Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  Nancy recalled her response to Griffin: “Oh, my God! I could have stopped it!”

  She immediately hung up on Griffin and called Quigley. “Merv tells me you knew about March 30,” she said.

  “Yes, I could see it was a very bad day for the president,” Quigley replied.

  “I’m so scared,” Nancy said. “I’m scared every time he leaves the house, and I don’t think I breathe until he gets home. I cringe every time we step out of a car or leave a building. I’m afraid that one of these days somebody is going to shoot at him again.”

  Quigley responded with sympathy. Nancy subsequently called her again, and again. She shared her fears and concerns not simply about her husband but about her children and her parents. “On all these matters, Joan was helpful and comforting,” Nancy said. “We had a professional relationship, but I came to view her as a friend. I now see that she was also a kind of therapist.”

  Quigley suggested that she could help Nancy by identifying days that were good or bad for her husband.

  “Well, I thought, what’s the harm in that?” Nancy remembered. “And so once or twice a month I would talk with Joan (sometimes by appointment, sometimes not). I would have Ronnie’s schedule in front of me, and what I wanted to know was very simple: Were specific dates safe or dangerous? If, for example, Ronnie was scheduled to give a speech in Chicago on May 3, should he leave Washington that morning, or was he better off flying out on the previous afternoon?” Quigley would listen and take notes. She would consult the stars and whatever other sources she used, and she would call Nancy back with her recommendations. “I would, if necessary, call Michael Deaver, who was in charge of Ronnie’s schedule,” Nancy said. “Sometimes a small change was made.” After Deaver left the White House and Don Regan became chief of staff with control of the schedule, Nancy worked through Regan.

  “I knew, of course, that if this ever came out, it could prove embarrassing to Ronnie,” she observed. “But as long as I worked with Mike Deaver, I knew my secret was safe. Mike was discreet. He had known Ronnie and me for years and was one of my closest friends. I never even thought of asking him to keep a confidence. I just knew he would.”

  43

  FOUR WEEKS AND a day after the shooting, Reagan returned to the political arena. He requested permission to address Congress and duly received an invitation. When he entered the House chamber, the senators and representatives leaped to their feet in a politically mandatory but no less heartfelt expression of relief that democracy had not been derailed by a madman. Reagan had to fight his way through the arms and hands that reached out for his; like the celebrity he had been for half a century, he reveled in and reciprocated the good feeling. When he mounted the dais, the applause and cheers kept on and on. He smiled and waved and nodded, and smiled and waved and nodded again and again. The applause continued. Finally he quipped, in obvious reference to his close brush with death, “You wouldn’t want to talk me into an encore, would you?”

  He had come to speak about the business of government. But he had a personal message first. “I’d like to say a few words directly to all of you and to those who are watching and listening tonight, because this is the only way I know to express to all of you on behalf of Nancy and myself our appreciation for your messages and flowers and, most of all, your prayers, not only for me but for those others who fell beside me. The warmth of your words, the expression of friendship and, yes, love, meant more to us than you can ever know. You have given us a memory that we’ll treasure forever.”

  Reagan’s audience was as moved as he himself obviously was. Applause again poured from both sides of the aisle. He told of the cards and letters he had received. He drew one such letter from his lapel pocket. The writer was a second grader in Rockville Centre, New York. “I hope you get well quick,” Reagan read, “or you might have to make a speech in your pajamas.” Reagan’s words and delivery lifted the somberness that had infused the applause; all remembered what a funny fellow he was and were delighted to have him back. Reagan let the laughter flow and slowly ebb. He finished the story with his young correspondent’s closing line: “P.S. If you have to make a speech in your pajamas, I warned you.” The legislators roared again, the Democrats despite themselves.

  He wasn’t finished with his prologue. Referring, as in the campaign, to Jimmy Carter’s lament at the malaise that afflicted Americans, augmented now by comments that only a sick society could produce a deranged gunman like John Hinckley, Reagan repeated what he himself had said, that there was nothing wrong or sick about America at all. He cited his own recent experience. “Sick societies don’t produce young men like Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, who placed his body between mine and the man with the gun simply because he felt that’s what his duty called for him to do.” The audience applauded, loudly and long. “Sick societies don’t produce dedicated police officers like Tom Delahanty.” More applause. “Or able and devoted public servants like Jim Brady.” Even more applause, and the eyes of the legislators turned, with the television cameras, to Brady’s wife, Sarah, seated in the gallery. “Sick societies don’t make people like us so proud to be Americans and so very proud of our fellow citizens.”

  REAGAN ALWAYS KNEW when he had an audience where he wanted it, and he knew he had this one. He launched into the job at hand. “Let’s talk about getting spending and inflation under control and cutting your tax rates,” he said. “Thanks to some very fine people, my health is much improved. I’d like to be able to say that with regard to the health of the economy.” But he could not. Six months after the election, an election in which voters had clearly registered their desire for a change of course, the economy remained on life support. Inflation had scarcely abated; interest rates were still punishingly high. Nearly eight million Americans were still unemployed. Real wages had fallen. “Six months is long enough. The American people now want us to act and not in half measures. They demand and they’ve earned a full and comprehensive effort to clean up our economic mess.”

  The effort must begin with the budget. Reagan reiterated the message of the election: “Our government is too big, and it spends too much.” He was pleased to report that the Senate Budget Committee had just that day approved a bipartisan budget resolution consistent with the recommendations the administration had issued. Unfortunately, the House was lagging. The House Budget Committee, controlled by Democrats, had presented a bill that was woefully deficient. It cut social programs too little and shortchanged defense. And rather than reduce taxes, it would raise them. “It adheres to the failed policy of trying to balance the budget on the taxpayer’s back,” Reagan said. The Democratic measure was conservative in the worst sense of the word: it would entrench the failed policies of the past. “High taxes and excess spending growth created our present economic mess; more of the same will not cure the hardship, anxiety, and discouragement it has imposed on the American people.”

  Reagan responded to expressed concerns that the administration’s program of cuts in spending and taxes would produce large deficits. Pollsters had asked Americans whether they placed greater importance on lower taxes or a balanced budget, and most chose the balanced budget. Reagan asserted that the question had been wrongly framed. He repeated that his proposed tax cut was really a refusal to raise taxes in the future. “A gigantic tax increase has been built into the system,” he said, referring to the effects of inflation in boosting people into higher tax brackets. “We propose nothing more than a reduction of that increase.” The pollsters should make this clear. “Our choice is not between a balanced budget and a tax cut. Properly asked, the question is, ‘Do you want a great big raise in your taxes this coming year or, at the worst, a very little increase with the prospect of tax reduction and a balanced budget down the road a ways?’ … I’m sure we all know what the answer to that question would be.”

  Reagan reiterated that the Democratic bill from the House was unsatisfactory. Fortunately, there was an alternative. Conservative Democratic congressman Phil
Gramm of Texas had worked closely with the administration from the start. As Gramm put it later, “Stockman and I wrote the Reagan budget.” Gramm had enlisted Republican Del Latta of Ohio, and the two sponsored a measure that Reagan now endorsed. “We embrace and fully support that bipartisan substitute,” the president said. It would accomplish the crucial goals of cutting spending, reducing taxes, and bolstering defense. And it would foster economic growth.

  Two weeks earlier NASA had completed a successful mission by the space shuttle, returning America to space after a hiatus of six years. The timing couldn’t have been better for Reagan, who cited the mission as an example of America at its best. “With the space shuttle we tested our ingenuity once again, moving beyond the accomplishments of the past into the promise and uncertainty of the future,” he said. “The space shuttle did more than prove our technological abilities. It raised our expectations once more. It started us dreaming again.”

  He quoted Carl Sandburg on American dreams: “The republic is a dream. Nothing happens unless first a dream.” Resuming his own words, Reagan continued, “That’s what makes us, as Americans, different. We’ve always reached for a new spirit and aimed at a higher goal.” He challenged Congress to dream with him. “We have much greatness before us. We can restore our economic strength and build opportunities like none we’ve ever had before … All we need to have is faith, and that dream will come true.”

  44

  THE SHOCK OF the shooting, Reagan’s grace at death’s door, and his dramatic return made him politically irresistible. He knew his speech was a hit when scores of Democrats joined the cheering. Overnight calls to the White House registered the same enthusiasm. Reagan’s job approval rating, as measured by Gallup, bounced upward to 68 percent, higher than it had yet been and as high as it would ever go.

  The Senate, under the guidance of the Republicans and Majority Leader Howard Baker of Tennessee, accepted Reagan’s direction on the budget easily. In the House, Tip O’Neill and the Democrats made a show of resistance. But as letters and calls supporting the president clogged the mailboxes and phone lines of House members, O’Neill found himself losing ground. “Am I lobbying people?” he asked reporters rhetorically. “The answer is yes. Am I getting commitments? The answer is no.” Reagan was simply overwhelming, the speaker explained. “We’re facing a popularity issue. That’s what we’re facing out there.” And Reagan was too popular. “He’s done the greatest selling job I’ve ever seen.”

  On May 7, nine days after the president’s appeal to the people, Reagan defeated O’Neill. Sixty-three Democrats joined the Republican minority to approve the Gramm-Latta bill by a broad margin. “We never anticipated such a landslide,” Reagan remarked privately. “It’s been a long time since Republicans have had a victory like this.” The administration celebrated and prepared to seal the triumph in the reconciliation of the Senate and House bills.

  “THEN WE SHOT ourselves in the foot,” James Baker recollected. The bullet was Social Security. In the half century since Franklin Roosevelt had made it the signature program of the American welfare state, Social Security had developed an enormous and powerful constituency. Retired people and those approaching retirement were poorly positioned to replace lost income, including income lost to Social Security cuts; they believed, with reason, that society had made them solemn promises and that cuts to Social Security represented the worst kind of promise breaking. Moreover, the pensioners and near pensioners voted in proportions that put younger Americans to shame. Reagan understood this, which was why he had exempted Social Security from the initial round of budget reductions. But the system was becoming financially unsound as the ranks of the retired grew. Payments would soon exceed workers’ contributions, and the problem would get worse over time.

  How to reform the system evoked bitter fights within the administration. Richard Schweiker, the secretary of Health and Human Services and a former member of Congress, advocated broadening the base of Social Security by extending it to currently exempt government workers and employees of nonprofit organizations. Doing so would increase revenues without immediately expanding outlays and would buy years, perhaps decades, of relief.

  David Stockman judged this exactly the wrong approach. “Schweiker and I might as well have been standing on different planets,” Stockman wrote. Calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” he said that bringing in more contributors would compound the deception. “Our job is to shrink the Social Security monster, not indenture millions more workers to a system that’s already unsound.”

  Stockman swayed most of his administration peers with supply-side logic and some tactical compromises that ultimately brought even Schweiker around. He presented his program of benefit cuts at an Oval Office meeting where he wrapped his argument in budget arcana no one in the room could rebut. Reagan, as a candidate, had often complained about Democrats’ faux fixes of Social Security; at this meeting he again berated the Carter administration. “They gave us the largest tax increase in history and said it would be sound until 2030,” he said. “Now we’re here four years later and it’s already bankrupt. It just proves what we’ve always said.”

  Stockman nodded vigorous agreement and praised the president’s insight. Reagan accepted Stockman’s proposal, delighted at the thought of finally making Social Security sound. Stockman ally Martin Anderson congratulated the president on a genuine breakthrough. “You’ll be the first president in history to honestly and permanently fix Social Security,” Anderson said. “No one else had the courage to do it.”

  James Baker hadn’t been prepared for the supply-siders’ blitz. “I was apoplectic,” he remarked afterward. Baker was certain there would be a backlash against the Social Security cuts, and he believed the president hadn’t been warned. “Our success on the budget resolution may have encouraged him to shoot for the moon on this issue, which he had talked about for years.”

  Baker didn’t think he could change Reagan’s mind directly, given the president’s pleasure at having saved Social Security. So he worked to deflect the criticism away from the White House. He called a meeting of the Legislative Strategy Group. “Look,” he said, “we’ve all agreed around here that the economic program is number one, top of the list. So let’s be a little concerned about whether we screw up the agenda.” He decreed that the Social Security plan be presented to the media and the public as a Health and Human Services project, not something from the White House. “To be precise,” he emphasized, “this isn’t Ronald Reagan’s plan. It’s Dick Schweiker’s. Has everybody got that?”

  David Stockman objected. “This isn’t extraneous to the president’s economic plan,” he declared. “It’s integral to it, because it”—the overall plan—“doesn’t add up without it.”

  Schweiker said Baker was sabotaging the Social Security proposal. “If there’s any doubt as to where the president stands, this’ll be dead on arrival when it gets to the Hill.” Schweiker wondered where Baker got the idea he could dictate political strategy. “By damn, I’ve spent twenty years on the Hill, and I know when something will fly. So let’s not start on the defensive. This is a plan we can be proud of.”

  Baker refused to reconsider. Reagan’s fingerprints must not be on the Social Security plan, he said. It was Schweiker’s responsibility.

  “I was furious,” Stockman recalled. “But there was nothing I could do. Baker was chief of staff.”

  Baker’s misgivings proved accurate. “Within two days I knew we were in deep trouble,” Stockman remembered. The budget director met with congressional Republicans to explain the Social Security reforms. “No sooner had I finished the final sentence of my opening remarks than Congressman Carroll Campbell of South Carolina lit into me like a junk yard dog. ‘You absolutely blind-sided us with this Social Security plan,’ he seethed. ‘My phones are ringing off the hook. I’ve got thousands of sixty-year-old textile workers who think it’s the end of the world. What the hell am I supposed to tell them?’ ” House speaker O’Neil
l happily piled on, calling the plan “despicable” and a “rotten thing to do” to seniors. Massachusetts Democrat James Shannon of the House Ways and Means Committee pinned the blame on Reagan. “He has gone too far,” Shannon said. “It’s time we stood up.”

  The Senate, in fact, stood up first. Without waiting for the administration’s Social Security plan to arrive, the upper house preemptively buried it by a unanimous vote.

  “And that was that,” Baker remarked later. The administration dropped the Stockman plan and said no more about it. “Social Security was off the front pages, but at a significant cost to our legislative momentum,” Baker reflected.

  45

  THE SOCIAL SECURITY debacle cost the administration weeks and cast doubt on the entire project of tax and budget reform. Reagan rolled with the reverse but refused to retreat. Springtime brought invitations to college commencements; Reagan accepted an offer of an honorary degree at the institution with which he had long been identified in the public mind. Notre Dame had given degrees to other presidents, but none of them had played George Gipp. After warming the crowd with one-liners even he admitted were hoary—“A university like this is a storehouse of knowledge because the freshmen bring so much in and the seniors take so little away”—he riffed on his famous role. “Today I hear very often, ‘Win one for the Gipper,’ spoken in a humorous vein,” he said. “I’ve been hearing it by congressmen who are supportive of the programs that I’ve introduced.” He pointed out that the story was more complicated than was commonly known, and he said it might serve as a parable for the present. “Rockne could have used Gipp’s dying words to win a game any time. But eight years went by following the death of George Gipp before Rock revealed those dying words, his deathbed wish. And then he told the story at halftime to a team that was losing, and one of the only teams he had ever coached that was torn by dissension and jealousy and factionalism … It was to this team that Rockne told the story and so inspired them that they rose above their personal animosities.” Congress should take the lesson and pass the administration’s tax and budget bills.