I Love You, Ronnie (17 page)

No matter how much power you have as president, there is so much you can’t control. Ronnie’s last years in office really taught him that. People who were supposedly under his command were off doing things he knew nothing about, and no one ever saw fit to tell him. He was badly served by the people who were supposed to aid and advise him.

In 1987, when the pope came to California.

Despite all the challenges, we were sad to leave the White House when Ronnie’s second term came to an end in 1989. We’d both been happy there. We’d become very attached to the White House, the ushers, and the staff—everyone. They didn’t care about what party you were with; they just loved the White House, and they’d been thrilled by all the work we’d done to fix things up and give the place back its former grandeur. I’ll never forget how, right after the renovations were done, one of the butlers who had been there a long, long time looked down the hall and said, “
This
is how the White House should look.” That was one of my proudest moments as first lady. It was my Oscar.

I also had such wonderful memories of our state dinners, which we tried to hold every month or two. Whenever possible, I’d have them outside, directly under the night sky. That was really magical. I’d put little white lights in the trees around the Rose Garden, and if we were lucky, there was moonlight, and starlight, then the lights of the White House and of the Jefferson Memorial. It was beautiful, just beautiful. And on great occasions, like the state dinner for the Gorbachevs that followed the Washington summit meeting of December 1987, it was very, very moving, too.

—

Our last few weeks in Washington were filled with good-byes, many of them very difficult. We hated to leave our new friends. They’d done so much to welcome us eight years earlier—and they gave us such a gracious send-off, too. I’ll never forget, for example, the last time we went to the Kennedy Center. After the show, Walter Cronkite came out onstage and said, “For eight years, two people have sat up there in that box alongside our honorees. The years have gone swiftly by, but, President and Mrs. Reagan, we’d like to detain you long enough to say thank you.”

Then everybody came out onstage—all the stagehands and all the people connected to the Kennedy Center. All the ushers came down the aisles, and they and everyone in the audience turned around, faced us, and started to sing “Auld Lang Syne.” That’s a song that does me in under any circumstance. And, of course, I started to cry.

Valentine's Day card.

Ronnie waited until everyone had finished singing. Then he shouted down to Cronkite, “It beats getting an Oscar!”

In the hammock at the ranch, 1980s.

O
n our last morning in the White House, Ronnie had gone over to the Oval Office to have a last look. I have a picture that we took then—all of his papers were gone and the office looked so bare. Then, all too quickly, it was ten o’clock and the Bushes were there. It was time for us to leave. As we were leaving the White House for the last time and walking to the plane, Ronnie turned to me with his wonderful grin and said, “Well, it’s been a wonderful eight years. All in all, not bad—not bad at all.”

As our helicopter took off, the pilots circled over the White House so we could see it once more. “Look, honey,” Ronnie said. “There’s our little bungalow.”

—

Air Force One
took us back to California. When we landed in Los Angeles, there was a band at the airport and our old friends were there to meet us. Fortunately, our new home in Bel Air was all ready.

Ronnie had only visited the new house once before. I’d been in charge of house hunting and had been told about this one by a friend and had made a trip to California to visit it. I’d liked it, but obviously, I wasn’t going to buy a house without Ronnie’s seeing it. Getting a president to make a discreet house visit, though, isn’t an easy thing. I had to find a way for him to see it without the press catching on and making a big fuss. I didn’t think that was the best way to make friends with the neighbors, either.

So one time when we’d gone to California, I’d decided to smuggle him in. We left our hotel and I persuaded him to get down on the floor of the car, out of sight. “You have to stay there,” I said. We got up to the house, and I took him through it so fast that I’m sure he didn’t really get a good look. He said, “I like it,” and then we got back into the car and we left, with the president of the United States on the car floor!

Now, when we walked in, there were boxes everywhere. I had a sinking feeling. It wasn’t a very big house (“I’ve
already
lived in a big house,” I’d told the realtors), but there still was so much to do. I got very sad when Tim McCarthy, the Secret Service man who’d been shot with Ronnie, had to leave. I started to cry, and said, “I don’t want you to go.”

I’ve often heard people say that it’s a trauma to leave the White House and adjust to life after the presidency. For Ronnie and me it was an adjustment, certainly. But a trauma? No. Ronnie never had a problem changing from one phase of life to the other. I think that’s because no matter what he’s doing or where he is in the world, he is always the same. And as far as I was concerned, everything was always fine as long as he was there.

We ended up loving our new home. Ronnie said that of all the houses we’d lived in, it was his favorite, which of course made me happy. We planned to split our time between Bel Air and our ranch, writing our memoirs, speaking out for the causes we believed in, riding horses, seeing friends and traveling. And at first that was the life that we had. We traveled some, toured the inland waterways of Alaska with friends, and just generally resumed our life together. We had fun. We had so many things to look back on together and enjoy.

A Christmas card.

On one anniversary, looking ahead to a happy day together in 2002, Ronnie wrote:

To the One Woman in my Life

Fifty years isn’t enough. Let’s carry on

Your happy happy husband.

Our life was to change soon, though, and to change irrevocably—and neither of us saw it coming.

Christmas 1998, with Maureen and Dennis.

I
n July 1989, Ronnie and I went down to Mexico to visit our friends Betty and Bill Wilson at their ranch. I remember that on one of our first days there, Ronnie looked up in the sky and saw a helicopter overhead. “What’s that?” he said.

“It’s the Secret Service,” I answered. “They’re trying to figure out where they could land a plane if they had to.”

Thank goodness they did.

A few days later, Ronnie went out riding. I was working on my memoir,
My Turn,
and decided to stay behind. I was sitting in the house when all of a sudden the Secret Service men came running toward me. As if by instinct, I found myself running, too.

Ronnie had been thrown off his horse. He was riding with some other men, going up an incline, when one of the ranch hands had hit something that made a loud noise and spooked Ronnie’s horse.

The horse reared once, and Ronnie stayed on. It reared a second time, and Ronnie stayed on again. Two Secret Service men tried to move in and calm the horse, but they couldn’t do it. The horse reared a third time, bucking so hard that Ronnie fell off and hit his head on the ground, miraculously missing the jagged rocks all around.