An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  41

  ONE THING I NEVER got comfortable with as president was riding in motorcades. Anytime we drove anywhere, we went in a convoy behind a police escort, and every time we crossed an intersection against the lights and I looked out and saw long lines of cars backed up on the side streets, I felt guilty because I knew how those people in the cars must feel having to wait like that.

  How much our motorcade could disrupt traffic really became evident to me when we went to New York City in the middle of March, about two months after the inauguration. After flying from Washington to LaGuardia Airport, we helicoptered around the Statue of Liberty and saw the spectacular skyline of lower Manhattan, landed on a downtown helipad, and then sped through the city in the usual motorcade while the police closed off all the intersections. Ever since the presidential campaign, we’d had police escorts, but something was different about this trip I wasn’t prepared for: The streets were lined with crowds of people all the way to the Waldorf Astoria, as if New York were having a holiday parade. Suddenly, I realized I was the parade. As we passed the crowds, people cheered and clapped and I wore out my arms waving back to them. It was an extremely humbling experience and that evening I wrote in my diary: “I keep thinking this can’t continue and yet their warmth and affection seems so genuine I get a lump in my throat. I pray constantly that I won’t let them down.”

  In New York, I did some speech-making to campaign for passage of the economic recovery program. On the second night we went to see Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller, two old friends from Hollywood, in Sugar Babies. At the final curtain, Mickey asked the audience to stay in place until we exited, and as we went up the aisle, the audience began singing “America the Beautiful”—more lump-in-throat time.

  The next night, we went to the Met to see the Joffrey Ballet. Our son Ron had flown in from the road company for the performance. I think I held my breath for the whole show, but he was great and didn’t need any fatherly prayers. He had a grace that reminded me of Fred Astaire, an extra flair that made what he was doing look easy.

  When I got back to Washington, the pending and difficult question of how to deal with the growing flood of Japanese car imports at a time when our economy needed every bit of help it could find took center stage and came to a head at a meeting at the White House on March 19. The special task force I’d appointed under Drew Lewis to review the problem wanted to impose mandatory quotas on the Japanese. But several members of the cabinet, including Don Regan, the treasury secretary, and David Stockman, head of the Office of Management and Budget, strongly opposed it. George Shultz, who chaired a volunteer economic advisory committee, was strongly in opposition. They argued that it would violate our commitment to free enterprise and free trade.

  I agreed with them but kept quiet. In Washington, I was following the same practice I had followed in Sacramento: I invited all the members of the cabinet to give me their views on all sides of an issue (everything except the “political ramifications” of my decision) and sometimes, as in this case, the result was a heated debate—and if I was leaning a certain way, I tried not to tip my advisors off, to ensure that I’d hear all sides.

  As I listened to the debate, I wondered if there might be a way in which we could maintain the integrity of our position in favor of free trade while at the same time doing something to help Detroit and ease the plight of its thousands of laid-off assembly-line workers.

  The Japanese weren’t playing fair in the trade game. But I knew what quotas might lead to; I didn’t want to start an all-out trade war, so I asked if anyone had any suggestions for striking a balance between the two positions. George Bush spoke up:

  “We’re all for free enterprise, but would any of us find fault if Japan announced without any request from us that they were going to voluntarily reduce their export of autos to America?”

  I knew the Japanese read our newspapers and must know about the sentiment building up in Congress for quotas on their cars; I also knew there must be some apprehension in Tokyo that, once Congress imposed quotas on automobiles, there was a good possibility it might try to limit imports of other Japanese products.

  I liked George’s idea and told the cabinet I’d heard enough and would make a decision, but didn’t tell them what it was. After the meeting, I met privately with Secretary of State Al Haig and told him to call our ambassador in Tokyo, Mike Mansfield, and have him pass the word informally to Japanese Foreign Minister Masa-yoshi Ito, who was scheduled to make a visit to Washington in a few days, that pressure was building in Congress for passage of a bill establishing mandatory quotas. I told him to suggest that an announcement of a voluntary cutback by Japan might head it off.

  During this one-on-one meeting with Haig, I was surprised by his mood. He claimed other people in the administration were trying to undercut him on matters of foreign policy, which he said was his territory, and he didn’t want others interfering with it. He was very upset and angry. As he would do on later occasions, he pounded the table and seemed ready to explode. The intensity of his attitude surprised and worried me, but he was placated when I agreed to meet with him privately three times a week to talk about foreign affairs and I gave him my assurance that no one was about to usurp his role in the administration.

  Two nights later, Nancy and I made our first trip to Ford’s Theater in Washington to attend a black-tie gala to raise money for support of this historic building. During the performance, I looked up at the presidential box above the stage where Abe Lincoln had been sitting the night he was shot and felt a curious sensation. As you look up there, you can’t help but run those events of 1865 through your mind: You imagine the figure of John Wilkes Booth bursting through the door at the rear of the box, shooting the president, then leaping onto the stage and running away before a stunned audience.

  It occurred to me that until that night probably no one had ever given much thought to the possibility someone might want to kill the president. As I watched the show, I thought about all the security provided Nancy and me and the children and how different things were now. Looking up at the flag-draped box, though, I thought that even with all the Secret Service protection we now had, it was probably still possible for someone who had enough determination to get close enough to a president to shoot him.

  Three days after the night out at Ford’s Theater, Foreign Minister Ito of Japan was brought into the Oval Office for a brief meeting to pave the way for a formal state visit later in the spring of Japanese Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki. I told him that our Republican administration firmly opposed import quotas but that strong sentiment was building in Congress among Democrats to impose them.

  “I don’t know whether I’ll be able to stop them,” I said. “But I think if you voluntarily set a limit on your automobile exports to this country, it would probably head off the bills pending in Congress and there wouldn’t be any mandatory quotas.”

  Not long after the meeting with Foreign Minister Ito, I got a call from Al Haig, who was extremely upset over a decision I’d made naming George Bush as chairman of a special group within the National Security Council that would help me manage affairs during an international crisis. In the past, the president’s national security advisor had generally served as chairman of the White House crisis management team. But Haig didn’t like or trust National Security Advisor Richard Allen. I had discussed the matter with the top three staff people in the White House, Jim Baker, Ed Meese, and Mike Deaver, and we’d come up with the plan giving the responsibility to George Bush. Not only would that deal with Haig’s unhappiness over Allen; I also thought that it was prudent—and important for the country—for the vice-president to play as large a role in the affairs of the administration as possible; I didn’t want George, in the words of Nelson Rockefeller, simply to be “standby equipment.”

  Now Haig was on the phone going through the roof, saying he didn’t want the vice-president to have anything to do with international affairs; it was his jurisdiction, he said, and he told me
he was thinking of resigning. I couldn’t understand why he was so upset, and I told him he had nothing to worry about.

  I thought he was seeing shadows in a mirror. No one wanted to invade his turf. But early the next morning, I was awakened by a call from Mike Deaver, who said Haig had raised a fuss with the staff the night before over George’s new assignment and was threatening to submit his resignation that day.

  I invited Haig to the Oval Office at eight forty-five, expecting his offer of resignation and intending to try to talk him out of it. But when he arrived, he was cool-headed and didn’t say anything about resigning; instead, he handed me a statement that he wanted me to issue declaring that he alone was in charge of foreign affairs. The statement was much too broad for me to accept, but after he left I drafted a statement of my own, short and simple, that made clear the obvious: that the secretary of state was my primary advisor on foreign affairs.

  That seemed to satisfy him, and with the Haig issue behind us, I continued trying to enlist support on Capitol Hill for my economic recovery program; besides the usual schedule of meetings and conferences and telephone calls to congressmen, there was a banquet of television and radio correspondents at which Rich Little did a pretty fair imitation of me holding a press conference; a luncheon honoring members of baseball’s Hall of Fame, where I met players like Bob Lemon and Billy Herman whom I’d covered as a sports announcer; and on Saturday, March 28, the annual Gridiron Dinner, where reporters poked fun at presidents, congressmen, and other members of the Washington scene, and I got the chance to poke fun right back.

  Sunday was a beautiful spring day and in the morning we went to St. John’s Episcopal Church, the house of worship not far from the White House that’s called “the President’s Church.” The choir from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis sang beautifully and looked and sounded so right that I felt everyone in the church that morning must have felt very good about their country.

  The main event on my schedule the following day was a speech to the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Conference at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Washington. Although I spent most of that Sunday afternoon working on my speech, I thought a lot about those people I’d seen in church, the future of America, and the “MAD” policy.

  The three initials stood for “mutual assured destruction,” three deceptively dull words describing our country’s only shield against nuclear annihilation. It was the name applied to the strategic policy of both of the world’s superpowers. The United States and the Soviet Union each kept a big enough stockpile of nuclear weapons at the ready that, if one attacked, the other would still have enough to annihilate the attacker. It would be like two spiders in a bottle locked in a suicidal fight until both were dead.

  As president, I carried no wallet, no money, no driver’s license, no keys in my pockets—only secret codes that were capable of bringing about the annihilation of much of the world as we knew it.

  On inauguration day, after being briefed a few days earlier on what I was to do if ever it became necessary to unleash American nuclear weapons, I’d taken over the greatest responsibility of my life—of any human being’s life. From then on, wherever I went, I carried a small plastic-coated card with me, and a military aide with a very specialized job was always close by. He or she (I was pleased to be able to appoint the first female officer to this position) carried a small bag everyone referred to as “the football.” It contained the directives for launching our nuclear weapons in retaliation for a nuclear attack on our country. The plastic-coated card, which I carried in a small pocket in my coat, listed the codes I would issue to the Pentagon confirming that it was actually the president of the United States who was ordering the unleashing of our nuclear weapons.

  The decision to launch the weapons was mine alone to make.

  We had many contingency plans for responding to a nuclear attack. But everything would happen so fast that I wondered how much planning or reason could be applied in such a crisis. The Russians sometimes kept submarines off our East Coast with nuclear missiles that could turn the White House into a pile of radioactive rubble within six or eight minutes.

  Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to unleash Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?

  There were some people in the Pentagon who thought in terms of fighting and winning a nuclear war. To me it was simple common sense: A nuclear war couldn’t be won by either side. It must never be fought. But how do we go about trying to prevent it and pulling back from this hair-trigger existence?

  During the spring of 1981, the arms race was moving ahead at a pell-mell pace based on the MAD policy. Investing a far larger portion of their national wealth on arms than we were, the Soviets were piling new weapon upon new weapon. We couldn’t let them get ahead of us—so, in response to the Soviet threat, we were beginning a top-to-bottom modernization of our nuclear forces and getting ready to send a new family of intermediate-range weapons to Europe to help our NATO allies defend themselves against Soviet missiles.

  There didn’t seem any end to it, no way out of it.

  Advocates of the MAD policy believed it had served a purpose: The balance of terror it created, they said, had prevented nuclear war for decades. But as far as I was concerned, the MAD policy was madness. For the first time in history, man had the power to destroy mankind itself. A war between the superpowers would incinerate much of the world and leave what was left of it uninhabitable forever.

  There had to be some way to remove this threat of annihilation and give the world a greater chance of survival. That Sunday afternoon, as I went back and forth from these thoughts and working on my speech for Monday, I reflected that in the past, man had been able to devise a defense against every other weapon thrown against him. I wondered if it might be possible to develop a defense against missiles other than the fatalistic acceptance of annihilation that was implicit under the MAD policy. We couldn’t continue this nervous standoff forever, I thought; we couldn’t lower our guard, but we had to begin the process of peace. As the afternoon of March 29 passed, I spent a lot of time wondering what I could do to get the process started.

  42

  I PUT ON A BRAND-NEW blue suit for my speech to the Construction Trades Council. But for reasons I’ll never know, I took off my best wristwatch before leaving the White House and put on an old one Nancy had given me that I usually wore only when I was doing chores outside at the ranch.

  My speech at the Hilton Hotel was not riotously received—I think most of the audience were Democrats—but at least they gave me polite applause.

  After the speech, I left the hotel through a side entrance and passed a line of press photographers and TV cameras. I was almost to the car when I heard what sounded like two or three firecrackers over to my left—just a small fluttering sound, pop, pop, pop.

  I turned and said, “What the hell’s that?”

  Just then, Jerry Parr, the head of our Secret Service unit, grabbed me by the waist and literally hurled me into the back of the limousine. I landed on my face atop the arm rest across the backseat and Jerry jumped on top of me. When he landed, I felt a pain in my upper back that was unbelievable. It was the most excruciating pain I had ever felt.

  “Jerry,” I said, “get off, I think you’ve broken one of my ribs.”

  “The White House,” Jerry told the driver, then scrambled off me and got on the jump seat and the car took off.

  I tried to sit up on the edge of the seat and was almost paralyzed by pain. As I was straightening up, I had to cough hard and saw that the palm of my hand was brimming with extremely red, frothy blood.

  “You not only broke a rib, I think the rib punctured my lung,” I said.

  Jerry looked at the bubbles in the frothy blood and told the driver to head for George Washington University Hospital instead of the White House.

  By then my handkerchief was sopped with blood and he handed me his. Suddenly, I realized I could barel
y breathe. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get enough air. I was frightened and started to panic a little. I just was not able to inhale enough air.

  We pulled up in front of the hospital emergency entrance and I was first out of the limo and into the emergency room. A nurse was coming to meet me and I told her I was having trouble breathing. Then all of a sudden my knees turned rubbery. The next thing I knew I was lying face up on a gurney and my brand-new pin-striped suit was being cut off me, never to be worn again.

  The pain near my ribs was still excruciating, but what worried me most was that I still could not get enough air, even after the doctors placed a breathing tube in my throat. Every time I tried to inhale, I seemed to get less air. I remember looking up from the gurney, trying to focus my eyes on the square ceiling tiles, and praying. Then I guess I passed out for a few minutes.

  I was lying on the gurney only half-conscious when I realized that someone was holding my hand. It was a soft, feminine hand. I felt it come up and touch mine and then hold on tight to it. It gave me a wonderful feeling. Even now I find it difficult to explain how reassuring, how wonderful, it felt.

  It must have been the hand of a nurse kneeling very close to the gurney, but I couldn’t see her. I started asking, “Who’s holding my hand? . . . Who’s holding my hand?” When I didn’t hear any response, I said, “Does Nancy know about us?”

  Although I tried afterward to learn who the nurse was, I was never able to find her. I had wanted to tell her how much the touch of her hand had meant to me, but I never was able to do that.

  Once I opened my eyes and saw Nancy looking down at me.

  “Honey,” I said, “I forgot to duck,” borrowing Jack Dempsey’s line to his wife the night he was beaten by Gene Tunney for the heavyweight championship.

  Seeing Nancy in the hospital gave me an enormous lift. As long as I live I will never forget the thought that rushed into my head as I looked up into her face. Later I wrote it down in my diary: “I pray I’ll never face a day when she isn’t there . . . of all the ways God had blessed me, giving her to me was the greatest—beyond anything I can ever hope to deserve.”