Last Act

by Craig Shirley

  The Associated Press veered from straight-up news reporting into opinion and editorials. “Reagan’s presidency overlaid the spendthrift 1980s, tagged by some as the ’Greed Decade.’ It was a time of conspicuous consumption, hostile takeovers, new billionaires. And for all the glowing talk of Reagan’s folksy appeal and infectious optimism, it was a time of growing division between rich and poor.”128 The wire service also said Reagan’s was a “career built on image making and public relations.”129

  George Will responded, saying, “Washington had not been hospitable to conservatives, to put it mildly, since—well, since one of Ronald Reagan’s heroes, Calvin Coolidge left. And there was a sense that the media elites and the intelligentsia were in control in Washington, and would look upon any conservative as a temporary interloper.”130 That applied to the tiresome elites, but at the other end, Taryn Solcoff of Boston said, “He shaped the way I saw the world.” She was thirty-three years old.131

  ABC was waxing the competition in content and substance. In addition to Will, Cannon, and others knowledgeable about Reagan, they also featured the esteemed historian Michael Beschloss to add his perspectives. Beschloss was approbatory of Reagan and his presidency. CNN later produced their own important historian, Douglas Brinkley, who’d been selected personally by Mrs. Reagan to edit her husband’s secret presidential diaries. Reagan was one of the very few chief executives to keep such documents and had they been known during Iran-Contra, they most definitely would have been subpoenaed and the world would have learned that Reagan thought Connecticut Republican senator Lowell Weicker was a “pompous, no good, fathead.” Or that he thought Oliver North was “lying” when it came to what Reagan knew about arms for hostages.132

  In 1994, Nancy Reagan and Paul Laxalt took the unprecedented step of endorsing North’s primary opponent, Jim Miller, a veteran of the Reagan years. It wasn’t because Mrs. Reagan was deeply enamored with Miller; rather, it was because she—and many other Reaganites—couldn’t abide by North trying to drag Reagan into the Iran-Contra mess to try to save his own hide.133 At times, Nancy Reagan not only got mad, she also got even. North won the Virginia GOP nomination but was badly damaged and was one of the few Republicans to lose in the Republican commonwealth in the Republican year of 1994.

  As of June 2004, the existence of the Reagan diaries was still a secret.

  Margaret Thatcher was one of the first to come with a formal public statement on Reagan’s passing among the former and current world leaders, but within hours these, too, began to flood newsrooms. The current prime minister, Tony Blair, also issued a kind testimonial. Élysée Palace put out a magnanimous statement on behalf of President Jacques Chirac. The French leader “pays homage to the memory of a great statesman who will leave a deep mark in history because of the strength of his convictions and his commitment to democracy.”134

  Brian Mulroney of Canada was kind, saying, “an absolutely marvelous human being and a great and historic leader” about his deceased friend. The president of Germany—not West Germany or East Germany but just Germany—said that Reagan’s speech calling on Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall would “remain unforgettable.”135

  Yelena Bonner, wife of Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, said, “To have achieved so much against so many odds and with such humor and humanity made Ronald Reagan a truly great American hero . . .”136 A large contingent of foreign dignitaries was expected to attend the Reagan funeral, possibly the largest since JFK’s in November 1963.

  Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky bluntly said, “His phrase ’evil empire’ became a household word in Russia. Russians like a straightforward person, be he enemy or friend. They despise a wishywashy person.”137

  Thatcher later said Reagan was “one of my closest political and dearest personal friends.”138

  Speculation abounded about who would and would not attend the Reagan funeral, such as heads of state and the famously recalcitrant Jimmy Carter, who had to be practically begged to attend the opening of the Reagan Library, even though Reagan had attended his and made extremely gracious remarks in Atlanta. It was believed by all that Thatcher, seventy-eight years old, would not attend, as she was ailing and had already taped a video tribute to Reagan to air at the funeral services in the National Cathedral. However, for the past ten years, whenever and wherever she traveled, she took a valise in which she always carried a black dress, the right shoes, and other appropriate memorial accoutrements, just in case she was on the road and her dear friend Ron passed away, as she explained to another friend, Gay Gaines, during a visit to the Gaineses’ home in Palm Beach.139

  The elders of the National Cathedral were themselves being difficult as they wanted most of the tickets for the Reagan service. Fred Ryan was in no mood to negotiate so he simply told them they were moving the services to another Washington church unless the Cathedral acquiesced. They did.140

  The networks, having made the announcement of Reagan’s death and gotten beyond the live interviews with some who knew Reagan well (and some who did not), began to move into reporting and footage reviewing his life. The Beirut bombing was kicked around (“Today was my most difficult moment”141), which included the horrendous death of 299 marines and French soldiers. Also, the airplane crash and death of hundreds of military personnel on their way back to the United States for Christmas was reviewed.

  From Europe, another military man and Reagan aide, Colin Powell, issued a statement about the passing of a president. “I was proud to be a soldier during his presidency as he restored the morale and fighting prowess of our Armed Forces.”

  It was also clarified that President Bush wanted all American flags at all government installations to be lowered for thirty days, beginning on Sunday, June 6.142

  At the foot of the hill leading up to the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, dozens and then hundreds and eventually thousands of American citizens gathered throughout the afternoon and into the early evening. Flowers—first a trickle and later a flood—began to pile up at the entrance. Local florists ran out. American flags began to appear, too, and condolence cards—someone even placed there a jar of jelly beans, Reagan’s long-favored candy. The radio of a parked car began playing “Amazing Grace,” and several pedestrians wandered up and began singing in unison.

  The library contained more than fifty million documents from the presidency, and later, the Air Force One jet 27000 on which Reagan had travelled “211 missions, 631,640 miles.”143 The Library went through considerable expense to build the magnificent pavilion and bring in the retired plane, piece by piece, and rebuild it. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter had also used it, and contrary to myth this was not the plane that transported the body of JFK back to Washington on November 22, 1963. That was the previous Boeing VC-137C SAM 26000. The logistics and cost involved were staggering, but were lessened by a ten-million-dollar donation from Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens.144

  There was also a large chunk of a wall that once divided freedom from slavery. Reagan had told a communist dictator to tear it down by trumpeting his horn of freedom, just as trumpets had once called down the walls of Jericho.

  The affairs of state went on, undeterred by death. The Bush administration was engaged in a heated argument about whether international and national laws against torture applied to their government. The Defense Department produced a lengthy memo saying that the Bush administration should be deterred from the use of torture against enemy prisoners.145

  The United States had at least one blemish on its record in the treatment of prisoners during the Civil War, but never in the history of the country had torture been state policy. Nine more American soldiers were pronounced dead in Iraq.146

  A documentary—based on a book by a left wing author and produc
ed by two friends of Bill Clinton about the Clinton impeachment and Senate trial—saw its debut postponed “out of respect,” the organizers said, for the passing of Reagan.147

  Both Nancy Reagan and Thatcher had their own wistful memories. Nancy was philosophical, reflecting on happier days but how, in the end, “you pay for everything.” Visiting sometime after the announcement of the Alzheimer’s, Thatcher said, “You don’t say, ’Do you remember?’ You talk about things. You look at the beautiful grounds . . . I know he has good days and bad days.”148

  Dr. Bernadine Healy, who’d worked in the Reagan White House, described in U.S. News what the disease did, exactly.

  Alzheimer’s knows no mercy . . . it relentlessly nibbles at the neural networks of the brain, first attacking the memory pathways, then spreading like an oily wave to engulf the higher cerebral centers. An organ known for its commanding might diminishes to a shrunken shadow of itself, choked with waxy protein clumps . . . millions of its neurons disappear . . .149

  Several years later, Dr. Healy died of brain cancer.

  Reagan’s suffering was over and that in and of itself was a blessing. With the release of his suffering came the release of the awful pain his family and friends had gone through for the last several years. His passing, though painful, was also a blessing for all, especially Reagan.

  “And whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts.”150

  He’d said that at the last Republican convention he ever addressed, in Houston in 1992.

  CHAPTER 4

  ROUGH REQUIEM

  “It took six hours for a bus.”

  In July 1975, I concluded my remarks in the Reception Room of the U.S. Senate with these words: “Very soon, all too soon, your government will need not just extraordinary men—but men of greatness. Find them in your souls. Find them in your hearts. Find them within the breadth and depth of your homeland.” Five years later, I was overjoyed when just such a man came to the White House. May the soft earth be a cushion in his present rest.1

  So proclaimed the great intellectual writer and Soviet dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, upon hearing of the death of Ronald Reagan.

  There had been a deep and mutual respect between the two men. Reagan quoted and cited Solzhenitsyn often. So deeply significant was their relationship that Solzhenitsyn may have been the single most important reason why Reagan chose to take on Gerald Ford in the 1976 primaries, something up until July 1975 he’d been reluctant to do.

  In late winter 1974, the Kremlin kicked the Nobel Prize–winning nonconformist out of the Soviet Union. He’d been imprisoned in Soviet gulags for eight years because he’d criticized Marshal Joseph Stalin in private letters. Solzhenitsyn had for a time become a cause for the trendy and the avant-garde in America, and he came to the United States where he was welcomed officially in Washington by Senator Jesse Helms (who was most definitely not celebrated by the elites) and Senator Joe Biden of Delaware (who was most certainly celebrated by the elites) at the U.S. Capitol in a crowded ceremony.

  But President Gerald Ford snubbed Solzhenitsyn at the recommendation of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Kissinger’s policy of détente—like the Helsinki Accords, which ceded the Warsaw Pact countries to the Soviets—seemed like so much more bowing and scraping before the Kremlin for many conservatives, including Reagan. They had put up with it from Nixon but they sure weren’t going to tolerate it from Ford.

  Yet rather than manfully say why Ford would not meet with the Russian dissident, the White House offered up one lame excuse after another. Ford had to meet with the Strawberry Queen of West Virginia and he had to attend a birthday party for his daughter Susan, were two of the lamest. George Will devastatingly wrote, “It is pathetically obvious that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is not very interested in Solzhenitsyn’s plight.”2

  The eyes of the world community and the national media were on Ford and Solzhenitsyn, and Ford’s fraidycat performance grated on many Americans, especially Reagan, who wrote his own nationally syndicated column blasting the president for the cold-shouldering of Solzhenitsyn. It also marked the time when Reagan moved from his Hamlet-like “Maybe I’ll run” against Ford to a Jack Dempsey-like “Let me at the son of a gun!” attitude. He also did a radio commentary on the topic, just as blistering as his column.3

  How isolated were Ford and Kissinger from reality? Solzhenitsyn gave speeches to the AFL-CIO in Washington and New York, introduced by George Meany in the nation’s capital and his deputy Lane Kirkland in New York. Thousands of commie-hating union men and women stood and applauded the old Russian of forbidden letters. The American labor movement and the American working man despised the Soviet Union and collectivism (though not collective bargaining) in 1975, but the big business Republicans of the era could never see who was really their friend and who was willing to sell someone—anyone—the rope to hang the Republicans with. Meany had once ordered union members to refuse to load ships with grain headed for Russia under a deal Ford had made with Leonid Brezhnev.

  The American left eventually moved away from Solzhenitsyn as they discovered he believed in a moral God, believed in Christ, and believed in moral absolutes. His cache with the Left further dissolved as they moved away from the anti-communism of Harry Truman, John Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey and toward the accommodationist positions of George McGovern.

  Reagan could be a little touchy about who was at the front lines with him and who was bringing up the rear. After all, it wasn’t Reagan who once said he’d crawl on his hands and knees to Hanoi for peace.4 It was the American left that had championed North Vietnam and Moscow and the American right that had opposed communism.

  At the 1992 GOP convention in Houston, Reagan was recounting the just-completed Democratic convention and how the opposition party had opposed him on so many anti-communist initiatives but were still trying to take the credit. “We” did this and “we” did that. “Just who exactly do they mean by ’We?’ ”5 he thundered to the cheering crowd of thousands about the other party that had just nominated an accused draft dodger for president of the United States.

  Reagan, of course, lost to Gerald Ford at the Kansas City convention in 1976 by a nose and an eyelash (and some hanky-panky in some state delegations), and yet it was Reagan who benefited more from the primary battles and the GOP gathering alongside the Missouri River than did the president. And when Ford lost narrowly to Jimmy Carter in the fall, the evidence was irrefutable that Reagan had a national following and could mount another attempt for the 1980 nomination—not that it would be easy. But 1976 led to 1980 and 1980 led to a changed America and a changed world. Without Solzhenitsyn and his snubbing by Ford in 1975, Reagan might never have run for president.

  To Solzhenitsyn, there was never any doubt about the East versus the West. He always credited Reagan with the victory over communism. So, too, did another knowledgeable observer, Dame Baroness Margaret Thatcher, peerage of the House of Lords and to the rest of the world the “Iron Lady.” “Ronald Reagan had a higher claim than any other leader to have won the Cold War for liberty and he did it without a shot being fired,” said Thatcher at the news of her friend’s passing.6 Before the week was over, she would have a lot more to say about her old ally.

  Like “The Great Communicator,” Thatcher’s nickname had been used derisively by her enemies, thinking it would earn ridicule but, like Reagan’s, her unofficial title also became enduring and, for their enemies, intimidating.

  The Reagan family, led by Mrs. Reagan, attended a private family service in the lobby of the Library early Monday morning. The lobby wasn’t enormous, about the size of “half . . . a basketball court.”7 Nancy looked gaunt and frail but also
very much in control of herself and events. During the private ceremony, she knelt at the flag-draped coffin and turned her left cheek and gently placed it on him. Her gold wedding band was readily apparent.

  The family service was brief, about fifteen minutes. Patti Davis was very emotional. She loved her father dearly, even through their often rocky relationship over the years. She and her mother clasped their hands together and both could be seen teary. The Reagans’ former reverend at the Bel Air Presbyterian Church Michael Wenning conducted the service and gently consoled the family. A band had performed “Hail to the Chief ” upon the arrival.

  Nancy Reagan had begun the day in private at the Gates, Kingsley & Gates Moeller Murphy funeral home in Santa Monica with her husband’s remains. The funeral home was Spanish Tudor and had a comfortable “old shoe” feel to it.

  She had a quiet and solitary moment there with her husband and then was joined by Patti and Ron. Michael was not with them but later stood silent and alone at his father’s bier. Reagan had been prepared for burial, and there was a private family service at The Little Chapel of the Dawn at Gates, Kingsley & Gates Moeller Murphy. Some of the staff also shared a few private moments with Reagan.

  Andrew Littlefair, along with the other Reagan advance team members, had met the evening before at the funeral home to go over assignments. The next day, on the unannounced trip from the funeral home to the Reagan Library, they were flabbergasted to see the spontaneous outpouring of citizens all along the route, which snaked about forty miles. “Along one stretch of freeway, the motorcade passed beneath a huge American flag that local firefighters had hung from the ladders of two fire engines.”8

  Nancy Reagan emerged just after 9:30 a.m. She followed a military procession and the coffin and briefly looked at a small, newly assembled memorial of flowers, teddy bears, and pictures of Ronnie. She waved to the applauding crowd and then got into her limousine for the forty-mile trip to Simi Valley. Along the way, Nancy saw handmade signs applauding the Gipper and citizens with their hands across their hearts as a show of their admiration and appreciation. Part of the trip took them over Ronald Reagan Freeway.