Authors: Hedrick Smith
As a political salesman, Reagan ranks with Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, both of whom, like Reagan, sold mood and confidence as much as substance. Reagan hungered for his summit meetings with Gorbachev, aides told me, not for the negotiations, but because Reagan was convinced that he could talk Gorbachev into accepting his idea of a strategic defense. Reagan was that confident of his powers of persuasion, although it turned out he was wrong.
The contrast between Reagan and presidents such as Nixon, Ford, or Carter is stunning. Prior to Reagan, Nixon was the president most obsessed with “the selling of the president,” in Joe McGinniss’s memorable phrase; but Nixon lacked the ease and personal warmth that convey sincerity and come so readily to Reagan. Neither Ford nor Carter was as devoted as Reagan to making the sale. Both Ford and Nixon were clumsy onstage compared to Reagan. Carter was image conscious, flashing his famous toothy grin, but he was curiously ill at ease asking for votes. He saw the complexity of issues, agonized over decisions, and was too deeply torn by inner self-doubts to be a natural salesman. And Carter’s inner conflicts came across on television, for all to see.
By contrast, Reagan has conveyed inner harmony. He has seemed at peace with himself, a man untroubled by insecurities, uncertainties, or the awful burdens of office. He has had dark moments, for example when Marines were dying in Lebanon, or when the nation anguished over Americans held hostage by terrorist groups. His closest aides admit he has been angered at the press or at congressional foes or by family spats with his son Michael or his daughter Patti. But the White House has kept his torment private.
By seeming at home in the presidency, Reagan helped build his political success, for with his easy manner, Reagan has dispelled the common perception of the misery and isolation of the presidency. Carter worked like an indentured servant; Reagan has enjoyed the presidency and let people see his enjoyment. He has worked relatively short hours, taken naps and joked about it, then turned his back on the White House, gone off to his ranch to ride horses and chop wood, and treated the presidency as a job, not as a ball and chain. Initially, his imagemakers were skittish about his light schedule—for fear it showed
his superficiality—but as time wore on they made a point of having the public see Reagan’s relaxed nine-to-five style. It made him seem less “Washington,” less power hungry, and less menacing, say, than Johnson or Nixon. But Reagan’s laid-back style came to haunt him in the imbroglio of his covert dealings with Iran; he looked gullible and foolish as well as duplicitous, his judgment a victim of his emotions and a conspiratorial staff.
Sheer likability, never to be underestimated in the image game, has been a great asset to Ronald Reagan. As Nancy Reagan’s Gridiron Club venture showed, news coverage of a public figure can be affected by the personal feelings of the press corps. Popular, likable presidents such as Eisenhower and Reagan have fared better with the press than others, such as Johnson, whom White House reporters saw as too raw and manipulative; Nixon, whom many reporters distrusted and disliked; or Carter, who was ultimately regarded as meanspirited and holier-than-thou. Such feelings, which most reporters try to suppress in the interest of fair reporting, are more important than political ideology in affecting how the press treats political figures.
Obviously, Reagan’s sense of humor in personal crises has endeared him not only to reporters but to millions who viewed him from afar. He was showered with public acclaim, admiration, and affection for his gallantry after being shot in 1981. To the doctors preparing to remove the bullet, he cracked, “Hope you guys are all Republicans.” To his wife: “Honey, I forgot to duck.” To a nurse: “Does Nancy know about us?” His one-liners made him an instant folk hero. They gave the country a reassuring glimpse of the president when his life was in danger; and that transformed his image. It was a turning point for Reagan: Overnight, he went from being a new president on trial to being the nation’s heroic and sympathetic leader. That early impression of gallantry was reconfirmed four years later, when Reagan underwent surgery for a cancerous polyp and came out joking that he was going to send his surgeon to Congress to operate on the budget. As for the cancer, he said with the understated valor of a combat hero, “Well, I’m glad it’s all out.”
What came across was a personal model of courage and vigor; the sympathy he generated paid large political dividends. Even his flubs and misstatements, like Eisenhower’s garbled syntax, added to his common touch. They made him human. They drove political opponents and the press wild, but ordinary people seemed unconcerned. The voters do not want their leaders to appear too much smarter than
they are. To many people, Jimmy Carter was too smart for his own political good.
Other presidents have paid for inconsistencies and deceptions. Johnson was regarded as Machiavellian, Nixon as devious, Carter as wishy-washy. Reagan has been far from constant. He has flip-flopped on tax increases, on balancing the budget, on veto threats, on dealing with Moscow and Peking. But until he tripped up by secretly selling arms to Iran, Reagan got away with zigzags, backdowns, and compromises, by acting as if nothing had happened. Most voters seem not to regard it as hypocritical that he could preach the virtues of religion and prayer in school and not be a regular churchgoer; or that he could limn the old-time values of family, though Mrs. Reagan admitted to a three-year “estrangement” in the family; his adopted son, Michael, protested that Reagan had not seen his granddaughter until she was nearly two; his daughter Patti printed painful cameos of her parents in her novel,
Home Front
.
Such pretense might make other leaders feel a shade guilty, but Reagan always seems convinced of his own fundamental innocence—and that self-perception gives power to his salesmanship. Reagan is like a method actor: He feels whatever part he’s playing—peace president, military-buildup president, tax-cutting president, tax-increasing president, foe of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, or secret bargainer with Iran. Reagan immerses himself in whatever he is saying at the moment, even if that contradicts his lifelong beliefs, and he always finds some way in his own mind to explain away the contradictions.
For decades, he denounced Red China but came home from his presidential visit there extolling the “so-called Communists” in Peking, as if their ideology had never been his bugaboo. He can demand a constitutional amendment to balance the budget and blithely submit budgets with $150 billion deficits. He can switch from economic sanctions against the Soviet Union to subsidizing cheap wheat exports to Moscow and talk—even within his inner circle—as if he had made no change in policy. Whatever Reagan is selling, he preaches like a true believer, and his appearance of sincerity makes him a powerful salesman.
Those around Reagan see a paradox. The popular myth about television is that it exposes character. Through the tube, the public feels it knows politicians such as Reagan, though some close associates and family members find him remote and hard to know. He shies away from intimacy, letting no one but Nancy Reagan get really close, his old political friends have told me. They say he cannot deal well with strong
emotions, perhaps because of a painful childhood. In private, some Reagan intimates express their surprise and hurt at how readily Reagan has let some of his oldest, closest lieutenants leave him: Mike Deaver, Lyn Nofziger, Bill Clark. When Deaver, who was like a son to the Reagans, resigned in mid-1985, Mrs. Reagan wept openly at his small farewell party. The president had many kind words and expressed heartfelt appreciation for Deaver, but he showed no strong emotions. And yet, when Reagan tells and retells old war stories about total strangers to large political rallies, his voice is sure each time to thicken and choke at the punch line.
George Tames, a
New York Times
photographer who has covered every president since Franklin Roosevelt, called Reagan the hardest to know. “Reagan is onstage all the time,” Tames remarked. “He looks immaculate, like he wears two suits a day. Reagan’s the only one of them all [the presidents] who’s been onstage constantly. You could always count on the others relaxing, one on one. He never took his coat off with me. He never calls me by my first name. All the others except Roosevelt did. I can’t get to know him.”
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That probably sounds odd coming from a White House regular, since Reagan makes a point of familiarity with the press at his news conferences, calling on Helen, Sam, Andrea, Bill, or Mike (Helen Thomas of UPI, Sam Donaldson of ABC, Andrea Mitchell of NBC, Bill Plante of CBS, Mike Putzel of Associated Press). He has made them characters in the presidential TV serial. The image of the press family helps project Reagan as a patient father figure dealing with unruly children—a very subtle but effective put-down. But few viewers realize that while Reagan genuinely knows a handful of reporters by name, he relies on a seating chart to recognize most others. If seats get mixed up, Reagan calls people by the wrong names—still affecting familiarity.
In personal contact, Reagan is unfailingly cheerful, gracious, polite; he makes people feel good. But to a reporter—and to senators and congressmen—he can sound wooden and staged at close quarters. I have interviewed him several times, all but once with frustration. His answers sounded like replays of a human cassette, his lines rehearsed, even the little jokes. He seemed to be reading a part. When I tried to probe Reagan’s thinking behind the practiced formulations, I heard a script.
But once in 1985, by the roaring fire in the Oval Office, I felt a real Reagan. He was talking about his dream of strategic defense, and his tone of voice, his animation, his body language conveyed how deeply
he felt. As he leaned into his answers, I gained a sense of his own passion and conviction in a way I would never forget.
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After that interview, his refusal to compromise on strategic defense with Gorbachev at Geneva, Reykjavík, and Washington came as no surprise to me. Reality matched the image.
Arm’s-Length Strategy vs. the Press
In 1980, as the Reagan team approached Washington, it was of two minds about the press. One approach was to charm and co-opt the press and make it a vehicle for spreading the Reagan line. But a second, mistrustful strain gained voice in a memorandum entitled “The Imperial Media,” written by Robert Entman, a Duke University professor. It was part of a study produced for candidate Reagan by the Institute for Contemporary Studies in San Francisco, a think tank with links to Meese and Weinberger. Entman’s advice was to hold the press at arm’s length and make it accept the role of merely reporting the “what” of presidential policy and not probe for the “why” and “how.” His memo cautioned against “personal mingling between press officers, other White House staff, and journalists.” The White House press office, except for the top man, Entman said, should be kept “in the dark about the politics of White House decision-making” to reduce leaks on inside debates. The memo advocated taking several steps to “tame White House-beat reporting” by decreasing reporters’ expectations of full access to officials.
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The Reagan team pursued both strategies: the charm offensive and arm’s-length stonewalling. Reagan has been shielded from the press far more than other modern presidents. In his first term, Reagan held only twenty-six press conferences—fewer than any other modern four-year president and less than half Jimmy Carter’s fifty-eight. His media managers cut the size, access, and rules for press pools—the small, rotating groups of photographers and reporters who cover the president on most events—with the result that White House regulars have had less daily access to Reagan than to his predecessors. Impromptu question-and-answer sessions were curtailed. When the White House was marketing its story line before critical votes in Congress or after foreign policy summits, Reagan video managers have flooded television shows with administration spokesmen but kept them under tight wraps when the news got rough. Reagan’s P.R. men became experts at dumping bad news on Friday nights when few people notice. In the image game, these are all techniques for cutting your losses.
When it has come to making government officials available for television appearances, the Reagan team has applied the squeeze to protect its story line. I know TV correspondents who have scrapped stories because the White House barred senior officials from appearing, and the stories seemed unbalanced without government spokesmen. When top officials do appear, the White House imposes conditions. The networks will ask for one official: The White House, like a Hollywood studio doling out stars, will provide someone else, or demand
unequal
time. Connecticut’s Senator Chris Dodd, a Democratic critic of Reagan’s Central American policy, told me that when he appeared on ABC’s
This Week with David Brinkley
in 1984, the White House price for producing a spokesman was to sandwich Dodd—with the smallest time segment—between its spokesman and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who pushed the Reagan line. Major cabinet officers like Secretary Shultz set their own terms. Lesley Stahl said she could not get Shultz on CBS’s
Face the Nation
unless she guaranteed Shultz two thirds of the airtime and promised that no unfriendly foreign spokesman would appear.
“In the beginning, the manipulation drove me crazy,” Stahl admitted. “I’ve gotten a little used to it because if you really want to do a subject and they don’t want you to do it, it becomes very, very difficult. More true on domestic issues than foreign issues, because you can always go to another country and, say, put on a Soviet spokesman.”
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The administration’s stonewall has forced networks to change topics. In late 1986, for example, Reagan officials had been privately encouraging stories that Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was planning a new spate of terrorism and was on a collision course with Washington.
Face the Nation
, Stahl told me, “wanted the administration to come on and talk about whether there was new evidence that Qaddafi was again instigating or reigniting his terrorist organization, whether there were or weren’t plans to apply pressure on him, if we had evidence that his own power was deteriorating. They refused to play with us. Refused. Just shut down the government. So we did a show on nursing homes. Now, that’s very infuriating.”