When I was young and a Democrat, the Democratic Party was the party of free trade and the Republicans were the party of high tariffs and protection. Today, it’s just the opposite. I’ve wondered how that happened. Back then, when the Republican Party came up with the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, it was unquestionably the party of big business and wanted to protect our industry, while the Democrats were closer to the working man and wanted free trade; today, it’s the Democrats in Congress who do most of the fighting on behalf of protectionist legislation and the Republicans who usually oppose it. I think the change probably came about because, as the labor unions that were affiliated with the Democrats became more powerful and the wages of their members grew higher, they decided that it was in their interest to limit competition from products made by foreign workers.
Although I intended to veto any bill Congress might pass imposing quotas on Japanese cars, I realized the problem wouldn’t go away even if I did. The genuine suffering of American workers and their families made this issue intensely charged politically. And the protectionists in Congress had some powerful ammunition on their side: There was plenty of evidence that the Japanese weren’t playing fair in the trade arena. They refused to let American farmers sell many U.S. agricultural products in Japan, and they imposed subtle but effective barriers that eliminated many of our other products from the Japanese marketplace: American cigarette companies, for example, could advertise their products only in English in Japan.
I believed in free but fair trade. I appointed a task force under Secretary of Transportation Drew Lewis to consider how we should deal with the flood of Japanese cars.
• • •
As we were launching our economic recovery program and beginning to lay the foundation for a new foreign policy during those first few weeks of 1981, I continued to discover my day-to-day office routine was surprisingly similar to what it had been during my time as governor, and I realized that governing a large industrial state was a good primary school for future presidents.
As Nancy and I settled into our new routine, she proved once again that, first and foremost, she’s a nest-builder.
Because the White House belongs to all the American people, Nancy said it should be the prettiest house in the land, and she set out to make it so. As far as I’m concerned—and thanks to her—it is. She began with the great Central Hall on the second floor that opened up from our living room. When she started out, its spectacular chandeliers shone on drab walls and dull, worn carpeting. It was a beautiful space badly in need of a renovation. The same was true of many other rooms in the White House.
With the help of Ted Graber, an old friend of ours who is a decorator, Nancy set out, as her first project, to recapture the lost beauty of the Central Hall. She saw to it that its floors were sanded and refinished for the first time in thirty years. For the first time in over fifty years, its mahogany doors were stripped and refinished; new carpeting was laid; the walls were painted and some were covered with lovely wallpaper. The result was stunning. Suddenly the drab hall had become a beautifully furnished parlor illuminated by those glittering chandeliers.
That was only the beginning: As time went on, virtually every room in the White House felt the touch of Nancy’s good taste and her determination to make it the most beautiful house in America.
She did it at no cost to the taxpayers. She went out and raised contributions from Americans who shared her dream of making the White House beautiful again. Once she got started, members of the White House staff began pitching in. A kind of treasure hunt began: Dipping into their memories, veteran staffers told her about pieces of fine furniture, mirrors, paintings, and so forth that had adorned the White House in years past and were gathering dust in nooks and crannies around Washington; Nancy went looking for them and brought the best back. She found a priceless English antique octagon desk, for example, that had been given to the White House when John F. Kennedy was president and was hidden under a layer of dust in a Quonset hut used by the government as a storage unit.
I’ll never forget one night when we were having dinner alone and a butler who had worked in the White House for over thirty years put Nancy’s meal down in front of her, then turned slightly and looked down the length of the Central Hall. “It’s beginning to look like the White House again,” he said very quietly.
Some people in the news media criticized Nancy’s work on the White House. I’ll never understand why. They gave the impression that she was extravagantly spending a fortune of public funds on unnecessary changes and new furnishings when in fact the furnishings were coming out of storage or being paid for by private contributions, not taxpayers.
A classic example was the new set of state china she ordered for the White House. Although it was frequently necessary at state dinners to serve well over a hundred guests, the staff told Nancy that, because of breakage and souvenir collectors, there weren’t enough matching dishes to go around for large groups. As a result they had to use unmatched sets of china whenever there was a sizable group at the White House for dinner. Knowing that the White House needed it, Nancy accepted the gift of a new set of White House china with 4,372 pieces that cost about $200,000. But taxpayers didn’t pay a cent for it; it was purchased by the Knapp Foundation and donated to the White House. Yet for some reason, some of Nancy’s critics still claim she bought the china; it was a bum rap, a backhanded way of getting at me.
One of the rooms in the White House that benefited from Nancy’s good taste was the Oval Office, which got some new paint, a new floor, and new carpeting. I did my part by hanging up a picture of Calvin Coolidge in the Cabinet Room.
I’d always thought of Coolidge as one of our most underrated presidents. He wasn’t a man with flamboyant looks or style, but he got things done in a quiet way. He came into office after World War I facing a mountain of war debt, but instead of raising taxes, he cut the tax rate and government revenues increased, permitting him to eliminate the wartime debt and proving that the principle mentioned by Ibn Khaldoon about lower tax rates meaning greater tax revenues still worked in the modern world.
• • •
Back when I was governor, I started having the same dream, often night after night: I’d find myself in a big old house that had huge rooms—not always the same house, but always one with huge rooms. Each time somebody would take me for a tour of the house; usually it was up for sale at a bargain price. I’d wander around, walk from room to room, stare up at high ceilings and great staircases and balconies above me. Although the house in my dream might be run-down, I’d see a great potential for it as a place to live, and I’d want to buy it. I guess there was a yen in me for a big house with big rooms, and the dream even spilled into my waking hours. After we bought the land near San Diego for a new ranch when I was governor, I told Nancy I wanted to build a ranch house with one really huge room, a combined living room and dining room. After we discovered that there wasn’t any water or electricity available on the land, and we had to sell it, we happily settled for our little adobe ranch house near Santa Barbara, but living in a house with big rooms was always on my mind and I still got the same dream year after year.
Funny thing: Once I moved to Washington, I never had that dream again. Somehow, living in the White House, with its ceilings that reached up to eighteen feet, cured me of my yen to live in a house with big rooms. I guess something inside me said: “You’ve made it.”
40
UNTIL I GOT TO THE WHITE HOUSE, I wrote all of my own speeches. But presidents make so many public appearances and have so many other demands on their schedule that I soon learned there wasn’t enough time to write every speech and I would need help from the White House staff. Because I’d always taken pride in my speeches, this didn’t sit well with me, but I didn’t have much choice.
I continued to write my more important speeches, but much of the time I would sit down with White House speech writers and go over the points I wanted to make during an upcoming talk, and then they woul
d present me with a draft to edit. I gave them copies of talks I’d made in the past so they would understand my style and technique, and I told them some of my rules for speaking: I prefer short sentences; don’t use a word with two syllables if a one-syllable word will do; and if you can, use an example. An example is better than a sermon.
Sometimes, speech writers write things that seem very eloquent on paper, but sound convoluted or stilted when you say them to an audience. “Use simple language,” I’d say. “Remember, there are people out there sitting and listening, they’ve got to be able to absorb what I’m saying.”
When I was a sports announcer, I learned something about communicating with people I never forgot. I had a group of friends in Des Moines and we all happened to go to the same barber. My friends would sometimes sneak away from their offices or other jobs when I was broadcasting a game and they’d get together at the barbershop to listen to it; after a while, I began to picture these friends down at the shop when I was on the air and, knowing they were there, I’d try to imagine how my words sounded to them and how they were reacting, and I’d adjust accordingly and spoke as if I was speaking personally to them. There was a specific audience out there I could see in my mind, and I sort of aimed my words at them.
After I did that, something funny happened: I started getting mail from people all over the Midwest who told me I sounded as if I was talking directly and personally to them.
Over the years I’ve always remembered that, and when I’m speaking to a crowd—or on television—I try to remember that audiences are made up of individuals and I try to speak as if I am talking to a group of friends . . . not to millions, but to a handful of people in a living room . . . or a barbershop.
I enjoyed trying to make my case to an audience, and have often been amazed at how little the people know about some of the things you believe need correcting. So, I suppose I became a kind of preacher. I’d preach in my speeches about the problems we had and try to get people roused and to say to their neighbors, “Hey, let’s do something about this.”
My years in show business and the experience of making thousands of speeches over the years probably taught me something about timing and cadence and how to reach an audience. Here’s my formula: I usually start with a joke or story to catch the audience’s attention; then I tell them what I am going to tell them, I tell them, and then I tell them what I just told them.
I’ve always found humor is a good way to get an audience’s attention, and for years I’ve been mentally collecting quotes and jokes to use in speeches. In fact, I’ve told some audience-catchers so often that they should be interred—like the story about a group of Christians who were about to be fed to a pack of lions in the Colosseum before a multitude that had gathered to witness the slaughter. As the hungry lions came charging onto the Colosseum floor, one of the Christians stepped forward and spoke to the lions and suddenly the beasts all lay down on the ground, leaving the Christians unharmed. The crowd was enraged and went wild, and people shouted that they were being cheated. Then the Roman Caesar sent for the man who had spoken to the lions and asked, “What did you say that made them act like that?” The Christian replied, “I just told them that after they ate, there would be speeches.”
For some speeches as president, I relied on my old private shorthand using four-by-six inch-cards. But for major speeches I usually used a teleprompter, which rolled the text of my speech across a screen that’s not seen by the audience and makes it appear that the speaker is looking directly at them. I always kept a copy of my speech handy in front of me, however, because I knew from experience that sometimes teleprompters went haywire.
I learned a trick with my contact lenses that helped me see not only my notes and the teleprompter but everything else in life. As I’ve noted, I am very nearsighted in both eyes and started wearing some of the first contact lenses made in America. But a few years ago, I discovered that if I wore only one lens, nature sort of took over and, in effect, gave me bifocals. I wear a contact lens on my left eye but nothing over my right eye; the corrective lens over my left eye gives me 20—20 vision for seeing things over distances, while my right eye takes over at shorter range and allows me to read fine print. Everything is in balance, equalized by nature.
Although I had a few problems when I was president with teleprompter machines that failed midway through a speech, I always managed to recover because of my rule of always having a written copy of the speech in front of me. However, I once learned that even having a speech in front of me couldn’t save me completely from embarrassing mistakes. One cold day, I put on my topcoat and went down to the South Lawn of the White House for a ceremony marking the start of a formal state visit by the president of Venezuela. When the time came for my opening remarks I took my speech out of my pocket and began to read it and found that if I did read it, I would be welcoming “His Royal Highness, the Grand Duke of Luxembourg.”
Stammering a bit, I couldn’t imagine why the staff had given me the wrong speech. Then, as I started to ad-lib, I remembered that the last time I had worn that topcoat was the month before, when we’d had a welcoming ceremony for the grand duke and duchess of Luxembourg. The correct speech was in my suit coat pocket, and so I reached in and found it and continued my welcome, albeit somewhat embarrassed.
We got into a routine during our first few months in the White House that lasted for the next eight years. Our day usually began about seven thirty, with Nancy and me having a light breakfast of fruit or juice, bran cereal, and decaffeinated coffee while we read The New York Times and The Washington Post. I might also have to study some homework left over from the night before. Then, a few minutes before nine, I’d take the elevator from the family quarters down to the ground floor of the White House and walk down the colonnade past the Rose Garden to the Oval Office, which was in the West Wing. Along the way, I passed the White House medical office, where the doctor was usually standing outside waiting to say hello.
At nine, there was a meeting with the vice-president and the top staff people to go over our current agenda and discuss any new problems that might have come up over the previous twenty-four hours. At nine thirty, my national security advisor joined us and briefed us on what had happened overnight in world affairs. The rest of the day was filled with meetings with cabinet members, staff people, foreign visitors, Congressmen, and other people, and sometimes a speech or other event outside the White House.
Especially during the early months, we spent a lot of time discussing appointments to key jobs in the administration. As I had done in California, I told the staff I wanted them to look for the best people we could find who were willing to leave their homes and their secure positions to come to Washington and give the country a hand. When I’d approach somebody about taking a job, I’d often say, “We don’t want people who want a job in government, we want people of accomplishment who have to be persuaded to come to work here.”
Lunch was usually a light meal of soup and fruit at my desk or in a small study off the Oval Office; on most Thursdays, lunch was with George Bush, when I brought him up to date on everything that was going on.
About five or so each afternoon—or whenever all the work was done—I went upstairs, peeled down and got into my trunks, then crossed the Central Hall to a guest bedroom that we’d converted into a gym with exercise equipment. I worked out a half hour or so, then took a shower. After that, unless there was a state dinner or other function on the agenda, Nancy and I usually went to the small study next to our bedroom and ate our dinner from portable tables while watching the evening’s three network television news shows tape-recorded by the White House staff.
After dinner, we both usually had more paperwork. Although I had not yet thought about writing this book, I decided to keep a daily journal while I was in the White House. This diary became in many ways the core of my recollections of the presidency that are contained in this book. Each night, I’d write a few lines about the day’s events, and Nancy would
do the same in her diary.
After all our homework was done, we’d go to bed with a novel or another book, or I might pick up a magazine about horses and riding, and we’d drop off to sleep about ten or eleven.
A month or so after the inauguration, we invited Tip O’Neill and his wife and a few other guests to have dinner with us in the family quarters. Nancy had already made a lot of progress in her efforts to renovate the second and third floors, and Tip said, “You know, I have been in and out of this place for twenty-seven years and I have never seen it look as beautiful as this.”
It was a warm, pleasant evening, and a good time was had by all. By the time it was over, I was certain Tip and I had worn out Nancy and the other guests by trying to top each other with Irish stories passed on by our fathers. I also thought I’d made a friend. But a day or two later, I picked up a newspaper and read a story in which Tip really lit into me personally because he didn’t like the economic recovery program and some of the cuts I proposed in spending.
Some of his remarks were pretty nasty. I was not only surprised but disappointed and also a little hurt. I called him and said, “Tip, I just read in the paper what you said about me yesterday. I thought we had a pretty fine relationship going . . .”
“Ol’ buddy,” Tip said, “that’s politics. After six o’clock we can be friends; but before six, it’s politics.”
Tip was an old-fashioned pol: He could be sincere and friendly when he wanted to be, but when it came to the things he believed in, he could turn off his charm and friendship like a light switch and become as bloodthirsty as a piranha. He was a politician and a Democrat to his roots. Until six o’clock, I was the enemy and he never let me forget it. So, after a while, whenever I’d run into him, whatever time it was, I’d say, “Look, Tip, I’m resetting my watch; it’s six o’clock.”
An American Life Page 25