Rawhide Down (3 page)

Reagan’s clothes draped without a wrinkle. Six foot one, lean and muscular, he kept fit by riding horses, cutting wood, and exercising regularly with a wheel that he rolled out and back from his body while kneeling on the floor. The president was proud of his physique and was known, from time to time, to pose for photographs in a way that jokingly showed off his biceps. His handsome face had deep creases that spread from his eyes when he smiled—which was often—and his cheeks were ruddy. Though only seventy days into his presidency, the former movie star appeared distinguished, confident, and entirely comfortable in his new role as the most powerful man in the world.

But his confidence wasn’t simply a pose: Ronald Reagan, unlike so many politicians, was remarkably at ease with himself. Long before his arrival in Washington, he had achieved far more than anyone could ever have expected. Born in 1911 and raised in Dixon, Illinois, he grew up the son of an alcoholic shoe salesman. After high school, he attended nearby Eureka College on a scholarship, whereas most of his friends went to work in factories and on farms. As a boy, he had fallen in love with the movies and acted in high school and college plays; by the time he graduated from Eureka with a degree in economics in 1932 he yearned to make a name for himself on the silver screen.

But getting to Hollywood wasn’t easy, especially during the Great Depression. He started in radio, convincing a station manager in Davenport, Iowa, to let him announce college football games; soon he was a radio personality in Des Moines. By the spring of 1937, he had managed to work his way to Hollywood, where he landed a seven-year contract. Over the next three decades, Reagan would appear in fifty-three movies, which ran the gamut from romances to dramas. His career, like that of many others, was interrupted by World War II. Because he was not allowed to serve in combat—his eyesight was too poor—the army assigned him to make training films. At war’s end, he declined a promotion to major, telling friends that he thought being a captain sounded more dashing.

Originally a Democrat and an ardent admirer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Reagan evolved into a staunch Republican. He launched his political career in 1964 by delivering a stirring nationally televised address in support of the ultra-conservative Republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater. Two years later, despite widespread skepticism that an actor could win public office, he was elected governor of California. In 1976, he challenged President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination; when he lost, he was written off as too old to try again. Still ambitious, he refused to ride off into the sunset. In 1980, the year he turned sixty-nine, he won his party’s nomination and defeated the Democratic incumbent, Jimmy Carter, in a landslide.

Reagan was arguably the best politician of his era, a performer who wielded his acting skills and charisma to sell his program of lower taxes, less government, and a strengthened military. He deflected concerns about his age and memory with one-liners and jokes. He held his own in debates. But he was much more than an actor turned politician: after serving for eight years as governor of the nation’s most populous state and writing by hand hundreds of radio commentaries that dealt extensively with domestic and foreign policy, Reagan had a fully formed political consciousness. He also understood the simple but profound truth that he could achieve much more if he allowed others to underestimate him. Supremely self-confident, he was not bothered by criticism that he was lazy or that he followed a script crafted by political advisors. A plaque on his desk read, “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.” And he meant it.

*   *   *

T
HE PETITE FIFTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD
woman who joined the president for breakfast that Monday morning in March deserved a great deal of credit for his success. A former movie actress, Nancy Reagan understood the importance of public perception, and for almost thirty years she had worked hard to shape and protect her husband’s image. Tough and demanding, she had played a key role during his run for the presidency, and she was not afraid to upbraid staffers who overworked her husband or gave him poor advice. Where Reagan was trusting, his wife was skeptical, and she often counseled him on sensitive political matters. Together, they made a formidable political team, but their marriage went well beyond politics. In the eyes of those who knew them well, they were living an almost fantastical American love story.

Earlier that month, on March 4, the couple had celebrated their twenty-ninth wedding anniversary with a night on the town. As they emerged from a restaurant, Mrs. Reagan was asked by reporters what she thought of her marriage. “It seems like twenty-nine minutes,” she replied. They had been too busy to exchange gifts, but Reagan had taken the time to write his wife a love letter. “As Pres. of the U.S., it is my honor & privilege to cite you for service above & beyond the call of duty in that you have made one man (me) the most happy man in
the world
for 29 years.… He still can’t find the words to tell her how lost he would be without her.”

A much more elaborate celebration had occurred less than three weeks after the inauguration, when Mrs. Reagan orchestrated a surprise party for her husband’s seventieth birthday. It is difficult to keep a secret in Washington, especially when trying to sneak more than one hundred guests into the White House. Nancy Reagan accomplished the feat by telling her husband that they were going to enjoy an intimate birthday dinner with friends in the residence, and then secretly inviting scores of his closest friends and associates. The impending party immediately began generating news stories, so Mrs. Reagan had to intercept the papers before they reached her news-hungry husband. One morning, Tom Brokaw of NBC’s
Today
show mentioned how large the president’s birthday party was expected to be; Mrs. Reagan turned to Mr. Reagan and said, “My, that Tom Brokaw certainly exaggerates.”

At eight p.m. on February 6, Reagan, wearing a tuxedo, walked into the East Room and was shocked to hear guests shouting “Surprise!” and singing “Happy birthday, dear Ronald!” The spacious, high-ceilinged room, more often used for formal state affairs, was decked out like a flower-filled fairyland, bursting with hyacinths, daffodils, tulips, lilies, and ficus trees. At the center of each table was a cake, and each cake was topped by a leaping horse. Dozens of friends, family members, wealthy backers, and lawmakers attended the party. The former Hollywood stars Jimmy Stewart, Irene Dunne, and George Murphy flew in to celebrate the “thirty-first anniversary of my thirty-ninth birthday,” as Reagan jokingly referred to it.

For the occasion, Nancy Reagan wore a sleek white beaded dress, one of her husband’s favorites. The couple danced to romantic music played by the Army Strolling Strings, which honored the first lady with the tune “Nancy with the Laughing Face.” When Mrs. Reagan took a turn around the dance floor with Frank Sinatra, the president made a show of cutting in. The first couple reveled late into the evening and did not retire until after midnight.

Now, a little more than seven weeks later, the Reagans finished their breakfast at about 8:30 a.m. The president gave his wife an affectionate kiss and headed for the elevator to make the short trip to his office. As always, the day ahead of him had been scheduled in detail. At 9:15 a.m., he was due to speak by phone with West Germany’s chancellor about the growing crisis in Poland; he would then attend his daily national security briefing. Later that morning, he would meet with Hispanic supporters in the Cabinet Room. The day’s biggest event was a speech to a trade union at a downtown hotel. Afterward, he would return to the White House, where he was to meet business executives. The script noted that in the afternoon he had ample “staff time”—a euphemism for relaxation, which sometimes meant a nap—and his official day was scheduled to end at 5:30 p.m. with a haircut. Then, after the Reagans hosted a dinner in the residence for the secretary of health and human services and his wife, the president would have a quiet hour or two before going to bed.

*   *   *

R
EAGAN
’
S FIRST TASK
that morning was to shake hands and deliver a pep talk. At 8:34 a.m., he emerged from the elevator on the first floor and was met by his so-called body man, David Fischer, and one of his rotating military aides, army lieutenant colonel Jose Muratti. Fischer, a boyish-looking thirty-two-year-old with a thick mustache, carried the documents Reagan would require in the next few hours and attended to the president’s needs as they arose, from fetching Reagan’s suit jacket to taking notes about a promised favor. Muratti, wearing a crisp green uniform and polished black shoes, shadowed the president and held the “football,” the satchel that contained the country’s nuclear war plans. Reagan carried the other tool necessary for launching a nuclear attack—an authentication card—in his jacket pocket.

Reagan, Fischer, and Muratti walked down the hall to the Blue Room, a handsome oval room with white walls, blue window sashes, and a beautiful view of the South Lawn. Presidents typically received guests here, and Reagan quickly took his place at the head of a receiving line and began to say hello to a stream of political appointees, all of whom he would be addressing in a few minutes. He shook a hand and smiled; a White House photographer’s camera clicked. He shook another hand, smiled, and a camera clicked again. Some politicians look stiff in such settings; others fake it, pouring on bogus charm. But Reagan always seemed to decant just the right mix of poise and charisma to make strangers feel, if only for a few seconds, as if they were his friends.

Reagan shook hands with more than sixty people in eleven minutes, and then everyone filed into the East Room. Gone were the flower arrangements and tables stacked with cakes that had greeted the president on his birthday; this morning, three rows of wooden chairs with white cushions had been placed in a semicircle around a small stage. Reagan took the podium to loud applause, which echoed off the room’s bare white walls. The men and women present that day were all fervent supporters; a number of them had worked on the 1976 and 1980 campaigns. Now they were administration officials charged with carrying out the president’s agenda.

“Sit down,” Reagan began. “You’re at work.”

The group laughed.

“Well,” Reagan said, “I just wanted to tell you that every day won’t start this way while you are here. I’ve long taken seriously the lesson, you know what they say, ‘If you get up earlier in the morning, get to work earlier than everyone else, you work harder than everyone else, you stay longer in the day, you’ll leave a lot more money to your kids.’”

Everyone chuckled.

“And you leave it a lot sooner,” the president said. “So judge yourself accordingly and pace yourself accordingly.”

Reagan, as he so often did, was making fun of himself. He was an incorrigible comedian who started many meetings with a joke and could instantly eliminate tension in a room with a clever quip. In his desk in the White House residence, he kept a stack of index cards filled with one-liners and funny stories. His prodigious memory, fortified by memorizing scores of screenplays, allowed him to recall complicated jokes and yarns he had not heard or repeated in years. A master at exploiting his comedic skills for political advantage, he was adept at turning the humor on himself. Even his most fervent admirers admitted he was not the hardest worker in the world: whereas Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Carter were known to work sixteen-hour days, Reagan made it clear that the Oval Office clock must be set to his internal nine-to-five schedule. And if he wanted to take an afternoon off to go horseback riding—he liked to tell aides, “There is nothing better for the inside of a man than the backside of a horse”—he didn’t hesitate to do it. The previous Wednesday, in fact, he and several staff members had hopped on the presidential helicopter to go riding on the wooded trails around the U.S. Marine Corps base at Quantico.

By making fun of his own work ethic, even in settings such as this one, Reagan effectively defused a political weapon wielded by his opponents, who had often tried to remind voters of his relatively advanced age. The jokes also endeared him to his audiences, who admired his humility and knew that only a secure man could laugh at himself in this way.

“It may sound like a tired cliché, talking about a team,” Reagan continued. “We are a team, and our goal is a strong prosperous nation at peace, and team play is the only way I know how to do it.” This was no exaggeration: Reagan had been a passionate believer in teamwork ever since his days as a guard on his high school football team and later on the Eureka College squad.

“Right now,” the president told his audience, “the country is in trouble, and you can be a major part in changing this situation.” He exhorted the officials to work hard so that in their lifetimes no one could write a book called
The Rise and Fall of the United States of America.

Continuing, the president said: “Maybe some of you were subjected to me a couple of times here and there during the campaign—I took pleasure in quoting some words of Thomas Paine, words that he said to his fellow Americans back when this nation was trying to be born. And he said, ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ So let our prayer be that we can live up to this opportunity that God has given us and we can build the world over again.”

It was a minor speech to a relatively small circle of advisors, and it lasted just three minutes and fifteen seconds. Yet it revealed something important about Reagan and his beliefs. On the one hand, the president was acknowledging that the country confronted serious problems. In March 1981, after all, the nation’s economy was anemic and the Soviet Union seemed ascendant. But Reagan, a perpetual optimist, did not believe he was witnessing the end of the American century, and his deep faith was fundamental to that conviction. As a boy, he had often heard his mother, a devout member of the Disciples of Christ, explain that God had a purpose for everyone. She instilled in her son the belief that even life’s most disheartening setbacks and seemingly random twists of fate were all part of God’s plan. In particular, Reagan had long believed that God had something special in store for the United States, that his fellow citizens were capable of prevailing because they were destined for greatness. As he had put it decades earlier, in a commencement address, “I, in my own mind, have thought of America as a place in the divine scheme of things that was set aside as the promised land.… I believe that God in shedding his grace on this country has always in the divine scheme of things kept an eye on our land and guided it as a promised land.”