Mrs. Reagan always came along on the riding excursions because he was so passionate about it, but also because she was nervous about him riding. Certainly after his colon cancer operation, she was constantly trying to get him to stop riding. He was in his midseventies and didn’t ride tame stable horses. Nor did he ever ride follow-the-leader, he was always out in front. She rode western, and although I wouldn’t categorize her as a great rider, she was definitely competent. I’m not sure how much she enjoyed riding. I think she wanted to be there to make sure that he was safe and perhaps believed that he would ride too fast if she wasn’t there keeping track. Letting him gallop off into the distance wasn’t going to happen whether she was there or not. Anyway, we never rode very fast. We would canter occasionally, but we trotted most of the time, and walked a lot.
Horseback riding is an inherently dangerous sport, and we paid a lot of attention to safety issues, always making certain that the horses were right and that no unnecessary chances were taken. The president was eventually thrown from a horse when he got older, after he had left office, and suffered some head injuries. And we had a lot of agents who got hurt on horses in training. So safety was always a primary concern for all of us and a legitimate concern on Mrs. Reagan’s part.
If you believe Mark Weinberg’s version of events, I saved the president’s life one day at Camp David. He was in the room and saw it. But Mark was also the assistant press secretary who was always saying, “If it’s not photographed, it’s like it never happened,” and unfortunately, it wasn’t photographed.
We were in the cabin called Laurel, which is where everyone eats dinner and where there’s a huge fireplace. It was winter, and the fire was roaring. A photographer was doing a photo session with the Reagans and wanted to shoot some pictures in front of the fireplace. The president and first lady sat down on the hearth. Instinctively, I went over and stood next to the fireplace. The photographer took a whole series of pictures, and when he was done, Mrs. Reagan stood up. Then the president started to stand up, and it was one of those moments when someone stands up too quickly and slightly loses his balance. He took a step forward and then half-fell toward the fireplace. I reached over and braced his back, and he regained his balance. It was nothing more complicated than that, and it happened so fast I didn’t think about it. I’m not sure the president even realized what had happened.
But Mark saw it and said, “You just saved the president’s life. You saved him from falling into the fire.” Of course, I didn’t. He wasn’t going to fall into the fire, and even if the situation had been worse and he had fallen into the fire, it wasn’t going to kill him because there were a dozen people standing around to get him out. But Mark kept saying, “You saved the president’s life,” and the only answer I could come up with was to throw back to him his own quote, “If it’s not photographed, it’s like it never happened.”
Weekends at Camp David were happy times for the president and Mrs. Reagan. You could see it in their eyes and see it when they walked together. They were always holding hands. But even the best of the days and nights at Camp David couldn’t come close to the joy they shared at their ranch.
Appropriately named Rancho del Cielo—Ranch in the Sky—it was 688 acres some thirty miles up the coast from Santa Barbara, on Bald Mountain in the Santa Ynez Valley, with sweeping views of the Pacific. The Reagans bought the place in 1974 for $527,000 when he was governor of California. The ranch was rustic, not at all luxurious, but it was where they both loved to be. You could actually see the physical change in him as we took off in Air Force One for the flight out west. He became buoyant. The next morning, he’d climb up the steps from the ranch house in his boots and breeches and a golf shirt like he was thirty years old.
There was the clay-tiled adobe ranch house, which was not very large. It had two bedrooms, a small kitchen, a small dining room, and a nice-sized living room, decorated in western style with woven Indian blankets, with a large window overlooking the ranch. Behind that was a small guest house with two more bedrooms. Those buildings were surrounded by a wooden fence that he himself built, and beyond that, up a slight incline, was a tall post with a bell. The sign on the gate at the house read, “The Reagans—1600 Penna Ave.”
There was a little pond, not more than twenty to thirty yards long and ten to fifteen yards wide, with a dock and a canoe with the hand-painted name TRULUV on the side. There was also a small house where the caretaker lived, and above the pond, a tack room and a four-stall stable. The horses were hardly ever there, as he preferred to let them run off and graze. There were other animals, too, notably a bull and a donkey. And up the hill there was a small area where the animals were buried when they passed on.
The barn was fairly big, and next to it we built three Quonset huts—one to serve as a staff building, one to serve as a residence for the doctor and the military aide, and the other to be our command post. The staff building had a conference room and a couple of meeting rooms, and the WHCA officers worked out of there. Just over the top of the hill, the marines built themselves a landing zone and a hanger for the helicopters and their own command post. We didn’t sleep at the ranch. There was always an on-duty working shift, obviously, but when we were off duty, we slept at a hotel in Santa Barbara.
We had uniformed guards at the gate and around the outer perimeter. Naturally, the entire ranch was fenced in and constantly patrolled. Contrary to press reports, we did not have secret surveillance equipment hidden under plastic boulders. The ranch was actually hard to alarm because the hills were filled with coyote and deer and all sorts of wild animals that would set off the alarms all the time. We used some electronics and a lot of line-of-sight security with night-vision devices. The plastic boulders—which were bought off the shelf at big hardware supercenters—were there to cover some WHCA equipment, not to hide it from trespassers, but so that the president wouldn’t have to see dishes and antennas all over the property.
Among ourselves we referred to the ranch as “Camp Dust,” because it was very dry and unbelievably dusty. It was also, at times, very foggy up there. I arrived one morning at 7:30 when the fog blanketed the entire mountain and was much too thick for the helicopters to fly, which caused real worries in the case of a medevac emergency. It was so bad that I literally couldn’t see a foot in front of myself. It started to lift at about 9:30, and when it did, right there in a field about 150 yards from the house, we spotted a little yellow pup tent. It was inside the property, which, it goes without saying, was much closer than we wanted anybody to be. Immediately, we moved in on the tent and scared the hell out of some poor guy in a sleeping bag who opened his eyes to find himself surrounded by nine heavily armed agents. He was hiking, got lost in the fog, didn’t know where he was, and pitched his tent for the night. We took him out of there, interviewed him, ran a background check, decided he was who he said he was, concluded there was no threat to the president, convinced him he’d picked a very bad place to camp, and sent him on his way.
The first time I went to the ranch, several things struck me. I was surprised how remote it was. Although it was only forty minutes by car from Santa Barbara, driving there was sometimes dangerous. Once you got to the base of the mountain, there were seven miles of very windy roads that weren’t easy to negotiate. Another thing I noticed was the media’s ability to see everything that went on there. There was a mountain about five miles away where the press set up their cameras with lenses that must have been eight feet long. Whenever you saw television pictures of the Reagans riding at the ranch, they were taken from those cameras across the valley. Back at my hotel at night I’d see news footage of us riding on a part of the trail where they had a view. It always amazed me how intent the media was on capturing every moment of this man’s life, even ten seconds of him on horseback.
Oddly, I was with him one day in the tack room, just the two of us, when I looked over his shoulder at a print on the wall that depicted three horses drinking out of a trough. What caught my eye was
the artist’s signature. I said, “That’s odd, Mr. President. Do you know the artist who did this print?” It had probably been there for twenty years, and if he ever bothered to look at the signature, he didn’t seem to recall it, because when he looked at it now, he was as surprised as I had been. Although he was no relation to me, the artist’s name was Joseph Petro.
Life at the ranch was very routine, which is exactly the way the president wanted it. After doing paperwork and reviewing his intelligence files, he would come up to the tack room at the same time every morning, and we would saddle the horses together. Then he’d ring the bell on the tall post, and Mrs. Reagan would come up. We’d walk and trot for an hour and a half to two hours, while he constantly told stories. We’d go by an old hanging tree, and he would explain that, by legend, this was where they used to hang cattle rustlers. Then there was a tree we pass and, every time we did without fail, he’d say, “Nancy, look,” and point to it because in the bark he’d carved a big heart with, “NDR RR 8/21/77.”
We’d get up high enough to see the islands offshore, and he’d tell stories and go through a repertoire of jokes. He told us about when he was an actor and about being on film sets. He told us about playing football, and also about being a lifeguard one summer at Lowell Park in Dixon, Illinois, when he saved seventy-seven people from drowning. His favorite story was how, in 1934, while he was broadcasting the ninth inning of a Chicago Cubs–St. Louis Cardinals game as a wire reader for radio station WHO in Des Moines, Iowa, the wire suddenly went dead. But he continued broadcasting the game, play by play, for six entire minutes, until the wire came back on, and the listeners never knew that “Dutch” Reagan had simply made up an entire inning. And then he’d re-create the play by play for us.
When he was finished with that, he’d start reciting “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” by Robert Service.
A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon; The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune; Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew, And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.
He could recite all ten stanzas. In fact, his memory was so remarkable that he once told me about a speech he’d given in 1953 and, just like that, slipped into five minutes of it.
By 12:30 or so, we’d be back. The Reagans would have lunch and at two o’clock he would spend the afternoon clearing trails. He had someone who ran the ranch, and the two of them would get chain saws and ride off with us in tow, to clear brush. Reagan had an old red Jeep at the ranch that he used to drive himself. That was the only time we let him drive. When he did, I’d climb into the right front seat next to him. And as soon as we were off, he’d start telling more stories, nonstop.
We were always there with him when he worked, but never joined in doing any of the work. We weren’t there to help, just to protect him. That was always awkward because we felt like we really should be pitching in. He never asked, and we had to resist volunteering, because, to tell the truth, it looked like fun. Although letting the president of the United States loose with a chain saw wasn’t exactly ideal. He had plenty of them in the barn, but his favorite was one given to him by a chain saw company with the proviso that they could photograph him using it. He agreed. A photographer showed up one day to take an hour’s worth of pictures of him cutting down some brush. On the way back to the ranch, I asked the photographer, “What do you think?”
He said, “It’s been a great afternoon, but I can’t use any of the pictures because the president violates every safety rule there is.”
In truth, he wasn’t overtly careless with the chain saw. He just did the kinds of things we all do—like using it over his head and not always wearing safety glasses. Only once was there a problem, and it was minor. The chain saw nicked his thigh and there was a little blood. The doctor got there right away, and in order for him to take a look, the president of the United States found himself standing out in the middle of the woods with his jeans down around his ankles. I can only wonder what the television crews across the valley would have done to get that footage.
So he’d spend the afternoon cutting wood on trails, and then, the next morning, we’d ride those trails so he could proudly ask his wife, “What do you think, Nancy?” He was his own person at the ranch. He was active and robust, an outdoors guy who never pretended to be anything else. He was just like any guy who worked on his property and wanted to show his wife what he had done. And at some point, on every ride, he’d remind us, “The best thing for the inside of a man is the outside of a horse.”
Evenings were usually just the two of them. They’d occasionally have guests, but they didn’t have many, and seemed to cherish their time alone. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip went to the ranch on one occasion. It was pouring rain that day, and part of the road up the mountain was nearly washed out. As I recall, she only stayed a couple of hours, for lunch. Mikhail Gorbachev visited there, too. Someone gave him a cowboy hat which, to the glee of the media, he wore backward. But for the most part, it was just us. Some staff people would come up every morning for his national security briefing, but they didn’t stay long. The Reagans had a housekeeper who cooked and cleaned and two ranch hands. But that was it. They were always very private at the ranch, almost certainly because privacy was something they couldn’t always get at the White House.
Being there alone with him made us all the more aware of the fact that the Secret Service was part of a very small clique with incredible access to the president. Only a few cabinet secretaries and some staff had that, and we had to be particularly careful about how we used it. If the director needed to get some information to him about a problem, we would talk to him. Otherwise, we tended to do everything else through normal channels.
Except once, on April 1, two days before Easter 1986. I was nervous about this, but I was determined to go ahead with it, having discussed it the night before with a couple of agents. The president came up that morning, as usual, to tack the horses. I would have my horse tacked, and he would tack his horse by himself, and then I would help him tack the big western saddle on Mrs. Reagan’s horse. There were a lot of straps so I would get on one side and he’d stand on the other and I’d pass the straps to him.
Standing a foot away from him that morning, I said, “Mr. President, by the way, I need to speak to you about something.”
He said, “What’s the problem, Joe?”
“I got a call last night from headquarters asking me to cut costs out here at the ranch.”
At this point he stopped tacking the horse and was very concerned. “Oh … well … what can we do? What are you planning?”
I said, “I spoke to some of the fellas”—that’s what he called us—“and we came up with a solution.” I pointed to the tack barn just as the two agents, who happened to be the best riders in the Secret Service, Barbara Riggs and Karen Toll, rode by on the same horse.
The president looked at them, then looked at me, and I said, “April fool.” And he burst out laughing. That was his kind of joke.
When Mrs. Reagan came up, the first thing he told her was, “Honey, you’re not going to believe what the fellas pulled on me today.” He told her the story and started laughing all over again.
If it’s true, as I believe it is, that PPD reflects the president, then that sort of joking around might have been possible to some extent with Clinton and both the Bushes. But I’m sure it never happened with Nixon, and I don’t know how much PPD could joke around with Carter. I’m proud that we could do it with President Reagan.
I saw him get angry only a couple of times. He was angry in Tokyo with Mitterand. And he was angry once at the ranch when he made a joke and the world took it wrong. But on that occasion, August 11, 1984, I think he was most angry at himself.
The president would come up to the Quonset hut staff room once a week to deliver his Saturday morning live radio broadcast. A WHCA team would set up the equipment, and he would do a microphone
check. Reagan usually said something funny, but on that particular morning his mike check included the ad-lib, “We will commence bombing Russia in five minutes!”
Everyone knew he was joking, and everyone laughed. The president did the broadcast, and from there we went to saddle the horses. We were still in the tack room when someone came in to say that his mike check had accidentally gone out live and the media was having a field day with it.
He said to me, “I can’t believe that people would make such a big deal out of that.” He’d been around radio long enough to know the old adage, there is no such thing as a dead mike, and was irritated with himself for making such a silly mistake. But he was also disappointed that the press was jumping on this the way they were. He felt perhaps that they owed him the benefit of the doubt, and that out of common sense and common courtesy, they should have just forgotten about it.
From that weekend on, mike checks were limited to “One, two, three, testing, one, two, three.”
The Reagans would spend three weeks at the ranch every August, then come out two or three other times throughout the year, for a week or so, as at Easter and Thanksgiving. Once they got to the ranch it was unusual that they would leave. Although the same Easter weekend that we played the April fool’s joke, the president told me that he and the first lady would like to go to services on Sunday. The closest church was down in the valley, and I asked him if anybody there knew about this. He said no, that they’d only just decided. I sent an advance agent to scout the church and began working out the logistics of how to do this safely. Because we didn’t have time to advance the trip properly, I had to warn the president that if word got out, we couldn’t go. He understood. The only people whom we told about this was a small press pool, and they were sworn to secrecy.
Standing Next to History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service Page 17