Reagan: The Life (68 page)

Presidential travel is good for a president’s reelection prospects, or at least so most candidates for reelection conclude. Incumbents attempt to highlight the difference between themselves and their challengers, and no differences are starker than those between the pomp that surrounds presidential travel and the grind that candidates in the opposing party’s primaries are subjected to. Reagan’s handlers understood this perfectly, and while the Democrats in the early months of 1984 were traipsing through the snows of New Hampshire and the bayous of Louisiana, the White House laid plans for a pair of foreign spectaculars.

The first took Reagan to China in April. Reagan’s schedulers, embarrassed that the president had nodded off while meeting with the pope on his 1982 European trip, made sure to space his events to give him plenty of rest. He laid over in Hawaii for two days and in Guam for one on the trip west and reset his eating and sleeping schedule to Chinese time well ahead of his arrival in the People’s Republic. In Hawaii he met Barry Goldwater, who was returning from
Taiwan. Reagan had been briefed by Richard Nixon by memo and phone before leaving; Nixon stressed the importance of China in American and international affairs. Goldwater, by contrast, clung to the Cold War view that Taiwan was the real China and registered displeasure that Reagan was going to Beijing. “
Barry is upset about my trip and can’t hide it,” Reagan wrote in his diary. “He
seems to think I’m selling out our friends on Taiwan.” Reagan reassured him but without obvious success. “He should know better,” Reagan wrote. “I’ve made it very plain to the leaders of the PRC that we will not forsake old friends in order to make new ones.”

Nixon had told Reagan what to expect by way of banquets and the like, and a few hours after arriving, the president sat down with Chinese president
Li Xiannian. “
Our first go at a 12-course Chinese dinner,” Reagan wrote afterward, speaking for himself and Nancy. “We heeded Dick Nixon’s advice and didn’t ask what things were. We just swallowed them. There were a few items I managed to stir around on my plate and leave.”

The next day Reagan met with Premier
Zhao Ziyang. They discussed world affairs generally and Asia in particular. The tone was formal, but Reagan felt a connection. “
We get along very well,” he wrote. “I like him and I think he reciprocates.”

Hu Yaobang, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, was a different sort. “He’s a feisty little man and more doctrinaire than anyone I met,” Reagan remarked. “He lectured me about removing our troops from South Korea. I gave it right back to him that there was no way we’d do that. If
North Korea wants better relations, let them stop digging tunnels under the DMZ etc.” Reagan spontaneously invited Hu to visit the United States. “He might learn something by seeing the outside world.”

Reagan awoke the next morning with anticipation. “
This was Big Casino day—my meeting with Chairman Deng,” he wrote. Nixon and Reagan’s own team had prepped him for
Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s unfolding economic reforms. Reagan discovered a mischievous wit. “Nancy went with me for the informal opening,” he wrote. “Deng, who has a sense of humor, invited her to come back to China without me.” But Deng was all business when he turned to international affairs. “He really waded in critical of our Mid-east policy, our treatment of the developing nations etc. and our disarmament failure.” Reagan took the criticism personally and responded accordingly. “He touched a nerve. When it was my turn I corrected him with facts and figures and I meant it.” Reagan was pleased with the result. “Funny thing happened—he warmed up although he did bring up Taiwan (the only one who did). I told him it was their problem to be worked out—but it must be worked out peacefully.”

That afternoon Reagan’s group visited the Great Wall. “We waved our arms off at the crowds lining the streets to see us,” he wrote of the drive there. The wall itself took his breath away. “The Wall has an amaz
ing effect even though you’ve seen photos and movies of it,” he recorded. “There is a feeling I can’t describe when you stand on it and see it disappear over the mountains in both directions.”

After a visit to the ancient capital of Xi’an and a tour of the site where archaeologists had unearthed hundreds of life-sized statues of warriors, Reagan flew to Shanghai. He was shown a factory where Chinese workers assembled electronics products. He visited
Fudan University, where he conversed with students and gave a formal speech. His words were aired on state television, and he made the most of the opportunity to describe America and its values to Chinese viewers. “
We believe in the dignity of each man, woman, and child,” he said. “Our entire system is founded on an appreciation of the special genius of each individual, and of his special right to make his own decisions and lead his own life.” Americans chose their own rulers. “We elect our government by the vote of the people.” Americans cherished freedom, for others as much as for themselves. “When the armies of fascism swept Europe four decades ago, the American people fought at great cost to defend the countries under assault. When the armies of fascism swept Asia, we fought with you to stop them.” Americans were a compassionate people. “When the war ended we helped rebuild our allies, and our enemies as well.” Americans were a peace-loving people. “We hate war. We think, and always have, that war is a great sin, a woeful waste.” Reagan acknowledged that America’s ways were not China’s ways, yet the two nations could cooperate to their mutual benefit.

Reagan was never a harsh critic of his own performances, but he thought he had done particularly well this day. “
It was a darn good speech,” he jotted to himself. “The students ate it up.” To reporters on Air Force One en route home, he said he thought he had made a good impression on China’s leaders and people. “
I think they have an understanding and a confidence in us.”

F
ROM THE STANDPOINT
of making Reagan appear a statesman, and hence deserving of reelection, the China trip was hard to beat. The Great Wall was the ultimate backdrop, and his thoroughly photographed sessions with the leaders of one of the world’s oldest civilizations elevated him far above any challengers.

But
Beijing was just the warm-up. Reagan mounted an even more compelling stage a month later. Preparations for the fortieth anniversary
of the
D-Day landings at
Normandy had been in the works for years, and as the day itself approached, Reagan’s handlers took pains with every detail. Timing, lighting, framing—nothing was left to chance.

The president stopped in
Ireland on his way to
France. He embraced his Irish roots by visiting Ballyporeen, the village that had sent his great-grandfather to America. He hopped to London, where he lunched with Queen Elizabeth and
Prince Philip before meeting with Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street.

On the big day he awoke at Winfield House, the home of the American ambassador. He was transported by helicopter across southern England to the English Channel, where the USS
Eisenhower
and other warships plowed the waters furrowed four decades earlier by the thousands of craft of the Allied armada.

He landed on the Normandy coast near Pointe du Hoc, the knifelike promontory between Omaha Beach to the east and
Utah Beach to the west. The point had appealed to the German army, whose engineers placed an artillery battery on the summit to prevent attackers from achieving a foothold on the neighboring beaches. For precisely this reason Pointe du Hoc figured centrally in the invasion plans, and a battalion of U.S. Army Rangers was assigned the task of scaling the cliff and capturing the battery.

Reagan told their story in remarks delivered at the memorial atop the cliff. The French government had wanted President
François Mitterrand to greet Reagan in the afternoon, before Reagan spoke at Pointe du Hoc, but that would have delayed the American president’s remarks past the end of the morning news shows in the United States. Michael Deaver reminded the French ambassador in Washington how accommodating Reagan had been on a visit by Mitterrand to America; the ambassador relayed the message to Paris, and the schedule was rewritten to give Reagan live access to America’s breakfast tables.

“
We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France,” he said to the audience of dignitaries, veterans, and distant television viewers. “The air is soft, but forty years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon. At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, 225 rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs. Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion: to climb these sheer and desolate
cliffs and take out the enemy guns. The Allies had been told that some of the mightiest of these guns were here and they would be trained on the beaches to stop the Allied advance.”

The president nodded to the veterans present as he recounted their heroism. “The rangers looked up and saw the enemy soldiers on the edge of the cliffs shooting down at them with machine-guns and throwing grenades. And the American rangers began to climb. They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up. When one ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe. Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After two days of fighting, only ninety could still bear arms.”

Reagan glanced over his shoulder at the memorial behind him, a chiseled shard of stone that gashed the air above the beaches. The sculpture, he said, symbolized the daggers the rangers thrust into the cliffs to help them up. “And before me are the men who put them there,” he said, looking again to the veterans. “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.”

Reagan inquired rhetorically into their motives. “You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here?”

He offered the answer: “It was faith and belief; it was loyalty and love. The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge—and pray God we have not lost it—that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.”

Reagan acknowledged the other heroes of D-Day: the British, the Canadians, the Poles, the Free French. He paid tribute as well to the contributions of the Soviets to the defeat of the Germans. But he dis
tinguished between the Soviets and the other Allies as he described the denouement of D-Day and the war. “In spite of our great efforts and successes, not all that followed the end of the war was happy or planned. Some liberated countries were lost. The great sadness of this loss echoes down to our own time in the streets of Warsaw, Prague, and East Berlin. Soviet troops that came to the center of this continent did not leave when peace came. They’re still there, uninvited, unwanted, unyielding, almost forty years after the war. Because of this, allied forces still stand on this continent.”

Yet he made this point primarily to emphasize his broader theme of remembrance and reconciliation. “I tell you from my heart that we in the United States do not want war. We want to wipe from the face of the earth the terrible weapons that man now has in his hands. And I tell you, we are ready to seize that beachhead. We look for some sign from the
Soviet Union that they are willing to move forward, that they share our desire and love for peace, and that they will give up the ways of conquest. There must be a changing there that will allow us to turn our hope into action. We will pray forever that some day that changing will come.” He spoke to his larger audience but referred to the heroes present and missing as he concluded: “Strengthened by their courage, heartened by their valor, and borne by their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.”

Reagan shook hands and personally thanked the veterans. He proceeded to Omaha Beach, to the American cemetery above the sand. He stopped in the chapel for a moment of prayer, walked among the nine thousand graves of the American dead, and laid a wreath at the burial site of Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who as the only general officer accompanying the landing forces had won the Medal of Honor and then died of a heart attack. He quoted General Omar Bradley observing of his troops, “
Every man who set foot on Omaha Beach that day was a hero.”

He told of Private First Class
Peter Robert Zanatta, who hit the beach with the first assault wave. Private Zanatta survived the battle to relate its story to his daughter, Lisa. “Someday, Lis, I’ll go back,” he said. “I’ll go back, and I’ll see it all again. I’ll see the beach, the barricades, and the graves.” But he hadn’t gone back; he died too soon. Yet his daughter promised, as he was dying, “I’m going there, Dad, and I’ll see the beaches and the barricades and the monuments. I’ll see the graves, and I’ll put flowers there just like you wanted to do. I’ll feel all the things you made me feel through your stories and your eyes. I’ll never forget what you went
through, Dad, nor will I let anyone else forget. And, Dad, I’ll always be proud.” Reagan gestured to a young woman as he completed his story: “Through the words of his loving daughter, who is here with us today, a D-Day veteran has shown us the meaning of this day far better than any president can. It is enough for us to say about Private Zanatta and all the men of honor and courage who fought beside him four decades ago: We will always remember. We will always be proud. We will always be prepared, so we may always be free.”