Deaver, by then, was well along on his plans to make his own exit. He was forty-six years old and, except for a year as an IBM sales trainee, had never worked for anyone but Ronald Reagan. As Deaver himself acknowledged, he had little interest in the details of policy. But no one was better at figuring out how to stage an event—or, as Deaver put it, “blending the gifts of Ronald Reagan with the proper pageantry.” Still, for all the acclaim he had gotten as “Magic Mike” and “the Vicar of Visuals,” Deaver had come to resent the subtext, which was that he was nothing more than a glorified family retainer; an image maker devoid of any real depth.
When Deaver finally made up his mind to leave, he told Nancy first. She asked him to stay for another year, and he was firm with her that he couldn’t. If he didn’t go now, he might never be able to bring himself to do it. Then Deaver went to the Oval Office.
“You know, Mike, I like to think I’m the only indispensable person around here, but the truth is…” Ronnie began.
Deaver put up his hand. “Please, Ron, don’t say whatever you were going to say. Don’t do that to me,” he said. It was, Deaver would later realize, the only time he had ever given himself license to use the president’s first name to his face.
At one o’clock in the afternoon on January 3, 1985, the White House announced his resignation. It also put out a statement by Nancy: “I’ll miss him, but I think he’ll be nearby.” At Deaver’s going-away party in the Rose Garden, Ronnie made an unusual request of White House aide Fred Ryan. He wanted Ryan to arrange for Deaver, though he no longer worked for the president, to continue to hold a pass that would allow him unfettered access to the White House grounds.
Deaver had promised to stick around long enough to do one last job for Ronnie and Nancy, which was to orchestrate the president’s next big overseas trip. But rather than being the grace note that Deaver had hoped, the trip to Europe that May would be remembered for his greatest blunder.
The main event was an economic summit in Bonn. But in late 1984, during a visit to the White House, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl had proposed to Ronnie that the two of them make a side trip to a concentration camp and a cathedral, and that they lay a wreath in the Kolmeshöhe military cemetery on the outskirts of Bitburg, a town of 12,500 people. It would be a coda to Ronnie’s spectacularly successful 1984 visit to Normandy on the fortieth anniversary of the D-day invasion. The two leaders would commemorate the passage of that same forty-year milestone since V-E Day and make a grand gesture that spoke to the reconciliation of their countries. Nancy, who knew that it was difficult for her husband to retain his composure in depressing settings, scotched the idea of a concentration camp visit.
Still, the cemetery remained a possibility. Deaver asked the Germans the question he always did when deciding whether to put something like this on the schedule: was there anything there that might embarrass the president? They told him no. Nor did he and Bill Henkel, the head of advance, see any problems when they visited the Bitburg cemetery. The markers, which lay flat against the ground, were covered by snow at the time. Henkel later double-checked with the US embassy, asking the deputy chief of mission if anyone there knew who was in the cemetery.
He got a dismissive retort: “Well, Mr. Henkel, what do you think? That Josef Mengele is buried there?”
“Could be,” Henkel replied.
The Bitburg cemetery visit was on a presidential itinerary the White House announced on April 11. What Deaver and Henkel hadn’t seen, and what German newspapers soon reported, was that the cemetery contained the remains of forty-nine members of the Waffen SS, which was affiliated with the elite and ruthless combat guards who ran Adolf Hitler’s death camps. One of those buried there had been given the German Cross, a star-shaped medal that featured a swastika, for killing ten US soldiers on a day when at least seventy-one of them had been captured, shot at close range, and buried in a shallow grave.
The outcry was immediate and went on for weeks. Jewish groups protested. Veterans marched and mailed in their medals. More than half the Senate went on record opposing the visit. Among the flood of letters to the White House was one on lined paper, decorated with a heart-and-rainbow sticker, from five-year-old Chelsea Clinton of Little Rock, Arkansas. “Dear Mr. President,” she printed, “I have seen The Sound of Music. The Nazis don’t look like very nice people. Please don’t visit their cemetary [sic].”
Holocaust memory keeper Elie Wiesel, who had lost his childhood and his family in the camps, confronted Ronnie during an April 19 White House ceremony awarding Wiesel the Congressional Gold Medal, Congress’s highest civilian honor. Wiesel said he believed that Ronnie had not known about the SS graves when he accepted Kohl’s invitation but argued that the president should find a different site now that he was aware of them. “That place, Mr. President, is not your place,” Wiesel implored. “Your place is with the victims of the SS.”
For a presidency that put such stock in symbolism, this was a disaster. What was meant to be an expression of transatlantic harmony had instead become a reminder of horror. Nancy was distraught. She begged Ronnie to cancel the visit to the cemetery. She argued that he was being taken advantage of by a supposed ally seeking to shore up his own shaky political standing at home. And she took out her wrath on Deaver and Henkel, demanding: “How could you do this to this man?”
But her persistence was no match for her husband’s sense of obligation and his determination to stand by the commitment he had made to Kohl. On April 19, the same day that Wiesel appealed to the president to cancel the Bitburg visit, Ronnie got a call from the German chancellor. Aides were hoping that Kohl would tell Ronnie they should call it off. The conversation went on for forty-five minutes; at one point, executive assistant Jim Kuhn entered the Oval Office and saw Ronnie throw his pen across the room in anger. Kuhn went back in when the call was over. “I just looked at him, and I didn’t ask,” Kuhn told me. “I didn’t say anything. I just looked, and he looked at me, and I waited. It took about ten seconds, and he said, ‘We’re going, Jim.’ I said, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘Yeah. We’re going. Helmut wants to do it. I gave him my word.’ ”
Ronnie recorded in his diary that Kohl “was emphatic that to cancel the cemetery now would be a disaster in his country & an insult to the German people.” Kohn had warned that his government might collapse if Ronnie pulled out. Vice President Bush had heard the president’s side of the conversation and scribbled a note to him, which Ronnie recorded in his diary:
Re Kohl Phone Call
Mr. President,
I was very proud of your stand. If I can help absorb some heat—send me into battle—It’s not easy, but you are right!!
George
Three days later, on April 22, Ronnie wrote: “The uproar about my trip to Germany & the Bitberg [sic] cemetery was cover stuff in Newsweek & Time. They just won’t stop. Well. I’m not going to cancel anything no matter how much the bastards scream.” But he could see how the stress was affecting his wife. “I’m worried about Nancy,” he wrote on April 28. “She’s uptight about the situation & nothing I say can wind her down. I’ll pray about that too.”
A stop at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was added, and it was arranged that Ronnie would speak there. On Deaver’s advice and Nancy’s insistence, the able speechwriter Ken Khachigian, who had left during the first term, was flown in from California to draft the address that Ronnie would deliver. The choice of Khachigian for this delicate task was a snub of the West Wing communications shop, which had recently been put in the hands of hard-liner Patrick J. Buchanan, whom Nancy mistrusted. Buchanan had worked in the Nixon White House and had been a major force in driving its harsh and divisive rhetoric pitting what it claimed was a “silent majority” against the liberal elite.
Amid the turmoil and controversy surrounding the planned Bitburg visit came an unexpected stroke of grace and generosity. Ninety-year-old General Matthew Ridgway, who had led the Eighty-Second Airborne Division during World War II and was th
e last living four-star general to have served in the European theater, volunteered to go to the cemetery with Ronnie, Kohl, and a German veteran. “I am a soldier, and I have never done anything political in my life,” he told Deaver. “But it appears to me that my commander in chief is in trouble, and I would like to help. I would like to lay that wreath in Bitburg for him.” The Germans suggested that Ridgway perform the ceremony with one of their own revered World War II veterans, General Johannes Steinhoff, an ace Luftwaffe fighter pilot who flew a thousand combat missions and survived being shot down a dozen times. He was severely disfigured in the final weeks of the war when his plane crashed and its fuel tanks ignited. “With all due respect,” Deaver said when the Germans offered to have seventy-one-year-old Steinhoff participate, “you better snake-check that son of a bitch for everything he’s worth.”
So it was arranged. Ronnie and the German president would spend only eight minutes at Kolmeshöhe Cemetery, would make no remarks there, and would supervise the laying of the wreath rather than perform it. Still, Nancy was beside herself—and she blamed Deaver. “I could not recall our ever having been on opposite sides of an issue. But now she was convinced that I had ruined her husband’s presidency and perhaps the rest of his life,” Deaver later wrote.
Right up until the last minute, Nancy argued that the cemetery trip should be canceled. But as she began to understand that this was one battle she would not win, she turned to her astrologer Joan Quigley for guidance on how to contain the damage. That led to a series of last-minute changes in the schedule. Quigley determined that the ceremony must take place in the afternoon. Nancy told Deaver to change the takeoff time from Bonn to Bergen-Belsen by twenty minutes. Then she insisted that the arrival time be shifted by another twenty-five minutes. Each new demand required complex adjustments to security arrangements. “Everything we were doing, we were constrained, because she wasn’t going to let us do anything that Joan didn’t plan on” and approve, said Henkel, who was in charge of the advance operation. Years later, Deaver told Lou Cannon: “It was a nightmare.”
The day of the event, Kuhn went to the guesthouse at Gymnich Castle near Cologne, where the Reagans were staying, to go over the final details with Ronnie. Nancy came into the room when she heard his voice and had another meltdown when Kuhn mentioned that the president was to touch the wreath.
“No,” she said, “we’re not doing it that way.”
Kuhn tried to reassure her: “Mrs. Reagan, it’s all worked out, and it’s gonna be fine.”
“No, it isn’t,” she shot back. “We’re not doing it.”
Kuhn looked at Ronnie, who said nothing. So, the president’s assistant picked up a phone and said, “Get Mike Deaver right away.” Deaver arrived and immediately figured out the situation. Silently, he embraced Nancy. “He held her for like a minute. It seemed like a long time, just held her tight, close to him. Never said one word, and then let go and walked out, and then she was okay,” Kuhn told me. “He knew how to communicate with her without even speaking to her. And Reagan and I were looking at it. I could tell what Reagan was thinking. Reagan thought it was amazing. You could just read his eyes, you know? That Mike had that kind of way with Nancy Reagan. And then I was able to go on with the briefing.”
Ronnie’s emotional speech at Bergen-Belsen salvaged what could be salvaged of the day. “This painful walk into the past has done much more than remind us of the war that consumed the European continent. What we have seen makes unforgettably clear that no one of the rest of us can fully understand the enormity of the feelings carried by the victims of these camps,” the president said. “The survivors carry a memory beyond anything that we can comprehend. The awful evil started by one man—an evil that victimized all the world with its destruction—was uniquely destructive to the millions forced into the grim abyss of these camps.” Ronnie then quoted words that the camp’s most famous victim, teenager Anne Frank, wrote three weeks before her capture: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.”
Reagan biographer Edmund Morris would later write that with that speech, “his agony—such as it was, brief as it was—transmitted itself, via television, into millions of human hearts.” But the scars lingered, particularly with Jewish Americans. Ronnie had lost some of his moral authority, and it was clear that just six months after his triumphant reelection, the White House was off its game. “We survived; but Bitburg was another sign that an era was ending,” Rollins wrote later. “These are the kind of things that always jump up and bite you when your political fortunes are in decline. In the first two years, when the revolution was riding tall in the saddle, Bitburg would have been a blip on the screen.”
Despite Nancy’s anxiety over Ronnie’s fortunes, the ten-day, five-nation European trip turned out to be a triumph for her personally. She got rave reviews in the media when she danced the flamenco in Madrid and met with parents concerned about drugs in Bonn. After a private audience at the Vatican with the pope, John Paul II handed her a message in which he lauded her work “against drug abuse and in the rehabilitation of those whose lives have been affected by this social evil.”
The following month, NBC aired a one-hour documentary about the first lady. Correspondent Chris Wallace said she was “at the peak of her power and the peak of her popularity. In polls these days, she does even better than her husband.” In the West Wing, however, things were not so felicitous. Deaver and Baker were gone. Rollins joined the White House exodus. New chief of staff Regan brought in his own team of advisers—a group that would become known within the building as “the mice.” The communications operation was in the hands of the bombastic Buchanan.
But even as Regan tightened his hold, those who worked for him could still feel Nancy’s will, like the pull of an unseen magnet. Peggy Noonan, a talented young speechwriter, described it this way: “Her power was everywhere, in personnel, in who rose and fell, she was on the phone with [national security adviser Robert C. “Bud”] McFarlane about foreign affairs, on the phone nixing and okaying trips and events, arranging to closet the president with this policy analyst or that, calling to get the speeches earlier. She was everywhere.”
Nancy and Regan had their first big run-in in July 1985. It was a struggle for control in the area where Nancy considered herself the first and final authority: Ronnie’s health and well-being. John Hutton, a new White House physician, had noticed that medical records showed a fluctuation in the president’s hematocrit number, the percentage of red blood cells to total blood volume, which might be a subtle indicator of a malignancy in the lower gastrointestinal tract. He recommended a colonoscopy, a diagnostic procedure not as common at that time as it is today. On Friday, July 12, Ronnie and Nancy boarded Marine One on the South Lawn for a short helicopter hop to Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Ronnie declined anesthesia for the procedure. As the flexible scope made its way through his descending and transverse colons, Hutton and the other physicians followed its progress on a TV-like screen and were relieved to see only a few benign-looking growths called polyps, similar to ones the president had had removed in the past. Then it took a turn downward into his right colon. “Suddenly, looming up in full view of the scope and occupying most of the lumen of the cecum was an enormous mass, purple in color, and with a large malignant-appearing crater in its middle,” Hutton recalled. Even without a biopsy, they knew they were looking at cancer. They studied it in silence, for fear that saying anything would alarm their patient. Thoughts began racing through Hutton’s head: “How do I tell the First Lady?” “What impact will this have on our country, the presidency, and perhaps the world?”
Nancy was waiting in a nearby office with White House spokesman Larry Speakes. Before telling the first lady, Hutton whispered to the
press secretary: “It’s cancer.” The doctor steered Nancy into a small office and delivered the news. He was struck by her composure. She insisted on knowing all the details—what this meant, what was next. Nancy noted that Chinese president Li Xiannian was set to visit Washington a week and a half later and asked whether the surgery could be delayed until after that. Hutton told her he wanted to do it as soon as possible, preferably the next day. Nancy agreed but made one request: she wanted to be the one to tell her husband. And she forbade the doctors from mentioning the word cancer to him.
They entered the president’s room so silently that Hutton could not even hear his own footsteps. Ronnie looked up and asked, “Why do you all look so glum?” Nancy sat on the bed and put her arms around him. “Honey,” she said, “the doctors have found a polyp that is too large to be removed the way the other ones were. The only way they can get it out is surgically. As long as we’re here, why don’t we do it tomorrow and get it over with?” Hutton was relieved. “Her aplomb was extraordinary. How easy she made it for us, as we then explained the procedure we would perform,” he said.
Ronnie took it calmly and said with a smile, “Does this mean I won’t be getting dinner tonight, either?” As she left his room, Nancy leaned against the wall, and the tears that she had been holding back came pouring out. That night, in the White House, she lay on Ronnie’s side of the bed, just as she had the day he was shot in 1981. And once again, she wrote in her diary, “What would I ever do without him?”
The operation began at eleven o’clock the following morning. This time White House counsel Fred Fielding rectified a mistake he had made when Ronnie was put under anesthesia after the assassination attempt. Fielding had Ronnie sign a document authorizing Vice President Bush to act as president temporarily. It was the first time ever that a provision of the Twenty-fifth Amendment had been invoked to deal with a president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Nancy stood by Ronnie’s bedside as he put his signature to the historic document. The president joked that Bush should be informed that Nancy didn’t convey to him as part of the brief transfer of power.
The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 43
