Reagan: The Life (107 page)

Another big payday came when he signed a contract with
Simon & Schuster to write a memoir. His guarantee against royalties for the memoir and a second, unspecified book was
$5 million. The publisher wasn’t bothered that Reagan had already written a memoir, published to promote his first campaign for governor. Though the new volume would cover the same ground (sometimes in nearly the same language, as it turned out) for his pre-political years, the publisher guessed that it was his tenure as president of the United States rather than of the Screen Actors Guild that would drive sales. Many conservatives and Republicans would buy the book as a way of voting for their hero one more time; whether they read it was beside the point.

Nancy didn’t miss out. The same speakers’ bureau that booked Reagan listed her at $30,000 per lecture. And
Random House paid her $2 million to get back at Don Regan and her other critics in a memoir of her own.

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HE
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EAGANS
’
SPEAKING
bureau also handled bookings for Oliver North, whose popularity among conservatives rose even while he faced criminal charges of lying to Congress and obstructing justice in the Iran-contra affair. One of Reagan’s last chores as president had been to decide whether or not to pardon North. He was tempted, and pressured, to do so. “
Rev. Falwell has sent a petition with 2 million signatures demanding a pardon for Ollie,” Reagan wrote. George Shultz had far less sympathy for North than Reagan did, but he nonetheless urged the president to pardon North lest a trial reveal secrets of national security. “
It was a hell of a presentation and I’ve ordered that we pursue this further,” Reagan recorded.

In the end he decided against a pardon. Elements of the media and the public were still debating Reagan’s complicity in the Iran-contra affair; to pardon North preemptively might appear part of a cover-up. Reagan remembered how Gerald Ford’s preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon had so weakened Ford as to make him vulnerable to challenge from within his own party, by Reagan himself. Reagan wasn’t running for reelection, but he had his reputation to consider.
Richard Thornburgh had replaced Ed Meese as attorney general after Meese was splashed with mud in a scandal involving defense contracts. Thornburgh argued that justice should be
allowed to run its course in the North case. “
I’m afraid he’s right,” Reagan concluded glumly.

What he didn’t realize was how the case was going to follow him. As he packed for California, he was subpoenaed to testify. The subpoena put him in a difficult spot. On one hand, presidents and former presidents, citing executive privilege and the separation of powers, had rarely testified in cases relating to their presidential duties, and Reagan didn’t want to establish a precedent that might weaken the office. On the other hand, his refusal to pardon North was premised on the belief that justice must be served, but refusing to testify could hinder the serving. North’s defense rested on his assertion that in orchestrating the arms sales to Iran and the diversion of the proceeds to the contras, he had the approval of the president. It was crucial to their case, his lawyers said, to ask Reagan if this was true.

Reagan disagreed. Or at any rate he refused to testify. “
I made up my mind I wasn’t going,” he explained in an interview. “I think it would have set a precedent that a president doesn’t have a right to impose on other presidents.”

The judge in the case,
Gerhard Gesell, chose not to challenge Reagan. “The trial record presently contains no proof that defendant North ever received any authorization from President Reagan to engage in the illegal conduct alleged, either directly or indirectly, orally or in writing,” Gesell wrote. This was good enough for him. The former president did not have to take the witness stand.

Reagan nonetheless became a centerpiece of the courtroom arguments. “
What’s the difference between what Oliver North did and what the president did?” demanded
Brendan Sullivan, North’s lead counsel. Nothing material, Sullivan said. Yet the legal system was treating the two quite differently. “The president is happily retired in California. Oliver North has spent the last two and a half years in Washington fighting for his reputation.” Recalling Reagan’s praise of North as a national hero, Sullivan declared, “Oliver North doesn’t want to be a hero. He just wants to go home.”

The jury wasn’t moved. North was convicted of shredding and falsifying documents and of obstructing a congressional investigation. He vowed to appeal and promised, “
We will be fully vindicated.”

Reagan continued to keep mum. “Because of the likelihood of further legal proceedings, it would not be appropriate for President Reagan to comment,” his spokesman told reporters.

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ORTH CONVICTION
, after the judge’s ruling that Reagan need not testify, prompted the lawyers for John Poindexter to redouble their efforts to ensure that the former president
did
testify in their client’s trial. They battled long and hard and eventually secured a partial victory. The judge in the Poindexter case,
Harold Greene, ruled that Reagan did have to testify but could do so in California rather than in Washington, where the trial was being conducted. The testimony would be videotaped and played for the Washington jury.

Judge Greene closed the Los Angeles courtroom to the media but allowed the defense and prosecution to field their full teams. Poindexter sat with his counsel. The CIA and other federal intelligence agencies sent experts to warn the questioners and the president if they were treading on ground that might compromise continuing operations. Reagan received 154 questions from Poindexter’s lawyers in advance to prepare for the deposition.

Reagan’s testimony did nothing good for Poindexter and nothing good for Reagan’s reputation. In eight hours in the witness box over two days,
he pleaded ignorance nearly one hundred times, saying he had never known of the events in question or now didn’t recall them. He was unable to describe various meetings and conversations in which he had taken part. He could not identify individuals he had worked with, including General
John Vessey, his chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff for three years. The gist of the Tower Commission report was lost to him.

The defense had hoped to demonstrate that Poindexter’s actions had had Reagan’s approval, but his foggy testimony failed them, and Poindexter was convicted on multiple counts. (The convictions were later overturned on technical grounds.) Yet Reagan’s performance left observers—including the public, after Judge Greene allowed the tapes to be released—wondering about Reagan. Had he been this out of touch while president? Or had he simply aged rapidly in the year since he relinquished the presidency?

On the tapes he looked every one of his seventy-nine years. The old tics were there: the faux-sheepish grin, the duck and nod of the head, the breathy radio voice. But the vibrancy Americans had come to expect of Reagan was missing. His face seemed slack and pasty; his eyes sometimes stared blankly; he tired quickly. He had never been as good in news conferences as in set speeches, or as good as he flattered himself to think he
was. Sharp questioning penetrated the thinness of his knowledge base. Yet he had been light on his feet and usually able to dodge the heavy blows. No heavy blows landed this time, but only because his questioners didn’t want to make him look any worse than he made himself look. The jury might punish the side that beat up on a confused old man.

The silver lining for Reagan was that his floundering diminished the possibility that he himself might be charged with criminal wrongdoing. Special counsel
Lawrence Walsh was moving up the chain of command; after winning indictments against North, Poindexter, and McFarlane, he was said to be investigating Caspar Weinberger and George Shultz. The obvious final target was Reagan. But Reagan’s hapless performance in the Poindexter case suggested that any trial of the former president could be a public relations disaster for the entire investigation.

N
ANCY
R
EAGAN DATED
her husband’s decline to an incident that occurred just six months after they left the White House. The Reagans were visiting William Wilson and his wife at their ranch in northern Mexico. The two couples were old friends, and Wilson had served as Reagan’s ambassador to the Vatican. Reagan loved to ride horseback as much as ever, and he set out with a small party across the rugged terrain of the ranch. He was an able rider, especially on his own horses, but the horse he rode this day turned skittish. It bucked a few times, causing two Secret Service agents to close in and try to calm it. Yet the horse would not be soothed, and it finally pitched Reagan out of the saddle and onto the rocky ground.

He got up and dusted himself off, seeming not much the worse for the tumble. But Nancy insisted that he be flown to a hospital in Tucson for a thorough checkup. Various scans indicated no fractures, and he and Nancy left the hospital to travel to their own ranch, where they celebrated her birthday.

Further tests, however, revealed a blood clot, a subdural hematoma, in Reagan’s skull, presumably the result of hitting his head in his fall. Doctors in Los Angeles monitored the condition during the next several weeks and chose not to operate. Reagan appeared to be recovering satisfactorily.

But when he and Nancy traveled to Minnesota in September for their annual physical exams at the
Mayo Clinic, his doctors detected a new clot. They recommended surgery, and Reagan consented. The procedure
involved drilling a hole in the skull and inserting a tube to drain the gathered fluid. The surgery went smoothly, and Reagan was released from the hospital after several days. His sense of humor survived intact; observing his shaved head, he commented to the attending staff, “
I guess my barber can have the week off.”

Nancy, as always, took her husband’s health problems more seriously than he did. “
I was in shock,” she recalled of the events surrounding the surgery. “It shows up in the picture that appeared in the press at the time: Ronnie leaving the hospital, taking his hat off to salute the crowd, and me dashing forward trying to cover his partially shaven head with my hand. He didn’t care that he had no hair on one side—but I did!”

She went on to say, “I’ve always had the feeling that the severe blow to his head in 1989 hastened the onset of Ronnie’s Alzheimer’s. The doctors think so, too.”

Y
ET HIS CONDITION
often seemed no more than simple aging. Reagan’s memoir
An American Life
was published in the autumn of 1990, and he went on the talk shows promoting it. His publicists booked him with interviewers certain to be friendly, and indeed
Barbara Walters,
Charles Gibson, and William F. Buckley couldn’t have been kinder. They pitched him softballs, and when he failed to make contact, they hit the pitches for him. “
Mr. Reagan is treated like a well-loved uncle who needs a little help these days in keeping the conversation going,” television critic
Walter Goodman wrote in the
New York Times
. Reagan looked fit, Goodman said, and his smile still charmed. “Words, however, do not always come easily or always in the right order; when dealing with his time in the White House he often reaches into past scripts for some phrase that has done proven service. The phrases he finds are not always directly on the mark, but no one calls him to task.”

The book was a commercial success for
Simon & Schuster and a personal triumph for Reagan. It topped best-seller lists and showed how much Reagan’s fans still loved their hero. Yet the triumph was bittersweet, in that the interviews revealed that the author was no longer the man his book described.

T
HE BOOK AUGMENTED
Reagan’s emerging historical reputation at a moment when the Cold War was coming to an irreversible end. The
reform tides Gorbachev had set in motion in the Soviet Union rolled across Eastern Europe in the year after Reagan left office. The
Berlin Wall came down metaphorically in November 1989 and concretely in the following months. In the autumn of 1990, just as Reagan’s book was hitting the bookstores,
West Germany absorbed
East Germany into a single federal republic, erasing the border that had long formed the front line of the superpower confrontation. Meanwhile, the communist regimes in the other countries of the Soviet satellite belt crumbled before popular uprisings.

Reagan kept in touch with Gorbachev as the anticommunist revolution unfolded. On a state visit to America in June 1990, Gorbachev invited Reagan to breakfast in San Francisco. Gorbachev liked Reagan better now that they no longer had to spar over strategic defense; he also understood that the former president had continuing pull in American politics and might be helpful to Gorbachev’s agenda. The San Francisco meeting went well, and Gorbachev invited Reagan and Nancy to visit Russia in the autumn.

Reagan emerged from the California meeting more taken by Gorbachev than ever. He shortly published an opinion piece in the
New York Times
under the headline “
I’m Convinced That Gorbachev Wants a Free-Market Democracy.” Reagan recounted his own role in the changes that were taking place in Eastern Europe. “Three years ago today I stood in front of the Berlin Wall and urged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear it down,” he wrote. “This was not a spur-of-the-moment idea. Rather, it reflected my belief that both my relationship with Mr. Gorbachev and the effects of his policy of
glasnost at home had reached a point where I could publicly call for this act of East-West reconciliation.” Reagan noted that Gorbachev had not responded positively at once, but he gave the Soviet leader credit for making the ultimate outcome possible. “Glasnost had let the free speech genie out of the bottle in the Soviet Union; Mr. Gorbachev’s call for
perestroika, or reform, held the promise of better times for his citizens.” Reagan told of his recent meeting with Gorbachev. “He was every bit as warm, earnest and optimistic about his country’s future potential as I remembered him from our previous meetings.” Yet he faced daunting challenges: rampant nationalism in the Soviet republics, consumer complaints over lack of goods in the stores, political opposition led by Russian leader Boris Yeltsin. Reagan thought Gorbachev deserved America’s support. Glasnost and perestroika had started Russia on the right path, but greater change was coming, and it behooved the United States to support
Gorbachev during the transition. There was no limit to what the positive results might be, in Russia and elsewhere. “Like the chips of the
Berlin Wall that are being sold everywhere these days, democracy seems to be sweeping the world.”