Killing Reagan

by Bill O'Reilly

  This comment is made all the more significant by the fact that not only has Bradlee been at the Post off and on since 1948, but he was also drinking buddies with President John F. Kennedy.

  So Ronald Reagan is not worried about this impromptu news conference. The president is never more relaxed than when here at the ranch. Congress is not in session right now, and he and Nancy are taking advantage of the hiatus by spending two full weeks on this six-hundred-acre mountaintop property. Their ranch house is a one-hundred-year-old white Spanish adobe with faux-brick linoleum floors that Reagan laid himself. There is nothing lavish about this private retreat. It has the air of a summer camp bunkhouse, yet it restores Reagan’s soul unlike any place else on earth. During his time in office, he will spend the equivalent of one full year on this mountaintop looking out over the Pacific.1

  Ronald Reagan works at the ranch, too, but guards his privacy very closely. He spends much of his time in the small living room, a private sanctuary to which not even his closest advisers are allowed regular access. Ever loyal, Reagan has filled the kitchen with GE appliances. The master bedroom is barely big enough to fit the two small twin frames pushed together to form one bed. The president is too tall for these mattresses, so a padded stool has been positioned at the end. He sleeps with his feet sticking out from under the covers, resting atop the stool.

  Nevertheless, Ronald Reagan loves the place—Nancy, not so much. One popular legend is making the rounds among the press. Apparently, one day, while driving up the long, winding road from the main highway to the ranch, Nancy Reagan was whining nonstop about having to endure another vacation at the remote outpost. She would much rather be back in Los Angeles with her friends.

  At first Reagan put up with his wife’s complaining, preferring to keep the peace. But this time, he snapped. He ordered his Secret Service driver to stop the limo. Turning to Nancy, he thundered, “Get out of this car.”

  Shocked, she did.

  The president then commanded the driver to continue up the seven-mile road. In the rearview mirror, the Secret Service driver could see Nancy standing in the middle of nowhere, looking panicked. Finally, the president relented, ordering the driver to turn around to pick her up.

  But on this afternoon, things are calm. Nancy’s dominant protective streak is nowhere to be seen. The president is ready for the eight questions the press will be permitted this morning.

  The first queries are softballs. Reagan fields them with ease.

  Then ABC newsman Sam Donaldson strikes, posing a question about the Russians.

  “Is there anything you can do to get them there?” Donaldson asks about a proposed nuclear arms meeting in Vienna, referring to the leaders of the Soviet Union.

  “What?” Reagan asks, suddenly befuddled.

  Donaldson smells blood.

  He has been on the White House beat throughout the Reagan presidency and is no fan of the administration. He was an eyewitness to the assassination attempt, standing just five feet from John Hinckley when he pulled the trigger. Still, Donaldson feels little warmth for the president, and many members of the media share his disdain.

  Donaldson doesn’t even bother to speak to Reagan with a tone of civility. He is outwardly antagonistic, often shouting questions. He has publicly insulted Nancy Reagan by comparing her to a venomous snake, calling her a “smiling mamba.”

  Sam Donaldson is now in full confrontational mode.

  “Is there anything you can do to get them to Vienna?” he bellows again.

  The man who has spent his life speaking on cue, the entertainer who likes to tell a good joke, the politician who has dazzled millions with his rhetoric, has no answer.

  Ronald Reagan is lost.

  As journalists and television cameras record the moment, the president seems incapable of rendering an answer to Sam Donaldson.

  Finally, Nancy Reagan leans over and whispers into her husband’s ear: “We’re doing everything we can.”

  “We’re doing everything we can,” the president says to Sam Donaldson.2

  * * *

  With Nancy carefully controlling his every appearance, Ronald Reagan hits the campaign trail for real in September. The nation is riveted by his “Morning in America” commercials, which paint a patriotic picture of a country rising from the shambles Reagan inherited from Jimmy Carter. The president now enjoys a nineteen-point lead in the polls over Democratic challenger Walter Mondale, the fifty-six-year-old Minnesota native who served as Carter’s vice president. At this point, Americans seem comfortable with Ronald Reagan as president. Many admire him—as a man and a patriot. They like his rock-solid belief in traditional values, and some voters see him as a father figure, putting their complete trust in his perceived paternal benevolence.

  Yet there is also some unease. Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union are still very tense, and Reagan has exacerbated the situation by publicly calling the Soviet Union an “Evil Empire.” Many Americans long for reassurance that their president will avoid nuclear war. They also crave relief from high unemployment and a skyrocketing national deficit that gives their dollar less buying power. Just as important, voters want to believe that their seventy-three-year-old leader is still vibrant.

  But that reassurance does not come on September 19, when Reagan visits Hammonton, New Jersey. He wears a dark gray suit and crimson necktie. The small town, famous for its blueberries, has turned out in force to see the president. Thirty thousand people fill the town square. A large American flag looms over his left shoulder, accompanied by a sign reading, “America: Prouder, Stronger & Better.”

  Reagan’s unlikely speech for today is based on the recent writings of two very prominent conservative voices. The first voice is that of columnist George Will, who behaves decades older than his forty-three years.

  Surprisingly, Will has become a Bruce Springsteen fan. Wearing a bow tie, ears packed in cotton, he watched an entire four-hour show at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, as a guest of Springsteen’s drummer. Will comes away inspired by the artist’s connection to Reagan. In the Boss, as Springsteen is known, Will sees a powerful believer in the American dream.

  “An evening with Springsteen,” Will writes admiringly in the Washington Post on September 13, “is vivid proof that the work ethic is alive and well.”

  Another guest at that concert is political correspondent Bernard Goldberg of CBS News, who reports that Springsteen’s shows “are like old-time revivals with the same old-time message: If they work long enough and hard enough, like Springsteen himself, they can also make it to the promised land.”

  It is hard to imagine other 1980s pop icons with whom the aging president could identify. The toe-tapping boogie-woogie of his Hollywood days has been replaced by music that makes listeners swing their hips and shake their heads. Young voters listen to musical sensation Michael Jackson, not Frank Sinatra. They like movies such as Ghostbusters and Footloose instead of Reagan’s beloved Westerns, which hardly get made anymore. So it is only natural that Reagan’s campaign staff attempts to make their boss look culturally relevant by cashing in on Springsteen’s popularity during this visit to the singer’s home state. At George Will’s urging, deputy White House chief of staff Michael Deaver has invited Springsteen himself to the campaign event. But the rocker, while having an open date between performances in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, declines.

  Ronald Reagan invokes Springsteen’s name anyway, his speechwriters mistakenly believing that the song “Born in the U.S.A.” is a patriotic anthem. In reality, the opposite is true. “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts,” Reagan says to the crowd. “It rests in the message of hope in the words of songs so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”

  Chants of “U.S.A.” sweep through the crowd, along with a number of incredulous gasps. Reagan’s policies have been savaged on Springsteen’
s latest album, Born in the U.S.A. Many of its songs vividly depict the loss of homes and jobs for the working poor. The title track, jingoistic in name only, attacks Reagan’s economic policies through the eyes of a down-on-his-luck Vietnam vet. At a time when Ronald Reagan wants to appear as if he is in touch, his staff has succeeded in making him look completely clueless by misinterpreting Springsteen’s lyrics.

  Later, the singer himself responds directly: “You see the Reagan reelection ads on TV—you know: ‘It’s Morning in America,’” Springsteen tells Rolling Stone magazine. “And you say, well, it’s not morning in Pittsburgh. It’s not morning above 125th Street in New York. It’s midnight, and, like, there’s, a bad moon risin’.”3

  Ronald Reagan’s aides will later claim that his favorite Bruce Springsteen song is “Born to Run,” but it is hard for even the most ardent Reagan supporter to imagine this might be true.

  “If you believe that,” Johnny Carson tells America during his Tonight Show monologue one evening, “I’ve got some tickets to the Mondale-Ferraro inaugural ball I’d like to sell you.”4

  * * *

  Three weeks later, Ronald Reagan is confused when about to deliver his closing remarks in the first presidential debate with Walter Mondale. The location is the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts, in Louisville, and television journalist Barbara Walters is the moderator. Walters has a history with the Reagans. In 1981 she paid a visit to the Reagan ranch for an interview, gripping her seat in Reagan’s four-wheel-drive jeep as he fearlessly drove it up and down the rugged dirt trails. But the fifty-five-year-old Walters is in her element now, pressing the president to begin his closing remarks. However, Reagan believes he is entitled to one more rebuttal to Walter Mondale’s statements. Walters is having none of it and firmly tells the president to wrap it up.

  The night has been a catastrophe for Reagan. Walter Mondale was the aggressor throughout the debate, commanding a quick grasp of domestic policy facts and appearing to be more physically robust than Reagan, despite being two inches shorter.

  “I wanted to show presidential stature,” Mondale will later remember. “I wanted to show mastery of the issues. I wanted to show that progressive dimension again, I wanted to show I was more alert than the president, without being negative. And I wanted the debate to build around that, that theme.”

  Mondale senses a mental weakness in Reagan, afterward telling an aide, “That guy is gone.” Despite that, Mondale has refrained from attacking the president in a way that would make Reagan look foolish.

  As Ronald Reagan begins his closing remarks, his rambling, disjointed speech does what Walter Mondale refuses to do. At a time when voters want reassurance of his vitality, the president looks visibly adrift on this very public national stage.

  Looking into the camera, Reagan begins his soliloquy. “Four years ago, in similar circumstances to this, I asked you, the American people, a question. I asked, ‘Are you better off than you were four years before?’”

  Already, Reagan has lost his place. His eyes do not focus on the front row of the audience, as they should. Instead, they roll slowly from side to side as he struggles to recite the closing remarks that his speechwriters have prepared so carefully for this very moment.

  Reagan continues: “The answer to that obviously was no, and as the result, I was elected to this office and promised a new beginning. Now, maybe I’m expected to ask that same question again.”

  To the discomfort of some, Reagan stutters. He appears a far cry from the man who improvised a brilliant speech within minutes of being called to the podium at the 1976 Republican National Convention.

  He continues: “I’m not going to, because I think that all of you, or not everyone—those people that are in those pockets of poverty and haven’t caught up, they couldn’t answer the way I would want them to—but I think that most of the people in this country would say, yes, they are better off than they were four years ago.

  “The question, I think,” says Reagan, again stammering, “should be enlarged. Is America better off than it was four years ago? And I believe the answer to that has to also be yes.’’

  There is little authority in Reagan’s closing remarks. Walter Mondale beams.

  “He seemed to lose his place,” Lesley Stahl of CBS News will report. “He’d lose his thoughts. There were a couple of places where the words he was searching for wouldn’t come to mind … [H]is closing statement didn’t come together.”

  “I flopped,” Reagan says to campaign adviser Stu Spencer immediately upon leaving the stage.

  The president is correct. Polls show Walter Mondale winning the debate in a landslide. Two mornings later, the Wall Street Journal will publish a story stating that 10 percent of all people over the age of seventy-five are senile. Reagan is seventy-three years old.

  Even worse, years later medical studies will link invasive surgeries like the one Reagan endured after the assassination attempt to the eventual onset of memory loss.5

  “I didn’t feel good about myself,” Reagan will confide in his diary during a weekend at Camp David to recover from the debate. “The press has been calling him the winner for two days now.”

  But Ronald Reagan is not finished. He will have one last chance to convince Americans that he is still fit to be their leader.

  That chance will come on October 21, in Kansas City.

  25

  MUNICIPAL AUDITORIUM

  KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI

  OCTOBER 21, 1984

  7:00 P.M.

  The man who was nearly murdered three years ago is out for blood.

  Ronald Reagan bounds onto the stage and takes his spot at the lectern, where he stands confident and poised. Despite it being evening, a time of day at which he often fades, the president looks crisp and attentive. As the contest gets under way, Walter Mondale stands on the opposite side of the stage, watching as Reagan fields a series of questions. The president does not like Mondale, thinking him a liar who has unfairly attacked his credibility. For Reagan, this second and last debate is personal. His answers now come easily. There is no sign of the stuttering or stammering from the first debate.

  There is one question, however, that everyone in the audience knows is coming. Finally, after twenty minutes of debate, Henry Trewhitt of the Baltimore Sun gets to the heart of the matter: Is Ronald Reagan too old to be president?

  Reagan stands ready to answer.

  * * *

  After the first debate, Nancy Reagan was livid—eager to apply blame on anyone but her Ronnie. “What have you done to my husband?” she screamed at Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver. They were standing in the Presidential Suite at the Hyatt Regency in Louisville. “Whatever it was, don’t do it again.”

  The problem, Nancy quickly decided, is that the president is being bullied in the pre-debate prep sessions. His advisers, notably budget director David Stockman, often interrupt Reagan when he makes a mistake. It is well known in the White House that the troika of Ed Meese, James Baker, and Michael Deaver have a method of slowing down Oval Office meetings if the president does not understand a complex issue. Without insulting him, they diplomatically reframe the discussion until Reagan comprehends.

  But there is no time for niceties while preparing for a presidential debate. Stockman is only doing his job, feeding the president facts so that he can easily rebut anything Walter Mondale might throw at him.

  On October 17, during the initial debate prep for the final confrontation with Mondale, a newcomer observes the scene. From 2:06 to 4:36 in the afternoon, Reagan stands at a mock lectern in the Old Executive Office Building, fielding questions and arguing with Stockman, who stands at an opposite lectern playing the part of Walter Mondale. At one point, the normally polite Reagan barks “Shut up” at Stockman, filling the room with an embarrassing silence.

  Tensions are high.

  Clearly, something must change.

  Afterward, Reagan returns to the White House, where he meets with the new observer. Roger
Ailes is a stocky man with long sideburns. He is part of the so-called Tuesday Team, which has prepared the successful “Morning in America” commercials for Reagan. Ailes also worked for the Nixon administration and is known for his ability to stop chaos cold.

  Michael Deaver makes the introduction. “Roger’s here to help you with the debates.”

  “What kind of help do I need?” Reagan responds. Though it is almost evening, Reagan shows no sign of fatigue, other than a slight hand and head tremor.

  “You sort of wandered off the highway in the last debate. I’m gonna try and help you focus a little bit,” Ailes answers.

  “That’s a pretty good idea,” the president replies.

  Roger Ailes agreed with Nancy Reagan that the president’s debate problem had nothing to do with age or mental health. Instead, Reagan had been poorly prepared.

  “You’re giving him too many facts, too much bullshit that he can’t use, you’re interrupting him,” Ailes tells Deaver. “Remember, he’s a guy who’s used to working with one director, who kind of lays out what the purpose of the thing is, and then he does it. Right now, you got five or six or eight guys interrupting him, all trying to prove they’re smarter than he is.”

  So it is that Reagan’s debate preparation is altered. Now it is just Ailes and Reagan, one on one. The president endures long bouts of “pepper sessions,” in which he has to answer question after question without reaching for obscure facts or numbers. Instead, he simply speaks from the heart.

  Now, with just four days left to the second debate, the strategy seems to be working. The president is upbeat and optimistic. He works hard, rarely seeming to tire.

  “When guys brief people for debates,” Ailes will later remember, “they want them to memorize what they say ’cause they’re the expert.… I shifted him back to staying in territory he knew and not trying to memorize a bunch of crap that nobody would remember.”