Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  But the controversy was swamping the presidential agenda. Ten days later, on April 29, Reagan placed a call to Helmut Kohl, ostensibly to wheedle the chancellor into letting him off the hook. It was a long, impassioned conversation that ran on for almost twenty minutes. The president suggested an alternative to Bitburg—Festung Ehrenbreitstein, the shrine at Koblenz. “It’s a memorial to your soldiers,” he said. “It honors your four or five million war dead.” Kohl wouldn’t hear of it. “But, Helmut,” he pleaded, “you and I will be there together.” That made no difference to Kohl. He’d put himself on the line about Bitburg. All of Germany was watching. If Reagan changed the itinerary, Kohl said, he would lose face. It would cause his government to fall.

  Jim Kuhn entered the Oval Office moments after the president’s phone line went dead. “He was just sitting there. His head was bent, his eyes were downcast,” Kuhn recalls. “I asked him whether we were going to Bitburg. He looked up and barely muttered, ‘Yeah.’”

  The only thing now was to make the best of it. Nancy Reagan was furious with Kohl and with Mike Deaver for not handling damage control. Deaver had always made things like this go away—or at least smoothed them over to her satisfaction. But this time—perhaps his last duty as the Reagans’ consigliere—he hadn’t come through. “I’m trying to do my damnedest to make the best of a very difficult situation,” he implored her. “Let me get on with it, please.” It wasn’t enough to assuage her fears; she decided to take things into her own hands. Panicked that something dreadful might come of the Bitburg trip, the First Lady turned to astrologer Joan Quigley for advice. Charts were drawn up of the various events, requiring that their times be shuffled or rescheduled to satisfy the astrologer’s concern that certain indicators put the president “in starry danger zones.” Deaver was ordered to coordinate with Quigley so her advice could be implemented. When he protested, Mrs. Reagan let him have it. “We’re talking about my husband’s life,” she shouted.

  The day of the Bitburg event brought no relief. “She was a nervous Nellie that morning,” says Jim Kuhn. “She was really agitated: ‘Ronnie is not touching the wreath! He’s definitely not placing it!’” On Quigley’s say-so, the wreath-laying was moved from the morning to the afternoon, their departure from Bonn delayed two separate times when the astrologer determined it was dangerous for the president to be airborne. In the hotel beforehand, Nancy Reagan came apart, her husband standing by, seemingly at a loss. “She was near-hysterical,” recalls Kuhn, who had never seen her like this before. Kuhn picked up the phone and ordered the White House operator who monitored the line to send Mike Deaver straight to the suite. No more than thirty seconds later, Deaver walked into the room, made a beeline for Nancy Reagan, and wrapped her in a bear hug, with the president watching from a corner. “He held her for a long minute or two,” Kuhn says. “Neither of them exchanged a single word.” Finally, Deaver let go of her, patted her on the back, and simply walked out the door. She was fine, exorcised, ready to go.

  Deaver, too, had received comfort from an unexpected source. Days before the Bitburg ceremony, he took a blind call from retired General Matthew Ridgway, the ninety-year-old World War II hero, who, in a heroic gesture, offered to accompany the president to the grave site and lay the wreath. For symmetry, Kohl volunteered the services of Luftwaffe ace General Johannes Steinhoff. The presence of both aging soldiers took some of the sting out of the occasion.

  In fact, the day, for the most part, passed without incident. Reagan acquitted himself well with a moving speech against the imposing backdrop of Bergen-Belsen. There were protests and demonstrations, but they were restrained. The streets along the presidential route to the Bitburg cemetery were lined with Jewish protesters who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with tender-faced Germans, many waving American flags. Lost in the rhetoric of postwar reconciliation was evidence that the healing process was already taking root. The wreath-laying ceremony was a superficial exercise. It took all of eight minutes. Reagan and Kohl made their way silently along the brick walkway around the graves, solemn eyes drawn down, expressionless, neither man acknowledging the crowd or ever touching the wreath. Aides said the president was deeply affected by the surroundings, haunted by recollections of the concentration camp footage he’d viewed at Fort Roach in 1945. “I promise you, we will never forget,” he told a small audience in a ceremony afterward at the Bitburg Air Base.

  Ronald Reagan had taken a beating while the affair unspooled, committing the prestige of the presidency to a relatively minor state function. At the end of the day, it caused unwelcome distractions and unnecessary embarrassments. The failure to allay its emotional impact was compounded by the president’s stubbornness, his unwillingness to back away from a promise once he’d given his word. But in the days following the Bitburg visit, his popularity stabilized. The way he’d handled himself in Germany—his presidential gestalt, the common touch—provided an image of dignified leadership that many Americans placed above substance.

  Instead, the blame for the Bitburg controversy was laid off on the president’s staff. They had dealt with it haphazardly. There was no oversight, none of the collective coordination that had given the first term its ballast. One man, Don Regan, was now calling the shots, and he had mismanaged the situation right out of the box. He isolated the president from opposing viewpoints. He sparred with the press. He hadn’t been straight with Jewish leaders who’d sought his help in reaching a fair solution. Nor had he mollified congressional leaders who had called seeking to voice their concerns. The new chief of staff’s inability to control the political fallout had cost Ronald Reagan heavily.

  Regan had no real experience in day-to-day administration. He constantly flashed his credentials as a Wall Street manager, but he hadn’t been a hands-on manager. His role at the brokerage had been dictatorial. On Wall Street, he hadn’t roundtabled issues with the fellas, hadn’t built consensus or cultivated opposing viewpoints, as Ronald Reagan encouraged. He issued orders and demanded results. Those were the ground rules Don Regan established as he revamped the business of the Oval Office. He insisted on compliance. He demanded loyalty—“loyalty up, and loyalty down,” as he put it. He didn’t like being disagreed with—or contradicted. To solidify his authority, he enlisted the help of four aides—David Chew, Al Kingon, Tom Dawson, and Dennis Thomas, yes-men referred to throughout the White House as the Mice. “They were the court jesters,” Ed Meese says.

  Regan had the staff on edge, and the tension extended right up the chain of command. He’d already read the riot act to National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane for telephoning the president directly when Chernenko died and again when Major Nicholson was shot. As a result, McFarlane told George Shultz he intended to resign, citing his inability to work with Regan and his henchman, Pat Buchanan, the new White House communications director. Other officials became similarly disgruntled. Accustomed to having access to the president, they found him suddenly unapproachable, insulated from his longtime advisers, the Oval Office off-limits. The White House became Don Regan’s bailiwick, and throughout the spring of 1985 he broadened his command over it.

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  —

  But there were meatier, more exigent problems. During the president’s state visit to Germany, Congress had dealt the administration a foreign-policy blow, cutting off all aid to the Contras, humanitarian or otherwise. And his tax-reform bill dangled by a thread. A summit with Gorbachev was on again, off again. SALT II remained a strategic hot potato. The administration was having trouble implementing its agenda.

  Nixon had warned of this. “A President in his second term, even after a landslide, has a much briefer honeymoon and a less effective mandate than after his first election,” he wrote to Reagan. He needed to somehow set new and inspiring goals rather than cling to the policies of the past.

  But first the administration had to reckon with a dark act of terrorism. On June 14, 1985, gunmen, members of Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad
, hijacked TWA flight 847, en route from Athens to Rome, and held 153 passengers hostage, 104 of them Americans. One of them, a Navy diver named Robert Stethem, was shot in the head and dumped onto the tarmac in Beirut. The terrorists demanded the release of 766 Shiite Muslims held “for security offenses” from Israeli custody, threatening to shoot another hostage every five minutes and to blow up the plane if it came under attack. Israel was willing to swap its prisoners in exchange for the hostages if the United States made such a request, but the concept was loaded with pitfalls. “This of course means that we—not they—would be violating our policy of not negotiating with terrorists,” Reagan concluded. A trade for American hostages put Americans at risk anywhere in the world. He refused to set that kind of precedent, ignoring Cap Weinberger’s and George Bush’s advice to make the swap. He resorted to diplomacy instead.

  It took seventeen days to finally secure the release of the hostages, and involved such characters as Nabih Berri, the commander of the Amal militia, and Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, an acknowledged sponsor of Middle East terrorism. Negotiations were strained and often murky. It was never certain who was in control of the hostage situation or had the authority to make decisions.

  The president was determined not to let this develop into a fiasco like the Iranian hostage crisis six years earlier. The hijacking was already a spectacle. Much of the crisis had played out on television, with a rapt audience following each new development. The major networks and CNN had camera crews on the ground, capturing the whole tension-packed affair live, day after day—the pilot of the hijacked plane who leaned out the cockpit window with a gun to his head while being interviewed, the hijackers who screamed their threats, the hostages as they were released one by one. The whole world was watching. Public outrage built with each new episode.

  The media circus made U.S. efforts to deal with the crisis much more difficult. The president was under pressure to make some kind of a deal. For the longest time, the coverage made it seem as though negotiations were going nowhere. Television demanded action and resolution. Where was Delta Force? Or those crack-shot Israeli commandos? Reagan had spent one of the evenings at Camp David watching First Blood Part II. Where was Rambo? Negotiators were working with every available resource behind the scenes, involving the diplomatic branches of as many as six different countries, until a deal was agreed to. The hostages were freed, and several weeks later, Israel released some seven hundred Shia prisoners, though it claimed there was no quid pro quo.

  The president was satisfied with the results. It wasn’t pretty, but no further lives had been lost in the process and no agreements had jeopardized U.S. policy. But another hostage crisis was already under way, one that would mar the Reagan administration’s final three years and deal a blow to the president’s legacy. Another seven Americans kidnapped by extremist groups were still being held hostage elsewhere in Beirut, among them William Buckley, the CIA station chief; David Jacobsen of the American University in Lebanon; Terry Anderson, the Middle East bureau chief for the Associated Press; and a missionary, Reverend Benjamin Weir. Ronald Reagan made it clear to Bud McFarlane that he intended to secure their release at all costs. “Let’s get them out. Do whatever you have to.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  INTO THE ABYSS

  “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”

  —ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  In July 1985, Nancy Reagan’s worst fear came true.

  During the president’s annual physical in March, doctors found traces of blood in his stool and two small polyps on his intestinal wall that, out of an abundance of caution, they decided to remove. It was a routine procedure, during which a colonoscopy was performed, which is when the situation took an ominous turn. A large tumor the size of a baby’s finger was discovered that couldn’t be easily dismissed or removed. The official designation was “precancerous,” a nebulous term whose meaning ranged anywhere from benign to malignant. No matter. The patient was the President of the United States. Nobody was taking any chances.

  The First Lady was “beside herself.” She’d spent four years fretting about her husband’s safety, from the attempted assassination in 1981 and Anwar Sadat’s murder later that same year. “If she could, she’d have placed him in a protective bubble,” says Sheila Tate. Nancy Reagan was at her happiest when she had the president to herself in the residence. Barring that, she’d taken every precaution possible, from shuffling his schedules on the advice of her astrologer to having trucks filled with sand placed at the entrances to the White House, heat-seeking devices on Air Force One, and armed SWAT teams escorting the presidential motorcade. The assassination attempt continued to haunt her. Safety became an obsession—not only Ronald Reagan’s safety, but the family’s in general. Weeks earlier, when her son, Ron, dismissed his Secret Service detail as an unnecessary bother, Nancy wound up on a screaming, sobbing phone call with him, pleading for its reinstatement.

  The initial operation had been postponed one time on the advice of Joan Quigley. There was no such allowance this time. The president had already been admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital, and the doctors were recommending immediate surgery. Ideally, the First Lady wanted them to hold off until she could reach “My Friend,” as she referred to Quigley. The astrologer needed to “clear” the date. Reagan himself put a stop to this. He was already prepped and ready to go. He wanted to get the procedure over and done with. His brother, Neil, had undergone an operation for cancer of the colon and gall bladder not even a week earlier. If this business ran in the family there was no time to waste in treating it.

  The First Lady launched into protective mode. She insisted that the White House had to manage the media. There would be no pictures of the president in his hospital room trussed up in tubes or wires, nothing that showed him the least bit indisposed. “He can’t be seen this way,” she ordered White House photographers. “We don’t want people to know it’s this bad.” And she laid down the law to Larry Speakes: “no mention of the words cancer or malignant.” There was already news enough to alarm the public. The president was undergoing major surgery . . . he’d be under anesthesia . . . a seventy-four-year-old man. It was essential that they put the best spin on it.

  The surgery was scheduled for 11:00 a.m. on Saturday, July 13. A half hour beforehand, the president signed two identical documents—one to the president pro tempore of the Senate (Strom Thurmond), one to the Speaker of the House (Tip O’Neill)—authorizing Vice President George Bush to “discharge powers and duties in my stead commencing with the administration of anesthesia.” It was the first official transfer from a president to his vice president in the nation’s history. It wasn’t in effect that long. The operation itself was over three hours later. The polyp was not cancerous, and Ronald Reagan pronounced himself “fit as a fiddle.” By seven o’clock that same evening, he had signed orders reclaiming all presidential powers.

  Nancy Reagan wasn’t happy about the transfer, and she was less than thrilled by the president’s prescribed recovery. He needed rest, she insisted, casting the evil eye at the White House staff that slipped in and out of his room carrying briefs and papers. Don Regan kept him posted on the ongoing budget battle and the legislative agenda. There was good news: the Soviet Union had agreed to a Gorbachev-Reagan summit in Geneva on November 19 and 20. The president would finally get his face-to-face with a Soviet premier. And the hostages. “Any word on the hostages?” It was the first question Ronald Reagan asked; he was preoccupied with their return. The two men spent considerable time—“longer than I would have thought wise,” Regan recalled—discussing the situation. The president was frosted that U.S. citizens were being held by common criminals and that foreign governments were possibly involved. Bud McFarlane, the national security adviser, had some relevant news, but Nancy Reagan had barred him from the premises.

  In fact, McFarlane had information for the president that
was sensational and time-sensitive. On July 3, 1985, he’d been visited by David Kimche, an old intelligence friend who had been deputy director of the Mossad and was currently director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. The Mossad, Kimche revealed, had identified “a moderate faction in various Iranian legislative branches that, if nurtured over time, could form an opposition to Ayatollah Khomeini.” They could become powerful allies if . . . if . . . the right pieces fell into place. There were a lot of moving parts in the offing, with mysterious characters moving them. It went without saying that such an operation was dangerous and risky. “No one is going to put their lives on the line,” Kimche told McFarlane, “unless you’ve got some skin in the game. The Iranians’ offer to demonstrate their bona fides is to release hostages. But they are not going to spend that chit unless the United States provides them with weapons that could make a difference in a war with Iraq.”

  McFarlane’s head was spinning. This could be the breakthrough he and the president were looking for. But Iranians? Weapons? The Mossad? McFarlane remembers thinking: “It’s fraught.”

  He expressed as much to Kimche. “David, you’ve got to have a lot of confidence in these interlocutors we’re talking about. Do they really have current standing to build on? Are these people qualified to broaden a political opposition, or are they just frustrated military officers?” Kimche shrugged and shook his head. “I really don’t know,” he admitted.

  Kimche’s vague response worried McFarlane, but he knew the president would be intrigued. He needed to run this by him as soon as possible.