Movie Nights with the Reagans

by Mark Weinberg

  This trip, however, had an ending that differed from the usual procedure. Fog had enveloped the helipad at the compound higher up the mountain, making conditions too dangerous to attempt a landing. Instead, Marine One landed at the foot of Catoctin Mountain, where a waiting motorcade drove everyone up to the top.VI

  Getting back to the White House could sometimes be complicated, too. First of all, the time of return had to be determined. If it was a Saturday night, the conversation about the just-shown movie would be short, with the focus being on what time the Reagans wished to return to the White House the next day. The ritual was always the same. The Marine One pilot would ask, “What time tomorrow, sir, and ma’am?” and with that, the process began. The president would repeat “What time tomorrow?” and turn to Mrs. Reagan. “Honey, is there anything you need to be back for?” Almost always, her response would be “No, honey, any time is fine.” Then the president would turn to the group and ask, “Does anyone have anything they need to get back for?” Everyone said no, of course.

  So everyone just looked at one another for a minute or two until finally someone, usually Jim Kuhn or I, suggested a time. “How about two o’clock? That gives you time for lunch and to wrap up.” The president would then say “Two? Seems fine. Honey?” Mrs. Reagan would say, “Sure, unless . . .” And then someone else would say, “Or maybe two thirty?”

  PRESIDENT REAGAN: Two thirty? Honey?

  MRS. REAGAN: Fine, honey.

  PRESIDENT REAGAN: Or maybe three would be better?

  MRS. REAGAN: Yes, three.

  And then Jim or I . . . (in the first term, it would have been Dave Fischer) would say loudly, “Great! Three o’clock. See you all then!” And we would lead the gang out. When I got back to my cabin, I would call the weekend press duty officer and tell him or her the arrival time.

  But in the winter, half the time it did not matter what had been decided, because weather conditions forced us to move up the time of departure. Usually wet snow was the culprit. In such weather, well before the agreed-upon time, I would get a call from Jim or sometimes the camp commander, saying departure would be earlier, often by several hours. I’d always have to scramble to be ready, but not before I would call the White House switchboard, ask to be connected to the weekend press duty officer in Washington, and inform him or her of the change in arrival time, so he or she could notify the press.

  On all return trips to the White House, just before we landed—as we were on what the pilots called the “short, final approach” around the Washington Monument to the South Lawn of the White House, I would leave my seat behind the president’s, sit on the couch across the tiny aisle from his seat, and attempt to talk to him about what questions the press might ask as he made his way from the helicopter to the White House. Usually he was reading either the newspaper or briefing materials when I got there, so I would say in a loud voice, “Mr. President, as you know . . .” and hope he would turn toward me. Often he did. When he did not, Mrs. Reagan would nudge him with a light tap from her foot to his. Then he would turn to me, as would she, and listen to what I had to say. Nine and a half times out of ten, the president already knew what I was going to say, but he always let me go through it, and he always expressed his appreciation.

  Back to the movie.

  Luckily, neither the weather nor any other logistical inconveniences got in the way of that night’s movie screening, and later that evening, our little group settled in at Aspen Lodge, as we’d been doing for years now, with the Reagans taking their usual places side by side on the center couch.

  That night’s offering was The Untouchables, director Brian De Palma’s stylish look at the face-off between the underworld kingpin Al Capone and law enforcement officers, led by the US Treasury agent Eliot Ness, on the bloody streets of Prohibition-era Chicago. The playwright David Mamet wrote the screenplay, basing it on Eliot Ness’s 1957 memoir, also called The Untouchables, which had earlier inspired a 1960s TV series of the same name.

  Kevin Costner, in the role that made him a superstar, headlines the movie playing Ness, an earnest, hardworking Treasury agent committed to cleaning up the bootleggers and putting away Capone. He is also determined to fight clean and not lower himself to the gangsters’ level of brutality. That brutality is on display from one of the earliest scenes, in which a little girl picks up a briefcase left behind in a drugstore by a mobster after the store’s owner refused to buy his bootleg booze. The bomb inside blows up the entire corner store along with the child.

  Ness starts his work with the Chicago police soon after that bomb attack rocks the city. But his first raid is a disaster. Capone’s thugs knew Ness was coming, thanks to rampant corruption in the police department. Despondent over mocking headlines sneering “Crusader Cop Busts Out,” Ness seems at a loss until he receives inspiration from an unlikely visitor. The mother of the little girl killed in the bomb attack shows up at his office and appeals to him parent-to-parent. “You see, it’s because I know that you have children, too,” she tells him, “and that this is real for you.” Ness realizes he has to go after Capone using unconventional means.

  Of course, with so many of the Chicago police taking Capone’s blood money, Ness’s immediate task is to assemble a team he can trust. The first member presents himself unexpectedly: the tough-talking veteran Irish cop Jimmy Malone, played by Sean Connery, nearly busts Ness for mere littering, but he has a deep well of crime-fighting wisdom gained from years of walking the beat. Ness and Malone soon recruit George Stone (Andy Garcia), also known as Giuseppe Petri, a sharp-eyed and sharp-witted kid from an Italian neighborhood on the South Side, straight from the police academy. As Malone tells Ness, “If you’re afraid of getting a rotten apple, don’t go to the barrel, get it off the tree.” The final addition to the team is Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith), a bookish but brilliant accountant convinced that Capone is guilty of tax evasion, and who also learns to handle himself well in a gunfight.

  Their target, Al Capone, is played by Robert De Niro. De Niro’s portrayal shows two sides of Capone: the suave media-savvy big shot who enjoys the finer things in life, such as lavish meals, manicures, and opera; as well as the brutal killer whose rage can erupt at any moment. The famous dinner scene in which Capone beats a disloyal associate to death with a baseball bat has since become iconic, but it is certainly an example of the gratuitous violence that the Reagans felt pervaded too much of modern Hollywood. Always at Capone’s side is his dapper but deadly enforcer Frank Nitti, played by Billy Drago, who slinks through the movie as a sinister force, determined to hit the Untouchables where it hurts most.

  From the back alleys of Chicago to the great plains of the US-Canadian border, Ness and his crew of Untouchables pursue Capone’s bootleg liquor and his henchmen, inching closer to the kingpin himself. The rousing horseback chase scene at the Canadian border is reminiscent of the old-fashioned Westerns of which Ronald Reagan was such a fan (along with Kevin Costner). The lawmen learn more and more about Capone’s organization, battling not only gangsters but also corrupt cops and city officials as the film builds toward its tense final scenes of confrontation.

  While the critics praised The Untouchables and box office receipts made it one of the top-grossing movies of 1987, the film won only one Academy Award, thanks to Sean Connery’s standout performance as Jimmy Malone. He won for best supporting actor, the only Oscar win of his career. The iron-spined Malone is a strong counterpoint to Costner’s earnest but unsure Eliot Ness. When Malone offers Ness his help, he asks Ness a simple question: “What are you prepared to do?”

  Malone explains that Ness won’t be able to beat a thug like Capone by fighting by the book:

  “You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way! And that’s how you get Capone.”

  Sean Connery’s portrayal of Malone as the rock of the Untouchables squad resonated with critics, audiences, and
the Academy members. The Scottish actor’s biographer Christopher Bray suggested one reason was “because Jimmy Malone’s no-nonsense heroics chimed with the ‘Morning in America’ vision of President Ronald Reagan.” The character, according to Bray, tapped into a broader American mood inspired by Reagan himself: “Just as Reagan came to power promising to banish what he saw as the lily-livered America of the past two decades, Malone believed the job of toughening up the youngsters who were following in his footsteps was no more than his duty.”VII

  Ronald Reagan probably would have objected to the idea of a “lily-livered America”—he was too much of a patriot for that—but it was true that he had little tolerance for weakness; political, personal, or otherwise. And that was true when it came to his efforts to fight organized crime, which I always felt was one of the more overlooked initiatives of his presidency.

  Reagan’s experience with the Mob went back long before he even entered politics. He was working in Hollywood when the Chicago Mafia attempted to get a piece of the movie business in the 1930s and 1940s. The Mob controlled a major union for film crews, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Motion Picture Operators. George Browne, the union’s president, was a former Chicago mobster. Another key official in the same union was Willie Bioff, another Chicago gangster who had been personally dispatched by the real-life Frank Nitti to plant the flag of the Chicago Outfit, a secretive organized crime cartel, in Los Angeles.

  The Mob also tried to take over Reagan’s own Hollywood union, the Screen Actors Guild. “But,” as Reagan would write years later, “through the commitment and efforts of people like my friend Robert Montgomery, then president of SAG, the Mob’s attempted infiltration failed.”VIII

  The actors may have managed to hold off the Mafia, but “the impeccably dressed and courtly Willie Bioff” was more successful with the crew union.IX He was the Mob’s man in Hollywood for six years, and Reagan would later note that he and another corrupt union boss “split a million dollars with the Chicago underworld.” But Bioff’s ride ended when he was convicted under an antiracketeering law and sent to prison in 1941, where he began to, as the Mob movies put it, “sing like a canary.” According to the Los Angeles Times, his information led to six more convictions of mobsters in the movie business, and “the syndicate’s direct control of Hollywood craft unions came to an end.”X Bioff’s testimony also likely led to the real-life death of Frank Nitti, who committed suicide in Chicago before he could be indicted.XI Bioff himself was blown up by a car bomb in 1955, after his release from prison. He had been living in Arizona under a new identity.

  After watching what he viewed as the Mob attempt to poison the industry he loved and in which he had earned his first success, it was no surprise that Ronald Reagan made it a priority to go after organized crime across the country during his first term in office. On September 30, 1982, he convened a special session of the Cabinet to deal with the problem. Attorney General William French Smith laid out the plan his office had come up with to tackle the problem. Smith outlined how strong the Mob’s influence remained in the United States, more than fifty years after the events of the Untouchables. He noted, according to Reagan’s own recollection, “the growth and increasing sophistication of regional and national networks of professional criminals” who were “buying and bribing their way to the kind of official protection and respectability that would permit them to operate their criminal undergrounds with impunity.”XII

  Smith’s strategy involved setting up a national commission on organized crime, regional task forces to track Mob involvement in the drug trade, a “sweeping” legislative update of the criminal code, and beefed-up efforts against the Mob by Smith’s own Department of Justice. A young assistant attorney general who had a hand in crafting this plan was Rudolph Giuliani, who later gained fame for prosecuting New York Mob bosses as a US attorney, eventually leading to his election as mayor of New York City in 1993.

  Some at Reagan’s Cabinet meeting objected to the cost of the plan Attorney General Smith had proposed. “I could sense the tension,” Reagan remembered. But his was the most important voice in the room, and he knew where he stood: “I made it clear that financial considerations could not stand in the way; I approved of this plan, and I wanted it.”XIII

  The president got what he wanted and announced the plan to the nation the following month, speaking in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice. In his speech, he paid tribute to Eliot Ness, among other “dedicated Americans [who] have broken the curtain surrounding this menace and successfully rooted it out.” He made it clear he intended his government to carry on that tradition:

  “We intend to do what is necessary to end the drug menace and cripple organized crime. We live at a turning point—one of those critical eras in history when time and circumstances unite with the sound instincts of good and decent people to make a crucial difference in the lives of future generations. We can and will make a difference.”XIV

  And the Reagan administration’s efforts against organized crime made a difference. Investigative work intensified, helped by the 289 recording devices installed as part of federal investigations of mobsters by 1984.XV In February 1985 he told the nation in his State of the Union address that the national crime index had gone down two years in a row, the first time that had happened in twenty years, and that drug and organized crime figures were being put “behind bars in record numbers.”XVI In October of that year, a preliminary report released by the President’s Commission on Organized Crime found that the higher rates of prosecution were resulting in lower rates of Mob recruitment, stemming the flow of manpower into these criminal enterprises: the numbers of “made men” had fallen across twenty-four different Mafia “families.”XVII

  In 1986 the president wrote a lengthy article in the New York Times Magazine further detailing his work to root out the Mob wherever they could be found. By that time, he could report that “organized crime convictions have more than quadrupled since 1981,” and that those prosecuted were not just low-ranking foot soldiers but also major crime bosses.

  The Reagan administration marked a turning point in the federal government’s efforts against organized crime. John Kroger, a veteran prosecutor who brought a number of New York Mafia figures to court, said this success was directly inspired by Reagan’s overarching philosophy:

  In the early 1980s the federal government reversed course and decided to take on the Mob. The primary catalyst was the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980. Reagan and his team believed that Washington was a corrupt and inefficient cesspool. Though an oversimplification, this view came with one clear benefit: a willingness to reexamine existing government policies and to question the status quo. The Reagan Justice Department took one look at the government’s Mafia policy and decided enough was enough. Virtually overnight, the new administration declared war on the Mafia.XVIII

  Kroger’s difference with Reagan’s “oversimplification” is understandable: Kroger himself was a committed Democrat who worked on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign and later served as Oregon’s attorney general. But that makes this bipartisan praise of Reagan’s crime-fighting efforts all the more significant.

  When Reagan launched his series of initiatives against organized crime in October 1982, he led into the conclusion of his speech by presenting the audience with a simple hypothetical:

  “It comes down in the end to a simple question we must ask ourselves: What kind of people are we if we continue to tolerate in our midst an invisible, lawless empire? Can we honestly say that America is a land with justice for all if we do not now exert every effort to eliminate this confederation of professional criminals, this dark, evil enemy within?”XIX

  Though it was delivered years before The Untouchables was released, these words were notably similar to those spoken by Sean Connery’s Jimmy Malone to Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness: “What are you prepared to do?” Over the next few years, mobsters brought to justice around the country learned how Ro
nald Reagan answered that question.

  16

  FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF

  Starring:

  Matthew Broderick, Mia Sara, Alan Ruck

  Directed by:

  John Hughes

  Viewed by the Reagans:

  June 21, 1986

  The Film That Reminded the Reagans of Yesterday

  The president showed up at Bethesda Naval Hospital wearing a black-and-white checked shirt, green pants, red argyle socks, and black loafers.I He was in good spirits, as was Mrs. Reagan. When the reporters assembled at the entrance shouted questions, asking how he felt, the president flung his arms wide and answered, “Fine, fine!”II

  This examination was to be routine, Reagan’s fourth since the major surgery in July 1985 that removed a cancerous polyp and two feet of his intestines. For the most part, he had remained in good health since then. A few basal cell carcinoma skin cancer cells had been removed from his nose later in 1985, and in January 1986 three benign polyps were removed during another colon exam. But this visit was more significant: it was his one-year checkup.

  The morning of Friday, June 20, had begun normally, with the president at work at the White House, but after a few hours, we boarded the helicopter for the short trip to Bethesda, arriving some twenty minutes after eleven o’clock. Inside, Dr. Edward Cattau, Bethesda’s head of gastroenterology, and Dr. Dale Oller, who had performed the president’s cancer surgery the previous year, greeted the Reagans.

  The doctors conducted a number of tests, including X-rays, blood tests, and a colonoscopy. The procedure revealed two new small polyps, which the doctors removed. Both would prove benign. The medical team also checked the president’s eyes and the skin on his nose to make sure no more cancerous cells had developed. The process was capped off with a CAT scan.