Reagan: The Life (29 page)

He moved stealthily. He sent
Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, to
Pakistan on a seemingly innocuous diplomatic mission. While in Karachi, Kissinger complained of stomach troubles of the sort travelers are prone to. He encouraged the reporters traveling with him to take a few days off while he recovered; they wouldn’t be missing anything. And then he slipped across the Himalayas in a Pakistani plane and surfaced in Beijing, where he met with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, respectively the reddest of the “Red Chinese” and the ablest of China’s diplomats. He delivered American greetings and wishes for constructive relations. They responded in kind.

Nixon and Kissinger reveled in their coup. Nixon called the opening to China “
the most significant foreign policy achievement in this century.” Kissinger arranged a visit to China by Nixon himself. “We have laid the groundwork for you and Mao to turn a page in history,” Kissinger told the president after returning to Washington. “The process we have now started will send enormous shock waves around the world.”

The shock waves rolled most powerfully to Moscow, as Nixon intended. The Kremlin would have to be cooperative lest America get too chummy with China, Nixon reckoned. And this was just how things developed.
The president traveled to Beijing in February 1972 and professed Americans’ friendship for the Chinese people. He urged rapid progress toward goals the two nations shared. “
Seize the day, seize the hour,” he quoted from the canon of Mao’s wisdom. In his own words he declared, “This is the day, this is the hour for our two peoples to rise to the heights of greatness which can build a new and better world.”

The Kremlin was listening, as became evident three months later when Nixon arrived in Moscow. Soviet general secretary
Leonid Brezhnev couldn’t let Mao and Zhou get all the love from the Americans; Brezhnev consented to the first major arms-control accord of the
Cold War, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, or SALT. As part of the deal, the two sides agreed to forgo a weapons race in anti-ballistic missile defenses; the
ABM Treaty placed strict limits on missile defense. Brezhnev also put his signature to what amounted to an armistice in the Cold War. The dozen basic principles of détente, as the armistice was called, began with an affirmation that in the nuclear age there was no alternative to peaceful coexistence. Despite their different belief systems, the United States and the
Soviet Union would pursue normal relations based on “
sovereignty, equality, non-interference in internal affairs and mutual advantage.” The subsequent principles wordily reinforced this live-and-let-live approach.

E
VERY REVOLUTION HAS
to cope with the forces of reaction, and the revolution in global affairs Nixon attempted with détente was no exception. But before reaction could mobilize, Nixon cruised through the election
of 1972. The Democrats had difficulty attracting strong candidates into the primaries, so formidable did Nixon seem on account of his shrewd maneuvering between liberals and conservatives and his clever conduct of American diplomacy. Yet even taking that into account, the Democrats outdid themselves in nominating the weakest candidate in their party’s modern history. Nobody thought
George McGovern was anything less than an honorable man, but South Dakota has never grown much presidential timber, and McGovern’s positions on crucial issues placed him considerably to the left of the middle ground that always decides presidential races. The Republicans scorned him as the “triple-A candidate,” the spokesman for “acid, amnesty, and abortion,” referring to the
hippies he was said to attract, the pardons he advocated for some Vietnam War resisters, and the support he promised to advocates of abortion rights. McGovern had scarcely been nominated before he appeared certain to
become for the Democrats in 1972 what
Barry Goldwater had been for the Republicans in 1964: a principled disaster.

Yet Nixon wanted more than a victory; he wanted a landslide. Hubris had set in, and he countenanced a campaign of dirty tricks against the Democrats. He later claimed that he feared for national security after the leaking and publication of the
Pentagon Papers, a classified history of the
Vietnam War. But the political espionage set in motion by the Nixon White House went far beyond trying to plug leaks, and when five administration operatives were arrested at the
Watergate office complex in Washington in June 1972, their target was the headquarters of the
Democratic National Committee. Nixon denied advance knowledge of the affair, and his denial held long enough for him to win an enormous victory over McGovern. He garnered 61 percent of the popular vote and carried forty-nine states.

The landslide seemed an irrefutable endorsement of moderation in politics. In 1964, American voters had rejected Goldwater’s rigid conservatism; in 1972 they refuted McGovern’s bleeding-heart liberalism. Nixon appeared to have found the magic middle ground. Americans looked to government to ensure that they didn’t suffer old-age poverty and untreated illness, they counted on government to clean the air and water and safeguard the workplace, and they insisted that government protect minorities against public discrimination. Yet they didn’t want government to do everything for them, preferring to do for themselves what they reasonably could. Government wasn’t their enemy, but neither was it their best friend. Most of all, Americans rejected passionate appeals from either left or right for any drastic altering of the status quo. And judging by their embrace of the uncharming Nixon, they put little store in charisma.

And then, almost before he was reinaugurated, Nixon’s presidency began to unravel. A federal judge in the District of Columbia refused to accept the Watergate burglars’ guilty plea, and they started to talk. The trail of evidence led back to the White House and, under congressional investigation, into the Oval Office itself. The charisma-less moderation that had been Nixon’s trademark became his undoing, for no zealous admirers rallied to his defense. One by one Republicans abandoned the president, until he stood almost alone against the Supreme Court, which heard his plea to retain crucial recordings of White House conversations. When the high court ruled against him, the House of Representatives moved toward impeachment. In August 1974, Nixon resigned the presidency, handing the White House to
Gerald Ford.

O
N THAT DAY
Reagan gained hope for life after the governorship. As pragmatic as he proved to be as California’s chief executive, he would never have been mistaken for a Nixonian moderate. The California constitution didn’t bar a run for a third term, but he didn’t want to be seen as a professional politician, let alone a permanent occupant of the governor’s office. If there was a public role for Reagan after Sacramento, it was in Washington or nowhere. Until Nixon imploded, nowhere seemed the likelier option.

Reagan would turn sixty-four a month after leaving the governor’s mansion. He would be old enough to retire from full-time work, and with the money he could earn from speeches and service on corporate boards, he and Nancy would be able to live in all the comfort they could wish. But he still wanted a stage. And the only one that appealed to him at this point in his career was the presidency.

He understood at once what Nixon’s resignation meant. The road from Sacramento to Washington was suddenly wide open. Nixon was no longer around to anoint a moderate successor.
Gerald Ford would be the favorite for the Republican nomination, but Ford wounded himself badly by preemptively pardoning Nixon weeks after taking office. Democrats and not a few Republicans muttered about a backroom bargain: the presidency for the pardon. Those who knew Ford didn’t believe the charge. But that didn’t lessen the damage it did him.

I
N
J
ANUARY
1975, Reagan handed the California governorship to
Pat Brown’s son. The succession suggested that Reagan’s mark on the state
might be fleeting, for
Jerry Brown was cut from considerably more liberal cloth than Reagan. Or perhaps Brown’s election simply reminded those paying close attention that Reagan’s style of governing had always been more pragmatic than his style of speaking.

Once again Reagan had to figure out how to fill his time. Of course he would run for president in 1976, but he mustn’t appear overeager. He needed to seem gainfully occupied. Ranch life beckoned, and he answered the call. He had sold his Malibu ranch about the time he was elected governor; as he prepared to leave office, he and Nancy purchased another ranch, in the Santa Ynez Mountains above Santa Barbara. They called it
Rancho del Cielo—Ranch in the Sky, or Heavenly Ranch—and Reagan devoted hours and days to renovating the house and improving the nearly seven hundred acres.

His service as governor had eaten dramatically into his income, but eight years as chief executive of the nation’s most populous state simply made him more appealing on the lecture circuit. Vacating the governor’s office also allowed him to resume his broadcast career. He received offers to become a television commentator but opted instead for radio. Michael Deaver was stunned. “
Walter Cronkite had called me, which impressed me, and said that he would like to have Reagan do a twice-weekly five-minute commentary on the
CBS Evening News,” Deaver recalled. “Well, I thought this was incredible. The CBS Evening News, at that point, was 30 or 40 million people a day. Then, this old guy from Hollywood named
Harry O’Connor, who was a radio producer who didn’t have any active clients at the moment, had come in and seen Reagan and told him he could get him on the radio, a five-minute radio show a day. So, the hour of decision came, and I thought this was going to be a slam-dunk. And Reagan said, ‘I’m going to do the radio show.’ I said, ‘What? You’re not going to do the CBS?’ ‘No, I’m not going to do the CBS Evening News.’ I said, ‘I don’t believe this. I can’t believe this.’ He said, ‘Mike, people will tire of me on television … They won’t tire of me on the radio.’ ”

Deaver later acknowledged that Reagan had been right. “At the end of that, when we finally had to give it up”—in 1980—“we were speaking to about 50 million people a day on the radio. In the key cities, New York, L.A., we were speaking to them twice a day, both commute times, morning and evening.” Deaver recalled being asked a question by Walter Mondale, by then the former vice president (and the Democratic nominee in 1984): “Do you really think that radio show had any impact on Reagan getting the nomination?” Deaver replied, “I think it had every
thing to do with it.” Mondale said, “Well, I’m thinking about doing that myself, a radio show.” Deaver said, “Well, good. Mr. Vice President, let me just tell you one thing. Ronald Reagan wrote every radio show himself.” Mondale said, “You’re putting me on.” Deaver said, “No. He wouldn’t let anybody write them. He’d let Pete”—Hannaford, a staffer—“write his newspaper column, but he always said, I think I can write the spoken word better.”

When Reagan predicted that people would tire of him on television, he might have been indulging the vanity of the aging actor worried about his appearance. His hair remained black—naturally so, he told anyone who inquired, and his barber never contradicted him. But his face and neck showed the inevitable lines and creases. He understood that his age would be an issue in a run for the presidency, and he had no desire to imprint an old face on the public mind.

He could indeed be vain about the way he looked. As a person in the public eye, he couldn’t avoid cameras, but he kept still photographs to a minimum. Michael Deaver noticed that he always grew tense when a still photographer approached him. “
Finally, one day I said to him, ‘I don’t get it,’ ” Deaver recalled. “ ‘How come when I bring a still camera in here, I can see the back of your neck stiffen?’ He smiled at me and said, ‘You’re the first person who ever said that to me.’ He said, ‘Mike, I can never recover from a still photographer.’ ” Television pictures were fleeting; an unflattering image was gone in an instant. But not so with a still shot. “I can’t recover from a still,” Reagan said.

Vanity wasn’t the only issue, though. Reagan understood that radio was a more intimate medium than television. It was far more suited to the personal stories and anecdotes that had long been his greatest strength in touching the heartstrings of his audiences. On television, if he told an uplifting story about a soldier home from Vietnam or a cautionary tale about a welfare queen on Chicago’s South Side, the medium would almost require him to show pictures. And the pictures would diminish the impact of his words. On radio the words were everything, spoken in his wonderful voice, which, if anything, grew more seductive with the throatiness of age. Reagan remembered the effect of Franklin Roosevelt’s
Fireside Chats; he recalled the mental images Roosevelt had conjured with spoken words and the feelings he elicited. Roosevelt hadn’t had an alternative to radio in that pretelevision age; Reagan did have one but declined to use it. He judged that he couldn’t do better than his political hero in trying to reach and touch his fellow Americans.

H
E HAD NO
policy agenda beyond basic conservative principles. He expected events to furnish direction. They obliged from the start. Three months after he left Sacramento, the final chapter of America’s Vietnam War came to a disillusioning end. The army of
North Vietnam, flouting a 1973 agreement under which the United States had withdrawn its troops, overran
South Vietnam and captured Saigon. Two decades of American effort to prevent the conquest had failed.

Reagan blamed a failure of leadership in Washington. “
When we withdrew our forces from the long bloodletting in Vietnam,” he told his radio audience, “we did so with the understanding that we would provide weapons and ammunition to enable South Vietnam and
Cambodia to resist if the North Vietnamese violated the negotiated ceasefire.” Reagan wasn’t surprised that the cease-fire had failed. “Violating agreements is standard operating procedure for communists. They violated this one 72,000 times in the first twelve months.” But Washington, or rather the Democrats who controlled the legislative branch, had let them get away with it. “We do nothing because the Congress has taken from the commander-in-chief the authority to take any action at all to enforce the terms of the treaty. Now that same Congress, with unprecedented irresponsibility, has refused to authorize the money that would permit this great nation to keep its pledged word.”