That’s both the medium and the message that the big boys never caught onto when they were out doing what Reagan liked to call “the rubber chicken circuit.” Once people stopped going to meetings in the evening and started watching TV, men like Ronald Reagan became a lot more familiar than full-time old school politicians such as Pat Brown and Tip O’Neill. The paint-by-the-numbers Democrats never saw him coming because too many of them obviously never watched television. They led their people into dismissing him as a “B-movie actor.” That self-delusion turned out to be suicidal.
Another fact overlooked by his critics was that Ronald Reagan was not just a great “communicator.” From the beginning, Reagan was a man with a cause. I remember the time he opened GE Theater by saying that the story he was about to introduce mattered to him personally. It concerned a woman who had been hoodwinked into joining a Communist front group. Discovering that the group was getting its cues from Moscow, the woman had turned informant. She became a double agent. At the urging of the FBI, she posed as a member of the leftist group and did reconnaissance work, yet as a result suffered daily the contempt of her neighbors.
HERE’S WHAT I REALLY THINK: I think that Ronald Reagan’s self-styled “citizen-politician” pose was bogus. He had been running for president since the day he left GE Theater in 1962. His speech for Barry Goldwater in 1964 was really the kick-off to his own run. His campaign for California governor in 1966 was a career arrow aimed directly at the White House. Why would a guy with Reagan’s philosophy want to be a government administrator? After just a year in Sacramento, he launched his ’68 presidential race, and that was that.
But it was too soon. Ronald Reagan was, for the first time, up against a politician who displayed a few tricks of his own. Through an alliance with South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, Richard Nixon outlanked Reagan in the area of the country where his philosophy commanded its utmost appeal, the conservative South. Then, with Nixon broken by Watergate, Reagan tried once again, but was thwarted by party loyalty to Nixon’s handpicked successor, Gerald Ford. Finally, in 1980, on the third try, the Gipper proved to be at the top of his game.
Those of us working for Jimmy Carter didn’t know what hit us. A hint of it had come in Reagan’s speech accepting the Republican nomination. After a brief reminder of the Carter administration’s sorry economic record, the newly minted candidate switched to sarcasm: “Can anyone look at the record of this administration and say, ‘Well done!’? Or at the state of our economy when the Carter administration took office with where we are today and say, ‘Keep up the good work!’?”
Then came the cavalry attack. “Can anyone look at our reduced standing in the world today and say, ‘Let’s have four more years of this’?”
President Carter launched his fall reelection campaign at a huge Labor Day picnic in Alabama. As the assigned speechwriter, I was anxious to see how the event would play on the evening news. Peeking into a Georgetown restaurant, I realized to my surprise what we were up against. There on the TV screen above the bar was Ronald Reagan, charismatic as hell, standing in shirtsleeves on a piece of overlooked real estate in New Jersey. Behind him loomed an icon of treasured American myth—the Statue of Liberty. I smelled trouble in River City. We weren’t running against a Republican; we were running against the republic!
What were the secrets to his great success? I can think of three strengths he carried with him into the political arena. They could only be labeled as secret if you were someone relying on the Democrats’ talking points.
1. Ronald Reagan knew why he wanted to be president.
2. He knew how to talk to real people.
3. He could describe his feelings about our country invoking the spirit most Americans share but have trouble expressing.
Every cab driver knew that Reagan wanted to beat the Communists abroad and to cut government and taxes at home. When Reagan spoke about “the boys” who stormed Normandy or the astronauts lost in the Challenger, he tapped into the deepest sentiments of his hero-worshipping compatriots. While he may never have fought in World War II, he evoked its aura with greater success than anyone who had ever lived on K-rations. The only times he got into real trouble as president were occasions when neither Communism nor big government came into play. The decision to deploy the Marines in Lebanon in 1983 and the arms-for-hostages deal of three years later were two situations when his worldview failed him.
The troubling truth is that this impressive American leader was just as compelling when he was fudging. He recited movie dialog as if it were real life when he told Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir and Nazi-chaser Simon Wiesenthal that he had photographed the death camps for the Army Signal Corps.
It was a stunning experience to hear Ronald Reagan say so confidently, in his TV debate with Carter, what I knew to be a lie. For years I’d heard him speak against such contributory programs as Social Security and Medicare.
Indeed, Reagan had fought Medicare at the time of its creation just as Republicans before him had fought Social Security. Now he was making the shameless claim that he, Ronald Reagan, had championed creation of a federal program to get medical care to retired Americans.
But, even when Carter was right and Reagan was wrong in their debate, all people remember from the exchange and indeed from the entire evening was the challenger’s brutal put-away line: “There you go again, Mr. President.” With those six withering words, the challenger reduced the incumbent to a desperate, sweating hack clinging to a great office he was no longer strong enough to fill.
Reagan entered the pantheon of mythical American heroes—Casey at the bat, John Henry, Paul Bunyan—with the grace and humor he exhibited after the assassination attempt on him in March of his inaugural year. “Honey, I forgot to duck,” he told wife Nancy. And, “I hope you’re all Republicans,” he kidded the doctors as he was wheeled into the operating room. An actor who had spent decades playing heroes suddenly had transcended the back lot and its illusions.
Where presidents since Kennedy were willing to coexist with the USSR, Reagan demanded that Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall. When that happened in November 1989 on President George H. W. Bush’s watch, I saluted the American president whose bright-eyed and brisk sentiments had helped to trigger the demolition. “This is the week I miss Ronald Reagan,” I wrote in my newspaper column. “He would have known what to say.”
HERE’S WHAT I REALLY THINK: I think that the man who played George Gipp in Knute Rockne: All American never stopped trying to reinvent the forward pass. Why couldn’t the bold play that won on the cinematic football field work on the U.S. economy? Instead of endless trench warfare over budget cuts, Reagan would surprise his rivals with some razzle-dazzle: a big tax cut. Instead of competing with the Soviets on how many missiles we could deploy at each other, he’d commission a missile shield that would render their missiles irrelevant.
Did the Reagan policies work? Politically, yes. Getting Congress to cut taxes helped stimulate the “morning in America” economic boom of 1983–84. Threatening Gorbachev with a missile shield, something his engineers could never build but ours might, may have caused the Soviet leader to call off the Cold War. But there was a considerable cost. Taken together, the 1981 tax cut and the big hike in strategic weapons spending produced huge annual deficits and quadrupled the national debt.
The smiling myth that was the Reagan presidency produced two benefits. The first was for the Republican party. For instance, when the Democrats decided to make the 1994 election a referendum comparing the early Clinton record with the Reagan record, they lost both houses of Congress for the first time in half a century. Like Paul Bunyan, he’ll always be there, towering above the landscape of lesser figures.
The other beneficiary of the myth was Ronald Reagan himself. Early in his movie career he played Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft in a series of four films. One of the kids to love those movies was a boy named Jerry Parr. When he grew up Jerry decided that he, too, wanted to be a Secret Servic
e agent. In fact, he made his career in the Secret Service and rose to become chief of the presidential protection detail during Reagan’s administration. When the shooting started that day in front of the Washington Hilton, a gutsy, quick-witted Jerry Parr was there to shove the critically wounded president into the car. It was Parr who jumped into the backseat on top of him to keep the deranged John Hinckley from getting him with a second bullet. It was the same chief presidential bodyguard who ordered that the driver race to George Washington University Hospital in just over ten minutes, just time enough to save Brass Bancroft’s life.
That story is typical of Reagan’s good fortune in life, which only abandoned him when the effects of Alzheimer’s disease overtook him. That, too, he took with grace. He wrote a last letter to the country in 1994 in which he expressed his profound belief in its future. He wrote, “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”
Ronald Reagan did not “win” the Cold War but he belongs in the roster of those who did. That list began with President Harry Truman, who drew the line on Soviet expansion in Europe with the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine. It includes all the other Cold War presidents of both parties who contained Communism until it could destroy itself. What set Reagan apart was his insistence that there be a winner and a loser.
CHAPTER NINE
Worldly Wisdom
If you add it up, I’ve spent thirty years studying politicians. In academic terms, that’s at least sixty semesters of real-life political science. In Hardball, which I wrote in 1988, you can find some of the basics. In this chapter I now offer three giant precepts as a kind of advanced seminar. They will get you where you want to get; better yet, they will help you be who you want to be. They constitute a user’s manual for the politics of personal ambition.
Show Up!
Ninety percent of life is showing up.
WOODY ALLEN
To win the game, you’ve got to get in it. Regardless of what you want to do with your life, in order to do it well, you’ve got to go to where the game is being played and get involved. This is pretty basic stuff. I went to grammar school with a kid named Jimmy Schuhl. He was the most popular kid in the class and, of course, good at sports. I remember him once explaining how he had become so good. Every afternoon he would go to the neighborhood playground and stand alongside the court while the older kids played basketball. Whenever the ball went out of bounds, he’d run and get it and throw it back in. Each night, as it got close to supper, one of the older kids would have to bail out. To even up the sides, one of them would yell, “Hey you, kid, want to play?” It’s as simple as that. “Hey you, kid, want to play?”
A quarter-century ago, author/actor/law school professor Ben Stein codified this rule of life in The Wall Street Journal. He called it “Bunkhouse Logic.” It’s one newspaper column I’ve never forgotten.
You most likely know Stein as the host of Win Ben Stein’s Money on cable’s Comedy Central. But you may not know you watched him play the nerdy teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, or that maddening slowpoke in front of the airport check-in line when Nicolas Cage was trying to save his wife from James Caan in Honeymoon in Vegas.
In the column “Bunkhouse Logic” Stein wrote about the kids with whom he’d gone to Montgomery Blair High School in suburban Washington, D.C. Most of them were ambitious and driven, and like so many teenagers, many who dreamed of being rich and famous ended up taking safe career routes—first to law school, then to some big firm, corporation, or bureaucracy. Only two succeeded early: Goldie Hawn and Carl Bernstein.
Goldie had the guts to go for glory. A drama major at Washington’s American University, she one day decided to hitch a ride to New York. There she got a gig dancing at the New York World’s Fair. Later she used her dancer’s skills as a go-go girl on weekends while she tried out for shows. Working her way to Los Angeles and subsequently onto television, she met a producer. He asked her to audition for a new show called Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Instantly, she became a TV star. Cast as Walter Matthau’s too young girlfriend in Cactus Flower, she was soon a movie star. She’s made countless films since, including classics like Private Benjamin.
Carl Bernstein’s route to success was shorter. He eschewed college. Wanting to be a reporter, he went straight to work at The Washington Post. He was in the city room when some burglars were arrested at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Why? he wondered. His curiosity and his tenacity drove he and Bob Woodward to score the biggest scoop of the twentieth century: the Watergate cover-up.
“You cannot win if you’re not at the table,” Stein deduced. It’s the best, most basic advice I have ever come across. Practicing what he preached, Ben now boasts his own TV show. “I can’t believe Ben Stein is a star!” Goldie Hawn told me at dinner after appearing on Hardball last year.
Getting that seat at the table accomplishes several things. It’s how you (a) meet people. It’s how you (b) learn the business. And it’s how you (c) put yourself in position to be dealt a winning hand, to be there when the lightning strikes.
It’s not who you know, I’ve discovered, it’s who you get to know. Former New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that getting a prized West Wing office during his Nixon White House service “meant I could piss standing next to White House Chief-of-Staff H.R. Haldeman.”
It’s how I got on the editorial staff of my high-school newspaper. It’s how I got my first job with Senator Frank Moss, became a professional staffer on the Senate Budget Committee, a top aide to Tip O’Neill, and a nationally syndicated columnist and bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner. I was there when the job opened up.
There’s a false assumption out there that talent will always be recognized. Just get good at something and the world will beat a path to your door. Don’t believe it. The world is not checking in with us to see what skills we’ve picked up, what idea we’ve concocted, what dreams we carry in our hearts. When a job opens up, whether it’s in the chorus line or on the assembly line, it goes to the person standing there. It goes to the eager beaver the boss sees when he looks up from his work, the pint-sized kid standing at courtside waiting for one of the older boys to head home for dinner. “Hey, kid, wanna play?”
This isn’t only about being a movie star or a renowned investigative journalist. It’s about getting where you want to get in life. If you want to be a lawyer, get into the best school you can or you can get into the worst school. Just find some desperate place in obscurity that can’t fill its rolls. Either way, you will get your law degree.
This is the logic that motivated me in 1971 as I knocked on two hundred doors on Capitol Hill before getting my first job in politics.
The more I study the careers of successful people the more I see this pattern. Here are two examples I always think of:
Ernest Hemingway wanted to be a writer. He went to the place where writers gathered, the Left Bank. There he met the people, especially F. Scott Fitzgerald, who would encourage him in his writing and recommend him to their editors back in New York. He settled himself in what he would later describe as “the town best organized for a writer to write,” a city Gertrude Stein said “was where the twentieth century was.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell also put himself in the right place. “There may be one moment in our lives we can look back on later and say that, for good or ill, it was the turning point. For me that day came in November 1971.” It was the day the thirty-five-year-old army officer was told to apply for a White House fellowship.
It was his service as a White House Fellow that brought Powell, a self-described poor minority kid from the South Bronx, into daily personal contact with the people who would open doors for him. Without that access, Powell never would have achieved his great success.
HERE’S WHAT I REALLY THINK: I think that in order to win the game, you first need a seat at the table.
Ask!
If you knock long enough and loud enough at the gate you are bound to wake up somebody.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
If you want something, ask for it. Some people aren’t going to like the cut of your jib. But those who do will change your life. They will open doors for you. They will invest in you—if you’re fortunate, not just once, but repeatedly.
My experience in the Peace Corps in Africa is a case in point. Each day, I had to ask Swazi traders—people vastly different from myself—to trust me and do things for me. Thanks to that experience I came to Washington well prepared to meet perfect strangers and immediately ask them to hire me. I described earlier how I had knocked on two hundred doors on Capitol Hill before I got the job that changed everything. It was then I noticed how every door that was opened for me was opened by someone on the inside. The secret, as Longfellow suggests, is to knock long enough and loud enough that someone can hear you.
Not everybody is going to buy your act. The good news is that there will be people who say “yes.” It packs enormous impact. It takes only one strike to transform a prospector into a gold miner, only one “yes” to turn a proposal into a marriage.
Thanks to a mutual friend, Bob Schiffer, Hendrik Hertzberg and I became friends when we both came to the Carter White House in 1977. Rik, a former New Yorker staff writer, had one of the prestigious posts, presidential speechwriter. He got to eat in the White House mess, consort with other top sides, and most important, write the words the president would say. When Rik was promoted to chief speechwriter, leaving his former position vacant, I asked Rik if I could fill it. Thanks to him, and a successful tryout, I got the job.
There is a magic that results when a person invests in you. If you’re an investment for someone, there’s a bond to be honored by both of you. I owe not just my speechwriting job to Rik but my start in journalism. As editor of The New Republic he ran a healthy number of my articles in the years after we left the White House.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 163