Between You and Me (9 page)

I am hardly the only member of the journalism fraternity who awards high marks to Reagan’s presidency. At the time of the millennium, Time magazine and CBS News collaborated on a most ambitious undertaking: to select from all walks of life the hundred most influential men and women of the twentieth century. Along with renowned world leaders and scientists and artists and captains of industry, three U.S. presidents made the final cut. That’s all, just three.

Two of them are named Roosevelt. And the third is Ronald Reagan.

After the Reagans left the White House and returned to California, Nancy spent the next several months finishing a book, and I interviewed her when it was published in the fall of 1989. The book was called My Turn, and the title could not have been more apt, because many of its pages were devoted to settling scores with high-ranking members of the Reagan administration who, in one way or another, had triggered her criticism, especially Don Regan, the president’s chief of staff. Her provocative book induced a provocative interview, and there were times when Nancy expressed irritation at my approach. When I brought up an incident that strongly implied she “felt that George Bush lacked political courage,” she as-

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serted in a scolding tone: “You’re putting words in my mouth, Mike Wallace!”

Toward the end of our interview, I mentioned how the Reagans were cashing in on their first-couple status by attracting very handsome lecture fees. That led to my comment on an extravagant junket they were about to take.

W A L L A C E : You’re going to be in Japan, and I’m told it’s a two-million-dollar two weeks.

M R S . R E A G A N : They’re getting two of us. They’re working us like crazy. We’re taking the wives of servicemen over there so that they can see their husbands.

W A L L A C E : But it’s going to be a well-recompensed two weeks.

M R S . R E A G A N : It is for everybody who goes there, which you probably know. Now, you really didn’t need that question.

I could tell from her icy stare and the metallic tone in her voice that this time she was really sore at me. I later learned that Nancy felt I had sandbagged her because I didn’t let her know in advance that I intended to ask her about the Japanese junket. This, alas, is an all too familiar complaint: guests who happily appear on 60 Minutes to plug their latest book (or whatever) and then are angered when we stray from that subject and bring up matters they would prefer not to discuss.

In any event, when Nancy passed the word that she was no longer speaking to me, I could only assume that was the end of our long friendship. Then one night some two or three months later, she was a guest on Larry King’s show, and I happened to be watching when King mentioned our falling-out and asked her if we were still estranged from each other. In reply, she asked Larry if she could send a message to me over the air. He said sure. Nancy looked directly into

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the camera and asked me to call her, which I did the next day. The upshot was that we patched everything up, and since then, I’m happy to say, our friendship has been as strong as it ever was.

My last 60 Minutes interview with her took place in 2002, eight years after her husband wrote a letter to his fellow Americans, informing us that he had begun his descent into the dark oblivion of Alzheimer’s disease. In that letter, Reagan wrote, “I only wish there was some way I could spare Nancy from the painful experience.” After quoting that line to Nancy, I suggested that he had been more anguished about her future sorrow than his own. And she agreed.

Much of that interview was an exercise in nostalgia. The two of us looked at excerpts from the 1975 story, at the ranch in the moun-tains above Santa Barbara. We talked about how happy their life together had been in those days and about the joy that awaited them a few years later on the way to the White House. What made 2002 an especially sad time for Nancy was the fact that in March of that year, she had observed her fiftieth wedding anniversary. Yet by then her husband was deep in the abyss of his dread disease, so she was unable to celebrate it with him. I asked her about that.

W A L L A C E : What did you do that day?

M R S . R E A G A N : Nothing. And how I’d love to be able to talk to him about it. And there were times when I had to catch myself, because I’d reach out and start to say, “Honey, remember when . . .”

W A L L A C E : Yeah. Do you think he knows you still?

M R S . R E A G A N : I don’t know . . .

W A L L A C E : What are your days like? What do you do all day?

M R S . R E A G A N : Well, I see friends. Not every day. I stick pretty close to home, really.

W A L L A C E : Lonely?

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M R S . R E A G A N : Yes, it’s lonely. Because really, you know, when you come right down to it, you’re in it alone, and there’s nothing that anybody can do for you. So it’s lonely.

W A L L A C E : It was back in1975 [when] you said that your life beganwith Ronald Reagan, and you’ve also said that you can’t imagine life without Ronald Reagan. And now you’re in the midst of what you call your long good-bye. Have you said good-bye?

M R S . R E A G A N : No, not really. He’s there. He’s there.

For a year or so after we did that story, I would hear rumors from time to time that Reagan was on the brink of death. I would then call Nancy, who would quickly assure me that in spite of his terrible illness, her husband was still holding firmly on to life. But when I called her on the first Saturday in June 2004 and asked if the latest reports I had heard about him being near death were the usual false alarms, she replied no and quietly confirmed that this time he was indeed dying. She went on to say that her son, Ron, and daughter, Patti, were with her at his bedside and that they did not expect him to last through the weekend. Of course, I offered my deepest condolences, and after we finished talking, I called the CBS News desk to alert them to the situation. About three hours later, the bulletin came in from California that Ronald Reagan had died. And in the stately rituals and tributes that extended through the following week, millions of her fellow Americans, along with dignitaries from other countries, joined Nancy Reagan in the final chapter of her long good-bye.

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T H R E E

R AC E I N A M E R I C A

E l d o n L e e E d w a r d s

J a m e s E a s t l a n d

O rv a l F a u b u s

THE STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL EQUALITY has pulsated through the American bloodstream since the early abolitionists launched their crusade to eradicate slavery. And of all the stories that have engaged my attention over the years, none was more significant or compelling than the civil rights movement that began in the mid-1950s and extended through most of the ’60s.

My first professional dealings with America’s racial conflict came in 1957, when I interviewed a couple of die-hard segregationists who B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

staunchly defended the Jim Crow laws that were still in effect throughout the South. When our Night Beat team made the move to ABC in the spring of that year, one of our first guests on the network program (rechristened The Mike Wallace Interview) was a fellow named Eldon Lee Edwards, who made his living as a paint sprayer in Atlanta. But that was merely his day job, for he much preferred to be identified by the title that defined his nocturnal activities: Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

The KKK had been around since the days of Reconstruction, when its night riders, dressed in white robes and hoods, roamed across the rural South and spread terror among the recently freed slaves in an effort to discourage them from exercising the rights of citizenship they had been granted by new federal laws. But by the 1950s, the Klan was no longer the menacing force it had been in earlier decades. Even in the South, there were signs that it was not taken seriously; to many southerners, the Klan had become an embarrassment, even a bit of a joke.

Eldon Edwards struck me as a cartoon figure when he arrived at our New York studio in full Klan regalia. With his ankle-length robe, conical hood, and emblematic cross stitched across his heart, he looked for all the world like someone who had just stumbled in from a Halloween party. But his manner could not have been more earnest, and he was not amused when I asked him if the Klan was now perceived as an object of mirth.

W A L L A C E : Do people regard it as something comical, as kind of a comic opera?

E D W A R D S : No, they do not.

W A L L A C E : You feel that the South respects the Klan?

E D W A R D S : Well, they do, they respect the Klan for the principles for which it stands.

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To challenge that assertion, I quoted from an article that had recently appeared in The New York Times. According to the Times story, when three Klansmen showed up on a busy street corner in Montgomery, Alabama, in their robes and hoods, “several Negroes looked unflinchingly at the robed men and began to smile and then to laugh.” White onlookers also greeted the Klansmen with “grins of amused incredulity,” and one of them said in a mocking tone, “Looks like they’ve been lost out of one of them old movies.”

Edwards dismissed the story as propaganda, claiming that the Times and all other major American newspapers—including the two in his hometown, The Atlanta Constitution and The Atlanta Journal—were “controlled” by the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. When I asked him if he had any evidence to support such an irresponsible charge, his only response was a knowing smirk. From the look in his eyes, I inferred that Edwards regarded me—a northern Jew who worked in the New York media—as part of the sinister conspiracy. He was far less reticent when I asked him about Klan dogma on the subject of racial purity.

W A L L A C E : In one piece of Klan literature that you furnished us, it is charged, quote, “One drop of Negro blood in your family destroys your white blood forever.” I take it that you believe that?

E D W A R D S : Well, I wouldn’t define it down to one drop now. But here it stands to reason, as common sense, that mongrelization means destruction. It means the destruction of the white race.

It means the destruction of the Nigra race. I sure will believe in segregationfor the simple reasonwe believe inpreserving and protecting God’s word. He created the white man. He intended for him to stay white. He created the Nigra. He intended for him to stay black. And we believe that mongrelization destroys both races and creates a mongrel which is not a race.

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Although the opinions he expressed were repellent, Edwards and his fellow Klansmen could be dismissed as beyond-the-fringe extremists whose heavy-handed racist views were not shared by respectable, law-abiding southerners, even those who supported segregation. What I found far more disquieting was an encounter I had later that year with another ardent segregationist who was also a prominent and influential member of the southern power bloc in Washington—Senator James Eastland of Mississippi.

It was our custom in those days to announce at the end of each broadcast who was slated to be next week’s guest. On the Sunday before Eastland’s scheduled appearance, I closed the show with the following promotional pitch: “Next week we go after the biggest fight the Confederate states have had since Bull Run—the battle for civil rights. We will get the story from the controversial, outspoken senator from Mississippi. He’s James Eastland. We will try to find out why Senator Eastland charges that, quote, ‘the Negro is an inferior race,’ unquote, and why he described the United States Supreme Court as, and I quote again, ‘a crowd of racial politicians in judicial robes.’ Unquote.”

I received a call from Eastland’s office the next morning to inform me that the senator had seen my promo and wasn’t going to answer

“those kind of questions.” I was told he was having second thoughts about appearing on our show under any circumstances, but he was willing to discuss the situation with me in his office. So Ted Yates and I quickly caught a flight to Washington. Known for his courtly manner, Eastland greeted us with suave courtesy, and for the next several minutes we gingerly talked around the subject of what questions might be appropriate if he decided to go ahead with the interview. Then, shifting abruptly to another tack, the senator inquired,

“Mr. Wallace, who is your sponsor?”

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“I don’t know why you ask, Senator. You know it’s the Philip Morris Company.”

But I had a pretty good idea why he’d asked. Philip Morris had built a reputationas anequal-opportunity employer, a policy that did not win the tobacco company many friends in the South during that era of mounting racial tension. Moreover, Philip Morris had not only supported Negro newspapers with advertising dollars, they had also donated money to the Urban League and other civil rights organizations.

“Yes, Philip Morris,” Eastland said in response to my answer,

“yes, that’s what I understand.” With his soft voice and honeysuckle smile, he continued to project an amiable demeanor, but his words were anything but friendly. “Mr. Wallace, should you ask me questions which I find inimical, I just might find it necessary to point out that Philip Morris, that cancer-bearing agent, is regarded in the South as a Nigra-lovin’ cigarette.” He paused for a moment to let that sink in, and then said, “So perhaps you would now care to be guided by that in framing the questions which you intend to put to me.”

Yates and I could hardly believe what we had just heard. “Nigra-lovin’ cigarette”? I had to remind myself that this was a United States senator talking, not some Ku Klux Klan wizard who pranced around in a goofy costume. In any event, Eastland must have concluded that his boorish threat was enough to intimidate us, because he did agree to appear on The Mike Wallace Interview the following Sunday. When the time came, I didn’t pull my punches; our interview did indeed revolve around the “kind of questions” I had pre-viewed, and Eastland, to his credit, did not dodge them or sugarcoat his position as a strong segregationist. Nor did he go through with his threat to take a shot at Philip Morris and its alleged reputation inthe South.