An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  I had admired Haig very much and respected his performance as commander of NATO, and had selected him as my secretary of state because of this record and his experience in Washington during the Nixon years. But he had a toughness and aggressiveness about protecting his status and turf that caused problems within the administration. On the day I was shot, George Bush was out of town and Haig immediately came to the White House and claimed he was in charge of the country. Even after the vice-president was back in Washington, I was told he maintained that he, not George, should be in charge. I didn’t know about this when it was going on. But I heard later that the rest of the cabinet was furious. They said he acted as if he thought he had the right to sit in the Oval Office and believed it was his constitutional right to take over—a position without any legal basis.

  In any case, I told Al that, despite his objections, I wanted to lift the grain embargo and that I was going to send a personal letter to Brezhnev aimed at reaching him as a human being, along with a more formal letter letting him know that, despite lifting the grain embargo, the United States had a new attitude of realism toward the Soviet Union. The State Department took my draft of the letter and rewrote it, diluting some of my personal thoughts with stiff diplomatic language that made it more impersonal than I’d wanted. I didn’t like what they’d done to it, so I revised their revisions and sent the letter largely as I had originally written it; on April 24, 1981, two letters went out to Brezhnev from me. In the formal message, I questioned “the USSR’s unremitting and comprehensive military build up over the past fifteen years, a build up which in our view exceeds purely defensive requirements and carries disturbing implications of a search for military superiority.” Putting him on notice that we weren’t going to accept any longer the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, I criticized repeated statements by responsible Soviet officials suggesting that the form of a country’s political, social and economic system bestows upon the Soviet Union special rights, indeed, duties, to preserve a particular form of government. I must inform you frankly and emphatically that the United States rejects any such declaration as contrary to the charter of the United Nations and other international instruments. Claims of special “rights,” however defined, cannot be used to infringe upon the sovereign rights of any country to determine its own political, economic and social institutions.

  Alluding to a possible U.S.-Soviet summit, I said it would have to be preceded by “careful preparations and a propitious international climate. I do not believe that these conditions exist at present and so my preference would be for postponing a meeting of such importance to a later day.”

  This is the text of the handwritten letter I also sent to Moscow:

  Mr. President, in writing the attached letter I am reminded of our meeting in San Clemente a decade or so ago. I was Governor of California at the time and you were concluding a series of meetings with President Nixon. Those meetings had captured the imagination of all the world. Never had peace and good will among men seemed closer at hand.

  When we met I asked if you were aware that the hopes and aspirations of millions and millions of people throughout the world were dependent on the decisions that would be reached in your meetings.

  You took my hand in both of yours and assured me that you were aware of that and that you were dedicated with all your heart and mind to fulfilling those hopes and dreams.

  The people of the world still share that hope. Indeed, the peoples of the world, despite differences in racial and ethnic origin, have very much in common. They want the dignity of having some control over their individual destiny. They want to work at the craft or trade of their own choosing and to be fairly rewarded. They want to raise their families in peace without harming anyone or suffering harm themselves. Government exists for their convenience, not the other way around. If they are incapable, as some would have us believe, of self-government, then where among them do we find people who are capable of governing others?

  Is it possible that we have permitted ideology, political and economic philosophies, and governmental policies to keep us from considering the very real, everyday problems of peoples? Will the average Soviet family be better off or even aware that the Soviet Union has imposed a government of its own choice on the people of Afghanistan? Is life better for the people of Cuba because the Cuban military dictate who shall govern the people of Angola?

  It is often implied that such things have been made necessary because of territorial ambitions of the United States; that we have imperialistic designs and thus constitute a threat to your own security and that of the newly emerging nations. There not only is no evidence to support such a charge, there is solid evidence that the United States, when it could have dominated the world with no risk to itself, made no effort whatsoever to do so.

  When World War II ended, the United States had the only undamaged industrial power in the world. Our military might was at its peak—and we alone had the ultimate weapon; the nuclear weapon, with the unquestioned ability to deliver it anywhere in the world. If we had sought world domination then, who could have opposed us? But the United States followed a different course—one unique in all the history of mankind. We used our power and wealth to rebuild the war-ravaged economies of the world, including those nations who had been our enemies. May I say there is absolutely no substance to charges that the United States is guilty of imperialism or attempts to impose its will on other countries by use of force.

  Mr. President, should we not be concerned with eliminating the obstacles which prevent our people from achieving their most cherished goals? And isn’t it possible some of these obstacles are born of government objectives which have little to do with the real needs and desires of our people?

  It is in this spirit, in the spirit of helping the people of both our nations, that I have lifted the grain embargo. Perhaps this decision will contribute to creating the circumstances which will lead to the meaningful and constructive dialogue which will assist us in fulfilling our joint obligation to find lasting peace.

  A few days later, I got an icy reply from Brezhnev. He said he, too, was against making immediate plans for a summit, repudiated everything I’d said about the Soviet Union, blamed the United States for starting and perpetuating the Cold War, and then said we had no business telling the Soviets what they could or could not do anywhere in the world.

  So much for my first attempt at personal diplomacy.

  Meanwhile, other important items were popping up on my foreign policy plate: After deciding to sell American-made airborne warning and control system aircraft—the AWACS planes—to Saudi Arabia to help with its defenses in the Middle East, we touched off a firestorm of protest from many elements of the American Jewish community that would last for months. And we continued quiet negotiations aimed at deflating the great pressure building up in Congress to slap a quota on Japanese car imports.

  On May 1, this policy paid off when Japan announced it was going to voluntarily limit its exports of motor vehicles to this country to 1.68 million a year. As I expected, the announcement defused the momentum in Congress to impose quotas, which could have been the first shot of a serious international trade war.

  At noon on the day Japan made the announcement of its export cutback, the Prince of Wales came to the White House for an informal visit prior to a dinner Nancy was planning for him and a few guests the following evening. I liked Prince Charles very much; he’d first won me over years before when I’d seen him interviewed on his twenty-first birthday and a television interviewer kept asking him to say what it was like growing up in a royal household and having a mother who was the queen of England.

  “Well,” he said, “I don’t know, I just call her Mummy.”

  When the prince arrived in the Oval Office, he was, as usual, charming, full of life, and full of energy. When a White House steward asked him whether he wanted coffee or tea, he asked for tea, and they brought in a tray and set it beside him.

  After a few minutes, I noticed the
prince was staring rather quizzically down into his cup, and I thought he seemed a little troubled. We kept on talking and it was all very cordial, but I knew something was bothering him, although I couldn’t figure it out. He just kept holding his cup up and looking into it, then eventually put it down on the table without drinking anything. All this time, I’d kept eyeing him, trying to determine what was wrong without making him feel uncomfortable. Finally, it dawned on me: The ushers had given him a cup containing a tea bag. I thought, well, maybe he had never seen one before.

  After my discovery, I decided to keep quiet and not embarrass him, but I brought it up over dinner the following night and he joked about it. “I just didn’t know what to do with the little bag,” he said.

  45

  AFTER THE SHOOTING AT THE HILTON, the Secret Service wouldn’t let me go to church as often, and I had to pass up many public events presidents normally attended, like the annual Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn. When I did go out, the Secret Service made me wear my iron underwear more often. It’s hard to feel comfortable or well dressed in a bulletproof vest, especially when you’re standing beneath a hot sun. But I took their advice.

  One of the first things I asked the doctors at George Washington University Hospital after the shooting was whether I’d be able to ride again. They assured me I could. A month after my discharge, they gave their approval for a Memorial Day weekend visit to the ranch and said I could go riding if I took it easy.

  After almost a year on the campaign trail, almost five months in Washington, and only a brief visit to the ranch in February, I wondered as we flew across the country if Rancho del Cielo would have lost its old magic. But I needn’t have worried. The weather was beautiful and so was the ranch. Its wild scenery and solitude only reminded us how much we loved it and how much we had missed our life in California.

  Over the next eight years, the ranch was a sanctuary for us like none other: Every time we lifted away from Andrews Air Force Base aboard Air Force One and headed westward, it began casting a spell over us. I always took some work with me, but at Rancho del Cielo, Nancy and I could put on our boots and old clothes, recharge our batteries, and be reminded of where we had come from. And I always got a few hours on a horse to do some thinking.

  On that first trip after the shooting, we rediscovered a freedom we never had anymore in the White House: In the same pattern we usually followed on subsequent trips, we rode in the morning and, after lunch, I cut brush and did other chores; then, after some office work, Nancy and I had dinner by the fire.

  Because it was in wild country, the ranch had its share of wildlife; once or twice people have seen bear tracks on the ranch, all of which made some of the Secret Service agents a little nervous. They established several security posts around the ranch, including one up the hill above the house, where an agent could keep an eye on it. One day, an agent came down from this post and his eyes were as wide as saucers. He’d been sitting on his camp stool watching the house when a big mountain lion had strolled past him only a few feet away; he said he just sat still and let it pass.

  “Does that happen a lot?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, “that’s a little unusual.”

  I’ve never liked hunting, simply killing an animal for the pleasure of it, but I have always enjoyed and collected unusual guns; I love target shooting, and have always kept a gun for protection at home. As I had done when I was governor, I sometimes did some target shooting with the Secret Service agents who accompanied us to the ranch, and occasionally managed to amaze them with my marksmanship. We have a small pond on the ranch that sometimes attracts small black snakes, and every now and then, one would stick its head up out of the water for a second or two. After I’d see one, I’d go into the house and come back with a .38 revolver, go into a little crouch, and wait for the next snake to rise up. Then I’d shoot.

  Well, since I was thirty feet or more from the lake, the Secret Service agents were shocked that I was able to hit the snake every time. They’d shake their heads and say to each other, “How the hell does he do it?”

  What they didn’t know was that my pistol was loaded with shells containing bird shot—like a shotgun—instead of a conventional slug. I kept my secret for a while, but finally decided to fess up and tell them about the bird shot.

  • • •

  On the Sunday after we returned from our Memorial Day trip to Santa Barbara, James J. (Jack) Kilpatrick, the newspaper columnist, invited Nancy and me to his home in Virginia for lunch. The security people gave their okay, and that Sunday afternoon I discovered another of the more enjoyable perquisites of being president.

  We lifted off from the South Lawn aboard a Marine helicopter at about noon on a bright, beautiful spring day, and twenty minutes later were landing a couple hundred yards from Jack’s home in rural Virginia. He was waiting to meet us, and on the way to the house he pointed out several men who were busily working in a tent.

  “Your fellows have been here all week installing your phones,” he said.

  “What do you mean, my fellows?” I asked.

  “They told me they work for the White House and wherever you go, you have to be able to talk to anyone in the world—in case there’s an emergency.”

  It was the first time I’d heard that. Later, I discovered that even a dinner invitation to a friend’s home in Washington meant White House phones would have to be installed and operating there when we arrived. But that Sunday morning, it was news to me. As we walked toward the house, Jack told me more about his conversation with the people from “Signal,” the White House communications agency. He said he had questioned their boast of being able to reach anyone in the world from the temporary phone setup. According to Jack, they said: “Okay, name someone.”

  Jack named his son, a marine who was on guard duty at an embassy in Africa. In less than five minutes, he said, they had his son on the line and Jack and his wife got to talk to him.

  Then the man from Signal, possibly with a little sense of pride, said: “Anyone else?”

  “Yes, I have a son who is a quartermaster on the USS Pratt,” a destroyer in the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, Jack said.

  A few minutes later, however, the Signal people told him that they were unable to reach Jack’s other son, and Jack said, “But you said you could reach anyone anywhere in the world.”

  Yes, normally that was true, they said, but the USS Pratt was on maneuvers, and as long as the maneuvers were going on, only the president could reach them.

  By the time Jack had finished his story, we were inside the big farmhouse and starting to meet the other luncheon guests; among them was the young wife of the quartermaster who was on a destroyer participating in maneuvers somewhere in the Mediterranean. She was a lovely young woman and she mentioned that she hadn’t seen her husband in months. I slipped away and went out to the Signal tent and said: “Is it really true that you can call anybody in the world from here, including Quartermaster Kilpatrick on the USS Pratt?”

  “Oh, yes sir,” one said.

  “Get him,” I said.

  I went back to the house and told the young lady she was going to get to talk to her husband. Understandably, she was ecstatic. Although the call didn’t come through until after Nancy and I had left the farm, we’d only been back in the White House ten or fifteen minutes when Jack and his daughter-in-law phoned to say she had spoken to her husband and was overjoyed.

  A couple of weeks later I received a letter from Quartermaster Kilpatrick. He thanked me for arranging the chance to speak to his wife, and went on to describe what it had been like that day in the Mediterranean. Because of the maneuvers, he said, the air had been full of radio traffic, ships talking to ships, admirals talking to admirals. Suddenly, a voice came over the air and said, “White House calling.” Another voice said, “What code is that?”

  Then a third voice spoke up: “Maybe that’s no code, maybe it’s the White House calling.”

  “Not even Holl
ywood could have silenced the airwaves as quickly as they were silenced,” young Kilpatrick wrote. “Then they came down and found a lowly quartermaster on a tin can and told him he was wanted on the phone.”

  The young sailor closed his letter by saying, “It was as if God had called the Vatican and asked for an altar boy by name.” He signed his letter, “Your altar boy.”

  There were more letters from him in the years that followed, always with the same sign-off. When Jack told me his son was going to reenlist and was about to be promoted, I arranged for both events to take place in the Oval Office in the presence of his family.

  On the Sunday evening after I had arranged for a young wife to speak to her husband in the middle of the Mediterranean, I told Nancy, “You know, some days, this job is more fun than others.”

  46

  DURING THOSE FIRST FEW MONTHS in the White House, there were certain things I wanted to accomplish as quickly as possible. Nothing was more important than getting the tax and spending cuts through Congress. They were essential to pull the nation out of its economic mess and beginning the modernization of our military forces. But I also wanted to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court.

  During the campaign, I pledged that “one of my first” nominations to the court would be a woman—but I felt it was long past the time when a woman should be sitting on the highest court in the land and intended to look for the most qualified woman I could find for my first nomination to the Supreme Court. We started looking for her during my first month in the White House, long before there was a vacancy to fill. There was no trouble compiling a list of potential candidates; not surprisingly, there were many outstanding female jurists sitting on the nation’s courts. In mid-spring, Justice Potter Stewart sent word to us that he wanted to retire at the end of the current term, giving me my opening. I asked William French Smith, the attorney general, to begin narrowing the search for a woman who was up to the challenge.