Sincerely,
Ronald Reagan
Another was from a minister who lived in a New York suburb who’d received a Republican senatorial fund-raising letter over my signature. A computer, for some reason, had seen fit to send the minister a letter that started, “Dear Mr. God.”
“I’ve asked God for a great many things—particularly since getting this job—but never for a campaign contribution,” I wrote to the minister. “Maybe I’ll ask for help in correcting a greedy computer. At least the computer has raised its sights considerably; the only other experience of this kind was hearing from a lady whose prize show horse had received such a letter.”
When the weather allowed it, we went for a ride at Camp David, and on some weekends we opened the back gate and rode through the lush green national forest surrounding it, following an old road that passed the tumbledown stone ruins of a onetime summer hotel. During the early 1930s, the hotel had been owned by a young woman named Bessie Darling whose boyfriend was a local doctor. One night, according to her maid, who still lived nearby, the doctor, who had been told Bessie was dating someone else, arrived at the hotel and demanded to see the mistress. The maid went upstairs to tell Bessie, who was asleep alone in bed. But the doctor, apparently in a fit of jealousy and expecting to find another man, followed her up the stairs, holding a gun. Bessie got out of bed and reached for a gun she had tucked under her pillow for protection; she had the gun in her hand when her doctor-lover shot her dead in front of the maid. The doctor was arrested and claimed self-defense, but because the gun in Bessie’s hand hadn’t been cocked and the safety was still on, he was convicted and sent to prison.
During World War II, the old lodge was used as a safe house where President Roosevelt sometimes met secretly with foreign intelligence officers. Later, a fire all but destroyed the lodge and left only a pile of ruins. Everyone joked that the ruins were haunted by the young woman who died there, and every time I passed on a horse, I’d say, “Hi, Bessie.”
The one thing I always missed during our weekends at Camp David was a chance to go to church. But I prayed that God would realize that when I was out in the beautiful forest I felt as if I was in His temple.
The ghost of Bessie Darling, incidentally, wasn’t the only one we heard about while we were in Washington.
Not long after we moved into the White House, Nancy happened to be in the Lincoln Bedroom on the second floor, and she noticed that one of the pictures on the wall, one that was said to have been a favorite of Abe Lincoln, was turned, hanging crooked. Nancy started to straighten it and a maid who was in the room at the time said, “Oh, he’s been here again.”
Later, one of the White House butlers said that he had heard music coming from the direction of the piano in the hall, and as he approached, it stopped.
Well, we’d heard the legend that Lincoln’s ghost haunted parts of the second floor and took it all with a grain of salt. Then something happened involving our dog, Rex, that nearly made me join the believers.
One night we were sitting in the living room of the family quarters when Rex suddenly stared down the length of the Central Hall toward the other end of the building. His eyes were fixed straight ahead and his ears stood up as straight as two flagpoles.
I looked out and couldn’t see anything. Rex started barking loudly and edging slowly down the hall while I kept an eye on him. He got about halfway down the hall and then stopped and seemed to be looking at something in front of him. It made me wonder: Is there something out there I can’t see from my angle?
By now, I was really curious, so I went down to where he was and I said, “Come on, Rex, come on back,” trying to persuade him to return to the living room. But he just stayed where he was, feet firmly planted, with that same fixed stare in his eyes and still barking. By then, I was down the hall almost to the Lincoln Bedroom, so I turned and went into it. Rex got as far as the door and stopped; he stopped barking and, with a deep growl, started backing away from the door. When I tried to get him to come into the bedroom, he wouldn’t, and finally he just ran away from whatever it was that had scared him in the room.
Another time, I was working in my study at the other end of the hall when Rex suddenly got up on his hind legs—I never saw him do that before or since—and started walking around the room upright while he looked up at the ceiling. It was as if he was following something; he circled around my desk, then went to the other side of the room, then left. The next day, I told the Secret Service about what had happened. I’d been told by our intelligence people that at our embassy in Moscow the Russians used electronic beams to try to eavesdrop on our personnel and detect messages and letters printed out on electric typewriters, so I asked if Rex might have been responding to some sort of electronic signals. Our communications experts checked out the room, but they weren’t able to find anything unusual—except an infinitesimal hum from a television set left over from Lyndon Johnson’s days as president.
It all seemed pretty strange to me, but I should say right here: I’m not claiming that Abe Lincoln’s ghost is alive and well in the White House. I don’t want to start another myth.
As I’ve mentioned before, the myth about myself that has always bothered me most is that I am a bigot who somehow surreptitiously condones racial prejudice. By appointing more blacks to important positions in the California government than all the previous governors combined, I managed to dispel that image when I was in Sacramento. But for some reason, this myth stuck to me when I became president.
In Washington, we tried hard to eliminate waste and fraud from all government programs. I wanted to eliminate some programs because I didn’t believe the federal government should plan and control programs better left to state and local government; and I argued that any quota system based on race, religion, or color is immoral. Because of these policies, many black leaders claimed that, if I wasn’t a bigot, at the very least I was unsympathetic to the aspirations of blacks and other minorities.
Neither claim was true, and I think the record shows that. It is true that I opposed quotas in employment, education, and other areas. I consider quotas, whether they favor blacks or whites, men or women, to be a new form of discrimination as bad as the old ones. But our administration filed plenty of cases to correct civil rights abuses—as many as or more than any previous administration in history. Funding for enforcement of civil rights laws went up eighteen percent over my eight years in office. We took the lead in developing new civil rights legislation that strengthened the Fair Housing Act of 1968. And proportionally, blacks benefited more than any other racial group from our economic policies.
There is still too wide a gap between the average income of blacks in our country and that of other Americans. But the gap narrowed substantially during the eighties: Between November 1982 and November 1988, employment of blacks rose twenty-nine percent while the number of black families in the highest income bracket, $50,000 and over, increased nearly eighty-six percent. During this period, more than 2.6 million blacks were added to the civilian labor force, black employment in the nation’s highest-paid occupations jumped almost forty percent, and black unemployment fell from 20.2 percent at the beginning of the expansion to slightly more than ten percent.
During the previous administration, per capita income had increased 2.4 percent for whites and one percent for blacks. Between 1982 and 1988, it rose more than fourteen percent for whites and more than eighteen percent for blacks.
Whatever the reasons for the myth that I’m a racist, I blow my top every time I hear it. In 1987, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall gave a television interview in which he implied I was a racist, the worst in the White House since Herbert Hoover. A meeting was arranged between the two of us.
We spoke for an hour or so upstairs in the family quarters, and I literally told him my life story—how Jack and Nelle had raised me from the time I was a child to believe racial and religious discrimination was the worst sin in the world, how I’d experienced some
of it as the son of an Irish Catholic in a Protestant town; how as a sports announcer I’d been among the first in the country to campaign for integration of professional baseball; how I’d tried as governor to open up opportunities for blacks. That night, I think I made a friend.
As the adjutant of my Army Air Corps post during the war, I’d had the responsibility to call the parents of combat cameramen who had been killed in action and tell them their sons wouldn’t be returning from the war. I learned then that there is not much you can say to comfort people in such a situation, but you have to try. All I could do was tell them how much they had to be proud of, and that we had to believe God’s promise that one day we will all be united with our loved ones.
As president, I frequently had to speak to the families of men and women who had died in the service of their country. Because of what I’d done during the war, it wasn’t a new experience; but it was not one I ever got used to, and this responsibility, this weight on my shoulders, felt like a ton of iron.
On a tragic day in January 1986, after my usual staff meetings, I began the morning with a conference with congressional leaders from both parties at which I had a few words with Tip O’Neill over my continuing (and still frustrated) efforts to cut federal spending. Then Alaska Senator Frank Murkowski brought in a family of his constituents he wanted me to meet. Next came a briefing from Larry Speakes, the acting press secretary. I was scheduled to have lunch a few minutes later with the television network anchors prior to the State of the Union address that night. We were in the midst of the briefing when several members of the staff rushed in to tell me the news that the Challenger space shuttle had exploded after takeoff a few moments earlier.
We all headed for a television set and, like millions of other Americans that heartbreaking day, we watched the film of the explosion played and replayed and replayed again.
One of the astronauts on that flight, Christa McAuliffe, had come to the White House with other teachers who had wanted to go into space, and I’d announced that she had won the chance. For some reason, this—this added proximity to the tragedy—made it seem even closer and sadder to me.
After postponing the State of the Union speech, I made a five-minute address to the nation expressing our collective grief over the tragedy. I said we would not be deterred but continue to reach out to the heavens: “Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journey continue.”
The rest of the day, I had to go on with the balance of my schedule. It became one of the hardest days I ever had to spend in the Oval Office.
The following day, I telephoned the families of the seven astronauts and tried to say things that might give them comfort. Every one of them asked me to do what I could to ensure that the space program continued; they all said that that was what their loved ones would have wanted.
Three days later, as Washington was carpeted with fresh snow, Nancy and I took off from Andrews Air Force Base on a sad journey to the Johnson Spacecraft Center in Houston and a memorial service for the astronauts. It was a very difficult time for everyone, but especially for the families of the astronauts. Nancy and I sat between the wife of Francis Scobee, commander of the Challenger’s crew, and the wife of crew member Michael Smith. I found it difficult to say anything. All we could do was hug the families and try to hold back our tears.
The Challenger disaster was a catastrophe that bestowed pain and grief on all Americans. But after a lengthy and thorough investigation pinpointed the cause of the explosion, we picked up the space program, the space shuttle flew again, and we launched a new program aimed at establishing a permanent station in space. In time, I’m sure this project will advance not only our knowledge of the universe but the state of American technology as well, and it will ultimately produce an economic payoff, as yet unforeseen, on earth.
Now more than ever, I’m convinced that the seven who died aboard the Challenger would want us to continue the space program. At the memorial service, Mrs. Smith handed me a card on which her husband had written a few words by H. G. Wells which he had intended to read from space. They expressed better than I could why the seven astronauts of the Challenger had lifted off into a blue sky on the morning of January 28, 1986:
For man, there is no rest and no ending. He must go on—Conquest beyond Conquest. This little planet and its winds and ways, and all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him, and, at last out across the immensity to the stars. . . . And when he has conquered all the depths of space and all the mysteries of time—still he will be but beginning.
PART FOUR
The Middle East, Lebanon, Grenada
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AS EVERY PRESIDENT since World War II has learned, no region of the world presents America with more difficult, more frustrating, or more convoluted problems than the Middle East. It’s a region where hate has roots reaching back to the dawn of history. It’s a place where the senseless spilling of blood in the name of religious faith has gone on since biblical times, and where modern events are forever being shaped by momentous events of the past, from the Exodus to the Holocaust.
I never had any illusions that it would be easy, but when I came to the White House in 1981 I hoped to build on the peace process in the Middle East that had been started by Jimmy Carter at Camp David, where Egypt and Israel signed a treaty ending their thirty-year state of war. Although we had moments of progress, and at times we managed to bottle up at least temporarily the savagery that forever lies beneath the sands of the Middle East, the region was still an adders’ nest of problems when I moved out of the White House eight years later. And along the way it had been the source of some of my administration’s most difficult moments.
There are two intertwined conflicts in this cauldron of hate and strife—one over territory, the other over religion. Each has roots centuries old.
At one level, there is the dispute between Arab and Jew over the land called Palestine. More than three thousand years ago, at the time of Abraham and Moses, a great Hebrew civilization blossomed in this corner of the ancient Fertile Crescent and flourished until the Jews were overrun by successive armies of Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Arabs.
During the late nineteenth century, seeking refuge from the anti-Semitism common in much of Europe, some Jews—known as Zionists—began asserting the right to reclaim this ancient territory as a national homeland for Jews. In 1948, as the world mourned the monstrous crimes of the Holocaust, the Zionists achieved their goal and the State of Israel was born. But with the creation of the new homeland for Jews, the Arabs who had been occupying Palestine for centuries became a stateless people—and a volatile and frustrated force eager to reclaim land they considered their homeland.
The Arab world declared war on Israel, and three times, in 1948, 1967, and 1973, the tiny new country courageously drove back its enemies. Throughout its brief history, Israel has had to live in a perpetual state of war as the constant target of Palestinian terror, a small country fighting for the acceptance of neighbors sworn to destroy it.
This conflict alone would make the Middle East a tinderbox. But animosity, prejudice, and divisions among the Arabs have made it even more volatile. First, there are nationalistic and political rivalries among Arab tribes that go back centuries and make them a far from cohesive or politically united people. Then there are deep and bitter divisions among the Palestinians. Although the Palestine Liberation Organization, which wants an independent Palestinian state, claims to speak for all Palestinians, it is splintered into rival factions ranging from relatively moderate ones to those led by bloodthirsty fanatics. Moreover, the creation of an independent Palestinian state dominated by the PLO is the last thing the leaders of some Arab countries want, even though they may publicly endorse the idea.
Add to these problems emotionally charged religious differences among the Arab people, as well as between Arabs and non-Arab Muslims in Iran and Afghanistan, who share with the Arabs only the commitment to destroy Israel.<
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In a schism reaching back centuries, based on differing interpretations of the prophet Muhammad’s writings, the Muslim world split into two major factions, the Sunni and the Shia. Then these two groups split, with the Shia splintering into many rival groups, including several radical fundamentalist sects who demand the abolition of secular governments and their replacement by priestly theocracies; to achieve their goals, they have institutionalized murder and terrorism in the name of God, promising followers instant entry into Paradise if they die for their faith or kill an enemy who challenges it. Twice in recent years, America has lost loyal allies in the Middle East, the shah of Iran and Anwar Sadat, at the hands of these fanatics. I don’t think you can overstate the importance that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism will have to the rest of the world in the century ahead—especially if, as seems possible, its most fanatical elements get their hands on nuclear and chemical weapons and the means to deliver them against their enemies.
In addition to the conflicts between Arab and Jew and between Muslim and Muslim, there are equally vicious rifts going back centuries between Christian sects, and between Christian sects and Muslim sects, especially in Lebanon. In 1943, the people of this former French colony reached an uneasy accord to share power, with the Christians given the upper hand based on a 1932 census that indicated they were in the majority: The president, who was to appoint the cabinet and prime minister, was to be a Maronite Christian; the prime minister was to be a Sunni Muslim, and the president of the Chamber of Deputies a Shiite Muslim. This agreement, however, did not anticipate a rapid growth after World War II of Lebanon’s Muslim population, nor that this would lead to civil war.
The rainbow of ancient antagonisms in the Middle East produced an instability that the Soviet Union spent decades and billions seeking to exploit. To Libya, Syria, and the PLO, Moscow and its allies in the Eastern bloc became eager suppliers of arms that were used not only to keep the Middle East pot boiling but also to foment terrorism in other parts of the world. Under President Hafez el-Assad, Syria had become virtually a Soviet satellite in the Middle East, its army supplied and trained by the Soviets. Russian money, arms, and influence were showing up throughout the region.
An American Life Page 42