Audition

by Barbara Walters

  Then, only sixty-nine days after Reagan took office, he was shot by a mentally ill twenty-five-year-old named John Hinckley Jr. In a later interview Reagan described to me what happened to him. “When we got to the hospital, I got out of the car first and walked into the emergency room and a nurse was coming to meet me. And I said, ‘I’m having trouble breathing,’ and just then my knees began to get rubbery and the next thing I knew I was on a gurney. Incidentally, I was wearing a suit for the first time, a brand-new tailored suit. I had to lie on the gurney while, with the scissors, they cut the suit off of me.”

  Reagan also told me that the doctors went crazy trying to find a missing contact lens in his eye. It seemed he only wore one contact so he could see both close up and farther away. I particularly remember this because I, too, usually wear just one lens so I can both look at my questions close up with my nearsighted eye, and with a contact lens in the other eye, read the teleprompter at a distance.

  The president seemed to put the assassination attempt behind him very quickly. In a remarkably short time he returned to work. The first lady had a harder time adjusting. I interviewed her two months after the attempt on her husband’s life, the first time she talked publicly about her fears and anxiety. She said the president slept soundly, but she often woke up in the middle of the night, and then, wide awake, wanted to eat something, maybe an apple. But, she said, she was afraid the crunching sound would awaken the president and instead she ate a banana. I thought that was very funny and very human.

  Perhaps this is the place to talk about the parents of the would-be assassin, John Hinckley Jr. After a seven-week trial, Hinckley was found not guilty for reasons of insanity. Doctors said he was schizophrenic. His motive, it turned out, was his infatuation with the actress Jodie Foster. He felt that by shooting the president he would impress her. After his trial he was sent to Saint Elizabeth’s, a hospital for the mentally ill in Washington, D.C. There were many people, however, who felt that he should have been found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

  After what I thought was a suitable time, two years, I wrote to Hinckley’s parents and asked if they would consider sitting down and talking with me. I told them that it would be an opportunity to have people understand the disease of schizophrenia and might help other parents determine if their child had severe mental problems or was just going through a difficult adolescence. I promised them a dignified interview. The Hinckleys considered my request and agreed. This was the first and only time they did such an interview. It was aired in April 1983.

  John Hinckley Sr. had been a successful businessman in Denver, Colorado. He and his wife, Jo Ann, had three children: two boys and a girl. John Jr. was their youngest child. He was, they said, “a beautiful and happy little boy.” The family was very close, took trips, and spent all their weekends together. But things began to change when John dropped out of college and came home. He used to sit and stare out the window, his father said. He was very depressed and, in his father’s words, “could not seem to cope with the outside world.”

  Eventually, after having John Jr. tested to make sure that there was nothing physically wrong with him, Jo Ann and John took him to a psychiatrist, who told them to stop pampering their son, make him leave the house, and force him to get a job. They were not to help him. He had to learn to be independent. It was a form of “tough love,” and the Hinckleys weren’t sure it was the right treatment. When, at one point, their son wanted to come home, the psychiatrist told them: “Well, if he were my son, I would send him a hundred dollars and tell him good-bye.”

  The Hinckleys were in anguish about what to do, but when their son did come home, unshaven and wanting to stay, his father said no. Jo Ann Hinckley protested, but her husband said they had to follow the psychiatrist’s advice. There seemed no other choice. “I gave my son all the cash I had,” John Hinckley told me, “and said, ‘You are on your own,’ and that was the last I saw of him until the shooting.”

  Then, with tears brimming in his eyes, Hinckley Sr. said, “It’s my fault. I sent him out when he couldn’t cope. It’s my fault.”

  The Hinckleys have since moved from Colorado to Washington, D.C., to be near their son, who is still incarcerated there. They devote their lives and funds to promoting research into the causes and treatment of schizophrenia and other mental diseases.

  To this day I consider my interview with the Hinckleys to be one of the most important that I have ever done. I am indebted to those brave and honest people. As the mother of a child who had her own teenage troubles but, thank goodness, was not mentally ill, I sympathize with their confusion and grief.

  The main victim of their son’s shooting spree was the president’s tough, husky, funny press secretary, James Brady. His nickname was “the Bear.” One of the bullets meant for the president landed in Brady’s head, and for a while he was at death’s door. When he recovered I also did the first interview with him and his courageous wife, Sarah.

  It was devastating to talk to this man. After the shooting Jim could express himself somewhat, but his sentences usually ended—and he could not help this—with a wailing sound, like a loud, moaning cry of despair. He continued to make an amazing recovery, but there were ongoing effects of the brain damage.

  Sarah Brady, when she was not devoting her time to her husband and son, tirelessly lobbied Congress for a gun-control bill. In 1993 the Brady Bill was passed. It requires licensed dealers to enforce a waiting period and do a background check of anyone purchasing a handgun.

  Just before Thanksgiving of 1981, eight months after he’d been shot, Ronald Reagan agreed to let me interview him. Furthermore he invited me to conduct the interview at his secluded ranch in the hills near Santa Barbara, California. No television cameras had ever been invited to the ranch where the president spent his happiest private times. Mrs. Reagan didn’t love it there, and I could understand why. The main house didn’t have proper heat, and she often complained of the cold. The bathroom was small, and it was more like a camp for a young couple than a vacation home for a president. As I recall, there were just a few books in the house. But this was just what the president liked. He wanted a comfortable, unpretentious home surrounded by hills and valleys where he and Mrs. Reagan could ride their horses and just relax, watch a little television, and go to bed early.

  There was a small lake on the property with a canoe called “True Love,” the name of the love song in the movie High Society. The film had starred Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby, both of whom Reagan knew well from his acting days. Most of all the president wanted plenty of trees on the property that he could prune and chop into firewood. This was what he was doing when I arrived. I couldn’t get over the fact that he was strong enough to saw logs when just the past spring, he had been in the hospital struggling for his life.

  This was my favorite interview with the president. It was vintage Reagan: charming, amusing, and even poetic. As part of our report the president drove me around the ranch in his jeep. I sat next to him in the front seat. His dog sat behind us, thrilled to be with his master. The jeep was all but falling apart. “Forgive me, Mr. President,” I remarked. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but this is the scroungiest jeep. The upholstery is coming out.” The president answered, straight-faced: “Yes, but, remember, we have an austerity program going on.”

  Later in the day, as the sun was setting, I stood with the president atop one of the hills on his property. He gazed at the valley before him for a while, and then he said quietly, “I’ve always believed that there was some plan that put this continent here to be found by people from every corner of the world who had the courage and the love of freedom enough to uproot themselves, leave family and friends and homeland, to come here and develop a whole new breed of people called American. You look at the beauty of it. And God really did shed his grace on America, as the song says.” He was not reading from a script.

  I went on to conduct three more interviews with Ronald Reagan while he was preside
nt and shortly after he left office, and I probably conducted more interviews with Mrs. Reagan while she was first lady than any other television reporter. She often said to me that her life began when she was introduced to Ronald Reagan. The president, too, once told the same thing to me: “I think my life began when I met Nancy.”

  The Reagans’ love for each other was never more apparent than when, during the president’s second term in office, Mrs. Reagan discovered she had breast cancer and made the decision to have a mastectomy. Five months later she talked with me about that decision, the first time she had publicly commented on the operation. She had been criticized by some women for having a modified radical mastectomy instead of a lumpectomy, the far less invasive procedure that my own sister had. Mrs. Reagan defended her choice. She had told her doctors, “I want it over and done with.” And then she added with a smile, “I told them it wouldn’t take them long because I was never Dolly Parton.”

  Her biggest concern, she said, was not the feelings of other women but her husband’s feelings. He assured her, she told me, that her decision would make absolutely no difference in their relationship and his love for her. She then went ahead with the operation.

  The Reagans moved to Bel Air, Los Angeles, after they left office, and I continued to stay in touch with them. When Merv and I married, we also had a house in Bel Air. “What fun,” Mrs. Reagan wrote me. “Who borrows the cup of sugar first?” We often had the Reagans over for lunch or dinner, and Mrs. Reagan and I became personal friends. After Merv and I divorced and I was spending all of my time in New York, Mrs. Reagan and I had long talks on the telephone. She had plenty of time then, as her husband had Alzheimer’s disease and had entered what she described as “the long good-bye.” I was invited to Ronald Reagan’s funeral in 2004. I attended it as a guest and also reported on it. It was symbolic of the many years during which Mrs. Reagan and I shared both a personal and professional bond.

  I have chosen to write more about Reagan’s personal side rather than the historic events of his presidency because others can do and have done the latter far better than I. I wanted to give my own impression of President Reagan because, unlike several historians and indeed, the common thinking, I never found him cold or hard to reach. True, he told too many jokes, several of which he had told me before, and though I may never have found him brilliant, I certainly didn’t find him stupid or, after he became president, uninformed. I didn’t agree privately with him on some issues, like his pro-life stand on abortion, but he was not a man who minded if you confronted him. He did indeed inspire pride and patriotism and confidence. At that time in our history, those were no small things.

  It may seem odd to some that, though I say openly that I am pro-choice, I rarely if ever give my political opinions on camera. I have interviewed politicians on the Left and on the Right, but I doubt if anyone watching me knows my politics. Although this doesn’t seem to be the style these days, I would like to keep it that way. Part of the reason is that ABC News expects its correspondents to behave with objectivity. Although I care very much about the issues facing this country, you would not know which candidates I favor in presidential elections or whether I am a Republican, a Democrat, or a freethinking anarchist.

  Of all the presidents I’ve interviewed, George H. W. Bush was the one I knew best on a personal level. We met way back in the sixties through his younger brother, Jonathan, a friend of my then husband, Lee. ( Jonathan had for a short time been in show business and their paths had crossed.) I got to know Bush much better in 1971 when he came to New York to begin a three-year appointment as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. He had just lost his race for the U.S. Senate in Texas (he was beaten by Lloyd Bentsen) and at first, was not overly enthusiastic about his new post. He was having “withdrawal symptoms,” he wrote me in a note. “I believed in what we were doing. I thought it was fair and reasonable, but we didn’t win. The U.N. will be an exciting place—and we must not look back.” Barbara Bush was not always in the city during his years at the U.N., and George Bush and I occasionally had dinner with mutual friends. I liked him a lot. He was smart, experienced, and had a sense of humor that followed him from the U.N., to China, where, from 1974 to 1976, he served as chief of the United States Liaison Office. (He did not hold the official title of ambassador because the United States did not establish formal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China until 1979.) I must have written him there about the latest shockers in the Watergate scandal and the impeachment proceedings against Nixon because his response took note of it. “Boy, are we isolated from the hot dope,” he wrote. “We are loving Peking. There is a certain luxury in being out of the crossfire and turmoil at home.” That luxury was short-lived. Bush came back from China to become director of the CIA, then to run for the Republican presidential nomination in the 1980 primaries. I never felt he had the fire in his belly that would propel him to run for the presidency. Obviously, I was wrong.

  One morning, after he had just done an early morning TV show, he called and woke me up, asking if he could come by my apartment for breakfast. He would be over in a few minutes, he said. I threw on a bathrobe and, over coffee, he told me that he had definitely decided to throw his hat in the ring. I was surprised and doubted that he had a chance. (An inside note here. When I did the first draft of this section on presidents, I wrote that before Bush arrived “I threw on some clothes.” I thought it sounded strange to say that I was in a bathrobe. But in the summer of 2006, I was at a party that he and Mrs. Bush attended and I mentioned that I was writing a memoir. “Did you say that I came over to your house and you were in a bathrobe?” he asked. I told him I thought that might embarrass him. “Not at all,” he said. “It’s the truth. Write it.” So I just did.)

  Bush didn’t win the presidency that time, but he did in 1988, after serving eight years as vice president to Ronald Reagan. In the early days of his presidency I went to a dinner at the White House and afterward sent a thank-you letter. I received back a photograph of the two of us with the inscription: “Souvenir time. George Jr. told me he had a nice time sitting next to you at dinner.” I barely remembered the conversation. Little did I think that my jovial dinner companion would one day become president himself. Thank heaven I didn’t yawn over dessert.

  I also remember a very special dinner in the private family dining room at the White House. It was March 1991. President Bush had invited a small group of people in honor of Margaret Thatcher. I was delighted to be included, but the reason I particularly remember the dinner is that I was leaving the very next morning to fly to Saudi Arabia to conduct the first interview with our victorious general in the Gulf War, Norman Schwarzkopf. When the president learned of this, he took his place card, which read, “The President,” and wrote on the back of it, “Norm, careful, careful; but she’s OK. Congratulations again, George Bush.” He then handed me the card to give to the general.

  Those were good days for George Bush. The bad days were to come when, in the last year of his presidency, in spite of winning the Gulf War, his popularity was falling. The race for the presidency was heating up. Ross Perot, the eccentric independent, was nipping at his heels, and the governor of Arkansas, named Bill Clinton, was throwing darts at Bush and becoming more and more popular. In addition both President Bush and Mrs. Bush had been treated that summer for a condition known as Grave’s disease, which is a dysfunction of the thyroid gland. They were both taking thyroid pills, but Bush claimed he was in very good health and no longer had any symptoms. Still, he had been turning down all requests for television interviews. I did my usual push, writing and repeatedly calling his aides, especially his media affairs assistant, Dorrance Smith. Dorrance had previously worked at ABC, and I knew him well. Finally, in June 1992, the president agreed to sit, with Mrs. Bush, and do what is called an in-depth interview.

  Dorrance told me I had an hour for the interview, which was plenty of time. Then I did something I had not done in any other interviews with president
s. The question that kept dogging Bush was that he had no vision for the future of America. His critics were pouncing on what was being called the “vision thing.” Dorrance knew it. We never tell our questions in advance, but I thought the “vision thing” was extremely important, and as I have said, I had known George Bush a long time and liked him a great deal. So I gave Dorrance a heads-up and said the president should be thinking about his answer. This was a rather dangerous thing to do, giving any politician a heads-up about what you’re going to ask. But I thought, “I have nothing but difficult and critical questions to ask him, starting with his being at the height of his popularity just a year ago and now being perceived as indecisive, weak, and a loser. So I’ll give him a little break.”

  In the interview Bush blamed the failing economy for his growing unpopularity, and we drudged along. I finally asked, “Again and again, what you hear people saying is, ‘We don’t know what the President’s vision is.’ So Mr. President, what is your vision for this country?”

  Despite the advantage I’d given him, Bush’s answer was long, turgid, and uninspiring, without anything to give the public real confidence in his leadership. He seemed to lack drive or energy. No wonder some people thought he was ill. My interview certainly didn’t help him.