Vintage Didion

by Joan Didion

  In the late summer of 1985, some months after the Outreach meeting in Room 450 of the Old Executive Office Building in Washington at which I had heard Jack Wheeler talk about the necessity for supporting freedom fighters around the world, I happened to receive a letter (“Dear Fellow American”) from Major General John K. Singlaub, an invitation to the International Freedom Fighters Dinner to be held that September in the Crystal Ballroom of the Registry Hotel in Dallas. This letter was dated August 7, 1985, a date on which Steven Carr was already sitting in La Reforma prison in San José and on which Jesus Garcia was one day short of receiving a call from a twenty-nine-year-old stranger who identified himself as Allen Saum, who said that he was a major in the U.S. Marines and had been sent by the White House, who enlisted Jesus Garcia in a mission he described as “George Bush’s baby,” and who then telephoned the Miami office of the FBI and told them where they could pick up Jesus Garcia and his MAC-10. “He looked typical Ivy League, I thought he must be CIA,” Jesus Garcia later said about “Allen Saum,” who did not show up for Jesus Garcia’s trial but did appear at a pretrial hearing, where he said that he took orders from a man he knew only as “Sam.”

  The letter from General Singlaub urged that any recipient unable to attend the Dallas dinner ($500 a plate) plan in any case to have his or her name listed on the International Freedom Fighters Commemorative Program ($50 a copy), which General Singlaub would, in turn, “personally present to President Reagan.” Even the smallest donation, General Singlaub stressed, would go far toward keeping “freedom’s light burning.” The mujahideen in Afghanistan, for example, who would be among the freedom fighters to benefit from the Dallas dinner (along with those in Angola, Laos, South Vietnam, Cambodia, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and of course Nicaragua), had not long before destroyed “approximately twenty-five per cent of the Afghan government’s Soviet supplied air force” (or, according to General Singlaub, twenty MIGs, worth $100 million) with just “a few hundred dollars spent on plastic explosives.”

  I recall experiencing, as I read this sentence about the mujahideen and the few hundred dollars spent on plastic explosives, the exact sense of expanding, or contracting, possibility that I had recently experienced during flights to Miami. Many apparently disparate elements seemed to be converging in the letter from General Singlaub, and the convergence was not one that discouraged that “search for conspiracy” deplored by Anthony Lewis a decade before. The narrative in which a few hundred dollars spent on plastic explosives could reverse history, which appeared to be the scenario on which General Singlaub and many of the people I had seen in Room 450 were operating, was the same narrative in which meetings at private houses in Miami Beach had been seen to overturn governments. This was that narrative in which the actions of individuals had been seen to affect events directly, in which revolutions and counterrevolutions had been framed in the private sector; that narrative in which the state security apparatus existed to be enlisted by one or another private player.

  This was also the narrative in which words had tended to have consequences, and stories endings. NICARAGUA HOY, CUBA MAÑANA. When Jesus Garcia talked about meeting in the cocktail lounge of the Howard Johnson’s near the Miami airport to discuss a plan to assassinate the American ambassador to Costa Rica, bomb the American embassy there, and blame it on the Sandinistas, the American ambassador he was talking about was Lewis Tambs, one of the authors of the Santa Fe document, the fifty-three pages that had articulated for many people in Washington the reasons for the exact American involvement in the politics of the Caribbean that this plan discussed in the cocktail lounge of the Howard Johnson’s near the Miami airport was meant to ensure. Let me tell you about Cuban terrorists, Raúl Rodríguez had said at the midnight dinner in the Arquitectonica condominium overlooking Biscayne Bay. Cuba never grew plastique. Cuba grew tobacco, Cuba grew sugarcane. Cuba never grew C-4.

  The air that evening in Miami had been warm and soft even at midnight, and the glass doors had been open onto the terrace overlooking the bay. The daughter of the fifteenth president of the Republic of Cuba, María Elena Prío Durán, whose father’s grave at Woodlawn Park Cemetery in Miami lay within sight of the private crypt to which the body of another exiled president, Anastasio Somoza Debayle of Nicaragua, was flown forty-eight hours after his assassination in Asunción (no name on this crypt, no dates, no epitaph, only the monogram “AS” worked among the lilies on a stained-glass window, as if the occupant had negotiated himself out of history), had lit her cigarette and immediately put it out. When Raúl Rodríguez said that evening that C-4 grew here, he was talking about what it had cost to forget that decisions made in Washington had effects outside Washington; about the reverberative effect of certain ideas, and about their consequences. This dinner in Miami took place on March 26, 1985. The meetings in Miami described by Jesus Garcia had already taken place. The flights out of Miami described by Jesus Garcia and Steven Carr had already taken place. These meetings and these flights were the least of what had already taken place; of what was to take place; and also of what, in this world where stories have tended to have endings, has yet to take place. “As a matter of fact I was very definitely involved in the decisions about support to the freedom fighters,” the fortieth President of the United States said more than two years later, on May 15, 1987. “My idea to begin with.”

  —1987

  IN THE REALM OF THE

  FISHER KING

  President Ronald Reagan, we were later told by his speechwriter Peggy Noonan, spent his off-camera time in the White House answering fifty letters a week, selected by the people who ran his mail operation, from citizens. He put the family pictures these citizens sent him in his pockets and desk drawers. When he did not have the zip code, he apologized to his secretary for not looking it up himself. He sharpened his own pencils, we were told by Helene von Damm, his secretary first in Sacramento and then in Washington, and he also got his own coffee.

  In the post-Reagan rush to establish that we knew all along about this peculiarity in that particular White House, we forgot the actual peculiarity of the place, which had to do less with the absence at the center than with the amount of centrifugal energy this absence left spinning free at the edges. The Reagan White House was one in which great expectations were allowed into play. Ardor, of a kind that only rarely survives a fully occupied Oval Office, flourished unchecked. “You’d be in someone’s home and on the way to the bathroom you’d pass the bedroom and see a big thick copy of Paul Johnson’s Modern Times lying half open on the table by the bed,” Peggy Noonan, who gave Ronald Reagan the boys of Pointe du Hoc and the Challenger crew slipping the surly bonds of earth and who gave George Bush the thousand points of light and the kinder, gentler nation, told us in What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era.

  “Three months later you’d go back and it was still there,” she wrote. “There were words. You had a notion instead of a thought and a dustup instead of a fight, you had a can-do attitude and you were in touch with the Zeitgeist. No one had intentions they had an agenda and no one was wrong they were fundamentally wrong and you didn’t work on something you broke your pick on it and it wasn’t an agreement it was a done deal. All politics is local but more to the point all economics is micro. There were phrases: personnel is policy and ideas have consequences and ideas drive politics and it’s a war of ideas… and to do nothing is to endorse the status quo and roll back the Brezhnev Doctrine and there’s no such thing as a free lunch, especially if you’re dining with the press.”

  Peggy Noonan arrived in Washington in 1984, thirty-three years old, out of Brooklyn and Massapequa and Fairleigh Dickinson and CBS Radio, where she had written Dan Rather’s five-minute commentaries. A few years later, when Rather told her that in lieu of a Christmas present he wanted to make a donation to her favorite charity, the charity she specified was The William J. Casey Fund for the Nicaraguan Resistance. She did not immediately, or for some months after, meet the man for whose every pu
blic utterance she and the other staff writers were responsible; at the time she checked into the White House, no speechwriter had spoken to Mr. Reagan in more than a year. “We wave to him,” one said.

  In the absence of an actual president, this resourceful child of a large Irish Catholic family sat in her office in the Old Executive Office Building and invented an ideal one: she read Vachel Lindsay (particularly “I brag and chant of Bryan Bryan Bryan / Candidate for President who sketched a silver Zion”) and she read Franklin Delano Roosevelt (whom she pictured, again ideally, up in Dutchess County “sitting at a great table with all the chicks, eating a big spring lunch of beefy red tomatoes and potato salad and mayonnaise and deviled eggs on the old china with the flowers almost rubbed off”) and she thought “this is how Reagan should sound.” What Miss Noonan had expected Washington to be, she told us, was “Aaron Copland and ‘Appalachian Spring.’” What she found instead was a populist revolution trying to make itself, a crisis of raised expectations and lowered possibilities, the children of an expanded middle class determined to tear down the established order and what they saw as its repressive liberal orthodoxies: “There were libertarians whose girlfriends had just given birth to their sons, hoisting a Coors with social conservatives who walked into the party with a wife who bothered to be warm and a son who carried a Mason jar of something daddy grew in the backyard. There were Protestant fundamentalists hoping they wouldn’t be dismissed by neo-con intellectuals from Queens and neocons talking to fundamentalists thinking: I wonder if when they look at me they see what Annie Hall’s grandmother saw when she looked down the table at Woody Allen.”

  She stayed at the White House until the spring of 1986, when she was more or less forced out by the refusal of Donald Regan, at that time chief of staff, to approve her promotion to head speechwriter. Regan thought her, according to Larry Speakes, who did not have a famous feel for the romance of the revolution, too “hard-line,” too “dogmatic,” too “right-wing,” too much “Buchanan’s protégée.” On the occasion of her resignation she received a form letter from the president, signed with the auto-pen. Donald Regan said that there was no need for her to have what was referred to as “a good-bye moment,” a farewell shake-hands with the president. On the day Donald Regan himself left the White House, Miss Noonan received this message, left on her answering machine by a friend at the White House: “Hey, Peggy, Don Regan didn’t get his good-bye moment.” By that time she was hearing the “true tone of Washington” less as “Appalachian Spring” than as something a little more raucous, “nearer,” she said, “to Jefferson Starship and ‘They Built This City on Rock and Roll.’”

  The White House she rendered was one of considerable febrility. Everyone, she told us, could quote Richard John Neuhaus on what was called the collapse of the dogmas of the secular enlightenment. Everyone could quote Michael Novak on what was called the collapse of the assumption that education is or should be “value-free.” Everyone could quote George Gilder on what was called the humane nature of the free market. Everyone could quote Jean-François Revel on how democracies perish, and everyone could quote Jeane Kirkpatrick on authoritarian versus totalitarian governments, and everyone spoke of “the movement,” as in “he’s movement from way back,” or “she’s good, she’s hard-core.”

  They talked about subverting the pragmatists, who believed that an issue could not be won without the Washington Post and the networks, by “going over the heads of the media to the people.” They charged one another’s zeal by firing off endless letters, memos, clippings. “Many thanks for Macedo’s new monograph; his brand of judicial activism is more principled than Tribe’s,” such letters read. “If this gets into the hands of the Russians, it’s curtains for the free world!” was the tone to take on the yellow Post-It attached to a clipping. “Soldier on!” was the way to sign off. Those PROF memos we later saw from Robert McFarlane to Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North (“Roger Ollie. Well done—if the world only knew how many times you have kept a semblance of integrity and gumption to US policy, they would make you Secretary of State. But they can’t know and would complain if they did—such is the state of democracy in the late 20th century…. Bravo Zulu”) do not seem, in this context, quite so unusual.

  “Bureaucrats with soft hands adopted the clipped laconic style of John Ford characters,” Miss Noonan noted. “A small man from NSC was asked at a meeting if he knew of someone who could work up a statement. Yes, he knew someone at State, a paid pen who’s pushed some good paper.” To be a moderate was to be a “squish,” or a “weenie,” or a “wuss.” “He got rolled,” they would say of someone who had lost the day, or, “He took a lickin’ and kept on tickin’.” They walked around the White House wearing ties (“slightly stained,” according to Miss Noonan, “from the mayonnaise that fell from the sandwich that was wolfed down at the working lunch on judicial reform”) embroidered with the code of the movement: eagles, flags, busts of Jefferson. Little gold Laffer curves identified the wearers as “free-market purists.” Liberty bells stood for “judicial restraint.”

  The favored style here, like the favored foreign policy, seems to have been less military than paramilitary, a matter of talking tough. “That’s not off my disk,” Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North would snap by way of indicating that an idea was not his. “The fellas,” as Miss Noonan called them, the sharp, the smooth, the inner circle and those who aspired to it, made a point of not using seat belts on Air Force One. The less smooth flaunted souvenirs of action on the far borders of the Reagan doctrine. “Jack Wheeler came back from Afghanistan with a Russian officer’s belt slung over his shoulder,” Miss Noonan recalls. “Grover Norquist came back from Africa rubbing his eyes from taking notes in a tent with Savimbi.” Miss Noonan herself had lunch in the White House mess with a “mujahideen warrior” and his public relations man. “What is the condition of your troops in the field?” she asked. “We need help,” he said. The Filipino steward approached, pad and pencil in hand. The mujahideen leader looked up. “I will have meat,” he said.

  This is not a milieu in which one readily places Nancy Reagan, whose preferred style derived from the more structured, if equally rigorous, world from which she had come. The nature of this world was not very well understood. I recall being puzzled, on visits to Washington during the first year or two of the Reagan administration, by the tenacity of certain misapprehensions about the Reagans and the men generally regarded as their intimates, that small group of industrialists and entrepreneurs who had encouraged and financed, as a venture in risk capital, Ronald Reagan’s appearances in both Sacramento and Washington. The president was above all, I was told repeatedly, a Californian, a Westerner, as were the acquaintances who made up his kitchen cabinet; it was the “Western-ness” of these men that explained not only their rather intransigent views about America’s mission in the world but also their apparent lack of interest in or identification with Americans for whom the trend was less reliably up. It was “Westernness,” too, that could explain those affronts to the local style so discussed in Washington during the early years, the overwrought clothes and the borrowed jewelry and the Le Cirque hair and the wall-to-wall carpeting and the table settings. In style and substance alike, the Reagans and their friends were said to display what was first called “the California mentality,” and then, as the administration got more settled and the social demonology of the exotic landscape more specific, “the California Club mentality.”

  I recall hearing about this “California Club mentality” at a dinner table in Georgetown, and responding with a certain atavistic outrage (I was from California, my own brother then lived during the week at the California Club); what seems curious in retrospect is that many of the men in question, including the president, had only a convenient connection with California in particular and the West in general. William Wilson was actually born in Los Angeles, and Earle Jorgenson in San Francisco, but the late Justin Dart was born in Illinois, graduated from Northwestern, married a Walgreen
heiress in Chicago, and did not move United Rexall, later Dart Industries, from Boston to Los Angeles until he was already its president. The late Alfred Bloomingdale was born in New York, graduated from Brown, and seeded the Diners Club with money from his family’s New York store. What these men represented was not “the West” but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities precisely because their ties to any one place had been so attenuated.