by Bret Baier
Reagan could also use sarcasm to biting effect, as he did with his attorney general. William French Smith, an original member of Reagan’s California kitchen cabinet, was Reagan’s first AG. One day he came to the Oval Office with a big idea. Concerned about illegal immigration, he announced to the president that he had a plan to institute a national identity card. “That was right off the wall,” Anderson said. “And we hadn’t prepared for it.” Recognizing that it could be a disastrously controversial action, Reagan spoke. “He didn’t say, ‘That’s a dumb goddamn idea,’ or, ‘I don’t like that,’ or, ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ or ‘I wouldn’t do this,’ ” Anderson remembered. Instead, Reagan said, “Well, we can brand all the babies.”
That was the death knell. It never came up again.
He had a Republican Senate and a Democratic House of Representatives, and he immediately set out to woo their members. He had a friendly relationship with Howard Baker, the Senate majority leader. But he also had to contend with Tip O’Neill, the powerful Speaker of the House, whose regard for Reagan was known to be low—he once called him “Herbert Hoover with a smile.”
Reagan’s assistant for legislative affairs, Max Friedersdorf, had served under Nixon, Ford, and Carter, and it was his job to bring Congress into alignment. First and foremost, that meant courting O’Neill. During the transition, Reagan told Friedersdorf that he wanted to invite O’Neill and his wife to the White House for dinner as soon as he was in office, and it was hastily arranged.
The dinner for eight upstairs in the private residence included the Reagans, O’Neill and his wife, Millie, the Jim Bakers, and the Friedersdorfs. “I was kind of on pins and needles because Tip O’Neill was pretty brusque—he’s a strong personality and a gruff old guy, like a big bear of a man,” recalled Friedersdorf. “His wife, Millie, was sweet as she can be, but it was kind of a tense situation for me.” He met them at the elevator and took them into the president’s sitting room. O’Neill and Reagan sat at opposite ends of a couch, where they ordered martinis and began telling each other Irish jokes. So far, so good.
Nancy was rolling her eyes. “I’ve heard this a million times,” she said to the wives. “Would you like to see the Lincoln Bedroom and the sleeping quarters?” They gratefully followed her out of the room.
At dinner, Reagan gave a flattering toast to O’Neill, speaking of how much he admired him and how he was in the tradition of the great Boston politicians. O’Neill loved it. By the time the O’Neills left that night, Friedersdorf was thinking “This is going to be a little easier than I thought. He [Reagan] could charm the socks off of you.” The president accompanied the O’Neills down in the elevator and walked them to the car. “Night, Tip,” he called warmly.
But after that occasion, Reagan got his first big reality check on Washington politics—that any personal warmth between the two men didn’t extend to their legislative battles. Initially, Reagan was baffled when O’Neill came out swinging against him publicly. He called up the Speaker and said he was hurt to read something nasty O’Neill had said about him. “I thought we had a pretty fine relationship going.”
“Ol’ buddy,” O’Neill chortled, “that’s politics. After six o’clock we can be friends, but before six, it’s politics.”
Following that, when Reagan called him, he sometimes said, “Look, Tip, I’m resetting my watch. It’s six o’clock.”
Much has been made of the bipartisan spirit supposedly created by “Ron and Tip.” But their relationship was unquestionably contentious. The myth gained purchase mostly because people liked the visual of two old Irishmen of similar backgrounds and stature working across party lines for the good of the country. But whatever their personal fondness for each other, it stood to reason that they would be legislative enemies. Reagan was leading a revolution against the very principles that O’Neill held most dear. They might have seemed like brothers when they were together privately, but they had different ideas of government.
Kenneth Duberstein, who replaced Friedersdorf at the end of 1981 when he left to take a position as consul general to Bermuda, found that Reagan’s temperament was his greatest gift in negotiations. He was a uniter, “always speaking to people’s better sides and giving them hope. As he used to say, ‘There’s a pony in there some place.’ ”
Duberstein observed that except for being two old Irishmen, Reagan and O’Neill were opposites, always in danger of ending up further apart when they sat down to negotiate. Reagan had to figure out a strategy. “Reagan found the formula,” he said, “and the formula was, Let’s bring people together. Let’s bring people inside the tent. He believed in free trade, he believed we’re a nation of immigrants. He believed everyone had a choice to make. He was willing to fight for what he believed in, but he was always optimistic. It attracted people. He inspired people, he inspired the better angels. And he was self-deprecating. You know, he seldom used the word I. He always preached to us, ‘It’s we, not I. We’re all in this together.’ ”
MANY PRESIDENTS HAVE BEMOANED the claustrophobic nature of being in the White House—Harry Truman referred to it as “the great white jail.” Reagan, accustomed to being his own man, found it so, calling it a “bird in a gilded cage sense of isolation.” He didn’t mind being alone; he minded being protected, coddled, controlled. A month into his presidency, he wanted to perform a ritual that had been sacrosanct in his marriage from its first year: buying his wife a Valentine’s card. He informed the Secret Service agents that he’d like to go shopping for a card. They complied, of course, but it was such a complex expedition that he vowed never to repeat it.
He didn’t fault the Secret Service. He understood that it had its job to do—and would feel even more strongly about that after a devastating attempt on his life on March 30, 1981.
So much time has passed since the assassination attempt that people often forget or are surprised to realize that it occurred just two months into Reagan’s presidency. The timing was stunning; Reagan’s presidency might have been over before it got started. Some writers have speculated that the experience cast a cloud over him, weakened him, and made him gun-shy, but that’s hardly convincing, considering that virtually everything he accomplished in his eight years occurred afterward.
The day it happened was so ordinary, and the event Reagan was speaking at so mundane, that the Secret Service agents didn’t insist he wear a bulletproof vest, as they sometimes did. On that afternoon, he was exiting the Hilton Hotel, where he had given a luncheon speech to the Construction Trades Council, when he heard several loud bangs; he thought they sounded like firecrackers. As he started to turn in surprise, Jerry Parr, the head of his Secret Service detail, tackled him and shoved him into the limousine. He felt a terrible stab of pain and assumed Parr had broken one of his ribs.
In the confusing early moments after the shots were fired, it was clear only that press secretary James Brady; Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, who had spread out his arms to shield Reagan’s body; and police officer Thomas Delahanty were wounded. Reagan was assumed to be unhurt, and his car began to head back to the White House. But then he started coughing up blood, and Parr screamed at the driver to make a U-turn and get to George Washington University Hospital. Reagan still thought a broken rib was impeding his breathing.
Deaver, who had been standing next to Reagan when the shots were fired but didn’t know the president had been hit, jumped into a car in the motorcade and was following the president’s car. Arriving behind Reagan, Deaver witnessed him stepping out of the limo and entering the hospital. “Reagan had a habit—if he’d been sitting in a plane or car, or even on a podium—when he got out, he would cinch his pants up . . . and then he’d button his coat,” Deaver said. “And that’s exactly what he did, cinched his pants up and buttoned his coat. He looked all right to me. The minute he crossed the frame of the door, it was like being behind the curtain. He collapsed. He got there and collapsed.”
At that point no one knew that Reagan had been sh
ot. They raced him into the emergency room and cut off the brand-new blue pin-striped suit he’d put on that morning. As doctors and nurses filled the room, examining him for injuries, one of the doctors held up his suit jacket to reveal a small bullet hole. Reagan slid in and out of consciousness while he was being prepped for surgery to locate the bullet. At one point he opened his eyes to see Nancy’s terrified face coming into view. “Honey, I forgot to duck,” he whispered.
As Reagan headed for surgery, an alternate drama was taking place at the White House. With Baker, Meese, and Deaver at the hospital and Vice President Bush stuck on a plane coming back from Texas, Haig marched into the pressroom and announced that he was in charge.
“Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the president, the vice president and the secretary of state, in that order, and should the president decide he wants to transfer the helm to the vice president, he will do so,” he said. “As of now, I am in control here in the White House.”
Reporters gaped at him. He’d skipped a couple of lines in the succession order. It was actually the vice president, the Speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate (Strom Thurmond), and then the secretary of state. What was Haig talking about?
Watching Haig storm around the West Wing barking orders, Weinberger was livid. He challenged Haig’s authority.
“You’d better read the Constitution,” Haig replied angrily.
“What?” shouted Weinberger. Haig was dead wrong about the order of succession but refused to listen to reason. Americans watching Haig’s wild-eyed performance on TV might have been alarmed, but most probably didn’t realize that he was not technically the person in control.
If the events around the assassination showed Haig in an embarrassing light, they also demonstrated what Vice President Bush was made of. “George Bush struck just the right note,” William Safire wrote in the New York Times, and it seemed to be so. As the historian Jon Meacham recounted in his superb biography Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, the vice president’s instincts on that fateful day demonstrated his faithfulness, his humanity, and his character. On the plane returning to Washington, he was intent on not being overly officious or egotistical, when the true crisis was that Reagan—“my friend,” he called him—was in desperate straits. So when John Matheny, his air force aide, suggested he land on the South Lawn instead of at Andrews Air Force Base so he could get to the hospital more quickly, Bush was concerned that it would look like showboating. “John,” he said, “only the president lands on the South Lawn.”
Meacham wrote that after the assassination attempt, Reagan felt closer to Bush and more confident in him: “The crisis had passed, and Bush emerged from the crucible of the shooting as a sensible and steadying force. . . . Reagan, already disposed to treat Bush with respect, had all the more reason to believe that his vice president’s professions of devotion and duty were genuine.”
Partisan bickering aside, the nation came together to support its felled leader. Cards, gifts, and flowers poured in. While Reagan was in intensive care after a successful surgery, his staff had to ward off eager visitors from Capitol Hill. More than one of them no doubt imagined the photo op of a lifetime: being beside the president at his hospital bed. Strom Thurmond managed to talk his way past the guards and enter Reagan’s room, where he found him lying in bed with a mass of tubes, barely conscious. Nancy was angry about that, so Friedersdorf was delegated to stand guard. Only Tip O’Neill was allowed to pass. He entered the room, got down on his knees next to the bed, and kissed Reagan. “God bless you, Mr. President, we’re all praying for you,” he said. Together they murmured lines from the Twenty-third Psalm:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.
The big, intimidating bull of a Speaker was crying. He sat and held the president’s hand for a long time.
HAIG NEVER FULLY RECOVERED from his assassination-day power grab. As Reagan got better and began to plot his focus for the coming months and years, he was growing weary of Haig’s antics. It wasn’t that Haig was always off the mark. “It’s amazing how sound he can be on complex international matters, but how utterly paranoid with regard to the people he must work with,” Reagan wrote in his diary.
By his second year in office, Reagan knew if he was going to tackle the Soviet problem, the mission of his life, he would need a steadier hand at State. So, in June 1982, when Haig once more threatened to resign over some office wrangle, Reagan took him up on his threat. Then he instructed the national security advisor to get George Shultz on the phone.
Shultz had been around political and economic circles for decades. As a professor of economics at MIT, he had served on Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors. Nixon had tapped him for three different positions: secretary of labor, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and secretary of the Treasury. Now back in private life as executive vice president of Bechtel Group, he was an informal foreign policy advisor to Reagan. Shultz was as unassuming as Haig was bombastic. He was thoughtful and even-keeled, widely respected and admired. Reagan liked him and felt they were on the same page.
Shultz was in London, speaking to a group of Bechtel clients, when someone passed him a note, saying there was a call from the White House. He was told that the president wanted to talk on a secure phone and the US Embassy was prepared to accommodate him.
Shultz went to the embassy and called Reagan. “Al Haig has resigned as secretary of state and I want you to be secretary of state,” Reagan said.
Shultz was taken aback. “Are you asking me to accept this offer over the phone?” Yes, Reagan replied, explaining that it was very important that there be no gaps. He needed him now.
Shultz said yes, and finally, after a false start, Reagan had the team he needed to win the Cold War.
Part Two
Speaking Truth
Chapter 5
The Trumpet Call
May 22, 1982
President Reagan bent over the neat stack of papers, turning the pages, scribbling words, crossing out paragraphs, and adding his own thoughts in longhand with a black felt-tipped pen on a yellow legal pad—“just purring along,” as one of his aides described his writing style. The task at hand that day was to compose a speech that would be a first for a US president—to be delivered in London on June 8 before both houses of Parliament at Westminster Palace.
He felt good—strong and healthy barely a year after the assassination attempt. A month earlier, he’d had an opportunity to show the nation just how robust a seventy-one-year-old man could be. It had long been his dream to throw out the first pitch of the baseball season, but he’d been unable to do it in his first year because he had been recovering from his injury. As the season approached in year two, he kept reminding his staff that he wanted to do it, and on April 5 he’d gotten his wish at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. He went out onto the field, accompanied by Orioles owner Edward Williams and the day’s pitcher, Dennis Martinez. The three of them began backing away from home plate, gauging the distance. About halfway to the mound, Martinez said, “Right about here, Mr. President, is where I’d throw the ball.” Reagan kept backing up, smiling all the way. When they reached the mound, Martinez said, “Mr. President, it’s a long way from here to home plate.” Reagan gazed out at the cheering, waving crowd and gripped the ball. “Well, I think I can do it.” He’d been practicing at Camp David with his Secret Service agents, and he wasn’t about to compromise. He stared at the catcher, who was crouched in place, wound up just as he’d practiced, and sent the ball sailing over home plate. A strike! The crowd came to its feet with a roar. Reagan was elated. He’d proved a point: he was back in full form, ready to take on anything.
Now he was intent on proving a different point on a global scale. Layers of complexity accompanied the invitation and the venue of the Parliament speech, touching on the sometimes delicate protocols
of two friendly nations with a historically complex relationship. It didn’t help that Reagan was a controversial figure, widely considered a warmonger by the nuclear freeze crowd or a second-rate actor by the intelligentsia. Surely Parliament was too elevated a platform for such a man, or so they said. Critics might have recalled that Winston Churchill had given three addresses before both houses of the US Congress (a rare invitation), the first on December 26, 1941, nearly three weeks after the United States had entered the war in Europe. Some appalled Brits asked whether Reagan considered himself to be on a par with Churchill. There was also a concern among Reagan’s foreign policy advisors that some members of Parliament who were unfriendly to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher might use Reagan’s visit to embarrass her by boycotting his speech or supporting demonstrations. Those concerns were all in the background for Reagan. He focused on one goal: to deliver a hell of a speech that would take a bold stand in a world threatened by Soviet aggression.
Speechwriting in the Reagan White House was a collaborative venture, with Reagan as an active participant. He enjoyed crafting speeches, and had his days not been jam-packed with the nation’s business, he would have liked to write them all himself. The common notion that Reagan, the former actor, merely stood on his mark and spoke lines written by others has been dispelled by everyone who worked with him on a speech. Before becoming president, he had often written his own speeches and radio addresses, and he continued to be the chief author of his Saturday-morning addresses while in the White House. He spent a lot of time poring over the drafts, marking them up, adding and deleting. He had an instinct for the way words sounded—“I write for the ear,” he said.
