by Joan Didion
Mrs. Gorbachev, as Mrs. Reagan saw it, “condescended” to her, and “expected to be deferred to”. Mrs. Gorbachev accepted an invitation from Pamela Harriman before she answered one from Mrs. Reagan. The reason Ben Bradlee called Iran-contra “the most fun he’d had since Watergate” was just possibly because, she explained in My Turn, he resented her relationship with Katharine Graham. Betty Ford was given a box on the floor of the 1976 Republican National Convention, and Mrs. Reagan only a skybox. Mrs. Reagan was evenhanded: Maureen Reagan “may have been right” when she called this slight deliberate. When, on the second night of that convention, the band struck up “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” during an ovation for Mrs. Reagan, Mrs. Ford started dancing with Tony Orlando. Mrs. Reagan was magnanimous: “Some of our people saw this as a deliberate attempt to upstage me, but I never thought that was her intention.”
Michael Deaver, in his version of more or less the same events, Behind the Scenes, gave us an arresting account of taking the Reagans, during the 1980 campaign, to an Episcopal church near the farm on which they were staying outside Middleburg, Virginia. After advancing the church and negotiating the subject of the sermon with the minister (Ezekiel and the bones rather than what Deaver called “reborn Christians”, presumably Christian rebirth), he finally agreed that the Reagans would attend an eleven o’clock Sunday service. “We were not told,” Deaver wrote, “and I did not anticipate, that the eleven o’clock service would also be holy communion,” a ritual he characterized as “very foreign to the Reagans”. He described “nervous glances”, and “mildly frantic” whispers about what to do, since the Reagans’ experience had been of Bel Air Presbyterian, “a proper Protestant church where trays are passed containing small glasses of grape juice and little squares of bread.” The moment arrived: “. . . halfway down the aisle I felt Nancy clutch my arm. . . . ‘Mike!’ she hissed. ‘Are those people drinking out of the same cup?’ “
Here the incident takes on elements of “I Love Lucy”. Deaver assures Mrs. Reagan that it will be acceptable to just dip the wafer in the chalice. Mrs. Reagan chances this, but manages somehow to drop the wafer in the wine. Ronald Reagan, cast here as Ricky Ricardo, is too deaf to hear Deaver’s whispered instructions, and has been instructed by his wife to “do exactly as I do”. He, too, drops the wafer in the wine, where it is left to float next to Mrs. Reagan’s. “Nancy was relieved to leave the church,” Deaver reports. “The president was chipper as he stepped into the sunlight, satisfied that the service had gone quite well.”
I had read this account several times before I realized what so attracted me to it: here we had a perfect model of the Reagan White House. There was the aide who located the correct setting (“I did some quick scouting and found a beautiful Episcopal church”), who anticipated every conceivable problem and handled it adroitly (he had “a discreet chat with the minister”, he “gently raised the question”), and yet who somehow missed, as in the visit to Bitburg, a key point. There was the wife, charged with protecting her husband’s face to the world, a task requiring, she hinted in My Turn, considerable vigilance. This was a husband who could be “naive about people”. He had for example “too much trust” in David Stockman. He had “given his word” to Helmut Kohl, and so felt “duty-bound to honor his commitment” to visit Bitburg. He was, Mrs. Reagan disclosed during a “Good Morning America” interview at the time My Turn was published, “the softest touch going” when it came to what she referred to as (another instance of somehow missing a key point) “the poor”. Mrs. Reagan understood all this. She handled all this. And yet there she was outside Middleburg, Virginia, once again the victim of bad advance, confronted by the “foreign” communion table and rendered stiff with apprehension that a finger bowl might get removed without its doily.
And there, at the center of it all, was Ronald Reagan, insufficiently briefed (or, as they say in the White House, “badly served”) on the wafer issue but moving ahead, stepping “into the sunlight” satisfied with his own and everyone else’s performance, apparently oblivious of (or inured to, or indifferent to) the crises being managed in his presence and for his benefit. What he had, and the aide and the wife did not have, was the story, the high concept, what Ed Meese used to call “the big picture”, as in “he’s a big-picture man”. The big picture here was of the candidate going to church on Sunday morning; the details obsessing the wife and the aide—what church, what to do with the wafer—remained outside the frame.
From the beginning in California, the principal in this administration was operating on what might have seemed distinctly special information. He had “feelings” about things, for example about the Vietnam War. “I have a feeling that we are doing better in the war than the people have been told,” he was quoted as having said in the Los Angeles Times on October 16, 1967. With the transforming power of the presidency, this special information that no one else understood— these big pictures, these high concepts—took on a magical quality, and some people in the White House came to believe that they had in their possession, sharpening his own pencils in the Oval Office, the Fisher King himself, the keeper of the grail, the source of that ineffable contact with the electorate that was in turn the source of the power.
There were times, we know now, when this White House had fairly well absented itself from the art of the possible. McFarlane flying to Teheran with the cake and the Bible and ten falsified Irish passports did not derive from our traditional executive tradition. The place was running instead on its own superstition, on the reading of bones, on the belief that a flicker of attention from the president during the presentation of a plan (the ideal presentation, Peggy Noonan explained, was one in which “the president was forced to look at a picture, read a short letter, or respond to a question”) ensured the transfer of the magic to whatever was that week exciting the ardor of the children who wanted to make the revolution—to SDI, to the mujahadeen, to Jonas Savimbi, to the contras.
Miss Noonan recalled what she referred to as “the contra meetings”, which turned on the magical notion that putting the president on display in the right setting (i.e., “going over the heads of the media to the people”) was all that was needed to “inspire a commitment on the part of the American people”. They sat in those meetings and discussed having the president speak at the Orange Bowl in Miami on the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s Orange Bowl speech after the Bay of Pigs, never mind that the Kennedy Orange Bowl speech had become over the years in Miami the symbol of American betrayal. They sat in those meetings and discussed having the president go over the heads of his congressional opponents by speaking in Jim Wright’s district near the Alamo: “. . . something like ‘Blank miles to the north of here is the Alamo,’ “ Miss Noonan wrote in her notebook, sketching out the ritual in which the magic would be transferred.
“ ‘. . . Where brave heroes blank, and where the commander of the garrison wrote during those terrible last days blank . . .’”
But the Fisher King was sketching another big picture, one he had had in mind since California. We have heard again and again that Mrs. Reagan turned the president away from the Evil Empire and toward the meetings with Gorbachev. (Later, on NBC “Nightly News,” the San Francisco astrologer Joan Quigley claimed a role in influencing both Reagans on this point, explaining that she had “changed their Evil Empire attitude by briefing them on Gorbachev’s horoscope”.) Mrs. Reagan herself allowed that she “felt it was ridiculous for these two heavily armed superpowers to be sitting there and not talking to each other” and “did push Ronnie a little”.
But how much pushing was actually needed remains in question. The Soviet Union appeared to Ronald Reagan as an abstraction, a place where people were helpless to resist “communism”, the inanimate evil which, as he had put it in a 1951 speech to a Kiwanis convention and would continue to put it for the next three and a half decades, had “tried to invade our ind
ustry” and been “fought” and eventually “licked”. This was a construct in which the actual citizens of the Soviet Union could be seen to have been, like the motion picture industry, “invaded”—in need only of liberation. The liberating force might be the appearance of a Shane-like character, someone to “lick” the evil, or it might be just the sweet light of reason. “A people free to choose will always choose peace,” as President Reagan told students at Moscow State University in May of 1988.
In this sense he was dealing from an entirely abstract deck, and the opening to the East had been his card all along, his big picture, his story. And this is how it went: what he would like to do, he had told any number of people over the years (I recall first hearing it from George Will, who cautioned me not to tell it because conversations with presidents were privileged), was take the leader of the Soviet Union (who this leader would be was another of those details outside the frame) on a flight to Los Angeles. When the plane came in low over the middle-class subdivisions that stretch from the San Bernardino mountains to LAX, he would direct the leader of the Soviet Union to the window, and point out all the swimming pools below. “Those are the pools of the capitalists,” the leader of the Soviet Union would say. “No,” the leader of the free world would say. “Those are the pools of the workers.” Blank years further on, when brave heroes blanked, and where the leader of the free world blank, accidental history took its course, but we have yet to pay for the ardor.
— 1989
Insider Baseball
* * *
1
It occurred to me during the summer of 1988, in California and Atlanta and New Orleans, in the course of watching first the California primary and then the Democratic and Republican national conventions, that it had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations. They had not run for student body office. They had not gone to Yale or Swarthmore or DePauw, nor had they even applied. They had gotten drafted, gone through basic at Fort Ord. They had knocked up girls, and married them, had begun what they called the first night of the rest of their lives with a midnight drive to Carson City and a five-dollar ceremony performed by a justice still in his pajamas. They got jobs at the places that had laid off their uncles. They paid their bills or did not pay their bills, made down payments on tract houses, led lives on that social and economic edge referred to, in Washington and among those whose preferred locus is Washington, as “out there”. They were never destined to be, in other words, communicants in what we have come to call, when we want to indicate the traditional ways in which power is exchanged and the status quo maintained in the United States, “the process”.
“The process today gives everyone a chance to participate,” Tom Hayden, by way of explaining “the difference” between 1968 and 1988, said to Bryant Gumbel on NBC at 7:50 a.m. on the day after Jesse Jackson spoke at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta. This was, at a convention that had as its controlling principle the notably nonparticipatory idea of “unity”, demonstrably not true, but people inside the process, constituting as they do a self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite, tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is. They tend to prefer the theoretical to the observable, and to dismiss that which might be learned empirically as “anecdotal”. They tend to speak a language common in Washington but not specifically shared by the rest of us. They talk about “programs”, and “policy”, and how to “implement” them or it, about “trade-offs” and constituencies and positioning the candidate and distancing the candidate, about the “story”, and how it will “play”. They speak of a candidate’s performance, by which they usually mean his skill at circumventing questions, not as citizens but as professional insiders, attuned to signals pitched beyond the range of normal hearing: “I hear he did all right this afternoon,” they were saying to one another in the press section of the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans on the evening in August of 1988 when Dan Quayle was or was not to be nominated for the vice presidency. “I hear he did OK with Brinkley.” By the time the balloons fell that night the narrative had changed: “Quayle, zip,” the professionals were saying as they brushed the confetti off their laptops.
These were people who spoke of the process as an end in itself, connected only nominally, and vesti-gially, to the electorate and its possible concerns. “She used to be an issues person but now she’s involved in the process,” a prominent conservative said to me in New Orleans by way of suggesting why an acquaintance who believed Jack Kemp was “speaking directly to what people out there want” had nonetheless backed George Bush. “Anything that brings the process closer to the people is all to the good,” George Bush had declared in his 1987 autobiography, Looking Forward, accepting as given this relatively recent notion that the people and the process need not automatically be on convergent tracks.
When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process”, or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life. “I didn’t realize you were a political junkie,” Martin Kaplan, the former Washington Post reporter and Mondale speechwriter who was married to Susan Estrich, the manager of the Dukakis campaign, said when I mentioned that I planned to write about the campaign; the assumption here, that the narrative should be not just written only by its own specialists but also legible only to its own specialists, is why, finally, an American presidential campaign raises questions that go so vertiginously to the heart of the structure.
What strikes one most vividly about such a campaign is precisely its remoteness from the actual life of the country. The figures are well known, and suggest a national indifference usually construed, by those inside the process, as ignorance, or “apathy”, in any case a defect not in themselves but in the clay they have been given to mold. Only slightly more than half of those eligible to vote in the United States did vote in the 1984 presidential election, An average 18.5 percent of what Nielsen Media Research calls the “television households” in the United States tuned in to network coverage of the 1988 Republican convention in New Orleans, meaning 81.5 percent did not. An average 20.2 percent of these “television households” tuned in to network coverage of the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta, meaning 79.8 percent did not. The decision to tune in or out ran along predictable lines: “The demography is good even if the households are low,” a programming executive at Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon & Eckhardt told the New York Times in July of 1988 about the agency’s decision to buy “campaign event” time for Merrill Lynch on both CBS and CNN. “The ratings are about nine percent off 1984,” an NBC marketing vice president allowed, again to the New York Times, “but the upscale target audience is there.”
When I read this piece I recalled standing, the day before the California primary, in a dusty Central California schoolyard to which the leading Democratic candidate had come to speak one more time about what kind of president he wanted to be. The crowd was listless, restless. There were gray thunderclouds overhead. A little rain fell. “We welcome you to Silicon Valley,” an official had said by way of greeting the candidate, but this was not in fact Silicon Valley: this was San Jose, and a part of San Jose particularly untouched by technological prosperity, a neighborhood in which the lowering of two-toned Impalas remained a central activity.
“I want
to be a candidate who brings people together,” the candidate was saying at the exact moment a man began shouldering his way past me and through a group of women with children in their arms. This was not a solid citizen, not a member of the upscale target audience. This was a man wearing a down vest and a camouflage hat, a man with a definite little glitter in his eyes, a member not of the 18.5 percent and not of the 20.2 percent but of the 81.5, the 79.8. “I’ve got to see the next president,” he muttered repeatedly. “I’ve got something to tell him.”
“. . . Because that’s what this party is all about,” the candidate said.
“Where is he?” the man said, confused. “Who is he?”
“Get lost,” someone said.
“. . . Because that’s what this country is all about,” the candidate said.
Here we had the last true conflict of cultures in America, that between the empirical and the theoretical. On the empirical evidence this country was about two-toned Impalas and people with camouflage hats and a little glitter in their eyes, but this had not been, among people inclined to the theoretical, the preferred assessment. Nor had it even been, despite the fact that we had all stood together on the same dusty asphalt, under the same plane trees, the general assessment: this was how Joe Klein, writing a few weeks later in New York magazine, had described those last days before the California primary:
Breezing across California on his way to the nomination last week, Michael Dukakis crossed a curious American threshold. . . . The crowds were larger, more excited now; they seemed to be searching for reasons to love him. They cheered eagerly, almost without provocation. People reached out to touch him—not to shake hands, just to touch him. . . . Dukakis seemed to be making an almost subliminal passage in the public mind: he was becoming presidential.
