Ronald Reagan’s amazing, mysterious life Part 2.
by EDMUND MORRIS
Reagan’s scrupulously kept Presidential diary is remarkable for a near-total lack of interest in people as individuals. In all its half million or so words, I did not find any affectionate remark about his children. He conscientiously names every visitor to the Oval Office, having a printed schedule to refer to, but in conversation he tended to rely on pronouns. Nor did he pay much attention to faces. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Ambassador,” he greeted Denis Healey, the former Defense Minister of Great Britain, while the real British Ambassador stood by. “But I’ve already met him,” his Excellency complained, “eleven times.”
This may be the place to note that, in all the years I observed Ronald Reagan until 1992—when he suddenly became weird—I never saw any sign of cognitive dementia. There were, to be sure, days late in his Presidency when he drifted off, as old men do. On May 29, 1988, for example, he emerged from an extended one-on-one with Gorbachev unable to recall a word that had been said. But such lapses were rare, and could usually be ascribed to fatigue. His prose style remained clear and sequential through 1994, when he bade farewell to the American people in a handwritten letter of unsurpassable poignancy.
Nancy Reagan conceded that there were “parts of Ronnie” that he kept to himself. I discovered, interviewing her, that she had little clue to how his mind worked—how he memorized scripts, pondered decisions, intuited political opportunities. He trusted her superior judgment of people but hardly ever asked her political advice; he did not even consult her about running for the Presidency. His locker-room side (which could be jovially obscene) was foreign to her, as was the Practical Christian and the imaginative dreamer who wanders through some unpublished short stories he wrote in college.
I hesitate to blaspheme against one of the most celebrated amours in White House history, but the way Reagan advertised his uxoriousness—the fulsome toasts and tributes, the hand-holding, the on-camera kisses—always struck me as excessive. There was something guilty about his superimposition of an enormous valentine card, all ribbons and bluebirds, over the stark black-and-white of his divorce decree from Jane Wyman. Possibly he was embarrassed by the many similarities between his two wives. Both had been wide-eyed, street-smart, scorchingly ambitious starlets, abandoned by their fathers in infancy, convinced of the world’s treachery, drawn to Reagan as a haven of goodness and strength, then frustrated to the point of despair by his reluctance to propose.
The difference with Nancy was that her ambition concerned only him: she wanted nothing for herself except the satisfaction of making him powerful. She had taken him on, moreover, when his acting career was in rapid decline, and when his brilliant future as a politician could hardly have been predicted. Yet she never flinched in her steely belief that he would recover and prevail. Even when he was forced to do variety in Vegas for money, early in 1954, she was there every night at a front table, giving him the luminous “look” that bolstered his self-respect.
Within a few months, Ronald Reagan was professionally reborn, as the host of “General Electric Theatre.” He became a star of the corporate lecture circuit, honing his oratory into “The Speech,” a statement of the free-market conservative principles that would sustain him ideologically for the rest of his life. Nancy’s stepfather, Dr. Loyal Davis, one of the most rock-ribbed reactionaries in the American Medical Association, has often been blamed for her husband’s swing to the right. But the truth is that Reagan lost his New Deal liberalism immediately after the Second World War, when he was targeted by Communist-controlled crafts unions as a lackey of studio management. He was a conservative Democrat long before he remarried.
By the early nineteen-sixties, he was a confirmed Eisenhower Republican, rich, well connected, and a political force strong enough to be courted by Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater. The more widely he travelled as campaigner and corporate spokesman, the more joyously he returned to his showplace house in Pacific Palisades, red-draped, mother-dominated, thrumming with appliances supplied free by his parent company. It was a kind of womb, to which he became almost pathologically attached. This ode to a shag rug was written by Reagan in 1961:
Across from where I sit . . . I can see certain paths pressed into the pile of the carpet . . . paths leading to a chair (big footprints), to a piano (feminine nine-year-oldsize prints), to a corner handy for hiding (very small prints) and of course narrow side paths (middle-size prints) . . . to her chair. To me, these middle-size prints act as guy wires and girders holding all the rest together. I am glad that the carpet sweeper can never erase them.
Much as he embraced domesticity, however, he relied on Nancy to relieve him of its petty nuisances, such as school and servant problems, and finding a home for his mentally ailing mother while he was out of town. She made her own and Jane Wyman’s children understand that although Dad was available for certain carefully scheduled hours of face time, in the pool or on horseback, he was not to be burdened with emotional demands. He had more important things than mere fatherhood on his mind: the governorship of California, for a start.
In grateful compensation, Reagan refused to believe any unsettling news about his wife—her parsimony, her pill dependencies, her violent disciplining of Patti, her middle-aged infatuation with Frank Sinatra. “I want you to go away and think carefully about what you have just said,” he reproved a gubernatorial aide, who worried that Nancy’s verbal abuse of staffers might become a news story. “My Nancy doesn’t behave like that.”
There is no doubt that she loved him for better and for worse, as her care of him in his last years has shown. Neither was there any equivocation in his love for her, as far as it went. But my impression is that it stopped at the frontier of his own comfort. One can read right through “I Love You, Ronnie,” the volume of love letters published by Nancy in 2000, without finding a single perceptive remark about her. The countless references to “Mommie” in the Presidential diaries are expressed almost entirely in terms of personal need. During her rare absences from the White House, his complaints of being “lonely” and “lonesome” echo with foghorn-like regularity. And this: “Why am I so scared always when she leaves? . . . I do an awful lot of praying until she returns.” It never occurs to him that she might be lonely, too, or bereaved or frightened, that she has any identity other than—by extension—his own.
Well, if love is the satisfaction of mutual needs, they got what they wanted. I stood behind them in church on May 10, 1992, just before Alzheimer’s began to separate him from her. They held the same hymnbook with their outer arms, while the inner ones circled in an embrace, and their voices blended as they sang “Blest Be the Tie That Binds.”
Ronald Reagan’s air of gentleness was such that few people noticed, or could believe they were noticing, that he had little private empathy with them. In November of 1988, a delegation of Bangladeshis visited the Oval Office to tell him about the catastrophic effects of the Burhi Ganga floods. After a few minutes, their spokesman stopped, disconcerted by the President’s dreamy smile. “You know,” Reagan said, “I used to work as a lifeguard at Lowell Park beach, on the Rock River in Illinois, and when it rained upstate you wouldn’t believe the trees and trash, and so forth, that used to come down.”
Yet he could be movingly sincere when he was required to emote in public. To question his identity with “the boys of Pointe du Hoc,” or the nameless dead of Bergen-Belsen, would be to misunderstand his essentially thespian nature. Actors are not like you or me: their real world, where they really feel, is onstage.
Reagan in any case was more than just an actor. He was a statesman, unaccustomed to encountering any will stronger than his own, and his detachment was a necessary armor against the emotional demands that responsibility attaches to power. All leaders have to sheathe themselves, or they cannot function. André Malraux’s first impression of Charles de Gaulle is equally applicable to Ronald Reagan:
[One felt] a remoteness, all the more curious because it appeared not only between himself and his interlocutor but between what he said and what he was. . . . He established with the person he was talking to a very powerful contact, which seemed inexplicable when one had left him. A contact above all due to a feeling of having come up against a total personality.
Was Reagan familiar with de Gaulle’s leadership maxim, “Il faut cultiver le mystère”? Probably not, but he didn’t have to be: the mystery was already there. I have a whole sheaf of “enigma” cards, wherein various interviewees speculate on how much the President knew, or didn’t know, about what they were trying to tell him. If he was as disengaged as he often seemed, doodling absent-mindedly during long presentations, how did he, time and again, manage to pose exactly the kind of simple hypothesis that showed the presenter to be confused? Was he sending a subtle message, when the doodle curved into the hindquarters of a horse?
Which brings me to the cards I most enjoyed compiling—those that caught Reagan’s humor. Most of his very funny stories (told with a verbal economy and cadence that would tax any prose stylist) were mentally prerecorded and played back at will. As a young actor in the Warner Bros. commissary, he used to sit at the “fast” Jewish table in order to study, and eventually compete with, the shtick of such motormouths as George Burns, Jack Benny, and the Epstein brothers. Although not naturally a wit, he was capable of dry riposte, as in the crack about Archbishop Desmond Tutu that George H. W. Bush repeated the other day at the Washington National Cathedral, convulsing the congregation.
Perhaps the best of Reagan’s one-liners came after he attended his last ceremonial dinner, with the Knights of Malta in New York City on January 13, 1989. The evening’s m.c., a prominent lay Catholic, was rendered so emotional by wine that he waved aside protocol and followed the President’s speech with a rather slurry one of his own. It was to the effect that Ronald Reagan, a defender of the rights of the unborn, knew that all human beings begin life as “feces.” The speaker cited Cardinal John O’Connor (sitting aghast nearby) as “a fece” who had gone on to greater things. “You, too, Mr. President—you were once a fece!”
En route back to Washington on Air Force One, Reagan twinklingly joined his aides in the main cabin. “Well,” he said, “that’s the first time I’ve flown to New York in formal attire to be told I was a piece of shit.”
Reagan’s most regrettable characteristic in later years was his incuriosity, compounded, as it was, by a refusal to be budged from any shibboleth that suited him. He had been quite the opposite as a young man, avid to learn what he could about world affairs. He passionately espoused the New Deal, and by 1938 he had swung so far toward the idealistic left that he tried to join the Hollywood Communist Party. He was quickly rejected, on the shrewd ground that he was not Party material (too garrulous, too patriotic). During the Second World War, he became addicted to the Reader’s Digest—so much so that he seemed to memorize every issue as soon as it hit the stands. Reagan has been rightly mocked for the condensed, packaged quality this gave to his thought, but at least until he left the employ of General Electric, in 1962, he was able to talk interestingly about subjects other than politics. From then on, all his considerable intelligence focussed on conservative doctrine, and his general knowledge atrophied.
As a result, he relied more and more on memories of past reading, and began to commit the gaffes that would bedevil all his political campaigns. By the time he became President, his ignorance had attained a kind of comic poignancy. He thought “Camus” rhymed with “famous” and that trees caused acid rain. He had never heard of “Our Town,” “The Magic Mountain,” “Carmen,” or “Blow-Up.” The names Goethe, Guevara, Disraeli, Knopf, Schumann, Fellini, Hockney, Piaf, and Prospero rang no bell. When I mentioned the Suez Canal, he shook his head sorrowfully and told me that it had been a mistake to give it back to the Panamanians.
His mind, if not protean, could nevertheless be described as Procrustean, in the scientist Frederick Turner’s definition:
[Such an intelligence] reduces the information it gets from the outside world to its own categories, and accepts reality’s answers only if they directly address its own set of questions. . . . It insists on certainty and unambiguity, and so is at war with the probabilistic and indeterminate nature of the most primitive and archaic components of the universe.
As anyone can see who consults Ronald Reagan’s disciplined, dogged manuscripts, he needed to impose order on chaos. He did not like to be surprised, or hustled; he liked punctuality, symmetry, sureness. Every item on his schedule was crossed off upon completion, with a triumphant arrow pointing down to the next. When travelling, he packed his own clothes, synchronizing them with his itinerary, so that each change would suit the time, occasion, and climate stops on tour. He even tried to reorder nature at Rancho del Cielo, his mountain retreat above Santa Barbara, pruning every thicket of brush, every dead madrona branch, until the skyline was as sharp as a sketch by Grant Wood.
Two sets of cards tabbed “rr: paradox” and “rr: passivity” might be combined in my drawer, were they not already alphabetical neighbors. It is indeed paradoxical that this most passive of Presidents should have been so active in bringing about the collapse of Soviet Communism. Ronald Reagan was not an initiator; he never called a meeting or drafted a new policy or hired or fired, unless somebody suggested it. He raised no objection when his first chief of staff and his Treasury Secretary swapped jobs. Even his angriest phone call to a foreign leader (Israel’s Menachem Begin, during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982) had to be prompted by Michael Deaver. Happy and fulfilled inside his Oval O—“I’ve got the biggest theatre in the world, right here,” he said, grinning at me—he paid no attention to noises off: the furious arguments of Alexander Haig and Caspar Weinberger, David Stockman’s whines and Donald Regan’s roars, the whisperings of Oliver North and John Poindexter. Even when truly disturbing sounds invaded his tranquillity—the blowing up of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, the outcry of Jews over the Bitburg affair, the explosion of the Challenger—he seemed oddly equable, although in each case he performed a moving ceremony of grief.
One sound, however, did shake his complacency. It was the pop-popping of John Hinckley, Jr.,’s .22-calibre pistol outside the Washington Hilton Hotel on March 30, 1981. Since Reagan nearly died in that attack, so early in his Presidency, we can credit the sincerity of his written vow: “Whatever happens now I owe my life to God and will try to serve him in every way I can.”
Nothing afterward, not even the debacle of Iran-Contra, deflected him from what he was convinced was his double mission: at home, to restore the American entrepreneurial spirit after fifty years of federal paternalism; abroad, to display such a resolute contempt for Marxism-Leninism that it would follow Nazism onto “the ash-heap of history.” Both conceits were perceived as laughably naïve in 1981, at least in those Chardonnay-fragrant areas of Manhattan and Marin County where political issues are always described as “complex.” Three years later, the first dream came true in a landslide reëlection, amid such a blizzard of red-white-and-blue as had not been seen across America since V-J Day. And after five years more—sadly, a little too late for Reagan to see it as President—the “evil empire” began to self-destruct, just as he had said it would.
History already shows that Reagan’s political instincts were astute and his sense of the future prophetic. The Berlin Wall, which he so memorably described as “ugly as the idea behind it,” is reduced to a few chips in museums. Teen-agers stroll hand in hand where guard dogs used to run. Cybercafés beep and brew in downtown Moscow and Beijing. Free-enterprise capitalism is now the norm of most economies, and free speech floods the Internet.
We became so positive a society under Ronald Reagan that we forget how low our national morale had sunk before he raised his right hand on January 20, 1981, and, by plain force of character, reinvested the Presidency with authority and dignity. In recent years, we have seen the office belittled again, but that is the way with democracy and its cycles: big men are followed by small; power gives way to dereliction. The Republic survives, and for as long as it survives I think Reagan will be remembered, with Truman and Jackson, as one of the great populist Presidents, an instinctual leader who, in body and mind, represented the better temper of his times.
In one of my last interviews with him, I tried out my theory that he “thought with his hips,” as follows:
Q: Mr. President, do you realize that you had Einstein all figured out at age eighteen?
A: Huh?
Q: There you were, a summer lifeguard on the Rock River, swaying every day in your high chair on the diving raft. Somebody starts to drown in midstream. You throw down your glasses—everything’s a blur—you dive into the moving water—you swim, not to where the drowning person is, but where he’ll be by the time you intersect his trajectory. You think that you’re moving in a straight line. But actually you’re describing a parabola, because the river’s got you too. Your curve becomes his curve; you grab him, swing him around, and start heading back in reverse, not toward the diving platform but upstream, sothat by the time you get to shallow water you’ll be back where you started. During all this action, you’re in a state of flux: no fixed point of reference, no sense of gravity. Everything’s relative. . . .
A (Uninterested, interrupting): Yeah, that river sure ran strong. Out there beyond the swimming line.
My Relativitätstheorie had understandably not impressed him, but I felt I’d at least touched on a subject that penetrated his shy pride. Long after the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, when he could not understand the simplest question or recognize photographs of himself as President, he would still show visitors a watercolor of Lowell Park beach on the wall of his office. “I was . . . uh, a lifeguard . . . there . . . uh . . . I saved seventy-seven lives!” Then words would fail him, and he would gaze at the picture with his glossy head cocked, looking out beyond the swimming line to where the river ran strong. |
