by H. W. Brands
THE NORTH CONVICTION, after the judge’s ruling that Reagan need not testify, prompted the lawyers for John Poindexter to redouble their efforts to ensure that the former president did testify in their client’s trial. They battled long and hard and eventually secured a partial victory. The judge in the Poindexter case, Harold Greene, ruled that Reagan did have to testify but could do so in California rather than in Washington, where the trial was being conducted. The testimony would be videotaped and played for the Washington jury.
Judge Greene closed the Los Angeles courtroom to the media but allowed the defense and prosecution to field their full teams. Poindexter sat with his counsel. The CIA and other federal intelligence agencies sent experts to warn the questioners and the president if they were treading on ground that might compromise continuing operations. Reagan received 154 questions from Poindexter’s lawyers in advance to prepare for the deposition.
Reagan’s testimony did nothing good for Poindexter and nothing good for Reagan’s reputation. In eight hours in the witness box over two days, he pleaded ignorance nearly one hundred times, saying he had never known of the events in question or now didn’t recall them. He was unable to describe various meetings and conversations in which he had taken part. He could not identify individuals he had worked with, including General John Vessey, his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for three years. The gist of the Tower Commission report was lost to him.
The defense had hoped to demonstrate that Poindexter’s actions had had Reagan’s approval, but his foggy testimony failed them, and Poindexter was convicted on multiple counts. (The convictions were later overturned on technical grounds.) Yet Reagan’s performance left observers—including the public, after Judge Greene allowed the tapes to be released—wondering about Reagan. Had he been this out of touch while president? Or had he simply aged rapidly in the year since he relinquished the presidency?
On the tapes he looked every one of his seventy-nine years. The old tics were there: the faux-sheepish grin, the duck and nod of the head, the breathy radio voice. But the vibrancy Americans had come to expect of Reagan was missing. His face seemed slack and pasty; his eyes sometimes stared blankly; he tired quickly. He had never been as good in news conferences as in set speeches, or as good as he flattered himself to think he was. Sharp questioning penetrated the thinness of his knowledge base. Yet he had been light on his feet and usually able to dodge the heavy blows. No heavy blows landed this time, but only because his questioners didn’t want to make him look any worse than he made himself look. The jury might punish the side that beat up on a confused old man.
The silver lining for Reagan was that his floundering diminished the possibility that he himself might be charged with criminal wrongdoing. Special counsel Lawrence Walsh was moving up the chain of command; after winning indictments against North, Poindexter, and McFarlane, he was said to be investigating Caspar Weinberger and George Shultz. The obvious final target was Reagan. But Reagan’s hapless performance in the Poindexter case suggested that any trial of the former president could be a public relations disaster for the entire investigation.
NANCY REAGAN DATED her husband’s decline to an incident that occurred just six months after they left the White House. The Reagans were visiting William Wilson and his wife at their ranch in northern Mexico. The two couples were old friends, and Wilson had served as Reagan’s ambassador to the Vatican. Reagan loved to ride horseback as much as ever, and he set out with a small party across the rugged terrain of the ranch. He was an able rider, especially on his own horses, but the horse he rode this day turned skittish. It bucked a few times, causing two Secret Service agents to close in and try to calm it. Yet the horse would not be soothed, and it finally pitched Reagan out of the saddle and onto the rocky ground.
He got up and dusted himself off, seeming not much the worse for the tumble. But Nancy insisted that he be flown to a hospital in Tucson for a thorough checkup. Various scans indicated no fractures, and he and Nancy left the hospital to travel to their own ranch, where they celebrated her birthday.
Further tests, however, revealed a blood clot, a subdural hematoma, in Reagan’s skull, presumably the result of hitting his head in his fall. Doctors in Los Angeles monitored the condition during the next several weeks and chose not to operate. Reagan appeared to be recovering satisfactorily.
But when he and Nancy traveled to Minnesota in September for their annual physical exams at the Mayo Clinic, his doctors detected a new clot. They recommended surgery, and Reagan consented. The procedure involved drilling a hole in the skull and inserting a tube to drain the gathered fluid. The surgery went smoothly, and Reagan was released from the hospital after several days. His sense of humor survived intact; observing his shaved head, he commented to the attending staff, “I guess my barber can have the week off.”
Nancy, as always, took her husband’s health problems more seriously than he did. “I was in shock,” she recalled of the events surrounding the surgery. “It shows up in the picture that appeared in the press at the time: Ronnie leaving the hospital, taking his hat off to salute the crowd, and me dashing forward trying to cover his partially shaven head with my hand. He didn’t care that he had no hair on one side—but I did!”
She went on to say, “I’ve always had the feeling that the severe blow to his head in 1989 hastened the onset of Ronnie’s Alzheimer’s. The doctors think so, too.”
YET HIS CONDITION often seemed no more than simple aging. Reagan’s memoir An American Life was published in the autumn of 1990, and he went on the talk shows promoting it. His publicists booked him with interviewers certain to be friendly, and indeed Barbara Walters, Charles Gibson, and William F. Buckley couldn’t have been kinder. They pitched him softballs, and when he failed to make contact, they hit the pitches for him. “Mr. Reagan is treated like a well-loved uncle who needs a little help these days in keeping the conversation going,” television critic Walter Goodman wrote in the New York Times. Reagan looked fit, Goodman said, and his smile still charmed. “Words, however, do not always come easily or always in the right order; when dealing with his time in the White House he often reaches into past scripts for some phrase that has done proven service. The phrases he finds are not always directly on the mark, but no one calls him to task.”
The book was a commercial success for Simon & Schuster and a personal triumph for Reagan. It topped best-seller lists and showed how much Reagan’s fans still loved their hero. Yet the triumph was bittersweet, in that the interviews revealed that the author was no longer the man his book described.
THE BOOK AUGMENTED Reagan’s emerging historical reputation at a moment when the Cold War was coming to an irreversible end. The reform tides Gorbachev had set in motion in the Soviet Union rolled across Eastern Europe in the year after Reagan left office. The Berlin Wall came down metaphorically in November 1989 and concretely in the following months. In the autumn of 1990, just as Reagan’s book was hitting the bookstores, West Germany absorbed East Germany into a single federal republic, erasing the border that had long formed the front line of the superpower confrontation. Meanwhile, the communist regimes in the other countries of the Soviet satellite belt crumbled before popular uprisings.
Reagan kept in touch with Gorbachev as the anticommunist revolution unfolded. On a state visit to America in June 1990, Gorbachev invited Reagan to breakfast in San Francisco. Gorbachev liked Reagan better now that they no longer had to spar over strategic defense; he also understood that the former president had continuing pull in American politics and might be helpful to Gorbachev’s agenda. The San Francisco meeting went well, and Gorbachev invited Reagan and Nancy to visit Russia in the autumn.
Reagan emerged from the California meeting more taken by Gorbachev than ever. He shortly published an opinion piece in the New York Times under the headline “I’m Convinced That Gorbachev Wants a Free-Market Democracy.” Reagan recounted his own role in the changes that were taking place in Eastern Europe. “Three years ago today
I stood in front of the Berlin Wall and urged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear it down,” he wrote. “This was not a spur-of-the-moment idea. Rather, it reflected my belief that both my relationship with Mr. Gorbachev and the effects of his policy of glasnost at home had reached a point where I could publicly call for this act of East-West reconciliation.” Reagan noted that Gorbachev had not responded positively at once, but he gave the Soviet leader credit for making the ultimate outcome possible. “Glasnost had let the free speech genie out of the bottle in the Soviet Union; Mr. Gorbachev’s call for perestroika, or reform, held the promise of better times for his citizens.” Reagan told of his recent meeting with Gorbachev. “He was every bit as warm, earnest and optimistic about his country’s future potential as I remembered him from our previous meetings.” Yet he faced daunting challenges: rampant nationalism in the Soviet republics, consumer complaints over lack of goods in the stores, political opposition led by Russian leader Boris Yeltsin. Reagan thought Gorbachev deserved America’s support. Glasnost and perestroika had started Russia on the right path, but greater change was coming, and it behooved the United States to support Gorbachev during the transition. There was no limit to what the positive results might be, in Russia and elsewhere. “Like the chips of the Berlin Wall that are being sold everywhere these days, democracy seems to be sweeping the world.”
REAGAN AND NANCY accepted Gorbachev’s invitation to Russia, and they expanded the trip into an eleven-day tour of Europe. They touched down in Germany, where Reagan was invited to have a whack at the Berlin Wall. “Darned hard,” he remarked after several unproductive blows with hammer and chisel. A German onlooker responded, “German quality work.” They entered East Berlin through the Brandenburg Gate and were greeted by the president of the East German parliament, who said, “Mr. President, we have much to thank you for.” Reagan replied, “Berlin is going to be Berlin once again.”
From Germany they traveled to Poland, where the Polish government newspaper hailed Reagan as the “real father of perestroika” and dubbed his European tour the “symbolic harvest” of his support of freedom as president. Reagan met Lech Wałesa, still the leader of the now-divided Solidarity movement. Reagan urged the opposing factions to keep their differences within bounds. “To protect the liberty you have won, you will need a full measure of the tolerance and openness that are Poland’s tradition,” he said.
The good feelings followed them to Moscow, where Gorbachev embraced his erstwhile partner in diplomacy and praised him as a statesman of true vision. “I’m sure you must have sensed by now during your stay here in this country that we, and people in Soviet society, hold you in tremendous respect and esteem,” Gorbachev said.
Reagan returned the compliment by praising Gorbachev to the Supreme Soviet. As in Poland he cautioned against demands of too much too soon. “These are yeasty times, times of ferment,” he said. “Freedom can bring out passions between groups of people that may boil over. When they do, cool and calm decisions are called for by leaders, so as to lower temperatures all around.” Reagan cited the anguish of America’s Civil War and said he hoped the Soviet peoples would spare themselves anything similar. “Reason must prevail over passion if there is to be a climate conducive to the settlement of disagreements.” He observed that the United States and the Soviet Union had long eyed each other with distrust, but things had changed between them. Cooperation was evident in joint efforts to settle a crisis in the Persian Gulf, where Iraq had recently invaded and occupied Kuwait. Reagan was pleased that the superpowers were on the same side of this issue, and he hoped their cooperation could be a model for responses to other crises. “Together, our great size can be used in the service of all humankind to persuade those whose passions have reached the danger point to cool down again.”
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REAGAN TURNED EIGHTY in February 1991. Merv Griffin hosted a black-tie dinner party at the Beverly Hilton that doubled as a fund-raiser for the Reagan Library foundation. Nearly a thousand guests drawn from Reagan’s two worlds, Hollywood and Washington, paid as much as $2,500 apiece to honor the former president. Charlton Heston, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jimmy Stewart mingled with George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, and Paul Laxalt. Margaret Thatcher traveled from London, where she had resigned as prime minister the previous November following a revolt within her Conservative Party. She offered a toast: “Twenty-five years ago, in a famous speech, you quoted President Franklin Roosevelt, who said we all have a rendezvous with destiny. Certainly you had such a rendezvous. Thank God you were on time.” Dan Quayle represented George Bush, who was busy directing a war in the Persian Gulf, where the crisis had not been resolved peacefully. Bush nonetheless sent videotaped congratulations. “They’ll get you on Mt. Rushmore yet,” he predicted. Lech Wałesa, similarly speaking via video, expressed gratitude for what Reagan had done for Poland. The San Diego Marine Corps Band supplied music.
Reagan thanked the guests for coming. He blew out the eight candles on his four-decker cake and accidentally smeared frosting on his tuxedo. He shared his birthday wish with the group: “That God will watch over each and every one of our men and women who are bravely serving in the Persian Gulf, and their families, wherever they may be. And may they know that we as a nation stand firmly behind them.” He closed the evening by holding hands with Nancy and leading the group in singing “God Bless America.”
THE DINNER RAISED $2 million for the Reagan Library, which opened to the public six months later. Many of the same group reconvened at Simi Valley for the dedication. They were joined by an additional two thousand people, mostly Republicans, and several hundred members of the media. All of America’s living presidents were there: Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Bush, along with Reagan. The Republican presidents praised Reagan unstintingly. “He believed that America was on the right side of history, standing with the forces of good against the forces of evil in the world,” Nixon observed. “And some have dismissed him, therefore, as an ideologue. But Ronald Reagan has been justified by what has happened.” Ford lauded Reagan as “a national leader who was able to articulate the highest hopes and deepest beliefs of the American people.” Bush called him “a political prophet leading the tide toward conservatism.” Carter, the outlying Democrat, couldn’t resist noting that poverty and unequal opportunity survived the Reagan years, but then he too joined the celebration, praising his successor as one under whom “our nation stood strong and resolute and made possible the beginning of the end of the Cold War.”
Reagan accepted the plaudits and added his own. “Within the course of only a few short years I have seen the world turned upside down and conventional wisdom utterly disproved,” he said. “Visitors to this mountaintop will see a great jagged chunk of the Berlin Wall, hated symbol of, yes, an evil empire, that spied on and lied to its citizens, denying them their freedom, their bread, even their faith. Well, today that wall exists only in museums, souvenir collections and the memories of a people no longer oppressed. It is also a reminder that a strong America is always desirable—and necessary in our world.”
NOT THREE YEARS out of office, Reagan had ascended to the realm of Republican legend. The party faithful loved him for the policies he had pursued in office, but they loved him even more for the vision he had conveyed of America’s inherent greatness. He made Americans feel good about themselves, and Republicans feel best of all.
Yet a few issues raised doubts, even among conservatives. On the tenth anniversary of his shooting, Reagan endorsed a handgun regulation bill named for James Brady, who had never recovered from the brain damage he incurred that day. The Brady bill would require a seven-day waiting period for the purchase of handguns, during which time state and local authorities could check the criminal and mental backgrounds of prospective purchasers. Reagan had previously supported waiting periods but only in the context of state laws. His support for the federal bill marked a significant concession to the big government he had long decried.
He explained his change of heart in an opinion pi
ece in the New York Times. He recounted his own near brush with death at John Hinckley’s hand, and he described the permanent injury to Brady, as well as the wounds to police officer Thomas Delahanty and Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy. “Four lives were changed forever, and all by a Saturday-night special—a cheaply made .22 caliber pistol—purchased in a Dallas pawnshop by a young man with a history of mental disturbance,” Reagan wrote. “This nightmare might never have happened if legislation that is before Congress now—the Brady bill—had been law back in 1981.” He acknowledged the argument for leaving gun control to the states as one he had often made himself. But the state-by-state approach wasn’t working. “Criminals just go to nearby states that lack such laws to buy their weapons.” The current system had to change. “Every year, an average of 9,200 are murdered by handguns,” he wrote. “This level of violence must be stopped.” He recognized that no law could prevent all mayhem, but the country had to start somewhere. “If the passage of the Brady bill were to result in a reduction of only 10 or 15 percent of those numbers (and it could be a good deal greater), it would be well worth making it the law of the land. And there would be a lot fewer families facing anniversaries such as the Bradys, Delahantys, McCarthys and Reagans face every March 30.”
Opponents of gun control reacted sharply. “I felt somebody had stabbed me in the back,” the former head of Sportsmen for Reagan, a campaign group from 1980 and 1984, said. The director of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms shook his head and declared, “This action on his part leads one to the conclusion that, well, he’s just another politician, after all.” The director added, hopefully and in topic-appropriate terms, “He’s no longer a kinetic force in American politics.” A spokesman for the Oregon State Shooting Association announced that Reagan’s turnabout made him suspect the former president’s entire party. “Every time I look at a Republican,” he said, “I’m going to wonder if he is telling me what he believes, or is he telling me what I want to hear to get my vote.”
