Reagan: The Life (69 page)

He continued to
Utah Beach for a gathering of the heads of state of several allied countries. Only France’s Mitterrand spoke, but American soldiers joined French, British, Canadian, and others in representing the combined forces that had freed Europe from the Nazi yoke. The
Eisenhower
and the other ships stood offshore, out of earshot but in full view of the television cameras.

Reagan returned to London by helicopter. He flew once more over the
Eisenhower
, whose five thousand crewmen assembled on the aircraft carrier’s deck in a formation that spelled out “Ike.” His helicopter circled the ship while he addressed the officers and men by radio-telephone. “
Believe me, all of us up here are inspired by the sight of your magnificent ship and the battle group which accompanied you to the coast of Normandy,” he said. “Today, as forty years ago, our navy and all of our armed forces are advancing the cause of peace and freedom.” The helicopter circled one last time. “
Admiral Flatley,
Captain Clexton, officers and men of the ‘Ike,’ ” Reagan said, “I salute you for your devoted service to the cause of freedom.”

W
ALTER
M
ONDALE HAD
emerged from the defeat of the Carter-Mondale ticket in 1980 with reputation intact, as losing vice presidential candidates often do. And the Democratic victories in the 1982 elections gave Mondale and other Democrats cause to think Reagan might be vulnerable in 1984. The recession grew worse past the election, with unemployment reaching nearly 11 percent in December 1982; many voters reasonably wondered if Reagan’s recipe for recovery wasn’t, in fact, a formula that aggravated the problem.

Other issues contributed to the Democratic hopes. The Reagan arms buildup, including SDI and the
Pershing program for Europe, continued to energize the antinuclear left.
Deregulation of industry pleased business but antagonized labor, which still smarted over the firing of the air-traffic controllers. Environmentalists decried the policies and pronouncements of
James Watt, Reagan’s interior secretary. Watt’s policies featured opening more federal lands to commercial development; this made many westerners happy but caused large numbers in the rest of the country to fear that the national patrimony was being sold for a mess of corporate pottage. Yet it was Watt’s words that sparked the greatest uproar. The interior secretary, a conservative Christian, suggested to a House committee that long-term conservation was a waste of time. “
I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord comes,” he said. Watt lambasted his opponents as un-American. “
I never use the words Democrats and Republicans,” he declared. “It’s liberals and Americans.” He ridiculed
affirmative action, saying of a coal advisory committee, “I have a black, I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple.”

Reagan supported Watt as long as he could. Watt’s policies were
essentially the president’s policies. Reagan considered himself an environmentalist, with stewardship of his ranch to prove it. But he opposed what he called “
environmental extremism,” as he said Jim Watt was doing. “He’s not going to destroy the environment, but he is going to restore some common sense,” Reagan told reporters.

Yet Watt’s language eventually made him a liability. Reagan wearied of questions about Watt at news conferences, and Watt’s derisive comment about the coal committee, with the 1984 campaign approaching, was a phrase too far. Tellingly for Reagan, the Democrats were coming to love Watt. “
He’s the best thing we’ve got going for us,” a Democrat on Capitol Hill anonymously said of Watt. Reagan was starting to think so too. A reporter asked if Watt could possibly be effective after his latest remark. Reagan left Watt dangling. “
I think that’s a decision that he, himself, would have to make, whether he feels that he has made it questionable as to whether he can be effective or not.” Watt got the message and resigned.

If Watt had been the best thing going for the Democrats, the worst thing, by the beginning of the 1984 election season, was the economy. The fever of the recession broke in early 1983, and during the next several months the important economic indicators turned in directions favorable to the country and therefore to an incumbent president. Unemployment and inflation fell; production and profits rose. Reagan had always asserted that the economy would revive once his program took hold; now that the economy was reviving, he could persuasively claim credit.

Walter Mondale entered the 1984 Democratic primary season as his party’s front-runner. He fended off challenges by
Gary Hart, a Colorado senator who struck voters as a bit light for the top job in American politics, and
Jesse Jackson, an African American minister and activist who thrilled black audiences and carried three southern primaries but left majorities elsewhere tepid or cold. Mondale claimed the Democratic nomination with little drama.

He created a modest buzz of his own by choosing as his running mate
Geraldine Ferraro, a New York member of Congress and the first woman on a major-party ticket in American history. The rest of his campaign was more traditional, focusing on the federal deficit and pledging to rein it in. “
Here is the truth about the future,” Mondale told the Democratic convention, meeting in San Francisco. “We are living on borrowed money and borrowed time. These
deficits hike interest rates, clobber exports, stunt investment, kill jobs, undermine growth, cheat our kids, and shrink our
future. Whoever is inaugurated in January, the American people will have to pay Mr. Reagan’s bills. The budget will be squeezed.
Taxes will go up. And anyone who says they won’t is not telling the truth to the American people.” Mondale was generally accounted a liberal, but on this central issue he took a stance that made him more conservative, in the received fiscal sense, than Reagan. “I mean business. By the end of my first term, I will reduce the Reagan budget deficit by two-thirds. Let’s tell the truth. It must be done, it must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”

Mondale took this message into the autumn campaign. “
One of the key tests of leadership is whether one sees clearly the nature of the problems confronted by our nation,” he declared in the first of his two debates with Reagan, in Louisville. “And perhaps the dominant domestic issue of our times is what do we do about these enormous
deficits.” The president had promised to balance the budget but hadn’t come close. “Every estimate by this administration about the size of the deficit has been off by billions and billions of dollars. As a matter of fact, over four years, they’ve missed the mark by nearly $600 billion. We were told we would have a
balanced budget in 1983. It was $200 billion deficit instead.” The current fiscal year looked even worse. “Virtually every economic analysis that I’ve heard of, including the distinguished
Congressional Budget Office, which is respected by, I think, almost everyone, says that even with historically high levels of economic growth, we will suffer a $263 billion deficit.”

Reagan shook his head while Mondale spoke. In reply he ignored Mondale’s numbers and attacked his convention speech. “I don’t believe that Mr. Mondale has a plan for balancing the budget,” Reagan said. “He has a plan for raising taxes.”

Mondale repeated what he had said in San Francisco. “Mr. Reagan, after the election, is going to have to propose a tax increase,” he insisted. Mondale had been following Donald Regan’s progress on tax reform, and he wanted Reagan to own up to what was being prepared in his name. “His secretary of the Treasury said he’s studying a sales tax or a value-added tax. They’re the same thing. They hit middle- and moderate-income Americans and leave wealthy Americans largely untouched.”

One of the debate questioners posed the issue to Reagan directly. “Do you think middle-income Americans are overtaxed or undertaxed?”

Reagan put on his best sheepish smile. “You know, I wasn’t going to say this at all, but I can’t help it. There you go again.” He paused for the laughter, which came perfunctorily, unlike the honest amusement and
applause that had greeted his use of the line four years earlier. “I don’t have a plan to raise taxes,” he continued. “Our problem has not been that anybody in our country is undertaxed; it’s that government is overfed.”

Mondale was ready for Reagan’s recycled humor. “Mr. President, you said, ‘There you go again,’ right?”

“Yes,” Reagan responded.

“You remember the last time you said that?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“You said it when President Carter said that you were going to cut
Medicare, and you said, ‘Oh no, there you go again, Mr. President.’ And what did you do right after the election? You went out and tried to cut $20 billion out of Medicare. And so, when you say, ‘There you go again’—people remember this, you know.”

T
HE HO-HOS AND
clapping that greeted Mondale’s riposte suggested he had the better of this exchange. And the reviews in the media extrapolated his victory to the debate as a whole. Reagan knew he had done poorly. He wandered off topic; he cited too many statistics; he forgot his closing statement; he looked uncharacteristically flustered. In a rare negative self-review, he afterward admitted, “
I have to say I lost.” But he didn’t blame himself. “I’d crammed so hard on facts and figures in view of the absolutely dishonest things he’s been saying in the campaign, I guess I flattened out.” He refused to concede defeat on the substance. “He was never able to rebut any of the facts I presented and kept repeating things that are absolute falsehoods.” Yet Reagan of all people knew that politics is about more than substance, and in the court of perception the verdict was against him.

Reagan’s disappointment was fleeting, as disappointment generally was with him. “
We left Louisville not feeling too bad,” he wrote the next day. “There was a rally at the hotel last night—1000’s of people who had all seen the debate and they thought I’d won.”

But the hotel crowd was a gift from the advance team, as Nancy Reagan knew. She took her husband’s dismal showing harder than he did. “
It was the worst night of Ronnie’s political career,” she recalled later. “Right from the start, he was tense, muddled, and off-stride. He lacked authority. He stumbled. This was a Ronald Reagan I had never seen before. It was painful to watch. There was no way around it; that debate was a nightmare.” She rushed to the stage at the end of the debate. He was seriously
upset. “I was terrible,” she remembered him telling her. She offered comfort but not dissent. “We both knew he was right.” She couldn’t sleep the night after the debate. He said the hotel room was stuffy. She agreed. “But we both knew that the real reason was that the debate had been a disaster.”

She looked for answers. “What have you done to my husband?” she demanded of Mike Deaver. “Whatever it is, don’t do it again.” She called for the firing of
Richard Darman, who had led the debate preparations. Darman’s boss, Jim Baker, refused. “
I never had one difference of opinion with her but one,” Baker remembered, the one being over the responsibility for Reagan’s flop. Baker thought Reagan simply hadn’t studied. This made Nancy even angrier. She complained to Paul Laxalt, who accompanied her on the return from Louisville to Washington. “
Jesus, Nancy Reagan was so unhappy,” Laxalt remembered. “I went back with Nancy and heard for two or three hours how this debate had been screwed up.” She vowed that things would change. “By God, it’s going to be different, the preparation is going to be different next time,” Laxalt recalled her saying.

The unspoken fear driving Nancy’s anger was stated aloud in the media. The consistently sympathetic
Wall Street Journal
headlined it starkly: “
Fitness Issue—New Question in Race: Is Oldest U.S. President Now Showing His Age? Reagan Debate Performance Invites Open Speculation on His Ability to Serve.” The article beneath the banner went on to say, “Until Sunday night’s debate, age hadn’t been much of an issue in the election campaign. That may now be changing. The president’s rambling responses and occasional apparent confusion injected an unpredictable new element into the race.” The article quoted a management expert who had voted for Reagan in 1980: “I am very concerned, as a psychologist, about his inability to think on his feet, the disjointedness of his sentences and his use of the security blanket of redundancy … I’d be concerned to put him in a corporate presidency. I’d be all the more concerned to put him in the U.S. presidency.” The article cited two gerontologists who contended that Reagan should take a mental-impairment test of the kind used to measure senile dementia, with the results made public.

Other papers and reporters pursued the age question.
Lou Cannon of the
Washington Post
, who had followed Reagan since the California days, interviewed various members of the campaign before writing, “
The president’s advisers, pressed to find an explanation for a performance they consider unusually ineffective, are trying to defend Reagan, 73, from the charge that he is showing his age.”
James Reston wrote in the
New York Times
, “
Age may have been a factor in his faltering performance in Louis
ville. Usually he is at his best onstage, and the bigger the audience the better. But he forgot his lines, even in his memorized closing speech, and that did surprise and trouble even his most devoted aides.”

The Reagan campaign team, beyond enlisting the crowds to boost the candidate’s spirits, felt obliged to trot out one of his physicians to attest to his soundness of mind. “
Mr. Reagan is a mentally alert, robust man who appears younger than his stated age,” the doctor declared.

R
EAGAN REMAINED CALM
. He had received bad reviews in Hollywood and survived them; he would survive these too. Polls still showed him ahead of Mondale, if by less than before. He listened to Jim Baker, who waved aside the age question as recycled irrelevance. “
It was the same old stuff,” Baker remarked afterward. Reagan studied harder, even as he indulged Nancy in her efforts to relax and rest him. “
Let Ronnie be Ronnie,” she told all who would listen. She arranged for Maureen and Ron and their spouses to join her and Reagan in Kansas City ahead of the second debate. Whether or not the children provided him the moral support she ascribed to them, they made her feel better.