drawing others into his special blend of fact and fiction. That same blend of wish and reality lies behind some of Reagan’s most wayward policies, and that same storyteller’s art lies at the heart of Reagan’s power as a political leader.
Reagan loves to retell the story of how he landed his first radio job in 1932 as a sports announcer, at WOC in Davenport, Iowa. One afternoon in the Rose Garden, four of us gathered around as he recalled how the station manager, a crusty old Scotsman named Pete MacArthur, had asked whether he could make a game come alive. MacArthur led young Reagan into a studio and told him when the red light came on to broadcast a football game as if he were watching it. Reagan picked one of his college games, so that he could use familiar names and plays.
“I didn’t want to start with the opening kickoff but with something else,” he told us. “We won in the last few minutes of the game. Our star halfback, Bud Cole, had taken the ball near the end of the game and had come around my side. You see, I was a running guard then, and I was running interference for him. But I missed my block, and Bud had to reverse his field and zigzag his way through the secondary and then over to the opposite sidelines and went all the way for a touchdown.” By this time, Reagan was tracing Bud Cole’s run with his finger in the air. “So, that’s the play I decided to broadcast, and when the light went on, I began.…” The president was rolling now, reliving the memory, his voice deepening, picking up tempo and excitement:
“Here we are late in the fourth quarter. The shadows are falling over the stadium. The Eureka Golden Tornadoes are deep in their own territory, trailing by six points. On the snap, the ball goes to Cole, who begins a sweep around right end. Ron Reagan, the running guard, pulls out of the line and leads the way into Western State’s secondary and throws a key block on the opposing halfback.” Interrupting his own replay, the president admitted, “And in that version, I made the block, and it was the best block you’d ever seen.” Then he resumed his broadcast voice: “And Bud Cole streaks down the sideline with the fans cheering wildly, and scores, to tie the game for Eureka.” The president smiled again. “An
d of course we made the extra point to go ahead and win the game. So that’s how I got the job.”36
Hugh Sidey of Time asked Reagan whether he had ever wanted to broadcast sports live, rather from the ticker. “Oh, no.” Reagan shook his head. “You see, the thing about doing it from the wire was that you could create the scene on your own.”
The moment was revealing, for it showed how Reagan relies on his imagination, to picture life in Nicaragua, in the Soviet Union, or how Star Wars will develop. Moreover, in the revisionism of his block as a running guard, Reagan displayed his politician’s bent for varnishing the truth. Like others, Reagan has done that often, enthusiasm getting the better of his memory. One incident, tracked down by Lou Cannon of The Washington Post, stuck in my mind. According to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Reagan, expressing his sympathy for the Holocaust, told Shamir at the White House in late 1983, that near the end of World War II he had served as a photographer in an American Army unit assigned to film Nazi death camps. That contradicted what Reagan had told his staff. Reagan, who spent the war with an Army Air Corps motion picture unit near Hollywood, had said that he never left the country during the war.37
The President as Salesman
As a political salesman, Reagan ranks with Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, both of whom, like Reagan, sold mood and confidence as much as substance. Reagan hungered for his summit meetings with Gorbachev, aides told me, not for the negotiations, but because Reagan was convinced that he could talk Gorbachev into accepting his idea of a strategic defense. Reagan was that confident of his powers of persuasion, although it turned out he was wrong.
The contrast between Reagan and presidents such as Nixon, Ford, or Carter is stunning. Prior to Reagan, Nixon was the president most obsessed with “the selling of the president,” in Joe McGinniss’s memorable phrase; but Nixon lacked the ease and personal warmth that convey sincerity and come so readily to Reagan. Neither Ford nor Carter was as devoted as Reagan to making the sale. Both Ford and Nixon were clumsy onstage compared to Reagan. Carter was image conscious, flashing his famous toothy grin, but he was curiously ill at ease asking for votes. He saw the complexity of issues, agonized over decisions, and was too deeply torn by inner self-doubts to be a natural salesman. And Carter’s inner conflicts came across on television, for all to see.
By contrast, Reagan has conveyed inner harmony. He has seemed at peace with himself, a man untroubled by insecurities, uncertainties, or the awful burdens of office. He has had dark moments, for example when Marines were dying in Lebanon, or when the nation anguished over Americans held hostage by terrorist groups. His closest aides admit he has been angered at the press or at congressional foes or by family spats with his son Michael or his daughter Patti. But the White House has kept his torment private.
By seeming at home in the presidency, Reagan helped build his political success, for with his easy manner, Reagan has dispelled the common perception of the misery and isolation of the presidency. Carter worked like an indentured servant; Reagan has enjoyed the presidency and let people see his enjoyment. He has worked relatively short hours, taken naps and joked about it, then turned his back on the White House, gone off to his ranch to ride horses and chop wood, and treated the presidency as a job, not as a ball and chain. Initially, his imagemakers were skittish about his light schedule—for fear it showed his superficiality—but as time wore on they made a point of having the public see Reagan’s relaxed nine-to-five style. It made him seem less “Washington,” less power hungry, and less menacing, say, than Johnson or Nixon. But Reagan’s laid-back style came to haunt him in the imbroglio of his covert dealings with Iran; he looked gullible and foolish as well as duplicitous, his judgment a victim of his emotions and a conspiratorial staff.
Sheer likability, never to be underestimated in the image game, has been a great asset to Ronald Reagan. As Nancy Reagan’s Gridiron Club venture showed, news coverage of a public figure can be affected by the personal feelings of the press corps. Popular, likable presidents such as Eisenhower and Reagan have fared better with the press than others, such as Johnson, whom White House reporters saw as too raw and manipulative; Nixon, whom many reporters distrusted and disliked; or Carter, who was ultimately regarded as meanspirited and holier-than-thou. Such feelings, which most reporters try to suppress in the interest of fair reporting, are more important than political ideology in affecting how the press treats political figures.
Obviously, Reagan’s sense of humor in personal crises has endeared him not only to reporters but to millions who viewed him from afar. He was showered with public acclaim, admiration, and affection for his gallantry after being shot in 1981. To the doctors preparing to remove the bullet, he cracked, “Hope you guys are all Republicans.” To his wife: “Honey, I forgot to duck.” To a nurse: “Does Nancy know about us?” His one-liners made him an instant folk hero. They gave the country a reassuring glimpse of the president when his life was in danger; and that transformed his image. It was a turning point for Reagan: Overnight, he went from being a new president on trial to being the nation’s heroic and sympathetic leader. That early impression of gallantry was reconfirmed four years later, when Reagan underwent surgery for a cancerous polyp and came out joking that he was going to send his surgeon to Congress to operate on the budget. As for the cancer, he said with the understated valor of a combat hero, “Well, I’m glad it’s all out.”
What came across was a personal model of courage and vigor; the sympathy he generated paid large political dividends. Even his flubs and misstatements, like Eisenhower’s garbled syntax, added to his common touch. They made him human. They drove political opponents and the press wild, but ordinary people seemed unconcerned. The voters do not want their leaders to appear too much smarter than they are. To many people, Jimmy Carter was too smart for his own political good.
Other presidents have paid for inconsistencies and deceptions. Johnson was regarded as Machiavellian, Nixon as devious, Carter as wishy-washy. Reagan has been far from constant. He has flip-flopped on tax increases, on balancing the budget, on veto threats, on dealing with Moscow and Peking. But until he tripped up by secretly selling arms to Iran, Reagan got away with zigzags, backdowns, and compromises, by acting as if nothing had happened. Most voters seem not to regard it as hypocritical that he could preach the virtues of religion and prayer in school and not be a regular churchgoer; or that he could limn the old-time values of family, though Mrs. Reagan admitted to a three-year “estrangement” in the family; his adopted son, Michael, protested that Reagan had not seen his granddaughter until she was nearly two; his daughter Patti printed painful cameos of her parents in her novel, Home Front.
Such pretense might make other leaders feel a shade guilty, but Reagan always seems convinced of his own fundamental innocence—and that self-perception gives power to his salesmanship. Reagan is like a method actor: He feels whatever part he’s playing—peace president, military-buildup president, tax-cutting president, tax-increasing president, foe of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, or secret bargainer with Iran. Reagan immerses himself in whatever he is saying at the moment, even if that contradicts his lifelong beliefs, and he always finds some way in his own mind to explain away the contradictions.
For decades, he denounced Red China but came home from his presidential visit there extolling the “so-called Communists” in Peking, as if their ideology had never been his bugaboo. He can demand a constitutional amendment to balance the budget and blithely submit budgets with $150 billion deficits. He can switch from economic sanctions against the Soviet Union to subsidizing cheap wheat exports to Moscow and talk—even within his inner circle—as if he had made no change in policy. Whatever Reagan is selling, he preaches like a true believer, and his appearance of sincerity makes him a powerful salesman.
Those around Reagan see a paradox. The popular myth about television is that it exposes character. Through the tube, the public feels it knows politicians such as Reagan, though some close assoc
iates and family members find him remote and hard to know. He shies away from intimacy, letting no one but Nancy Reagan get really close, his old political friends have told me. They say he cannot deal well with strong emotions, perhaps because of a painful childhood. In private, some Reagan intimates express their surprise and hurt at how readily Reagan has let some of his oldest, closest lieutenants leave him: Mike Deaver, Lyn Nofziger, Bill Clark. When Deaver, who was like a son to the Reagans, resigned in mid-1985, Mrs. Reagan wept openly at his small farewell party. The president had many kind words and expressed heartfelt appreciation for Deaver, but he showed no strong emotions. And yet, when Reagan tells and retells old war stories about total strangers to large political rallies, his voice is sure each time to thicken and choke at the punch line.
George Tames, a New York Times photographer who has covered every president since Franklin Roosevelt, called Reagan the hardest to know. “Reagan is onstage all the time,” Tames remarked. “He looks immaculate, like he wears two suits a day. Reagan’s the only one of them all [the presidents] who’s been onstage constantly. You could always count on the others relaxing, one on one. He never took his coat off with me. He never calls me by my first name. All the others except Roosevelt did. I can’t get to know him.”38
That probably sounds odd coming from a White House regular, since Reagan makes a point of familiarity with the press at his news conferences, calling on Helen, Sam, Andrea, Bill, or Mike (Helen Thomas of UPI, Sam Donaldson of ABC, Andrea Mitchell of NBC, Bill Plante of CBS, Mike Putzel of Associated Press). He has made them characters in the presidential TV serial. The image of the press family helps project Reagan as a patient father figure dealing with unruly children—a very subtle but effective put-down. But few viewers realize that while Reagan genuinely knows a handful of reporters by name, he relies on a seating chart to recognize most others. If seats get mixed up, Reagan calls people by the wrong names—still affecting familiarity.
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