Audition (74 page)

There was a party that night for the children of White House employees, and Walter Cronkite had been asked to read
A Visit from Saint Nicholas
. “’Twas the Night before Christmas,” Walter intoned to the delighted children in that famous mellifluous voice. I was invited to that part of the festivities. When the performance was over and Walter and I were preparing to leave, President Carter asked us to stay for coffee. Walter and I have often laughed at what happened then. Each of us had hoped the president would say something newsworthy that we might use on a broadcast—some pithy kind of a Christmas message. Instead the president took the opportunity to tell us about his hemorrhoids. “Very uncomfortable and painful,” he said. He might have to have an operation. Merry Christmas: I have hemorrhoids.

My last anecdote about Jimmy Carter took place in the Oval Office in January 1981, just weeks before he was to vacate it. Roone Arledge and I, perhaps because we’d had so many encounters with Carter, asked if we could pay him an informal, off-the-record visit. I can’t imagine doing that with a sitting president today, but that’s what we did and Carter, dispirited and depressed, seemed happy to see us. All his negotiations for the release of the American hostages in Iran had proved fruitless, and a U.S. rescue mission, nine months before, had failed miserably. The newspapers, in recapping his presidency, were not only dwelling on the hostages but dredging up his encounter with an angry swamp rabbit some months before while fishing in a lake. The rabbit had attempted to board the president’s small boat (I didn’t know rabbits could swim), and Carter had had to shoo it away with his paddle. It was a silly incident but the report of the “killer rabbit” had been carried on the evening news of all the major television networks, making Carter look very foolish. And here it was being rehashed again.

Roone and I were more interested in the election than in rabbits. When we asked Carter if he blamed the Iranian hostage crisis for his defeat, he said yes, but then surprised us by saying, “That and the Cubans in Florida.” Why the Cubans? Because in 1980 Castro had allowed, and Carter had permitted, the influx of more than 100,000 Cubans, among them convicted felons and psychiatric patients. The Cubans had flooded into south Florida, particularly Miami, overwhelming immigration services and infuriating the resident “Anglos” and African Americans. The economy was in a recession, and the non-Cuban population deeply resented the havoc caused by the influx of refugees and the millions of U.S. tax dollars being spent on them. “It was costly in political popularity,” Carter later admitted in his presidential memoir
Keeping Faith
. As a result Carter, who had won the state of Florida in 1976, lost it in 1980. But as history has recorded, Carter has become a more admired ex-president than president.

As for Rosalynn Carter, I found her distant and chilly but I applaud her attention, while first lady, to those suffering with the misery of mental illness. She brought about greater understanding and helped millions to seek assistance. It was an important contribution. Congress even passed legislation she had introduced, the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, but it was never implemented by the incoming Reagan administration.

In spite of his great success in negotiating a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, and returning the Panama Canal to its rightful owner, Jimmy Carter never really recovered from the series of crises that plagued his later years in office, not the least of which was the 1979 energy crisis that resulted in gas rationing and long lines at the pumps. In what became known as his “malaise speech,” Carter called on the country to carpool, drive slower, and turn down their thermostats to reduce our dependency on foreign oil. It was a message Americans didn’t want to hear or heed. But, if Jimmy Carter’s presidency ended on a note of despair, his successor, Ronald Reagan, began his presidency on a high note of hope.

When Reagan came into office in 1981, the country entered into a state of near euphoria. No sacrifices were called for with the arrival of good-natured, optimistic Ronnie and his ever-so-stylish wife, Nancy. The American people much preferred this optimistic view of the world.

I had interviewed Reagan as a candidate. He was certainly affable, but I couldn’t help but be struck by his lack of knowledge in specific important areas. For example, there was a lot of talk in the press back then, as now, about Israel achieving peace with all its Arab neighbors by returning the land it had occupied since the 1967 war. Much of the arguing back and forth had to do with an important United Nations Resolution, number 242, which outlined the formula of “land for peace.” But when I questioned Reagan about it, he looked at me blankly. Not a clue.

In the summer of 1980 I reported on the Republican convention in Detroit that nominated Reagan. It was an unusual convention. There was some concern that he might not be a strong enough president and the convention was debating the possibility that Gerald Ford might be chosen as Reagan’s vice president. As an ex-president, Ford would then have been a kind of copresident, an unprecedented position.

Here is my own sideline experience at the time. I was in a room off the convention floor, doing special reports with Sam Donaldson and columnist George Will. The three of us weren’t anchoring; Frank Reynolds was. Frank would call on us from time to time for special reports or when we had some news. My friend Alan Greenspan, a former adviser to Ford, was also attending the convention in an unofficial capacity. He wasn’t giving me any secret information, but knowing him did give me good access. It looked as if the Ford nomination wasn’t going to happen, and George H. W. Bush’s name was beginning to surface. This was a surprise because Bush had run against Reagan in the primaries and had been quite critical of him.

I knew George Bush fairly well, and I was on the phone with him in the midst of all the speculation about who would be the VP nominee. Suddenly he told me to hold on, that Ronald Reagan was calling him. I shouted to my producer that I was about to get big news and to tell the director to put me on the air instead of just on the phone. But the attempt to do this disrupted the call, and I lost Bush. As I was trying desperately to get him back, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported that she had just heard that George Bush was going to be Reagan’s running mate. Good for Andrea, but I nearly went crazy. I had lost the scoop of the whole convention. At this point George Will looked at me with disdain and said, “It’s only television, Barbara.” Well, although I enjoy listening to George and reading his insightful columns, he has also for many years earned a very good living from “only television.”

The Reagan years, especially during the first term, were a great contrast to the Carter era. Hollywood stars attended the state dinners along with the other guests all gussied up in diamond necklaces and fur coats. The wine flowed. The orchestras played. Except for Jacqueline Kennedy, Nancy Reagan was the most fashionable first lady we ever had. She was applauded by her friends but criticized by most of the press for her extensive and costly wardrobe. She loved the color red, and her favorite designers were Bill Blass and Adolfo, whose outfits cost thousands of dollars. Mrs. Reagan claimed she paid for them herself, but there were investigations and she didn’t get off the hook until her performance at the Gridiron dinner, an annual roast given by the Washington press corps. I was there when she came onstage looking like a bag lady. Singing special lyrics to a Barbra Streisand song, “Second Hand Rose,” Mrs. Reagan crooned, “I’m wearing secondhand clothes.” She was a smash and had an easier time of things after that.

Then, only sixty-nine days after Reagan took office, he was shot by a mentally ill twenty-five-year-old named John Hinckley Jr. In a later interview Reagan described to me what happened to him. “When we got to the hospital, I got out of the car first and walked into the emergency room and a nurse was coming to meet me. And I said, ‘I’m having trouble breathing,’ and just then my knees began to get rubbery and the next thing I knew I was on a gurney. Incidentally, I was wearing a suit for the first time, a brand-new tailored suit. I had to lie on the gurney while, with the scissors, they cut the suit off of me.”

Reagan also told me that the doctors went crazy trying to find a missing contact lens in his eye. It seemed he only wore one contact so he could see both close up and farther away. I particularly remember this because I, too, usually wear just one lens so I can both look at my questions close up with my nearsighted eye, and with a contact lens in the other eye, read the teleprompter at a distance.

The president seemed to put the assassination attempt behind him very quickly. In a remarkably short time he returned to work. The first lady had a harder time adjusting. I interviewed her two months after the attempt on her husband’s life, the first time she talked publicly about her fears and anxiety. She said the president slept soundly, but she often woke up in the middle of the night, and then, wide awake, wanted to eat something, maybe an apple. But, she said, she was afraid the crunching sound would awaken the president and instead she ate a banana. I thought that was very funny and very human.

Perhaps this is the place to talk about the parents of the would-be assassin, John Hinckley Jr. After a seven-week trial, Hinckley was found not guilty for reasons of insanity. Doctors said he was schizophrenic. His motive, it turned out, was his infatuation with the actress Jodie Foster. He felt that by shooting the president he would impress her. After his trial he was sent to Saint Elizabeth’s, a hospital for the mentally ill in Washington, D.C. There were many people, however, who felt that he should have been found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

After what I thought was a suitable time, two years, I wrote to Hinckley’s parents and asked if they would consider sitting down and talking with me. I told them that it would be an opportunity to have people understand the disease of schizophrenia and might help other parents determine if their child had severe mental problems or was just going through a difficult adolescence. I promised them a dignified interview. The Hinckleys considered my request and agreed. This was the first and only time they did such an interview. It was aired in April 1983.

John Hinckley Sr. had been a successful businessman in Denver, Colorado. He and his wife, Jo Ann, had three children: two boys and a girl. John Jr. was their youngest child. He was, they said, “a beautiful and happy little boy.” The family was very close, took trips, and spent all their weekends together. But things began to change when John dropped out of college and came home. He used to sit and stare out the window, his father said. He was very depressed and, in his father’s words, “could not seem to cope with the outside world.”

Eventually, after having John Jr. tested to make sure that there was nothing physically wrong with him, Jo Ann and John took him to a psychiatrist, who told them to stop pampering their son, make him leave the house, and force him to get a job. They were not to help him. He had to learn to be independent. It was a form of “tough love,” and the Hinckleys weren’t sure it was the right treatment. When, at one point, their son wanted to come home, the psychiatrist told them: “Well, if he were my son, I would send him a hundred dollars and tell him good-bye.”

The Hinckleys were in anguish about what to do, but when their son did come home, unshaven and wanting to stay, his father said no. Jo Ann Hinckley protested, but her husband said they had to follow the psychiatrist’s advice. There seemed no other choice. “I gave my son all the cash I had,” John Hinckley told me, “and said, ‘You are on your own,’ and that was the last I saw of him until the shooting.”

Then, with tears brimming in his eyes, Hinckley Sr. said, “It’s my fault. I sent him out when he couldn’t cope. It’s my fault.”

The Hinckleys have since moved from Colorado to Washington, D.C., to be near their son, who is still incarcerated there. They devote their lives and funds to promoting research into the causes and treatment of schizophrenia and other mental diseases.

To this day I consider my interview with the Hinckleys to be one of the most important that I have ever done. I am indebted to those brave and honest people. As the mother of a child who had her own teenage troubles but, thank goodness, was not mentally ill, I sympathize with their confusion and grief.

The main victim of their son’s shooting spree was the president’s tough, husky, funny press secretary, James Brady. His nickname was “the Bear.” One of the bullets meant for the president landed in Brady’s head, and for a while he was at death’s door. When he recovered I also did the first interview with him and his courageous wife, Sarah.

It was devastating to talk to this man. After the shooting Jim could express himself somewhat, but his sentences usually ended—and he could not help this—with a wailing sound, like a loud, moaning cry of despair. He continued to make an amazing recovery, but there were ongoing effects of the brain damage.

Sarah Brady, when she was not devoting her time to her husband and son, tirelessly lobbied Congress for a gun-control bill. In 1993 the Brady Bill was passed. It requires licensed dealers to enforce a waiting period and do a background check of anyone purchasing a handgun.

Just before Thanksgiving of 1981, eight months after he’d been shot, Ronald Reagan agreed to let me interview him. Furthermore he invited me to conduct the interview at his secluded ranch in the hills near Santa Barbara, California. No television cameras had ever been invited to the ranch where the president spent his happiest private times. Mrs. Reagan didn’t love it there, and I could understand why. The main house didn’t have proper heat, and she often complained of the cold. The bathroom was small, and it was more like a camp for a young couple than a vacation home for a president. As I recall, there were just a few books in the house. But this was just what the president liked. He wanted a comfortable, unpretentious home surrounded by hills and valleys where he and Mrs. Reagan could ride their horses and just relax, watch a little television, and go to bed early.