THE REAGAN DIARIES
RONALD REAGAN
EDITED BY DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
TO NANCY REAGAN
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE 1981
CHAPTER TWO 1982
CHAPTER THREE 1983
PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT-I
CHAPTER FOUR 1984
CHAPTER FIVE 1985
CHAPTER SIX 1986
PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT-II
CHAPTER SEVEN 1987
CHAPTER EIGHT 1988–1989
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
GLOSSARY
SEARCHABLE TERMS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
INTRODUCTION
When I was first asked to edit President Ronald Reagan’s diaries, I was, of course, flattered and excited, not to mention terribly curious. What would I find? Would the “real” Reagan finally emerge from the man’s personal journals? How would the diaries alter perceptions of his White House tenure?
To my knowledge only four presidents other than Ronald Reagan maintained written diaries on a consistent basis: George Washington, John Quincy Adams, James K. Polk, and Rutherford B. Hayes. (Others, like Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, kept them sporadically.) Reagan had never kept a diary before entering the White House, which was something he and Nancy later regretted. “The Sacramento years flew by so quickly; we both wish we had kept diaries,” she would tell friends. “But the kids were younger then, and we just did not seem to have time.” Reagan made a serious commitment to maintaining one as president, starting with his inauguration on January 20, 1981. Unlike so many new diarists who trail off after the first few weeks, he took his task seriously, and in eight years he never neglected a daily entry, except when he was in the hospital.
When I first saw the White House diaries at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, I was astounded. Lined up on a research table, all five volumes resemble a handsome half-set of an encyclopedia. For a moment, I just looked at them. In physical appearance, the diaries were hardcover books, 8½ by 11, bound in maroon and brown leather with the presidential seal embossed on the center of the front and the name RONALD WILSON REAGAN in gold lettering at the bottom right. No words appeared on the spines. The inside cover boards all had elegant designs, with intertwined brown autumnal leaves or swirling red-blue-beige paisley or some other exquisite pattern.
Within the pages themselves, you see immediately that Reagan had neat, rounded handwriting, done in ink that is variously blue or black. It is a welcoming script, easy to read. Cross-outs are rare. Economical to the core, Reagan filled every page to the very bottom. Occasionally, he inserted auxiliary material into the diary pages: comic photographs, a picture of a young child wearing a REAGAN straw hat, or newspaper clippings pertaining to U.S. soldiers killed abroad.
Reagan was a master of the art of summary. As an orator, he was known to keep notes in shorthand on cards that he kept in his breast pocket. He wrote in the diary in a similar fashion. The very act of composition helped him organize his thoughts, as it had since his boyhood. Over the decades, he wrote his own speeches, radio broadcasts, and newspaper columns. He once claimed that the creative act gave him “great clarity.” As president, he made the time to write (or revise) many of his own speeches. He answered his own mail. “You specified that you wanted to hear from me personally,” Reagan wrote a citizen from the White House in 1981, “so here I am.” He enjoyed reading books of all sorts—if the writing was inspiring. To judge by the liveliness of many diary entries, from the first to the very last, keeping a daily log was, for Reagan, anything but a chore.
Nancy Reagan explains that her husband kept the diaries in his second-floor White House study next to their bedroom. When traveling, he’d bring a volume with him, often writing while on Air Force One. “We just wanted a way to capture the moment and our feelings before we were whisked on to the next day,” Nancy explained, “so we could savor it a little more.” For several years after their return to California, the Reagans would often sit together in their den after dinner, reading aloud from their diaries and reminiscing about their White House years.
As soon as I started reading the daily entries the president had written, I could almost hear his voice. It was Reagan, circa the 1980s. The familiar, plain-spoken, direct tones were back. It was as if he were talking just to me. And I found that I was fascinated by what he had to say.
In these writings Ronald Reagan’s true nature is revealed. His uncomplicated and humble notations are on display in these pages: genuine, thoughtful, and caring. They are an extension of an honest man who loved freedom but hated communism, inflation, and…taxes. The Reagan appeal, evident in each volume, helps to explain why he never outlasted his welcome with the American people. They, and millions of others around the world, regarded him as a powerful leader, and, at the same time, a trusted neighbor. Those who made Reagan a hero in his own lifetime even saw something of themselves reflected in him—a modern American unashamed of the nation’s majesty and his own pride in time-honored traditions. It’s all here in his own hand, in his own words: from the everyday musings of ordinary thoughts to the detailing of diplomatic summits, Reagan’s entries reveal the hidden rhythm of life as a president, a husband, a father, and a friend.
Many have referred to Ronald Reagan as “larger than life.” The national outpouring of grief when he died in 2004 was proof positive that he was no ordinary politician. But now, with the publication of The Reagan Diaries, there is even more: an immense presidential legacy is extended.
Ronald Reagan wrote about seemingly everything and everyone in the diaries—from his first inauguration in 1981 to his very last day in the White House in 1989. Arms reduction, Reaganomics, the military, Lebanon, Iran-Contra, Camp David, Rancho del Cielo, and much more are recorded in considerable detail. Queen Elizabeth II, Mohammar al-Qaddafi, Pope John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Tip O’Neill, George H. W. Bush, Fidel Castro—they are all here, too.
And rarely can one turn a page without realizing that Ronald Reagan’s marriage to Nancy was the cornerstone of his life. Nothing was more important to Ronald Reagan than his marriage. His deep and enduring love for her was a foundation for him. In the George Washington University Hospital after being shot, he wrote, “I opened my eyes once to find Nancy there. I pray I’ll never face a day when she isn’t there. Of all the ways God has blessed me giving her to me is the greatest and beyond anything I can ever hope to deserve.” He felt a real sense of loss whenever his wife was away. On one occasion, when she left for a ship christening, he asked himself, “Why am I so scared when she leaves like that?” Later, when she went on a trip to New York, he contracted one of his typical bouts of White House loneliness. “I don’t like it here by myself,” he wrote.
Like his marriage to Nancy, his strong relationship with God was of paramount importance in Reagan’s life. Consistently, he thanks God for allowing him to be physically fit and for sparing his life from Hinckley’s bullet spray, after which he recalls lying on a bed in the emergency room: “I focused on that tiled ceiling and prayed. But I realized I couldn’t ask for God’s help while at the same time I felt hatred for the mixed-up young man who had shot me. Isn’t that the meaning of the last sheep? We are all God’s children & therefore equally beloved by him. I began to pray for his soul and that he would find his way back to the fold.”
Another personality trait that frequently surfaces in passages is Reagan’s enormous empathy for citizens with physical disabilities. At one juncture or another, he comments on blindness, epilepsy, sickle cell anemia, deafness—the list goes on and on. He learned as much as possi
ble about those afflicted with conditions such as muscular dystrophy or cancer, and reported their stories to his diary. On many occasions, as he freely admitted, he “puddled up” in the face of human tragedy and the courage that often accompanied it. “Francis Albert (Sinatra) came by with the Multiple Sclerosis Mother and Father of the year,” he wrote. “He’s heading up their fundraising drive—‘FS for MS.’ What a cruel disease.” Observations such as this one abound.
Looking through the pages of Reagan’s White House diaries, we see daily events and historical moments as he saw them. We see the nation, too, through his eyes. With the immediacy of the moment, these diaries present history as it unfolded.
Interest in forming personal bonds was especially distinct in his meetings with world leaders. He chafed at the layers of communication that he felt complicated international relations. In the diary, we see him searching for a way to improve his contact with the successive general secretaries of the Soviet Union: Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev. While Reagan was always guarded in his attitude toward the Soviets, he believed that progress would be made if he could communicate directly with them—by letter, telephone, or in person. And he was right.
The president was, by nature, anything but a Washington insider. Yet he had a remarkably sure understanding of his relationship with Congress. It was the rare week that went by without his personal negotiations over legislation or an outright campaign in anticipation of a coming vote. Some of the struggles could be rough, as any president can attest. Reagan, however, had the admirable quality of being able to rise above policy disagreements and set aside the day’s battles for friendly socializing. Some of his best friends, according to the diary, were those Democrats with whom he had had the most bitter differences politically. He was especially fond of Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O’Neill (D-MA), with whom he could match Irish stories by the hour. “Tip is truly a New Deal Democrat,” he wrote while in the middle of a budget crisis feud. “He honestly believes that we’re promoting welfare for the rich.”
History regards Reagan as an important president with lasting influence. How he accomplished as much as he did can be better understood with the publication of The Reagan Diaries. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain once said that Reagan “won the Cold War without firing a shot.” Reagan’s own entries through the years explain how he fought his most critical adversary, the USSR. It may surprise even Cold War scholars. As he wrote of April 6, 1983: “Some of the N.S.C. staff are too hard line & don’t think any approach should be made to the Soviets. I think I’m hard line & will never appease but I do want to try & let them see there is a better world if they’ll show by deed they want to get along with the free world.” In foreign relations, Reagan knew innately when to show power and when to be subtle. The personal relationship he developed with Gorbachev, in fact, as recorded in these diaries, was of a deeply historic nature. “There is no question in my mind,” he wrote at one juncture in 1988, “but that a certain chemistry does exist between us.”
As with the man himself, there is an appealing earnestness to the diaries, an unvarnished accounting of his days in office. The entries don’t dazzle in a self-congratulatory fashion. Nor do they consciously attempt to spin history in his favor. They are prosaic, not grandiose. The power of the diaries is in their cumulative effect. His attitude seemed to be that it would be left to the echo of history to decide whether he was right or wrong. Nowhere in the entries did the president bask in glory, savor the misfortune of adversaries, or wallow in his own defeats. More often than not, he is self-deprecating. The furthest that Reagan reached into hyperbole was along the lines of “all in all, a good day” or “things might have been better.”
Because the complete Reagan diaries would fill two or three fat volumes, I had to be selective in deciding what to choose to include in this abridged version. Heavy cuts were made. My objective was to combine both the most intriguing historical material and a healthy sampling of the more mundane, day-to-day realities of his center-stage life in the 1980s, (or the Reagan Era, as it is frequently called). Great effort was made not to lose the rhythm of his economical prose. Unlike the wording often found in his speeches, here he assiduously avoids flowery, adjective-driven observations.
All the annotations in brackets throughout the text are mine. They are an editorial attempt to earmark what topical events or material was excised. In the book’s back matter I have included a glossary, where readers will find capsule biographies for people Reagan mentions in the diary. Occasionally in the text I’ve placed asterisks to indicate a footnote on the page’s bottom. The National Security Council read all five diary volumes and redacted only about six pages of material for national security reasons. In addition, Nancy Reagan requested that a few entries be edited out for personal reasons. I respected her wish. The locations of all redactions within the text are indicated by ellipses within brackets: […]
The most profound achievements of the Reagan administration changed the world. When Reagan took office, the Soviet Union expected war imminently, according to a report the president received. By the time he left the White House, the threat of nuclear war with the USSR was reduced to a memory, as the Cold War was fast coming to a close. Domestically, Reagan left as strong a legacy. His personality, no less than his policies, led to a resurgent belief in the power of the individual, competition in business, and private sector initiative to solve domestic problems. Such successes were no accident; Reagan worked hard, coming fully prepared to each difficult decision. His executive ability, and the work habits that went along with it, are evident throughout the diary.
It was quickly apparent that my initial curiosity about reading these diaries was well founded. Far from being disappointed or feeling intrusive, I was intrigued by the unprecedented look behind the scenes of one of the most significant presidencies of modern times. Even though the historical events described are very familiar, I could not read the diaries fast enough. In many ways, though, this is a whole new story, because it is told from the unique perspective of the man at its center.
The Ronald Reagan you’ll encounter in these pages is principled, confident, happy, free of ego, and devoted to his wife. And, most of all, a man who understood instinctively that he did not “become” president, but was given “temporary custody” of an office that ultimately belongs to the people. By sharing these stream-of-consciousness diaries with us, the Reagans have given a gift to history that will endure forever.
CHAPTER 1
1981
1981
The Inaugural (Jan. 20) was an emotional experience but then the very next day it was “down to work.” The first few days were long and hard—daily Cabinet meetings interspersed with sessions with Congressional leaders regarding our ec. plan.
Monday, January 26
A meeting on terrorism with heads of F.B.I.—S.S.—C.I.A. Sec’s of St., Defense & others. Have ordered they be given back their ability to function. Next a Cabinet meeting on the deal with Iran. We just may not implement some of the Carter executive orders on grounds they violate our own laws. Hostages will arrive in country tomorrow. It seems some of them had some tough questions for Carter in Germany as to why they were there so long and why they were there to begin with. Rest of day meeting committee chairmen & Sens. on raising the debt ceiling.
Tuesday, January 27
Ceremony on S. Lawn to welcome hostages home. Thousands of people in attendance. Met the familys earlier. Now we had in addition the familys of the 8 men who lost their lives in the rescue attempt. One couple lost their only son. His widow was also here. I’ve had a lump in my throat all day.—Evening 1st white tie reception for the diplomatic corps.
Wednesday, January 28
Visit by P.M. Seaga of Jamaica, his wife & members of his admin. Our 1st state luncheon. He won a terrific election victory over a Cuban backed procommunist.
I think we can help him & gradually take back the Caribbean which was becoming a “Red�
� lake.
Thursday, January 29
Nancy had a great triumph with committee which rides herd on White House (to preserve its history). They were enthusiastic about what she has already done to upgrade the 2nd & 3rd floors.
[Received cable from Mike Mansfield, U.S. ambassador to Japan.]
Friday, January 30
More meeting with Cong. leaders on trying to get debt ceiling lifted. If don’t we’ll be out of money by Feb. 18. Cong. recessing from 5th to 12th. Must get passage of bill by Fri. the 5th.
Short day in office—left for 1st weekend in Camp David. It was great to be in a house with the knowledge you could just open a door and take a walk outdoors if you wanted.
Saturday, January 31
Had a before lunch walk (it was cold). Spent afternoon in front of fire reading intelligence reports & Briefing papers for visit by Pres. Chun (Korea). We have definite evidence Nicaragua transferring hundreds of tons of arms from Cuba to El Salvador. P.M. ran a movie—“Tribute”—Jack Lemmon. He is truly a great performer.
[Sunday, February 1: took walk; returned to W.H.]
Monday, February 2
What’s getting to be routine—full day in Oval office.
Tuesday, February 3
The arrival of Pres. Chun, his wife & staff. These meetings through an interpreter which can become a strain. Good meetings though—assured him we would not withdraw our troops from Korea
Wednesday, February 4
Cabinet discussion of grain embargo. I’ve always felt it hurt our farmers worse than it hurt Soviets. Many of our allies?? filled the gap & supplied Soviet. But now—how do we lift it without sending wrong message to Soviets? We need to take a new look at whole matter of strategy. Trade was supposed to make Soviets moderate, instead it has allowed them to build armaments instead of consumer products. Their socialism is an ec. failure. Wouldn’t we be doing more for their people if we let their system fail instead of constantly bailing it out?
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